Imagine destroying everything you've spent decades building — an internationally known theatrical production company, citywide influence and plenty of neighborhood sway — to stop the city from building a bike lane.
But this is exactly where Gina and Tony Argento, the sibling team that runs the Greenpoint soundstage company Broadway Stages, find themselves, indicted on Thursday by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for bribing an aide to Mayor Adams to get her to block the safety redesign on McGuinness Boulevard.
The pair allegedly spent $2,500 on a direct cash bribe, plus picked up a $10,000 catering bill so that the aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, could throw a party at Gracie Mansion, and got her a walk-on role in an episode of "Godfather of Harlem," which filmed at Broadway Stages. The pair has also been big donors to Mayor Adams and the Brooklyn Democratic Party political machine.
That soft money has, for years, bought influence, which the Argentos have used to oppose street safety upgrades in north Brooklyn. The Argentos had largely been successful — blocking a road diet on the Greenpoint Ave. Bridge and thwarting an effort to put new bike lanes on roadways near their soundstages — but it all came crashing down over McGuinness Boulevard because they encountered something they had never encountered before: organized local resistance to dangerous streets as usual.
After a beloved local teacher was run down and killed on McGuinness in 2021 — one of 15 people killed since 1995 — the outpouring of support for a redesign of the street was so overwhelming that the de Blasio administration pledged a $40-million redesign to remove two lanes from the highway-like roadway and install a protected bike lane.
The Argentos got around to flexing their political muscle — which included opening their wallets — and are now facing 11 years in prison on felony charges for the bribes, according to the bombshell indictment [PDF].
It was, in the words of Bragg, a "classic bribery" scheme.
Their campaign against the bike lane — which they said would adversely affect their business — could now very well destroy their business, their reputation and their political connections.
It's a mistake that one local pol said could have so easily been avoided if the Argentos had only cared about their neighbors, not themselves.
"Imagine using all of that money, energy, and creativity to improve the lives and well-being of New Yorkers instead," Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, who has long pushed for a safer McGuinness, posted on X.
More than a decade of interference
The McGuinness fiasco is just the latest and most brazen case of the Argento's fending off efforts by the Department of Transportation to make streets safer in Greenpoint across at least three mayoral administrations.
Back in 2010, the city had planned to install a bike lane on the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, by removing a lane of traffic and connecting the existing bike lane on Greenpoint Avenue itself. But the following year, Tony suggested that DOT move the Greenpoint Avenue bike lane to Monitor Street and Kingsland Avenue — effectively useless for cyclists riding on and off the span — and the city shelved the span's redesign for years, then watered it down.
More recently in 2020, Broadway Stages began an application to de-map a section of Monitor Street south of Greenpoint Avenue so the company could turn it into a private backlot between properties they owned.
But when DOT proposed bike lanes on Monitor and Kingsland in 2022, both Tony and Gina, who was on the local community board, fought those changes at the civic panel’s meetings.
But this time, the Argentos had a new friend at City Hall: Mayor Adams. Over the years, Gina and Tony Argento had donated $15,100 to Adams's various campaigns over the last decade. And after becoming mayor, Adams installed Ingrid Lewis-Martin, whom he has long described as a "sister," to oversee DOT projects with the goal of stalling or outright killing the ones she and her allies did not like.
To fight the bike lane project on Monitor and Kingsland, the Argentos sought help from the ethically flexible Lewis-Martin and her City Hall point person — identified in the court documents as CH-1, according to DA Bragg. The anonymous city official forwarded proposals by the Argentos' "consultants" for DOT to "bend ... for Broadway Stages" and put the lane on the wide sidewalk of Kingsland instead of the roadway.
Subsequent to that exchange, DOT never followed through on its own Monitor and Kingsland proposals. But the Argentos followed up with Lewis-Martin, getting her what she craved: a cameo on the Hulu series "Godfather of Harlem," which filmed at Broadway Stages. Manhattan prosecutors allege it was payback for Lewis-Martin's work on stalling the bike lane.
The battle for McGuinness
Unlike the previous street redesigns, the fight around McGuinness Boulevard galvanized a grass-roots movement of advocates to make the roadway safe, following the hit-and-run killing of local teacher Matthew Jensen in 2021.
The slain educator was the 12th pedestrian (plus three cyclists) to be killed by drivers on McGuinness since 1995.
Greenpoint residents and lawmakers got then-Mayor Bill de Blasio to commit $40 million in funding to make the roadway safe for all people in the neighborhood. Locals formed the group Make McGuinness Safe to rally around the safety upgrades.
In May 2023, Streetsblog revealed DOT's plans to remove a lane in each direction of McGuinness, from the Pulaski Bridge to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, while installing a parking-protected bike lane and pedestrian islands near corners to shorten crossing times.
Initially out-hustled by safety advocates, the Argentos soon came out against the proposal, backing a counter-insurgency to stop the redesign, dubbed Keep McGuinness Moving. The pair claimed without evidence that the so-called "road diet" would hurt local businesses, including their soundstages that dot the northeastern industrial zone of the neighborhood.
McGuinness had long served as a cut-through route for people traveling between the BQE and the Long Island Expressway. DOT had predicted only some initial increases in travel times for drivers as they got used to the changes; more motorists would just stay on the highways rather than cutting between them.
But Keep McGuinness Moving plastered the neighborhood in bright orange anti-redesign banners and organized rallies. That included a notorious "town hall" that was anything but: It was held on a Broadway Stages soundstage and supporters of the redesign were barred. And, oddly, the Brooklyn Democratic Party boss, Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, whose district is in distant Flatbush, was on hand, praising her "friends," the Argentos.
Friends, indeed: The Argentos had donated more than $80,000 to Bichotte-Hermelyn’s campaign account and to the Brooklyn Democratic Party since 2014, either through the company or themselves, campaign finance records showed.
Behind the scenes, Gina Argento allegedly also gave Lewis-Martin $2,500 via Zelle in June, and within days, the Adams confidante sent an email to DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez and others that she wanted to monitor the McGuinness redesign, according to the indictment.
Days after that on July 8, Gina texted a copy of a pro-safety flier to Lewis-Martin, upon which the ex-City Hall honcho responded: "We do not care what they say. We are ignoring them and continuing with our plan. They can kiss my ass," according to court documents.
In early 2024, Lewis-Martin asked Gina to arrange a delivery of clothing from Bloomingdale's and asked Tony to get another role, this time on the show "Blue Bloods," which is also filmed at Broadway Stages. And Lewis-Martin also asked the Argentos to pay for catering services for an event Lewis-Martin planned to host at the mayoral residence at Gracie Mansion. That's another $10,887.50 bribe, according to the indictment.
Lewis-Martin also told her "point person" city staffer to "make sure we shut their asses down on McGuinness."
As Streetsblog previously exposed, Lewis-Martin railed against the plan at closed-door meetings with Mayor Adams and other senior officials, claiming only outsiders want it, though all of the neighborhood's elected officials supported the road diet and bike lane.
And the "only outsiders want it" argument was debunked in the 2024 elections, when politicians who had the backing of the Argentos were trounced. Incumbent Assembly Member Gallagher, for example, got 75 percent of the vote in her race against the anti-road diet candidate Anathea Simpkins, who got just 20 percent.
Simpkins received $3,250 in campaign donations from Tony Argento, along with another $3,000 from two limited liability companies that share the film bigwig's address, state campaign finance records show. Tony Argento ran and lost for the hyper-local party position of County Committee member, as did Broadway Stages's community relations director Monica Holowacz, her mother Christine Holowacz, and Keep McGuinness Moving rep Evelyn Pinezich.
Mayor Adams nevertheless ordered DOT back to the drawing board on McGuinness, and within weeks, the agency released a revised plan that left two lanes intact on the northern section of McGuinness closer to Broadway Stages's properties.
The weakened design went in that fall, and Adams had originally planned to neuter the road diet on the other part, too. But in September 2024, the whole scheme began to unravel: investigators for Bragg's office seized the phones of Lewis-Martin and Gina Argento, and the city reversed course on its reversal and implemented the original road diet south of Calyer Street, exposing the hold Lewis-Martin had over DOT.
Lewis-Martin resigned from her post in December, just before Bragg released her initial corruption charges with more than $100,000 in bribes, although the original case did not make mention of McGuinness.
Bragg and the Department of Investigation on Thursday released four additional indictments totaling another $75,000-plus in alleged bribes, impacting an alphabet soup of city agencies, including DOT, the Department of Buildings, the Fire Department, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, and the city's Housing Preservation and Development agency.
The Argentos and Lewis-Martin pleaded not guilty at their arraignment on Thursday. All three declined to comment to Streetsblog as they left the criminal courthouse on Centre Street in Manhattan, mere feet from the seat of power where Ingrid Lewis-Martin reigned for years.
Safety might finally come to McGuinness under the next mayor. Democratic nominee and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani signed a pledge earlier this year by Make McGuinness Safe to finish the road diet.
"Greenpoint deserves better than this despicable corruption. We all do," the group Make McGuinness Safe said in a statement. "Mayor Adams must restore the full road diet on McGuinness Boulevard now and build the bike lanes that were stopped by Broadway Stages on Kingsland Avenue and Monitor Street.
"We will never stop fighting for safe streets for our community," the statement concluded.
