A law firm that says it found no evidence to support corruption allegations against two New York City unions has long-running financial and familial ties to those labor organizations, public records show.
The Hotel Trades Council (HTC) and UNITE HERE Local 6 (UH6) hired Pitta LLP to investigate a whistleblower letter alleging a culture of quid pro quo corruption and improper gift-giving at the two unions. The firm’s review was completed in March 2026. While Pitta LLP ultimately found no evidence that the two labor organizations had broken the law, the firm had previously received millions from the unions. The firm’s leaders also share family ties with former union leaders.
Some legal experts said this could lead to an appearance of impropriety.
Though the financial and familial relationships may raise eyebrows, Pitta LLP had no legal obligation to disclose them in its review.
SOURCES CORROBORATE WHISTLEBLOWER CLAIMS OF CORRUPTION, QUID PRO QUO CULTURE INSIDE POWERFUL NYC UNION
Between 2020 and 2025, HTC and UH6 collectively paid $11.6 million to Pitta LLP for legal services, an average of nearly $2 million a year, according to disclosure documents filed with the department.
The Center for Union Facts (CUF), a nonprofit watchdog group that is sharply critical of labor unions and union leadership, provided documentation to Fox News Digital showing that the father of Vincent Pitta, the law firm’s chairman, held leadership positions at the two unions and that his sister is married to Peter Ward, HTC’s former president. Pitta later confirmed both relationships in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital obtained and reviewed the preliminary statement from a second independent investigation conducted by a former state and federal prosecutor affiliated with a different law firm that also concluded that there was no evidence to support any of the allegations of misconduct set forth in the whistleblower letter.
“When confronted with information suggesting that employees, consultants, or other business partners have engaged in serious misconduct, most companies’ first reaction is to consult with a trusted outside firm with which the company has a long working relationship,” the law firm Quinn Emanuel wrote in a 2022 publication. “But there are drawbacks to this approach. In a complex internal investigation, a company’s longtime corporate counsel can become subject to ethical conflicts, confirmation bias, divergent incentives and other issues that may produce a suboptimal result for the client.”
Quinn Emanuel’s blog post relates to general legal ethics, not the facts of the relationship between Pitta LLP and the two labor unions.
“Companies facing potential criminal or regulatory investigations or any allegation of serious misconduct almost always will be better served by hiring counsel that does not have a long history of providing corporate or transactional advice to the company,” the publication continued. “Even where the firm’s lawyers can acknowledge, for example, misconduct by the executives from whom the lawyers have taken instructions, confronting those issues creates tricky reputational and financial problems for the firm … the firm might fear that the company’s board of directors or other executives not implicated in misconduct will blame the firm, thereby jeopardizing the firm’s relationship with the company going forward.”
UNIONS THAT PARALYZED NEW YORK COMMUTE OVER PAY SPENT MILLIONS ON LUXURY TRAVEL, FILINGS SHOW
The American College of Trial Lawyers, similarly, released guidance for internal investigations in 2020 which noted that government prosecutors “might be skeptical of an internal investigation of high-level or sensitive wrongdoing conducted by outside counsel regularly retained by the company” because “regular counsel may have a motive to avoid criticizing, and thus alienating, senior management, the source of past and future law firm revenues.”
McKenna Long & Aldridge, another law firm, noted that engaging a firm with which an entity has “significant economic ties” presents “an obvious risk to independence” that must be weighed against the benefit provided by their familiarity with the case.
Pitta, in a statement to Fox News Digital, denied that financial and familial ties presented a conflict of interest when investigating the claims made against HTC and UH6.
“Our four-decade relationship with the unions, did not and does not constitute a conflict of interest as it relates to the expedited preliminary review conducted by one of our partners of the ‘anonymous allegations’ which you are interested in,” he wrote. “We assiduously ‘call them, as we see them,’ to steal some baseball vernacular — without fear or favor.”
Pitta said his firm charges the two unions a reasonable rate for its legal services.
“If the $12 million figure is accurate,” he said, the average cost spread across the roughly 40,000 members of the unions would come out to just around “$1 per member per week for expert labor, employment, employee benefits, election law, and other requested legal services.”
UTAH JUSTICE ALLEGEDLY SENT ‘INAPPROPRIATE’ TEXTS TO LAWYER IN KEY REDISTRICTING CASE, OFFICIALS LAUNCH PROBE
He also confirmed that his father, who passed away in 2005, held leadership positions at the two unions for roughly 30 years and that his sister is married to Ward. Pitta maintains that neither relationship constituted a conflict of interest and that, if it did, the firm would address it with the “highest ethical standards and the best practices of our profession.”
Critics of organized labor, however, see things differently.
“Tapping the union’s family firm doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the results,” CUF communications director Charlyce Bozzello told Fox News Digital.
CUF has repeatedly targeted Richard Maroko, who serves as president of UH6 and HTC.
“The contract with Pitta originated under the previous administration and there have been no familial relationships with the union for more than 6 years,” HTC spokesman Austin Shafran told Fox News Digital. “During that time, the firm has handled over 1000 arbitration cases for the union, recovering more than $200 million that went directly into the pockets of our members.”
Sources familiar with the inner workings of UH6 and HTC previously told Fox News Digital that leadership at the two unions had what they described as an unusually close relationship with hotel management — a relationship they alleged allowed hotel owners to strike beneficial deals in exchange for information that helped union leaders retain their power.
The sources further alleged that individuals involved in hotel management provided union leaders with improper gifts, such as high-end food and drink, to build relationships with them.
An HTC spokesman previously flatly denied the underlying whistleblower claims, pointing to two investigations the union commissioned, including Pitta LLP’s March 2026 review, which found no evidence to support claims that hotel management was unusually close to union leadership or that union officials accepted improper gifts.
“Two exhaustive, independent investigations, including one by a former federal prosecutor, have concluded that these anonymous claims are frivolous, lack any factual basis, and were clearly an attempt to derail contract negotiations between the union and hotel management,” HTC spokesman Austin Shafran previously told Fox News Digital. “Thankfully, these efforts failed as our union secured the best contract in its history that will provide unprecedented wage increases and benefits to tens of thousands of hotel workers. Nothing will ever deter the union from working every day to better the lives of our members and their families.”
No HTC or UH6 leader, and no hotel executive allegedly involved in the whistleblower claims, has been charged with a crime or found to have engaged in professional misconduct in connection with the allegations.
This post appeared first on https://www.foxnews.com
