McMahon Political Shakedown Exposed
Sources: DNC ordered a crackdown to boost NY-11 lawsuit optics—and McMahon delivered Muslims; Political Newcomers
NOTE: This piece first appeared on NYNewsPress.com.
By Richard A. Luthmann
I’ve been in enough political knife fights to know when the blade is meant for me, and with Michael McMahon, the brazenness is never new—it’s a continuing pattern. Staten Island’s DA has long operated like a political hack masquerading as a prosecutor, but in July 2025, he finally overplayed his hand.
One day, I was exposing the corruption of McMahon, Kamillah Hanks, and their enforcer, Kevin Barry Love; the next, I was the target of a secret ICARD—a fake, judge-less “felony on sight” alert slipped into NYPD systems to silence me.
Why? He took his pound of flesh out of me in 2017. He was responsible for sending me away, up the river, out of New York, using the instrumentalities at the disposal of his government office. A modern-day ostraka with one vote.
His motives are now made clear during the explosive NY-11 redistricting battle and his judge wife Judy’s abrupt retirement. McMahon is taking orders. He’s being told what to do.
When an NYPD detective bragged on tape that he could “get whatever [he] wants ” because McMahon was the “victim,” the mask came off. This wasn’t policing. It was a political hit job—McMahon’s latest stunt in a career defined by corner-cutting, intimidation, and weaponized lawfare.
But in trying to bury me in this latest go-around, he finally exposed himself, revealing that he’s been told his days as Staten Island District Attorney are coming to an end.
McMahon Political Shakedown Exposed: A Bogus “Felony on Sight” Plot
In July 2025, Staten Island District Attorney Michael E. McMahon orchestrated a highly irregular police operation to target me – an investigative journalist and longtime McMahon critic – under the flimsiest of pretenses. The instrument of this ploy was an NYPD “Investigative Card” or ICARD, a backdoor alert that allowed McMahon’s allies in the NYPD to flag me for pickup without a judge’s warrant or oversight.
In essence, McMahon rigged what he hoped would be a “felony on sight” arrest, manufacturing a charge out of thin air to silence my reporting and detain me at will.
The supposed crime?
An automatically generated Substack newsletter email sent to McMahon’s public office inbox – an email not even written or sent by me, containing no threats whatsoever.
In fact, McMahon’s own staff had voluntarily subscribed to my newsletter, yet he later feigned terror at receiving a routine post he could have simply ignored or unsubscribed from.
This farcical complaint – claiming the DA felt “in fear for his life” from a single mass email – became McMahon’s pretext to weaponize the NYPD against a journalist he’s long sparred with. Instead of seeking a standard warrant (which would require actual evidence and a judge’s approval), an NYPD detective entered a citywide ICARD alert for my arrest.
An ICARD is not a real warrant – it bypasses the courts and is not supposed to be used to nab someone outside New York City. But bending rules was the whole point: McMahon wanted me grabbed in Florida and dragged back to New York before any judge could sniff out the sham. Or else, he wanted me to “stay away” from New York indefinitely.
He essentially ordered “warrant theater” – a performative use of police power to create the illusion of a justified arrest, when in truth it was a political hit job from the start.
“I Get Whatever I Want”: The Taped Confession
McMahon’s scheme might have stayed in the shadows if not for a bombshell recording. On July 21, 2025, NYPD Detective John Wilkinson – the warrant squad officer tasked with executing this plot – unknowingly spilled the truth on tape.
In a phone call with my then-attorney, Lawrence Almagno, Detective Wilkinson bluntly admitted the fix was in. When Almagno asked who the complaining witness was, Wilkinson replied it was “the Staten Island DA”. Then came the stunning boast.
“With the victim who it is… I get whatever I want,” Wilkinson bragged.
In other words, because the victim was DA McMahon himself, Wilkinson felt entitled to any warrant, any favor from a judge – no questions asked. I ask for X, I get X. I ask for Z, I get Z, he elaborated, openly describing a rubber-stamp process with complicit judges.
This jaw-dropping quote lays bare how justice was rigged on McMahon’s behalf. Wilkinson believed McMahon’s name was a golden ticket to override due process. He even boasted about elevating a baseless complaint into a felony warrant and an interstate manhunt, musing about using U.S. Marshals to haul me up from Florida.
All of this over an email that didn’t even mention McMahon by name, one sent to tens of thousands of people. It’s the definition of malicious prosecution – “classic racketeering,” as one veteran journalist observed, perpetrated under color of law.
Unbeknownst to Wilkinson, his call was recorded, and it now sits in the hands of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau (among others). An internal investigation is active, scrutinizing how a detective could so casually discuss subverting the courts for a political favor.
The tape is a smoking gun: proof that McMahon and his cronies saw the law as their personal plaything. In Wilkinson’s own words, they thought they could “get whatever [they] want” – and what they wanted was to muzzle Richard Luthmann at all costs.
But in trying to handcuff me, they effectively handcuffed themselves.
McMahon Political Shakedown Exposed: Redistricting Revenge and Clintonworld Connections
But why was McMahon so eager to take me off the board in mid-2025? I don’t live on Staten Island. I rarely visit. When I head to New York City, it’s usually for a reason that has nothing to do with the rugged slums of Shaolin. Usually, I’m at an annual civic event: my alma mater, Columbia University’s homecoming, Old Blue Rugby Football Club’s Foundation Dinner, the Italian American Civil Rights League’s Christmas Party.
This year, I missed them all, as well as substantial New York opportunities, because of an ICARD that still remains on the NYPD’s books. Why?
The answer traces back to a high-stakes political battle over New York’s 11th Congressional District (NY-11) – Staten Island’s seat in Congress. In a Voting Rights Act lawsuit filed by Democratic powerbroker Marc Elias (of Clintonworld fame), I was explicitly named and shamed.
The Elias-led complaint, filed in 2025 amid New York’s redistricting wars, accuses Staten Island Republicans of racial gerrymandering – and cites me in Paragraph 90 as an example of racially charged dirty tricks in local campaigns.
The lawsuit claims that in 2017, I “allegedly created a fake Facebook page” in the name of a Black city councilmember (Debi Rose) to stoke racial tension about a “welfare hotel” and a “heroin/methadone den.”
Yeah. It’s true. I fucking did it. I said it (and I was right, the North Shore of Staten Island has gone to shit).
But most importantly, it was ordered by NYC Council Member Kamillah Hanks and Kevin Barry Love, her husband, who legally admitted it.
It was Democrat on Democrat crime in the purest sense, if it even was a crime.
I have since apologized to Debi Rose. But for Marc Elias’s NY-11 narrative, I’m still a racist. RACIST, RACIST, RACIST. In reality, I am the least racist person you have ever met.
This incendiary allegation – however dubious its sourcing – planted a target on my back. It made me the perfect bogeyman for Elias and his associates, a convenient villain to invoke in their quest to redraw NY-11 for partisan gain. And it would be perfect if they could use me to dirty NY-11 in a courtroom where I could not defend myself because an appearance would mean an arrest, maybe Riker’s, or maybe an “accident.”
Clintonworld.
It appears McMahon is more than willing to do Elias’s dirty work now. But Mike’s no fool. He’s a good lawyer, or at least he was. He perjured himself half a dozen times in the sworn report he gave to the NYPD. Frank Parlato catalogued it publicly. Why would he risk this?
Because he was told.
As a Democrat and Clinton ally himself, McMahon stood to benefit if the Elias v. GOP 2026 redistricting narrative went unchallenged. My journalism had been publicly pushing back against that narrative. My outlet and I reported on the real stench of Staten Island politics, including vote dilution tactics and backroom dealings – horsetrading, trading elected judgeships and political positions – that the lawsuit conveniently ignored.
My investigative reporting threatens to expose how power brokers like Elias and McMahon collude, using courts and prosecutions to advance their agenda. Silencing me ahead of the NY-11 case would be highly convenient for them.
A little too convenient.
The July 2025 ICARD shakedown thus reeks of retaliation – a preemptive strike to intimidate a witness/journalist who knew too much. McMahon essentially acted as Elias’s hatchet man: abusing his DA’s office to curry favor with the Clintonworld and DNC operatives behind the lawsuit.
It is political revenge masquerading as law enforcement.
McMahon Political Shakedown Exposed: Thugs, Threats, and Councilwoman Hanks
This saga doesn’t stop at one overzealous DA. It sprawls into the seedy underbelly of Staten Island’s Democratic machine – notably into the orbit of City Councilmember Kamillah Hanks and her husband (and de facto enforcer) Kevin Barry Love.
In fact, McMahon’s July 2025 ICARD maneuver was the culmination of a longer campaign to shut me up, a campaign that Hanks and Love had been spearheading since the previous year. They had their own reasons to keep me quiet: I had been digging into anti-Muslim hate threats tied to Kevin Barry Love, which McMahon’s office inexplicably failed to prosecute.
In early 2023, I also began pursuing legal action against Hanks, trying to collect money I was owed and exposing corruption. Hanks and Love responded not through attorneys, but through threats and intimidation.
On April 4, 2023, Kevin Barry Love personally telephoned my attorney at the time, Lawrence Almagno, and delivered a menacing ultimatum. Love – described by those who know him as a millionaire real estate developer with a violent streak – effectively told Almagno to drop me as a client or else.
According to a sworn complaint, Love “sounded high as a kite” and threatened to destroy Almagno’s career and law license if he continued representing me.
This wasn’t empty bluster: Love explicitly invoked federal authorities, claiming the FBI and DOJ were already in his pocket, and hinted he could unleash them at will.
The call’s “sole purpose,” as our filings later noted, was to scare my lawyer into breaching our attorney-client agreement – to leave me defenseless by intimidating my counsel. For the record, that threatening call was recorded and preserved as evidence.
It worked: within weeks, my lawyers buckled. By April 25, 2023, Almagno’s firm abruptly withdrew from my cases against Hanks and Love (and Judge Ronald Castorina as well), offering a sheepish apology that they feared “government heat” and didn’t want to end up like “Trump’s lawyers” – targeted and ruined for daring to fight the powers that be. They filed Notices of Discontinuance without first seeking my consent or even informing me, a move that could get them disbarred (grievances are dockted).
Kevin Barry Love isn’t just some angry spouse – he has long acted as Councilwoman Hanks’s personal thug. By many accounts, Love serves as Hanks’s “de facto agent” and enforcer, willing to bully or bribe anyone standing in her way. His record backs it up.
Love has a history of extortionate threats and even violence. One political consultant, Michael Cox, attested that after Hanks’s 2017 campaign stiffed him $14,000, Love lured Cox into his car under the pretense of settling the debt – only to threaten him.
Cox had just suffered a heart attack days before, yet Love “took Cox for a ride” and tried to force him to accept a token $1,250 payment, effectively at figurative gunpoint, while Cox was too frail to resist. Love implied that was the only money Cox would ever see, and if he didn’t take the pittance quietly, there’d be consequences.
Cox, fearing for his health, did what he had to do to get out of the car. He never got any payment. Earlier this year, Love tried to make amends over a pint of Guinness. Cox said he would die of hunger before he took a sesame seed from Love.
This is textbook mobster behavior, carried out by an individual who circles City Hall dressed like a dandy.
Little wonder one of my former attorneys likened Hanks and Love to those who “do to others what they do to Trump’s lawyers” – using law enforcement and goons as weapons of Lawfare.
Councilmember Kamillah Hanks, for her part, has benefitted from Love’s strong-arm tactics while maintaining a veneer of deniability. But evidence from my litigation against them indicates Hanks was fully aware and even directed these efforts to silence me. Love acted “at all relevant times” as Hanks’s agent in threatening my lawyer.
It’s telling that the ICARD arrest order in July 2025 directly served Hanks’s interests as well: I had been on the verge of publishing damning findings about an anti-Muslim harassment incident involving Love (Hanks’s husband) and the DA’s office dragging its feet. McMahon’s sudden move to slap me with a bogus felony alert conveniently derailed that story and any further newsgathering or reporting.
The timing was no coincidence – this was a coordinated hit from multiple angles. Hanks and Love had tried street-level intimidation; when that failed to shut me up, McMahon delivered the “legal” hammer via the ICARD.
All three were working in concert, directly or indirectly, to protect each other and punish a dissident journalist with the insider knowledge to expose their scandals.
An Orchestrated Vendetta – and a Bungled One
Step back, and the pattern is clear: this was never about law enforcement or public safety. It was an orchestrated political vendetta. A sitting DA, a City Council member, and her shadowy partner all conspired – tacitly or overtly – to weaponize the system against a critic. They dredged up old allegations (even the 2017 “fake Facebook” stunt mentioned in the Elias lawsuit) to paint me as a present-day menace.
They deployed “thugs” and threats behind closed doors to scare off my allies.
And finally, they abused official tools like a fraudulent ICARD – cooked up in the DA’s own personal office – to try and disappear me.
This was a hit job, plain and simple, carried out under the guise of a contempt case.
I’ve moved on. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.” (Isaiah 43:18).
McMahon is still finding new and improved ways to “settle the score” and “Get Luthmann.” It would be pathetic if it weren’t so dangerous.
But the Devil always goes a step too far. Detective Wilkinson’s brazen remarks on tape turned a spotlight back onto McMahon’s operation, triggering inquiries at the highest levels. NYPD Internal Affairs is now examining how a false “felony on sight” alert was pushed through – and by whom.
So are the Feds.
I have formally demanded that the NYPD void and expunge the bogus ICARD, calling it out as the “fraudulent and bogus” instrument of a political shakedown. In a letter to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and NYC’s Corporation Counsel, I detailed how McMahon “used the color of law and the largesse of his office to bend the badge” – in other words, to turn the police into his personal strike force.
I’ve put the City on notice that this abuse of power violates my First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and I’m prepared to sue everyone involved for civil rights violations if the ICARD isn’t torn up pronto.
Even Mike McMahon, in Florida federal court. He and Judy have four pensions between them. I’ll be happy with one.
Some within law enforcement and legal circles are quietly acknowledging the stench of this Staten Island affair. McMahon’s credibility has taken a hit; whispers in the halls suggest even New York’s Attorney General may be eyeing the situation, given its egregiousness.
In the court of public opinion, the verdict is already in: this was a coordinated political hit, not a legitimate investigation. And like many overzealous hit jobs, it has backfired spectacularly. Instead of silencing me, McMahon and his crew have only drawn more attention to their own misconduct.
The evidence of their collusion – from taped calls to documented threats – is now out in the open, a case study in “weaponized justice” gone wrong.
But, sadly, I am not alone.
McMahon Political Shakedown Exposed: The DA’s Special Squad is Coming
Sources inside Richmond County’s political and law enforcement circles say DA Michael McMahon has unleashed a fresh wave of “Special Squad” investigations, targeting first-time campaign volunteers, Muslim activists, and grassroots political newcomers under the banner of “designating petition fraud.” On paper, it looks like a righteous anti-corruption push.
In reality, insiders say it’s a politically timed dragnet—ordered from Clintonworld and the DNC—designed to bolster the optics of the NY-11 redistricting lawsuit, where Democrats desperately need to sell the fiction that Staten Island politics is riddled with lawless operators while their own ranks are pure as the driven snow.
And who better to stage that theater than McMahon, a fixture of the Democratic machine, who will investigate anyone so long as they’re weak, Muslim, or politically inexperienced—and importantly, not part of his own donor or patronage network.
The absurdity is that McMahon is now criminalizing what amounts to clerical errors—mailroom mistakes, wrong dates, duplicated signatures—while branding these tenderfoot activists as if they’re masterminds of political forgery. According to multiple sources who’ve been contacted or interviewed, McMahon’s Special Squad is “banging down doors” and interrogating harmless volunteers for technical missteps that, historically, have never been treated as crimes.
No one has been arrested for Primary Elections Violations since 2018—me, when McMahon and his cronies railroaded my case for political revenge. But mark my words: sources say that will change before Christmas. There will be prosecutions.
Why?
Because the DNC wants headlines to feed the Elias NY-11 narrative, and McMahon, ever the obedient political hack, is only too happy to generate them.
![Staten Island District Attorney Michael E. McMahon [L] and Brian Laline [R] at an event at the Richmond County Country Club.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tVW6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F78223f56-aede-460b-81ba-a408e91fb85b_486x495.jpeg "Staten Island District Attorney Michael E. McMahon [L] and Brian Laline [R] at an event at the Richmond County Country Club.")
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. McMahon himself had dead people and out-of-state lawyers signing his own petitions when he ran for DA in 2015—including an infamous signature from the late William Peck, who had been deceased for two years before helping “nominate” Michael E. McMahon for District Attorney. Another came from Gladys Smith. Reporters visited her headstone for a statement.
PIX11 News reported extensively on McMahon’s invalid signatures during that race, which included multiple individuals who had moved out of state, no longer lived in the jurisdiction, or whose signatures were collected under questionable circumstances. One was Quentin Smith, a former Assistant District Attorney under former DA Dan Donovan, who had retired and moved to Ohio. His signature appeared on McMahon’s petition, and, at the time, he emphatically told reporters that he did not sign.
I believe Quentin Smith when he says he never signed McMahon’s 2015 petition. I believe there was rampant fraud tied directly to Michael McMahon’s DA candidacy. And many others believe the same thing, including decorated prosecutors and public servants.
Yet McMahon faced zero consequences, no investigation, no Special Squad knocking on his door.
A few years ago, his office turned its firepower on Staten Island Albanian leader Marko Kepi, launching an intimidation-style probe into alleged petition irregularities.
The accusation? Forgery.
The outcome? Nothing.
Not a single arrest. Not one charge. The Kepi probe ultimately collapsed into what people inside the office have called pure political Lawfare—a scare tactic dressed up as an investigation, designed to kneecap an emerging Republican ethnic organizer with a growing base.
McMahon’s pattern is unmistakable: weaponize the office for political optics, target perceived enemies, and selectively feign concern for election integrity only when it serves his patrons’ purposes.
Now, with NY-11 hanging in the balance and the Democrats’ Voting Rights Act lawsuit faltering under scrutiny, McMahon is once again rummaging through his old playbook. This time, the targets aren’t entrenched political players but Muslim community organizers, immigrant advocates, and young campaign volunteers—people least equipped to fight back.
Community leader Abou Diakhate has stated publicly that McMahon’s Special Squad came knocking, asking invasive political questions that had nothing to do with ballot integrity and everything to do with mapping the resistance to the establishment Democratic machine.
And all the while, Kevin Barry Love gets a free pass for making bodily threats against a Muslim activist in the same election.
At the same time, his wife, Council Member Hanks, avoids any accountability for Muslim bashing, racial slurs, and political retaliation. She was called out by over 90 imams. They all can’t be wrong.
Kamillah remains indignant and still hasn’t apologized. And why should she? According to her, she “ain’t no nigger-whisperer.” Her words.
It turns local Democratic Party Leader Charles Fall’s stomach, but there was nothing he could do. Not against the McMahon machine with a directive from Clintonworld on high.
The optics aren’t subtle—they are Putinesque: “For my friends anything, for my enemies THE LAW.”
McMahon’s office is scrutinizing Muslim signatures and first-time political volunteers while making no parallel inquiry into his historically documented petition or current crimes committed by his own political allies. It’s offensive, transparent, and dangerous.
This sudden zeal for petition “enforcement” isn’t a righteous crusade. It’s 2026 election-season theater, a made-for-courtroom performance choreographed to help Marc Elias argue that NY-11 is a cesspool of Republican malfeasance requiring Democratic judicial intervention. And McMahon—ever the political creature—is only too willing to stage the show.
The man who cheated his own way onto the ballot, who pardons his friends with a wink and a nod, who activates Special Squad raids on Muslim businesses and political newbies over clerical mistakes, now pretends to be the guardian of electoral purity.
It would be funny if it weren’t so abusive.
But the walls are closing in. Internal Affairs is already circling the July ICARD scandal. The press is finally waking up to what Staten Island insiders have known for years: McMahon is a paper-tiger prosecutor and a full-time political hatchet man, the kind who mistakes abuse of power for professional achievement.
If sources are correct, another wave of politically timed “arrests” is coming before Christmas—harmless first-timers sacrificed to help Democrats claim NY-11 is “a war zone of GOP fraud.”
It’s not. The only fraud here is the man orchestrating the crackdowns.
Michael McMahon is a political hack who cheats, bullies, and investigates everyone but himself—and now, finally, he’s being exposed.
