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The FBI raided the Manhattan offices of a New York City police union on Tuesday, and hours later two officers left the building with cardboard boxes of evidence in their arms.
Armed with a warrant, officers raided the headquarters of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, which represents 13,000 active and retired New York City Police Service sergeants and is the nation’s fifth largest police union.
Simultaneously, FBI agents raided a house on the Long Island suburb of Port Washington, New York, an FBI spokesperson said. It is owned by outspoken SBA leader Ed Mullins, sources told NBC News.
It was not immediately clear why the FBI had targeted the SBA and Mullins’ home, but the spokesperson told the New York Daily News that the agency was “taking law enforcement action in connection with it. ‘an investigation in progress’.
Members of the Public Corruption Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York were also involved in the raid, according to the New York Times.
At around 1 p.m., the pair of officers lifting large brown cardboard boxes were seen leaving union headquarters and heading to the FBI base in lower Manhattan.
Neither Mullins, who has led the union since 2002, nor SBA lawyer Andrew Quinn, could be reached for comment.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was aware of the FBI raid but shed no light on the surprise SBA raid.
A dockworker’s son, Mullins, who grew up in Greenwich Village, often clashed with both NYPD management and de Blasio.
The union leader’s scathing posts on Twitter notably called a city councilor “fucking first class,” calling a former health commissioner a “b —-” and in response to the shooting death of Michael Brown, a Noir, in 2014 as a teenager, and the protests that followed, he said: “Ferguson, Missouri was a lie and a nation of cops has been under attack ever since.”
Mullins also remains a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump.
SBA statutes require Mullins to continue working as an NYPD sergeant, but records show he is currently not assigned to a specific position. And while he was paid $ 133,195 by the city in 2020, his full-time job was as the head of the SBA, which pays him extra pay.
Mullins was paid $ 88,757 by the union in 2019, according to the most recent SBA documents, which mentioned him as a trustee.
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