The founder of the Queens Defenders, the borough-based organization that provides legal services to low-income clients, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring with her husband to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars from the public defense nonprofit.
Lori Zeno returned to court Tuesday morning, after a prior plea hearing broke down, to admit that she conspired with her husband and Queens Defenders employee Rashad Ruhani to defraud the group she helped create in the 1990s. Federal prosecutors are pushing for a 51- to 63-month prison sentence.
“I agreed with another person to charge personal expenses to the corporate credit cards of the Queens Defenders,” Zeno told U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Vera M. Scanlon during the hearing.
Prosecutors said the pair, who were wed in a religious ceremony, not legally married, stole at least $300,000 from the organization over a year and a half, though Zeno only stipulated to taking at least $150,000 as part of her plea.
From June 2024 and January 2025, the couple diverted the legal service funds, which are primarily generated through city, state and federal contracts to provide services to low-income New Yorkers, to finance a luxurious lifestyle, including spending on foreign travel, meals, luxury shopping and rent for a penthouse apartment.
The pair allegedly used the company credit cards to spend over $10,000 on a vacation to Bali, $3,300 for an 85-inch smart television to be installed at the Penthouse Apartment and $4,000 for a Louis Vuitton designer handbag, among other expenses.
Zeno repeatedly mischaracterized personal payments as business expenses to get reimbursed, prosecutors said. To pay for her apartment, Zeno and Ruhani fraudulently collected over $39,000 in rent by submitting false receipts.
As a result of the Queens Defenders’ financial mismanagement, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice reassigned the organization’s $32 million contract to the Brooklyn Defenders last March.
The Brooklyn-based provider officially took over the Queens practice after Zeno was indicted in June.
The proceeding brought to light Zeno’s struggles with her mental health and alcoholism. As part of the court’s assessment of mental fitness, Zeno said she is diagnosed with depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder and that she has also struggled with alcoholism since the early 2000s. She attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings daily and had relapsed in May of 2025 — shortly before she was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Zeno had planned to make her plea on Jan. 20 before she became emotional and suddenly cut the proceeding short. It was rescheduled for Tuesday.
“It’s a very sad day for Ms. Lori Zeno, a very accomplished attorney,” her lawyer Steven Legon said leaving the courtroom with Zeno.
Zeno’s sentencing is scheduled for April 20. Ruhani is scheduled to stand trial starting on June 1.
“The defendant brazenly betrayed and abused her position of trust as the director of a non-profit, stealing funds that were meant for legal services for disadvantaged clients and members of the community and then spending those funds on luxury goods and expensive vacations,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella Jr. said in a statement.
