Lori Zeno, the former head of the Queens Defenders, who one former employee compared to a “White Walker” monster from “Game of Thrones,” was sentenced to three years and seven months behind bars for betraying the non-profit’s indigent clients to fund a life of luxury.
Zeno, 66, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy in February, and her ex-con boyfriend, Rashad Ruhani, were sentenced in Brooklyn Federal Court after trading blame in a flurry of legal filings, including one in which Zeno called Ruhani a “master manipulator” just hours before the court proceeding.
Ruhani, 56, who’s on lifetime parole for a robbery conviction, was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison.
Zeno and Ruhani raided the Queens Defenders’ coffers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, giving Ruhani’s relatives no-show jobs and using the public defender organization’s accounts to pay for their big-money lifestyle — a $6,000-a-month Astoria penthouse apartment, vacations to Bali and Southern California, fancy dinners, an 85-inch television, and designer clothes.
Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Rachel Kovner said she set the sentence because of the “seriousness of the crime and the harm that it caused.”
“Because of this crime, this organization lost its contract with the city and had to close,” Kovner said. “She’s a smart person who’s in a position to be responsible for her actions. She also had the power to effectuate this fraud.”
Queens Defenders Executive Director Lori Zeno, right, is pictured with attorney Sanford Rubenstein outside the Queens courthouse on Thursday, June 25, 2020, in New York City. (AP Photo/Kevin Hagen).
Zeno, who remains free on bond, must surrender to federal custody by Sept. 28. She declined comment as she left the courthouse.
In court filings, Zeno’s lawyer described the Queens Defenders executive director as a devoted but troubled public defender who long struggled with alcoholism and depression, and who fell under the sway of Ruhani’s charms.
“Rashad Ruhani is a handsome, well built man who showered Lori Zeno with attention, as he studied her weaknesses, which she confessed to him included years of loneliness and an unfulfilled and broken emotional spirit,” wrote Zeno’s defense lawyer Anthony Ricco. He was asking for no jail time.
Ruhnai’s attorney, Elena Fast, countered that Zeno was trying to make him “the scapegoat for their collective misdeeds,” accusing her of funneling funds to an earlier boyfriend, of getting her son a six-figure “software specialist” job with Queens Defenders, and of loading the organization’s board with her relatives.
Zeno wept as she described herself as a broken woman, “filled with shame and humiliation,” after her arrest. “I disappointed so many people, my family, my friends, people who trusted me, and people who somehow looked up to me. I am so very sorry for my actions, for the choices that I made and for the consequences that came from those choices.”
She added, “I loved Queens Defenders, and given the chance I would have cut my right arm off rather than hurt her. But I did hurt her, and the only one that can forgive me is God, because I can never forgive myself.”
Rashad Ruhani is pictured in an image in court documents.
The fraud brought the organization crashing down in 2025 — the city yanked its contract to represent indigent New Yorkers and turned the group over to Brooklyn Defender Services, not long after the Queens Defenders cut ties with Zeno following a wave of scandal. Zeno and Ruhani were indicted in June 2025.
In a stunning letter, the Queens Defenders organization called on Kovner to lock up its former founder, despite the work its attorneys have done over the decades trying to keep its clients out of jail.
“It is difficult—and goes against the very fiber of our professional identities—to submit this statement to the Court and ask for the incarceration of another,” the letter reads. “However, the unprecedented scale of Lori Zeno and Rashad Ruhani’s crimes, and the massive, destructive impact those crimes have had on our organization, our staff members, and the 16,000 clients we served in Queens, compels us to seek justice. Lori Zeno’s legacy is the wreckage she left behind.”
The letter describes a culture of fear under Zeno’s “reign of terror,” how more than 150 staff members were forced to leave for the Brooklyn Defender Services, and how the only contract it still has is for eviction defense services.
The Queens Defenders also had to shutter food pantries that served 150 families every week. “While the defendant enjoyed $1,300 steakhouse dinners on the company card, she was taking the bread out of the mouths of hungry families,” the letter reads.
Lori Zeno, the former head of the Queens Defenders, is pictured leaving Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, after being sentenced to three years and seven months behind bars for betraying the non-profit’s indigent clients to fund a life of luxury. (John Annese / New York Daily News)
Three of Zeno’s former employees also submitted letters, blasting her as a “vile boss” and “a power-driven bully who ruled with intimidation.”
One former Queens Defenders staff attorney, Jackson Dunne, whose mother co-founded the organization described her as abusive, vindictive and corrupt.
“She is a rotten person. The fact that she got caught doing this fraud wouldn’t surprise anyone that worked for her,” he wrote. Dunne did data management work for the Queens Defenders when he was in high school and, he wrote, “It would be like a chill washed over the office if someone found out that she was indeed appearing in the office, like if the white walker from ‘Game of Thrones’ had shown up.”
Another former employee, Elisha Rudolph, wrote that Zeno sued her to recover healthcare benefits when she took a job at the Legal Aid Society after going out on maternity leave.
“I firmly believe that she sued me to make an example of me,” Rudolph wrote. “I have been told that my name was brought up at many meetings in an effort to intimidate young female attorneys from leaving or considering alternate employment.”
Zeno co-founded the Queens Defenders under the name Queens Law Associates in 1994, which was formed after then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani quashed a strike by the Legal Aid Society’s union employees and broke their contract.
In 2021, Zeno fired two employees who supported the workers joining the same union that represents Legal Aid’s lawyers.
“There is a reason that only a few years after she forced the former executive director out, the employees at Queens Defenders overwhelmingly voted to unionize,” Dunne wrote in his letter. “There is a reason that a few years after that the Queens Defenders contract that she was responsible for stewarding got cancelled by the city due to her mismanagement and fraud.”