New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, the handpicked education chief of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, could face criminal charges for deliberately splitting payments on an unauthorized contract to dodge city financial oversight, a Manhattan litigator told the New York Post. The revelation adds a legal dimension to a scandal that has already rattled Tweed Hall and left City Hall scrambling for answers.
New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, the handpicked education chief of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, could face criminal charges for deliberately splitting payments on an unauthorized contract to dodge city financial oversight, a Manhattan litigator told the New York Post. The revelation adds a legal dimension to a scandal that has already rattled Tweed Hall and left City Hall scrambling for answers.
Investigators are now examining contracts Samuels signed while serving as superintendent of District 3 on the Upper West Side, contracts with a vendor the Department of Education had never approved. The probe follows a string of Post reports showing that Samuels inked a $180,000 deal with Sean Kreyling's staffing company, then carved the payments into $25,000 checks in what appears to have been a calculated effort to slip beneath the city's financial review thresholds.
For taxpayers already weary of watching New York's education bureaucracy consume billions with little accountability, the emerging facts read like a case study in how insiders protect each other, and how the system punishes the wrong people when something goes wrong.
Kreyling's companies provided temporary foreign-language teachers to city schools. He signed two $180,000 contracts with District 3, one signed by Samuels in 2023, another with Samuels' former Deputy Superintendent Mariela Graham in 2024.
The Post revealed last week that Samuels signed the contract with a non-DOE-approved vendor and broke the payments into smaller checks, a red flag in any government contracting environment. In one email obtained by the Post, Samuels wrote that he understood Kreyling was not an approved vendor and suggested a workaround.
That email alone could prove damaging. Manhattan-based civil and criminal litigator Jason Goldman said the payment-splitting scheme and the chancellor's own written acknowledgment of the vendor's unapproved status open the door to serious legal exposure.
"If there was a deliberate effort to bypass the city's financial safeguards, that could potentially lead to criminal exposure from a public corruption standpoint."
Goldman laid out several potential charges: defrauding the DOE, submitting contracts that misrepresented the true nature of the transaction, and official misconduct. He also flagged federal wire fraud exposure tied to possible electronic payments sent to Kreyling and emails discussing the payment-splitting arrangement.
"This could be much more than just a paperwork or ethics issue."
Samuels earns $363,000 a year, more than even the mayor who appointed him.
The contracting irregularities might have remained buried in district paperwork had it not been for a far more alarming consequence. After Kreyling's company Language Learning Network signed the 2024 contract, the one bearing Graham's signature, it inadvertently placed a Spanish teacher in two city schools who had been banned from working for the DOE for sexual misconduct.
That incident triggered an investigation by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, known as SCI. The probe ultimately held the schools' principals liable for not properly vetting the teacher.
But the June 2025 SCI report failed to mention Samuels' involvement in the underlying contract. Instead, it pinned the blame on Graham and recommended she be fired.
Kreyling charged that SCI was covering up for Samuels to protect Mamdani's key appointee.
What happened next will strike most taxpayers as the opposite of accountability. Rather than terminating Graham, the deputy superintendent SCI recommended be fired, Samuels promoted her to a $225,571-per-year post as the DOE's senior executive director of strategy.
Let that sink in. The person an oversight body said should lose her job got a raise and a bigger title. The person whose signature started the chain of events that put a banned teacher in front of children faced no consequences at all, at least not until the Post started asking questions.
Kreyling told the Post he informed SCI about the Samuels-signed contract during their initial investigation and offered to share all materials. SCI never followed up.
The mood inside the DOE's headquarters shifted sharply after the Post's reporting went public. SCI officials would not confirm that Samuels is now under investigation, but high-ranking education sources described Tweed Hall as being at "DEFCON 1." Officials are reacting as though Mamdani's handpicked schools chief is being probed.
A City Hall insider put it bluntly:
"They're completely freaked out at the DOE. If SCI is calling witnesses for documents, that means they're investigating Samuels."
A well-placed DOE source offered an even more damning account:
"City Hall is scrambling, asking about the contract and grant funding.... I heard [Samuels] met with his team to brush it under the rug.... he hopes this blows over and he is not held accountable."
Mamdani's team allegedly told Samuels to "lay low," the DOE insider said. City Hall declined to comment.
After a week of silence, SCI officials finally reached out to Kreyling on Friday. SCI attorney David Casanova asked to see his documents.
"Please provide everything you think is relevant, even if it was previously provided to one of our investigators (all contracts, emails, invoices, payments from DOE, etc.)."
Casanova said he would review the documents and "possibly" schedule a follow-up meeting. The word "possibly" does not inspire confidence that the oversight body is treating this with the urgency it warrants, particularly given that Kreyling says he tried to hand them the evidence months ago.
Kreyling said he spent the past week trying to sound the alarm to City Hall officials directly, emailing First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and even messaging Mayor Mamdani on social media. He got no response.
"I had a lot of hope in Mamdani, and I'm very disappointed. I was hoping we could at least come together on protecting kids."
Samuels paid Kreyling from a government grant his district received for foreign language instruction. But the chancellor prematurely terminated the contract in March 2025, records show. The DOE has not responded to the Post's inquiries about what happened to the remaining, unspent grant funds.
That unanswered question matters. Public grant money designated for a specific educational purpose was routed through a contract the chancellor knew involved an unapproved vendor. When the arrangement fell apart, the leftover funds apparently vanished into the bureaucracy. Nobody at the DOE will say where the money went.
The Samuels contract scandal lands at a moment when Mayor Mamdani's administration can ill afford another credibility problem. Fox News has reported that Mamdani himself faces criminal referrals over alleged foreign donations to his New York City mayoral campaign, a separate but thematically linked cloud hanging over an administration that promised clean governance.
Taken together, the picture is one of an administration where financial rules are treated as suggestions, oversight bodies pull their punches on politically connected appointees, and whistleblowers get ignored until reporters start calling.
Several questions remain unanswered. Will SCI expand its investigation to include Samuels directly, or will the agency that missed him the first time find a way to look past him again? Will federal prosecutors take an interest in the wire fraud exposure Goldman identified? And will anyone at City Hall explain why the mayor's office went silent when a vendor tried to warn them about a contract that put children at risk?
The DOE has not responded to the Post's questions. City Hall declined to comment. Samuels has not publicly addressed the allegations.
When a $363,000-a-year public official signs a contract he knows is irregular, splits the payments to avoid scrutiny, and then promotes the subordinate an oversight body told him to fire, the system isn't broken by accident. It's working exactly the way the people inside it want it to.
