When a judge was ready to sentence R. Kelly for sexually exploiting children, Breon Peace, the federal government’s top prosecutor in Brooklyn, was in the courtroom’s front row. Peace, who oversees more than 160 attorneys and many times that number of cases, can’t go to many hearings personally. This one was an exception, and not just because it was so high profile. It was a chance for R. Kelly’s victims to finally confront him, to look him in the eye. Peace wanted to be there to send a message: “It’s OK to come forward, tell your story.”
So they did.
“I am a representation of every woman, boy, child, man that you have ever afflicted with your deplorable, inexplicable acts and with that I leave you with yourself, Robert Sylvester Kelly,” survivor Jovante Cunningham said.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be whole,” added a second survivor, who wished to remain anonymous.
Then the judge sentenced R. Kelly to 30 years.
Peace came out of the courthouse and told reporters: “The sentence shows that the witnesses reclaim control over their lives and over their futures. These are the voices of mostly Black and brown women and children that were heard and believed, for whom justice was finally achieved.”
I met Peace in his office last week, with a plan to talk to him about Chinese spies. As U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York for the last three-and-half years, he helped turn what was once thought of as something of a legal backwater into a global security powerhouse. Under Peace’s watch, EDNY, as it’s known, went after Mexican cartel bosses, Russian weaponeers, accused Iranian hitmen, and, especially, covert agents of the Beijing government operating on the streets of New York. Along the way, the office prosecuted crooked politicians like former congressman and serial bullshitter George Santos. It’s also reportedly investigating a top fundraiser for New York Mayor Eric Adams with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
We touched on all of those topics in a rare and wide-ranging interview on Peace’s next-to-last day as the federal government’s top prosecutor in this part of New York. But when I asked him about the cases that really stayed with him, out of the hundreds and hundreds his office pursued, Peace, a Brooklyn-bred preacher’s son, steered the conversation toward a pair of trials involving giants of rap and R&B, the wounds left behind, and the moment that may be ahead for the pop culture industry.
“What stuck out at me was all the victims coming forward to talk about what [R. Kelly] had done to them, the trauma he had caused,” he tells me. “It never leaves. It could be, you know, years later, decades later, but you can tell you’re still feeling it. And it’s important to hear those voices and vindicate those interests and respect those people.”
“I don’t know if there’ll be a reckoning or what that would look like,” he adds. “But I’m hopeful that anyone that’s been violated, sexually abused” would look at his office’s prosecution of R. Kelly, and be prompted to tell their story. “Then we can take action.”
Peace isn’t talking in the abstract. After alleged victims came forward, his office was able in October to indict the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch on sex trafficking charges.
It’s one of a number of tectonic cases and years-long investigations that Peace will be handing off to his successor. President-elect Donald Trump has named Joseph Nocella, a little-known Long Island district court judge who, Bloomberg Law notes, previously presided over cases “involving defendants charged with stealing from makeup shop Sephora or drunk driving.”
Nocella, if he’s confirmed in time, will presumably handle the sentencing of fellow Long Islander and convicted fraudster George Santos, who recently managed to convince a local judge to delay any jail time for several months, after arguing he needed to make money from his podcast. (No, seriously.)
Nocella will also be overseeing EDNY’s widely-reported investigations into Eric Adams’ inner circle. Adams has already been indicted by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for taking illegal campaign donations from Turkish officials in exchange for municipal favors. At least one of the Brooklyn probes involves Adams’ longtime Asian community liaison Winnie Greco, who had her former campaign office in a Chinatown mall raided last year by the FBI. Greco, who previously served as a paid “consultant” to Beijing-funded organizations, accompanied Adams on one of his many trips to China, and separately met on numerous occasions with one of two men Peace later indicted for operating a secret Chinese police station in lower Manhattan. According to the New York Daily News, EDNY’s investigation into Greco includes her “Chinese government ties,” as well as an extremely suspicious campaign donation scheme which operated from the site of Greco’s old campaign HQ.
The mayor and his lawyer have derided the federal investigations into him as political payback for Adams’ criticisms of the Biden administration. (“Even Ray Charles can see what’s going on,” the mayor said earlier this week.) As Rolling Stone recently reported, Trump and his team are among the many observers who believe that Adams is campaigning for a pardon with such statements; the Trump crew has been laughing at the “thirsty” mayor for his none-too-subtle efforts. The president-elect, a convicted felon, later said he would “look at” pardoning Adams, and claimed the mayor has been “treated pretty unfairly.”
Peace was measured in his response to Adams and his accusations of prosecutions as political persecutions. “It is something that is said generally, and I understand it’s a way to undermine confidence in a case. Everyone’s free to state their positions, and everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense,” he tells me. “But that is not something that has factored into any decision we’ve made here in the Eastern District, and I don’t think it’s a factor in decisions made by my colleagues, my fellow U.S. attorneys around the country.”
Peace also added that he expected his Trump-appointed successor to keep his office’s investigations going. “The core work of this office, I expect to continue, because it’s impactful and important work for this district and the country,” he says. “I can see no reason why it shouldn’t, or anybody wouldn’t want it to continue.”
And while he didn’t cite an investigation of Adams (or Greco), either directly or indirectly, Peace does believe that there’s a common link between many cases his office pursued, from the secret policemen in Manhattan to the Chinese hackers who targeted U.S. senators’ families to Beijing’s agents who infiltrated dissident groups in New York. It even leads to the New York governor’s mansion. According to Peace’s investigators, an influential aide to governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul was able to covertly steer local policy toward China — in exchange for millions of dollars from Beijing and favors, including braces of Nanjing-style salted ducks. While there’s been some speculation that these may be separate operations by various Chinese government actors, the equivalent of covert entrepreneurship, Peace sees them as a part of a larger, if extremely diffuse, campaign.
“I think our investigations have revealed… [a] more organized [effort] by intelligence agencies, police forces, etc., in China, we think is much more significant than just entrepreneurship by individuals,” he says. “That’s one of the things that’s been challenging about that threat. It’s many different forms. It’s hacking. It’s infiltration of the government at a bunch of different levels. There’s transnational repression… using tools to try to harass and stalk and threaten people who are Chinese residents of this country. So it’s a lot of different forms, and we have been trying to deal with all of them aggressively.”
Sometimes, critics allege, these efforts have been too aggressive, with FBI agents raiding the homes of people whose only crime appears to be that they’re ethnically Chinese. Those critics point to EDNY’s prosecution of former New York police officer Baimadajie Angwang, whom Peace’s lawyers accused of being a Chinese spy — only to abruptly drop their charges without explanation. Peace still won’t offer one now. “I’m limited to what is in the record in terms of our dismissal of that case,” is all he’ll say.
But he did back his office against charges of anti-Asian bias more broadly, saying, “Our approach here is not, ‘let’s just go after the Chinese community.’ This is really trying to focus on important cases where we think they’re real threats that are generated by a nation state [trying] having influence here in the United States.”
We went back and forth about these international cases for a bit longer. But Peace kept wanting to talk about cases closer to home. He grew up on rap, and in the 90s, lived not far from one of the Notorious B.I.G.’s haunts. So it shouldn’t come as much of a shock that Peace paid particular interest in EDNY’s case against the men accused of murdering a hip-hop icon, Run DMC’s Jam Master Jay. When the jury was ready to reveal its verdict last February, Peace was back in court, back in the front row.
Jay was shot and killed 22 years earlier, at a recording studio in Jamaica, Queens. It took the better part of a generation before a key witness was willing to come forward. “It’s been 20-plus years,” one of his sons told Rolling Stone. “Over that time, you lose faith in the justice system.”
The court room was packed on the verdict day, so crowded that Peace sat over by the defense table, instead of the prosecutors’ side. When the verdict came down as guilty, the place erupted. “Y’all just killed two innocent people,” one of the defendants yelled. A supporter screamed, “Bullshit. Bullshit. He didn’t do it. The feds made the witnesses lie.” The U.S. Marshals had to be brought in to keep things from getting out of hand, Peace remembers. A third member of the alleged conspiracy is supposed to go on trial in a year from now.
“I grew up as a fan of Run DMC,” he tells me, “And so, you know, as a citizen, it was great to see the people who killed him held accountable. But for me, sort of putting my U.S. Attorney hat on, I was incredibly proud, because that’s the kind of case — it was an old, cold case — and many times those cases never get solved and people walk away.”
