A notable New York politico has filed hundreds of lawsuits on behalf of a doctor repeatedly accused of being a key cog in a sprawling auto insurance fraud ring, according to records reviewed by New York Focus.

Between May 2024 and July 2025, Frank Seddio, Brooklyn’s Democratic commissioner on the New York City Board of Elections, filed more than 500 “no-fault” auto insurance lawsuits on behalf of a Brooklyn-based physician. The cases were filed under the state law meant to expedite drivers’ reimbursements for medical expenses stemming from accidents — regardless of who is at fault.

Before becoming Seddio’s client, Dr. Jules F. Parisien had been accused across multiple lawsuits of participating in schemes to obtain money from insurance companies by submitting thousands of fraudulent, unlawful, and non-reimbursable claims for purported medical services.

Seddio is a former state assemblymember, Surrogate’s Court judge, and chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party whose recent campaign spending as a Brooklyn Democratic Party district leader has faced media scrutiny. He has not been charged with any wrongdoing and did not respond to questions about how he became involved with filing the cases.

Progressive lawmakers rallied in lower Manhattan on Wednesday with a message for Governor Kathy Hochul: It’s time for New York to act on President Trump’s federal cuts.

Backed by over 60 left-leaning groups, the event called for state legislators to return immediately to Albany and get to work fortifying New York’s safety net.

“It doesn’t make sense to wait for the cuts to actually happen,” Assemblymember Claire Valdez, one of the legislators who spoke at the rally, told New York Focus. “It’s pretty simple: The Republicans have made their decisions and it’s time for us to make some as well,” Valdez said of the Democratic party.

“It isn’t sufficient anymore to say the Republicans did such a bad job. What have we done?”

Legislators departed Albany for the year in June after delivering a delayed state budget that largely ignored inevitable federal cuts. Weeks later, Trump signed his “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” into law, slashing over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over the next decade.

The result is billions less in federal support for New York’s Medicaid program — the most generous in the country, with nearly 7 million New Yorkers enrolled — and an unprecedented funding cliff for SNAP, which feeds 1.7 million households statewide. The largest Medicaid cut takes effect January 1, giving the state little headway.

Despite the high stakes and tight deadline, top Democrats including Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins quickly ruled out the need for a special session, delaying the matter until next year. Governor Kathy Hochul, whose office was granted emergency powers to temporarily manage any fiscal gaps, has seemingly agreed.

Now, a contingent of progressive leaders and groups are calling on the legislature to reconvene and raise taxes to avoid cuts to lifeline services, as well as to expand protections for immigrants from Trump’s mass deportation push.

The idea is proving to be politically divisive in more ways than one.

In recent months, New York Focus has been reporting on “sewer service,” the term for when plaintiffs in a lawsuit fail to properly inform defendants that they’re being sued.

Sewer service is particularly widespread in the debt collection industry, where it frequently results in creditors winning cases and garnishing a defendant’s paycheck before those defendants even realize they’ve been sued.

It’s often the result of dishonest process servers — people hired by plaintiffs to hand-deliver lawsuits to defendants — who lie about having done their job.

High-profile lawsuits over sewer service in the early 2000s prompted government crackdowns and reforms designed to rein in lawless servers. Since then, some of the most notorious actors have been banned from the industry.

Yet the fraud can still haunt New Yorkers years later. That’s because a plaintiff can collect a debt up to 20 years after winning a judgment in New York, even if serious doubts arise about the process server’s integrity. Industry experts refer to these delayed debt-collection attempts as “zombie debt.”

New York Focus found several examples of zombie debt persisting for years after a server was credibly accused of widespread fraud. In most cases, the defendants never fight back. Here are three stories of defendants who did.

Related: Have You Been Sued for Credit Card Debt? Your Fake Relative Might Know.

On Monday, New York Focus revealed that one of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s signature technology projects is also a backdoor for police surveillance.

The NYPD has been using Big Apple Connect, the mayor’s free broadband program for public housing residents, to connect CCTV cameras at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments to the department’s city-wide surveillance software, called the Domain Awareness System. The connections enable the police department to stream footage in real-time, without needing to ask for NYCHA’s permission.

The video surveillance component of the project was never publicly disclosed. New York Focus learned about it after reviewing Office of Technology and Innovation documents that laid out the agency’s intention to link the housing authority’s cameras to the NYPD three years ago. Only recently did the NYPD confirm to New York Focus that the program is being used to implement real-time, remotely viewable video surveillance at at least 20 NYCHA developments.

There’s still a lot that the Adams administration hasn’t told us. Here’s what we still don’t know about Big Apple Connect ...

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s administration is quietly using a flagship free internet program for public housing residents for another purpose: expanding NYPD surveillance.

The New York City Police Department is working to use network connections established under the three-year-old Big Apple Connect program to link cameras at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments directly to the NYPD’s central digital surveillance system, a police department spokesperson confirmed to New York Focus.

Cameras at one development were linked last Wednesday, the spokesperson said, and 19 more are set to follow.