NYPD brass retaliated against former captain for reporting corrupt promotions, lawsuit claims

A former New York Police Department captain is suing the department and outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, accusing former police executives of placing “cronies” who were “unqualified and incompetent” on a prestigious federal joint taskforce.

Brian Nyhus, a 26-year NYPD veteran and former commanding officer of the Homeland Security Investigations Task Force, filed a lawsuit on Dec. 22 against the city alleging that former Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey retaliated against him after he reported the corruption to his superiors.

Nyhus is seeking $5 million in punitive damages, asserting the defendants’ actions were willful and malicious, and additional $50,000 for lost wages, scheduled raises and the resulting decrease in his pension.

The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several months after Maddrey took over as the NYPD’s top uniformed officer, he began to bypass the official procedure for promoting investigators to the federal taskforce that Nyhus led, “and put his own friends and cronies on the taskforce,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit alleges that one investigator was transferred to the money-laundering unit because he knew someone “high up” despite not having any investigative experience with banking. Another officer who was transferred to the narcotics unit confused having experience with “wires,” meaning wiretaps, for knowledge about wire transfers from her former job as a bank teller.

A third officer who was transferred to the border security taskforce had been flagged as non-credible by two separate United States district court judges — a designation that forced federal investigators to block the move.

Nyhus at first reported these issues with unqualified assignments to his division chief, Christopher McCormack, who in turn reported them up to the chain, leading to his own removal. McCormack was forced to resign in September 2023 and is suing the city in his own whistleblower retaliation lawsuit .

Nyhus eventually warned the federal officials that he worked with that they could no longer rely on NYPD vetting.

The complaints allegedly made Nyhus a target for Maddrey, who in March 2024 transferred him out of his high-ranking taskforce to the transit bureau — a move that the lawsuit said would have necessarily risen to the level of awareness of then-NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban.

Though the transfer did not technically involve a demotion, transit is widely seen as less elite and less desirable than the taskforce. Nyhus decided to retire from the NYPD rather than “accept the humiliation and professional impediment that such a transfer was intended to confer.”

He was 14 years away from mandatory retirement, and said that he fully intended to serve until that time, which would have entitled him to a series of scheduled pay raises.