By Jacob Kaye
Rashad Ruhani, a former Queens Defenders employee, is expected to plead guilty to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the public defender group with the help of his wife, the organization’s former executive director, Lori Zeno.
Ruhani, who pleaded not guilty to wire fraud, theft, money laundering, obstruction of justice and concealment of evidence charges in December, is expected to switch his plea later this month in federal court and admit to stealing, with Zeno, at least $400,000 from the Queens nonprofit.
He was originally facing up to eight years in prison.
Ruhani will be the second person in the case to switch his plea before trial, which is currently scheduled for June.
Zeno pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in February after initially entering a not guilty plea in the case that shook Queens’ legal community and resulted in the decimation of Queens Defenders’ criminal practice.
A third defendant in the case, media personality Kimberly Osorio, is accused of helping Ruhani hide his phone from FBI agents. She pleaded not guilty in December.
Elena Fast, Ruhani’s attorney, declined to comment on Ruhani’s plea change.
Ruhani and Zeno were arrested in June 2025 after prosecutors said the pair used a company credit card to fund their $10,000 honeymoon in Bali, a number of meals at high-end restaurants, designer shopping sprees, and a $3,000 TV for their penthouse apartment in Astoria, which they allegedly also schemed to get Queens Defenders to pay for.
During her February plea hearing, Zeno suggested that Ruhani was responsible for the bulk of the theft. While she said she stole around $150,000 from the nonprofit, which was primarily funded by city taxpayer dollars, she didn’t account for the remaining $250,000 the couple was accused of pilfering.
While not legally married, Ruhani and Zeno were wed in a religious ceremony not long after the former executive director hired Ruhani to work as a client advocate at the public defense firm she helped create nearly three decades ago.
He was hired shortly after his release from a 25-year prison sentence he served for a 1996 robbery, his third violent felony conviction at the time. Prior to his June arrest, Ruhani was under lifetime parole supervision.
According to prosecutors, Ruhani and Zeno charged a number of personal expenses to a Queens Defenders credit card. They also used reward points from the card to fund luxury vacations.
The couple also allegedly claimed that their $6,000-a-month penthouse apartment in Astoria was being used for work and submitted monthly rent invoices to the organization, which Queens Defenders paid out.
Prosecutors said Zeno and Ruhani also worked together to hire several people to work lucrative no-show jobs, including Ruhani’s legal wife, Ureka Washington.
Ruhani, Washington and former staffer Teyana Reyes were fired by Queens Defenders’ board of directors in January. Zeno was put on leave at the time, but was later fired after being arrested.
In a superseding indictment filed in December, federal prosecutors also brought charges against Osorio, a music journalist who formerly worked as editor-in-chief of The Source magazine.
According to the indictment, Osorio lied to FBI agents about her efforts to hide Ruhani’s cellphone, which he allegedly gave her as the pair traveled back to New York from Los Angeles.