As rumors swirled whether Mayor Eric Adams’ would end his candidacy in recent weeks, his election lawyer Vito Pitta suggested to those working in the campaign there was no choice but to follow the mayor’s often-repeated mantra: stay focused and grind.
Pitta, who has worked with Adams as an election lawyer since his first run for Brooklyn Borough Hall, maintained that though his work throughout the election cycle had been derailed by Adams’ five-count federal indictment, the campaign hasn’t had trouble fundraising, even without additional matching funds.
Asked if the mayor would drop out of the race several days before his press conference announcing his commitment to continuing the campaign, Pitta dismissed the possibility.
“There have been rumors like this a lot of times over the past couple years and they all proved to be just that,” he said.
Pitta, the descendant of a prominent labor, law and lobbying family in Staten Island has led Adams’ campaign finance effort, so when Manhattan federal prosecutors indicted the mayor for campaign fraud — charges the Department of Justice later dropped under President Trump — it turned Pitta’s job on its head.
As a direct result of the charges, the New York City Campaign Finance Board (NYCCFB) has denied Adams matching funds, forcing Pitta to scramble to get the funds back.
“It certainly added to the workload,” Pitta said of the aftereffects of indictment with a chuckle.
The campaign launched an administrative appeal of the NYCCFB’s decision, which the board denied. Now the campaign is pursuing an injunction in federal court that would overturn the NYCCFB’s decision and is expecting a ruling in the short-term.
But Pitta insisted that the case is not a make-or-break matter for the campaign, which has already raised approximately $6.8 million in net contributions — about a million under the roughly $8 million spending limit on matching funds.
“To the extent that we even need matching funds by the time that decision comes down it would be pretty minimal,” Pitta said, adding that at this point the campaign has a little under $3 million.
As far as Pitta sees it, all the work he does in campaign finance is an extension of the values of organized labor.
“There always in my mind had been a necessary and integral relationship between labor and election law and politics, so it just seemed to me to be a natural extension of that work,” he said.
The Pitta family has been a major force in organized labor and city politics for generations. Pitta’s grandfather, also named Vito Pitta, rose to be the head of the powerful Hotel Trades Council from his start as a busboy at the Plaza Hotel after immigrating to New York from Sicily in 1929. Pitta’s father, Vincent, has focused his 40-plus-years career on labor relations before founding his employment law firm Pitta LLP the same year he co-founded the lobbying firm Pitta Bishop & Del Giorno.
Yet, despite the Pitta family’s long history and involvement with unions, Adams’reelection bid faces a diminished relationship with organized labor. Though the mayor was able to rack up an impressive labor coalition in 2021, after the recent Democratic primary, the city’s largest labor unions, including the one that Pitta’s grandfather once led, lined up to endorse Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. One of the only large labor groups that Adams has the support of so far is the Uniformed Forces Coalition 2025, a group of 13 law enforcement, corrections and sanitation unions not including the Police Benevolent Association, the largest police union in NYC.
Though Vito found his own path within the family business through campaign finance, it was at an early age that he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I knew in early high school that’s the path I wanted to go down,” he said. “I just was exposed to it my whole life, both through my dad’s work as a lawyer and then my grandfather’s work as a union official.”
Pitta’s role as a managing partner at both the lobbying and labor law firms that his father founded forms a kind of missing link between the two entities. Before he had his law degree, Pitta learned the ropes of the campaign finance system from his father’s partner Jon Del Giorno, a lobbyist who worked at the state Board of Elections early in his career.
When Pitta joined the two firms, campaign finance was an area of consulting services that had previously been limited to the lobbying firm. He built out that area practice into a full-fledged arm of Pitta LLP in the period shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision drastically changed political campaigning.
But the dynamic between the two firms has been an object of scrutiny over the years. Pitta LLP, the law firm, works with a lot of unions, and politicians, whom the lobbying arm helps with campaign finance consulting services, and then lobbies on behalf of their union clients, which government watchdogs say is a legal loophole for third-party interests like unions to influence sitting politicians.
During his career as a campaign lawyer, Pitta has also made time to co-found his own practice with two friends, Pitta & Baione LLP focused on representing 9/11 victims that has recovered more than $550 million dollars on behalf of 10,000 victims. It remains a big part of his practice, he said.
Pitta started working with Adams during the mayor’s run for Brooklyn Borough President in 2012, and has worked with him in every campaign since. He recalled being impressed by Adams’s hands-on approach to campaigning during their first meeting.
“It really struck me that he was so hands on and willing to get into the weeds. A lot of follow up questions,” Pitta said. “I later sort of realized that is the type of person that he is. He does want to get into the weeds, he wants to understand and to be involved himself.”
Though Pitta didn’t handle the traditional ballot access role of a campaign attorney for Adams, he both serves as general counsel for the campaign and manages campaign finance compliance, meaning that he trains and leads the staff who are in charge of vetting Adams campaign contributions for fraud.
So when the DOJ indicted Adams for fraudulently accepting public matching funds for his campaign from “straw donors” — contributors who made donations by falsely certifying them under a different name — it meant they had eluded Pitta’s team.
“I found the allegations to be pretty surprising,” he said. “But in this campaign and many other campaigns I’ve worked on, there are definitely people that try to game the system.”
Pitta described his compliance duties as managing a team of people whose job it is to review every monetary contribution that comes in, be that over credit card or check, to look for signs that they could be fraudulent.
“If you have a concern, reject it. That’s it. [Adams] has been very clear about giving me that discretion and authority,” Pitta said.
Though the DOJ dropped its indictment of Adams, prosecution of the campaign’s straw donors continued. So far two individuals have pleaded guilty to coordinating illegal donations who were included in the indictment of Adams.
Asked about his responsibility in letting the campaign get to this point, he said, “I feel pressure all the time in representing clients. That’s part of the job, but obviously the stakes are certainly higher here.”
It’s not just Adams that Pitta is representing going into the general election although the other two reelection campaigns for borough presidents Vanessa Gibson and Donovan Richards in the Bronx and Queens, are not considered to be competitive races.
The morning that amNY Law spoke to Pitta, Gibson had actually backed out of endorsing Zohran Mamdani at the last minute — leaving reporters surprised after his campaign had already sent out a press advisory on the endorsement. Pitta said that he was “not privy to any conversations they’ve had about the election.”
At the end of the call with amNY Law, when asked about Adams’ chances in light of his fourth-place polling in the general, Pitta said he leaves campaign strategy to the consultants, but couldn’t help but express his optimism for Adams’ chances. Despite the outright rejection the campaign received from the campaign finance board, the now-defunct federal indictment and the collapse of organized labor support, he still said that Adams was more popular than the polls are indicating.
“I will say polls change,” Pitta said. “We saw polls leading up to the primary that were significantly wrong, so that is not gospel, and I think there’s a lot of good work that [Adams] is doing in the administration that speaks for itself.”
