New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration filed an 80-page RICO lawsuit on Sunday against Asher & Associates, and the complaint reads like a confession. For nearly a decade this personal-injury shop has run an assembly line: scrape a knee in a parking lot, swear it was a city pothole, file a million-dollar claim against the public fisc, settle, repeat. The city has been paying — in unmended sidewalks, in deferred maintenance, in premiums that never stop climbing — and City Hall has finally had enough. The suit is overdue.
The confession is not only the firm’s. New York’s Democratic-socialist mayor built his political identity on denouncing corporate lawfare and standing with injured workers against powerful institutions, and he has now picked up the federal statute written to dismantle organized-crime enterprises and aimed it at a personal-injury practice filing roadway-defect claims for clients with broken bones and wrecked knees. The federal RICO statute does not care about the political complexion of its user. It was written to be wielded, and Mr. Mamdani has decided to wield it.
The complaint lays out the engine with documentary precision. It recites fifteen matters dating to 2017 — the receipts — in which clients told emergency-room attendants a different account of how they were hurt than the one Asher & Associates eventually filed against the city. A motorcyclist told an ER he twisted an ankle dismounting to avoid a car, left in a cast, kept riding, and crashed two more times; the firm demanded three million dollars from the city for a roadway defect. A scooter rider told a hospital a stopped car broke his fall; the firm recorded the cause as the asphalt. A man who admitted at the hospital he had been drinking before an e-bike fall was reassigned by his own attorneys to a city-roadway narrative. A man who walked into an ER with injuries from a lead-pipe beating was filed against the city as a sidewalk-trip victim.
These are not “vigorous advocacy.” These are submitted-to-a-court lies, instrumented by a network of “runners” soliciting clients to “advance and stand behind fabricated narratives” and bankrolled by litigation funders “fronting” expenses in exchange for eventual settlements. The firm takes clients “with bona fide personal injuries but caused by unknown or impecunious actors, or self-inflicted,” then files sworn claims blaming “defective, cracked, misleveled, broken, warped, elevated, depressed, or uneven” city roadways.
If you have ever wondered why a New York sidewalk stays broken for two years, why a bus bunches into oblivion on your commute, why a school counselor disappears, why the firehouse down the block is closed — start at the litigated docket. Every hour the city’s lawyers spend defending a fabricated three-million-dollar scooter claim is an hour not spent on the next genuinely injured cyclist on the next genuinely broken stretch of road. It is an hour the Law Department is forced to “expend money to defend itself in lawsuits in which the City had no liability as a matter of fact or law.” That is not a sympathetic gloss on the firm’s business. That is the firm’s business, extracted from the public till.
Here is the political lesson, plain and unflattering to the mayor. The complaint is exactly the legal recourse his own political movement has long championed as the counterweight to corporate impunity — now turned on a firm that does in miniature what that movement spent a decade blessing at scale. The city’s suit accuses Asher & Associates of burdening the courts and the Law Department with hundreds of matters, and of suing dozens of utility companies and paving contractors besides the city. In one filing, the mayor has allied his administration with Uber, FedEx, and the auto-insurance carriers who have filed parallel racketeering suits of their own, for precisely the reason the city did: the schemes are no longer defensible as ordinary contingency practice. The business lobbies across New York and the country that spent a decade demanding federal racketeering actions against the plaintiff bar have received exactly the precedent they were looking for, signed by a mayor they did not expect.
Mamdani’s predecessors sat on the same evidence, retained the same lawyers, and let the meter run. He pulled the trigger. Good.
The injury-bar lobby, losing in court after court, is now running to the legislature for relief. Which brings us to Albany. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “modest reforms” this year are not modest and they are not reforms. They are the opening bid of the corporate tort lobby’s wish list, and the package did not touch the scaffold law — the rule holding property owners and contractors fully liable for gravity-related construction injuries even when a worker is at fault, and lifting project insurance premiums by some six percent. The Wall Street crowd wants it gutted. They themselves concede the six percent; what they do not say is that it is baked into every affordable-housing unit this mayor has promised to build — and that it should be. It is the price New Yorkers pay so the people who actually build this city do not get turned into the people who actually pay for it. The workers who climb the scaffolds are still worth more than the contractors’ quarterly margins.
The plaintiff bar’s defenders will call this a “mugging” of legitimate lawyers by an overreaching mayor. It isn’t. It is overdue accountability for an industry that has been mugging the public for the better part of a generation. Let Asher & Associates put its fifteen examples on a courtroom table and explain them to a judge. Let the runners and the funders explain them too. And let every firm watching understand that New York is no longer the easiest mark in America.
Still, the mayor has not explained how an aggressive RICO prosecution of a personal-injury firm differs in moral or legal character from the aggressive plaintiff practice he is prosecuting. He has not explained which of the firm’s allegedly fraudulent clients should be denied recovery for their actual injuries because their attorneys embellished the pleadings. He has not explained why the litigation abuse the complaint denounces is acceptable when it is directed at large employers, rideshare platforms, or building owners.
Counsel for Asher & Associates did not respond to a request for comment, which is its own kind of answer. The mayor’s office has not yet had to explain how the bar it is suing is not the bar it spent a campaign promising to empower. Mayor Mamdani is not the victim in this story. He is the first mayor in a long time willing to act like he isn’t.
