Investigators are now examining contracts signed by New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels during his time as a district superintendent, and a criminal litigator says the deals could expose the chancellor to public corruption charges, wire fraud, and official misconduct.
The city's Department of Education is in crisis mode. High-ranking education sources told the New York Post that DOE headquarters at Tweed Hall has been "at DEFCON 1" since the paper's initial reporting, reacting as though Mayor Mamdani's handpicked schools chief is being actively probed by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools.
The core facts are damning on their own. Samuels, while heading District 3 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, signed a $180,000 contract with a vendor named Sean Kreyling whose companies were not approved by the DOE. He then split the payments into $25,000 checks, a move that appears designed to duck the city's financial oversight thresholds. A second $180,000 contract was signed in 2024 by Samuels' former deputy superintendent, Mariela Graham.
Kreyling's companies supplied temporary foreign-language teachers to city schools. After the 2024 contract was signed, his staffing company Language Learning Network inadvertently placed a Spanish teacher in two city schools, a teacher who had been banned from working for the DOE over sexual misconduct.
That incident triggered an SCI investigation. But when SCI issued its report in June 2025, the findings pinned blame on the schools' principals for failing to properly vet the teacher. The report recommended Graham be fired. It did not mention Samuels' involvement in signing the original contract.
Kreyling charged that SCI was covering up for Samuels to protect a key Mamdani appointee.
Instead of terminating Graham as SCI recommended, Samuels promoted her, to a $225,571-per-year post as the DOE's senior executive director of strategy. Samuels himself earns $363,000 annually, more than the mayor he serves under. Mayor Mamdani has faced mounting scrutiny on multiple fronts in recent months, and the Samuels matter now threatens to become his most serious institutional liability.
Kreyling told the Post he informed SCI about Samuels' signed contract during the original investigation and offered to share all materials. SCI never followed up.
It took the Post's reporting to change that. SCI officials finally contacted Kreyling on a Friday and asked to see his documents. SCI attorney David Casanova wrote to Kreyling in a message obtained by the paper:
"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. SCI officials would not confirm that Samuels is under investigation. But the behavior inside Tweed Hall tells its own story.
A City Hall insider described the atmosphere 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 even more detail: "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.
Samuels paid Kreyling from a government grant his district received for foreign-language instruction. But the chancellor prematurely terminated the contract in March 2025. The DOE has not responded to the Post's inquiries about what happened to the remaining, unspent grant funds.
That silence matters. Public grant money is supposed to be tracked, accounted for, and spent on its intended purpose. When a contract funded by a government grant gets cut short, the money doesn't just vanish, or at least it shouldn't. The DOE's refusal to answer basic questions about where those dollars went only deepens the cloud over Samuels' tenure.
Meanwhile, Kreyling said he spent the past week trying to alert City Hall officials directly. He emailed First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. He messaged Mayor Mamdani on social media. He got no response from anyone. The Mamdani administration's pattern of ignoring or sidelining inconvenient voices is by now well documented.
Kreyling expressed his frustration plainly:
"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."
Manhattan-based civil and criminal litigator Jason Goldman told the Post that Samuels could face criminal charges on multiple fronts. Goldman laid out a roadmap of potential liability that goes well beyond an administrative slap on the wrist.
"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 said Samuels could be charged with defrauding the DOE, submitting contracts that misrepresented the true nature of the transaction, and engaging in official misconduct. Federal wire fraud charges are also possible, Goldman noted, based on electronic payments sent to Kreyling and emails in which Samuels discussed the payment-splitting scheme.
In one email obtained by the Post, Samuels acknowledged that Kreyling was not an approved vendor and suggested a workaround. That email alone undercuts any defense built on ignorance or bureaucratic confusion. Mayor Mamdani has already drawn criticism for a series of judgment calls that have alienated broad swaths of New Yorkers, and the Samuels affair now raises questions about who the mayor chose to run the city's schools, and why.
Goldman's bottom line was stark:
"This could be much more than just a paperwork or ethics issue."
City Hall declined to comment.
Consider the sequence. A chancellor signs a contract with a vendor he knows isn't approved. He splits payments to stay under the radar. The vendor's company sends a teacher banned for sexual misconduct into two schools. The investigative body tasked with oversight issues a report that omits the chancellor's role entirely. The deputy who co-signed the deal gets promoted instead of fired. The whistleblower gets ignored by City Hall. And the DOE won't say where the leftover grant money went.
Every layer of this story follows the same pattern: insiders protecting insiders, and the people who are supposed to provide oversight either looking the other way or arriving late. SCI's initial failure to follow up on Kreyling's offer of documents is not a minor procedural lapse. It suggests an investigative body that, at best, was incurious about evidence pointing toward a politically connected figure, and at worst, was actively shielding one.
The students who ended up in a classroom with a teacher banned for sexual misconduct had no say in any of this. Their parents had no way to know. The principals who failed to vet that teacher bear responsibility, as SCI found. But the chain of decisions that put an unapproved vendor's employee in front of children started with the contracts Samuels signed, contracts SCI's own June 2025 report conveniently left out.
Political opposition to Mamdani continues to build across the city, and the Samuels scandal gives critics something more concrete than policy disagreements to point to: a handpicked appointee, earning $363,000 of taxpayer money, now facing the real possibility of criminal exposure while the mayor's office tells him to lay low.
New York City parents send their children to public schools trusting that the adults in charge will follow the rules. When those adults break the rules, cover for each other, and pocket six-figure salaries while doing it, the system isn't failing by accident. It's failing by design.
And the people who pay for it, literally and otherwise, are the families who never had a seat at the table.
