The FBI on Tuesday raided the Manhattan offices of a New York City police union and several hours later two agents left the building with cardboard evidence boxes in their arms.
Armed with a search warrant, the agents spent several hours in the headquarters of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, which represents 13,000 active and retired New York City Police Department sergeants and is the fifth-biggest police union in the country.
Simultaneously, FBI agents searched a home in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington, New York, an FBI spokesperson said. It belongs to the SBA's outspoken leader, Ed Mullins, sources told NBC News.
It was not immediately clear why the FBI targeted the SBA and Mullins's home, but the spokesperson told The New York Daily Newsthe agency was “carrying out a law enforcement action in connection with an ongoing investigation.”
Members of the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan were also involved in the raid, according to the New York Times.
Around 1 p.m., a pair of agents hefting large brown cardboard boxes were seen leaving the union's headquarters and walking to the FBI's base in Lower Manhattan.
Neither Mullins, who has run the union since 2002, nor the SBA's lawyer, Andrew Quinn, could be reached for comment.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was aware of the FBI raid but shed no light on the surprise raid of the SBA.
The son of a dockworker who was raised in Greenwich Village, Mullins has frequently clashed with both the NYPD leadership and de Blasio.
The union leader's acerbic Twitter posts have included calling a city councilman a “first class whore,” calling a former health commissioner a “b----,” and in response to the officer-involved shooting death of Michael Brown and subsequent protests, he said, “Ferguson, Missouri was a lie and a nation of police have been under attack ever since.”
