Disgraced former NYC building commissioner facing possible criminal charges
A Manhattan grand jury has been hearing evidence involving disgraced former city buildings commissioner Eric Ulrich, who resigned last fall during a gambling probe by the district attorney’s office, The Post has learned.
The criminal probe includes allegations of misconduct from before Ulrich was the buildings department head, and may relate to favors that date back to his time as a city councilman from Queens, sources said Monday.
The grand jury has been hearing evidence for about two months, one source said.
But it is winding up its work — charges drop as soon as this week, according to The New York Times.
Ulrich’s attorney, Sam Braverman, would not confirm that.
“Anything anyone says is just a guess — and probably without merit — so I will await the indictment,” Braverman told The Post.
Ulrich — a 38-year-old former career politician who as of January had been selling insurance to make ends meet — stepped down from his lucrative city government position in November 2022 after investigators in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office seized his phone and interrogated him for hours about a criminal gambling investigation.
The former Republican councilman had potentially racked up debts in backroom Ozone Park card games frequented by mob associates, sources told The Post at the time.
Ulrich was not charged with a crime, but he resigned two days after news of the probe broke.
The investigation continued following Ulrich’s resignation.
Prosecutors are looking into whether he got a deal on a below-market-rate apartment and if he accepted a discounted couch from someone who had business with his department, the Times reported Monday.
The Manhattan DA’s office declined to comment.
The card games weren’t Ulrich’s first run-in with the mob.
In 2018, the then-city councilman wrote a letter to a federal judge asking her to be lenient on his “personal friend” Robert Pisani — who was also a reputed Bonanno crime family associate who had pleaded guilty to a RICO charge.
Ulrich represented Queens’ 32nd District from 2009 to 2021, when he term-limited out.
In January 2022, he joined Mayor Eric Adams’ administration as a senior advisor before taking over the city Department of Buildings. In that role, he made more than $243,000 a year.
Besides a battle with alcoholism — which Ulrich announced in an April 2021 Facebook post — he was a persistent gambler who reported winnings of between $5,000 and $47,999 on his ethics disclosures in 2016 and 2017.
He also reported the same range of winnings from the New York State Lottery in 2018, 2019 and 2020, according to the disclosures.
“I consider myself to be a lucky guy,” Ulrich once told The Post. “I got a great job, a beautiful daughter and every so often, lightning strikes.”
