Poof! In late summer, RIOC AVP Akeem Jamal, who challenged President/CEO Shelton J. Haynes for authority suddenly vanished from Roosevelt Island. But with the help of a professional associate, we found Jamal. Turns out, he did well after his RIOC exit. Probably too well.
by David Stone
The Roosevelt Island Daily News
What appeared to be an arranged marriage in August 2022, never looked promising, considering the egos involved. When Jamal left his assistant communications director job, the story floated out of Yonkers was that Mayor Mike Spano’s young star was going to work “for the Hochul administration.”
Spano declared it Akeem Jamal Day in Yonkers,. No one explained why he’d leave a city of 210,000 where he thrived for a parking place on tiny Roosevelt Island. His star was not rising, unless…
Even though he did not meet the minimum qualifications for his AVP post at RIOC, Jamal had a certain swagger. He was self-confident, and he was here to clean up the messes within RIOC.
Later, with RIOC communications lagging and strewn with illiteracies, another much more capable specialist was hired. Bryant Daniels’s hiring looked like a death knell for Jamal, but it wasn’t. More like a bandaid.
The best of a bad lot at the state agency, Jamal broke ground by communicating with the dreaded local media and was a consistently friendly figure at public events.
A funny thing, though, developed. As his professional shortcomings grew more evident, Jamal grew closer to Haynes. And then, in August, this year, he stepped out ahead of Haynes in a public article advocating an approach diametrically opposite that of his sensitive boss.
Then, poof! He was gone.
But We Found Jamal
For whatever reason, Jamal blocks us from seeing this resume on LinkedIn, just as Haynes does. What’s there that either wants kept unseen?
After our earlier report on Jamal’s disappearance, a journalist with the Yonkers Ledger, Mark Parolisi, reported a soft landing. Jamal became press secretary for Yonkers Public Schools in November. His compensation is a whopping $170K per annum.
“Unbelievable,” a regular reader reacted. “I guess his daddy still has the juice”
Jamal’s Daddy is Abdool Jamal, currently Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology for the City of Yonkers. Immediately before that appointment, he served for three years as an appointed trustee with Yonkers Public Schools.
All of these are patronage jobs controlled by Mayor Spano. Patronage is common among local and state governments in New York. They are reviled by good government groups because they create bloated payrolls without sufficient attention to results that affect taxpayers.
And as with Roosevelt Island, the cash all comes out of residents’ pockets.
Still, none of this should bother you unless…
- You’re disgusted that public education is perilously underfunded across the United States.
- Or, it turns your stomach that poorly paid teachers go begging for classroom supplies or pay for them out of their own earnings.
- It pisses you off that Jamal hauls in $170K in a city where the average annual salary is under $35K and the average household earns about $72K per year.
- Or you’re sick and tired of dizzyingly high salaries not tied to qualifications or performance.
This is Governor I-Can’t-Believe-She’s Worse-Than-Cuomo Hochul’s New York now.
Just pay your taxes and shut up.
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