Jodi Pulice was about to be fired.
In a Midtown conference room at Cushman & Wakefield, she met with a group of Cushman veterans: Todd Schwartz, Gus Field and Ron Lo Russo, as well as a team from another brokerage that was small like her eight-person firm, JRT Realty Group, which she founded with her husband in 1996.
Not everyone was attending in person. Cushman broker Diana Boutross teleconferenced in, her face projected on a large TV screen on the wall. Boutross is a close friend of Jesse Hamilton, a Mayor Eric Adams crony who oversees leasing for the city at the Department of Citywide Administration Services, or DCAS.
On the agenda: a handover. The Cushman colleague who had led the firm’s lucrative account with Hamilton’s agency was retiring. The departing broker, Bob Giglio, had worked side by side with Pulice for a decade on the $1.5 billion account with the city, doing lease deals that sometimes took years to complete. When they finally closed, JRT received one third of the commission.
Now, Giglio was giving the account to the new team: Boutross, Field and Lo Russo.
The new team assured the smaller brokerages that nothing would change, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation. Yet the relationship started to sour almost immediately.
“There was a very quick change in direction and you could tell the temperature in the room got much different,” a source said. “It wasn’t warm and cozy anymore and it was going the wrong way very quickly.”
A few months later came the official email taking Pulice off the account. Pulice, “not a shrinking daisy,” as a friend described her, filed a lawsuit against Cushman in December 2024, later expanding it to include the individual brokers.
The city contract with Cushman was not Pulice’s only line of business. She’d created a robust book over the last 30 years, forming key alliances with larger players, eventually leasing and managing more than 50 million square feet of space valued at more than $5 billion. She’d won a REBNY award for leadership, served on many advisory boards and was known for mentoring young women coming up in the business.
Among other advantages she brought to the table was her certification as a Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise, or MWBE, since some clients wanted or were required to ensure that a certain number of their vendors had verified 51 percent ownership by a woman or minority.
“Cushman used its expertise in certain markets but JRT was always at the table.”
But change was afoot, and not just in the internal succession plans of the Cushman team. Federal prosecutors were investigating Mayor Eric Adams, and in the widening circle of suspicion, JRT accused Hamilton of intervening in Boutross’s hiring to take over the team. Hamilton, according to Pulice’s lawsuit, allegedly told Cushman that if Boutross were not made account manager, the brokerage would lose its DCAS account. Cushman called the lawsuit “frivolous” and “a coordinated PR and lobbying campaign to damage Cushman’s ability to conduct future work with DCAS.”
Adding to the muddle, corporations were backing away from decades-old diversity commitments that had spawned MWBE contracting, first after a 2023 Supreme Court ruling and then amid recent threats from the Trump administration to withhold funding from companies and governments that prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion.
The upheaval may soon come to a head. New York City is preparing to hire five new brokerages to handle its leasing business, potentially setting up a showdown between Cushman and JRT — no longer a duo — to snag one of the spots. For Pulice, who declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the ongoing lawsuit, a career lies in the balance.
Diversity business
Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society meant business opportunity for all, and the president set up a program within the Small Business Administration to support companies owned by minorities. Richard Nixon established an office to further the work, and Jimmy Carter later added the “W” — pulling women into the mix of groups whom governments would “affirmatively” help get into business.
New York state established its own MWBE program in 1988, requiring state agencies to set employment and business participation goals for minorities and women on state contracts.
Firms who wanted to do business with the government were going to have to find a way to diversify.
By the time Pulice was getting going in her career, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA, was one of them.
“Their big focus was on women-owned and minority companies because 65 percent of their annuitants were women and people of color. They were teachers,” Pulice told a publication last year.
JRT became an MWBE, with Pulice as CEO who owns 100 percent of the company and her husband, Greg Smith, as president. Certification in hand, it landed TIAA, its first major account.
JRT also formed a partnership with brokerage behemoth Insignia/ESG. Pulice brought a book of business to Insignia, including TIAA, and helped the larger firm land contracts with MWBE requirements; Insignia supplied clout and capacity.
“At the time, you didn’t have anything like that and it was very hard for women, even if they had a company, to win RFPs because they didn’t have all the backup or support that a larger firm would have,” real estate consultant Suzy Reingold, who worked at Insignia and managed the relationship with JRT, said. (Reingold later worked for Cushman & Wakefield, which she sued for gender discrimination. She left the firm after the lawsuit was resolved. She does some work for JRT and is a friend of Pulice.)
But resentment soon built.
Insignia’s mostly male brokers didn’t want to share their commissions with MWBE partners, and they were slow to embrace the angle as a boon to business, Reingold said. Pulice spent a lot of time explaining her value.
“What I thought would be evident was that the large brokerage firms would understand that by partnering with JRT and with Jodi they could increase their size of the pie,” Susan Brustien Macgregor-Scott, who worked at JRT in the early 2000s, said.
“But brokerage is a notoriously competitive field, and so that was not universally understood or accepted within the organizations that she’s partnered with.”
“I think those of us who have survived this long definitely are strong personalities. Jodi is as well.”
Brokers eventually got it: If they weren’t minority or women owned, they’d have to pair up with someone who was to go for certain contracts.
Meanwhile, rooms where commercial brokers transacted were growing more diverse.
“Where in the past you were always pitching to a room full of white men, you now had diversity of who was in the room,” Reingold said. “So your next argument to the brokers is ‘everybody can’t look the same. We have to look like our clients.’ So it evolved that way.”
Insignia merged with CB Richard Ellis in 2003 and the partnership with JRT ended. The firm hitched its wagon to Cushman the same year, and Pulice encountered resistance again.
But one broker, Giglio, embraced the partnership, said Reingold, who also landed at Cushman. Giglio did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2011, DCAS awarded its leasing contract to Cushman and JRT. For a decade, with Giglio at the helm, the brokerages secured city leases. JRT’s participation helped meet the contract’s requirement of hiring a certain percentage of MWBEs. (The city had followed the state on participation mandates.)
“Cushman was the lead on the account and JRT was always at the table at regular status meetings,” Christopher Nesterczuk, who worked at DCAS at the time, said. “That was the dynamic. I think Cushman used its expertise in certain markets but JRT was always at the table.”
Small scale
Pulice grew up in Staten Island, the daughter of a New York Police Department detective dad and gym teacher mom. She studied microbiology in college but decided against a career in health care after an internship at a pediatric cancer ward. A self-described fitness buff with a perky blond coif, Pulice is often photographed in a business suit and a strand of pearls peeking out beneath a button-down shirt.
She was working as a reservations agent for Northwest Orient Airlines in the early 1980s when her friend Richard Baxter suggested she try commercial real estate brokerage. At the time, two powerhouse women named Carol Nelson and Mary Anne Tighe were setting the commercial real estate world on fire and competing with male brokers.
“I saw Jodi as someone with similar talents as those two,” said Baxter, who went on to become a top investment sales broker before retiring in 2020. “I was watching these two women kill it, so I wasn’t worried about Jodi.”
He set her up with interviews at several brokerages and she landed a job at the now defunct Berley & Company. Tenacious, driven and adept at cold calling, she immediately took to brokerage.
She faced battles along the way.
“She told some pretty crazy stories about her time being a young woman in the business and how she would show up to meetings and people would ask her to get coffee or assume she was there to take notes,” a young female broker she mentored told The Real Deal.
At Berley & Company, Pulice formed an alliance with fellow broker Greg Smith that eventually grew into a marriage and, in 1996, the formation of JRT, named after Jodi and their children Ryan and Taylor.
“They had been very successful on their own and most of their business was generated through their own relationships,” Baxter said. “It did not make sense for them to be at a large company and pay 50 percent to the firm anymore because between the two of them they were creating all their own business.”
Among their big wins: Pulice and Smith were the leasing brokers for the Seagram Building when TIAA decided to sell it in 2000. They partnered with Baxter’s team at Insignia/ESG to sell the building to RFR for $380 million. Pulice was also part of the original leasing team for 1 World Trade Center and, in 2019, she received REBNY’s Bernard H. Mendik Lifetime Leadership in Real Estate Award.
If the MWBE designation got her in the room, she knew how to stay there. “She leans in, she speaks up, she says what she has to say,” said Pam Agnone of the United Nations Federal Credit Union, who first worked with Pulice in 2002 when she was looking to buy land for a headquarters in Long Island City.
“She has a super database of people who she can call up and ask questions,” Jennifer Maldonado of the New York City Educational Construction Fund, who hired JRT as a consultant, added.
Pulice’s forcefulness and tenacity drive her success at the deal table, people who have worked with her said.
“I think those of us who have survived this long definitely are strong personalities,” Macgregor-Scott added. “Jodi is as well.”
The women
Pulice wasn’t running a charity, but she was recognized for being a high-powered woman in a male-dominated industry who supported other women. New female brokers would matriculate at JRT before Pulice launched them to larger firms like JLL. Asked who were the women to know in the industry, sources always put Pulice and her sidekick Ellen Israel on the list.
Pulice’s goodwill did not extend to Diana Boutross.
Boutross began calling Pulice with questions about the DCAS account in December 2022, after Giglio had announced his retirement. During one call, Boutross allegedly bragged that she would get the job, according to JRT’s lawsuit. Later, at a lunch with several Cushman heavyweights, Hamilton pointed to Boutross and said, “She is my broker,” according to the complaint.
Pulice complained from the start about Boutross’s hiring, calling her unqualified due to her background as a retail broker, Lo Russo said in an affidavit to dismiss the lawsuit. He accused JRT representatives of “Mean Girl” behavior, like eye rolling, when Boutross spoke.
In April 2024, a few months after the handover meeting, Boutross emailed DCAS officials to tell them JRT would no longer be involved with the account due to “performance issues.”
JRT claims that was so Cushman wouldn’t have to share future commissions, including the city’s potential $750 million purchase of the Bronx Logistics Center. If true, these were the same objections JRT had been hearing for decades from its partners.
In its latest argument to dismiss the suit, Cushman has called for JRT to be sanctioned and pointed to the gender discrimination claims in the lawsuit as particularly egregious and irrelevant.
Pulice’s tactics for bidding on the DCAS contract directly with the city are vague, as is the question of what is keeping her busy as the lawsuit proceeds. Reingold believes the DCAS contract was never the one keeping the lights on for JRT.
“Yes, there’s money to be made in that account, but it’s not like it comes in every day,” she said. “It’s sporadic, it takes a long time to finish deals. It’s not an easy account.”
Her friends said she has no plans to retire.
“Knowing Jodi, she’ll find the next opportunity and she’ll run with it,” Reingold said.
Likewise, New York has said it won’t back away from MWBE goals, despite threats from the federal government. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a friend of Pulice, has long championed the cause.
“I believe in this so intrinsically,” Hochul said at an annual MWBE event in 2021. “It’s part of who I am as a woman and a person who helped start women-owned businesses.”
But it’s still unclear how the private sector will make its Judgement of Solomon: Follow New York’s MWBE contracting rules to do business in the state and risk losing federal dollars, or vice versa.
“Who knows what the future of MWBE is but [Jodi] has been determined to carve her path,” Reingold said. “What the next thing is for the business I can’t answer because I don’t think anyone really knows at this time.”