Queens Defenders founder, ex-husband seek leniency after admitting to $500K fraud

Former Queens Defenders Executive Director Lori Zeno and her ex-husband, Rashad Ruhani, blamed one another for stealing $580,000 from the nonprofit. File photo via Queens Defenders

By Jacob Kaye

Queens Defenders’ former executive director and her ex-husband asked a judge for leniency ahead of their joint sentencing scheduled for next week after the pair admitted to defrauding and effectively bankrupting one of the borough’s largest public defense firms last year.

Lori Zeno, the founder and former top executive of Queens Defenders, and Rashad Ruhani, who worked at the organization, both asked a judge in separate filings to minimize the sentences she plans to hand down to them on Tuesday, July 28.

Both Zeno and Ruhani pleaded guilty to wire fraud earlier this year after prosecutors said the duo used company credit cards to steal more than half a million dollars from the organization that Zeno founded around three decades ago.

Ruhani’s attorneys asked the judge for a three-year sentence – federal prosecutors plan to ask the judge to hit Ruhani with a five-and-a-half-year sentence. Zeno’s attorneys said she shouldn’t serve any prison time at all, while prosecutors said she should spend a little more than four years behind bars.

Prosecutors also said that the pair owe restitution of about $580,000, a sum that Ruhani has already indicated he’ll be unable to contribute to. Even if Zeno and Ruhani were to pay the money back to Queens Defenders, it would do little to right the financial outlook of the organization, which lost a $32 million contract with the city after Zeno and Ruhani’s scheme was discovered.

Though Zeno and Ruhani were once wed in a religious ceremony, there appeared to be little love lost between them in the filings they recently submitted to a federal judge.

Zeno claimed she was pursued and manipulated by Ruhani, while Ruhani claimed the opposite – Zeno lusted after him and rewarded him with promotions, access to company funds and no-show jobs for his friends and family as the two became romantically entangled.

Zeno, who was pulling in around $500,000 in salary and benefits from the nonprofit the year she was busted, said her problems began when she met Ruhani, who her attorneys described as a “handsome, well-built man who showered Zeno with attention, as he studied her weaknesses.”

“Lori Zeno pled guilty to diverting over $500,000 of money from the Queens Defenders into purchases that had nothing to do with the legitimate business of Queens Defenders, but instead were diverted to satisfy the thirsts of Rashad Ruhani, and the emotional desires (albeit damaged) of Lori Zeno,” the former attorney’s filing read.

For his part, Ruhani, who had just completed a 26-year prison sentence when he was hired by Zeno in 2022, pointed the finger at Zeno and Queens Defenders in his filing, claiming that it was an “organizational failure which led to Mr. Ruhani being put in a position where he was entrusted with QD’s financial resources without adequate oversight.”

“Despite all this, from the moment Mr. Ruhani was issued a QD corporate credit card at Ms. Zeno’s discretion, he was given explicit permission to use it for personal expenses,” Ruhani’s filing read. “He was insulated from any scrutiny or oversight of his spending, which precluded an intervention which may have prevented the ultimate demise of QD.”

But there was one thing the former lovers agreed on – they both regretted using company funds to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal purchases, including a $10,000 Bali vacation, luxury shopping sprees and a penthouse apartment in Astoria.

“Lori Zeno was devastated by her own criminal conduct and how she destroyed, over a course of months, what took her decades of hard work and commitment to providing services to the poor and indigent, to accomplish,” Zeno’s filing read.

In a letter to Judge Rachel Kovner, who will determine Ruhani and Zeno’s sentences, Ruhani said that he was “internally troubled by my spontaneous decision making, remorseful for my actions, and quite frankly, angry with myself for not maintaining the standard of conduct such responsibility called for.”

Zeno’s side of the story

Zeno said in her filing that while she “possessed a strong will to achieve…her life trajectory was influenced by a confluence of unresolved traumatic experiences that converged critically around the time of her meeting” Ruhani.

The pair met in 2023, when Zeno was 64 years old, a decade older than Ruhani, who had just been released from prison after completing his sentence for a violent robbery committed in 1996.

They were introduced to each other by a judge, who recommended that Zeno consider hiring Ruhani, who had been working in the courts as a liaison and mentor to young defendants. Zeno hired Ruhani as a client advocate and began paying him $60,000 a year. But according to Zeno, it didn’t take long before Ruhani’s employment became troublesome.

“It quickly became clear that Rashad Ruhani had his own personal agenda, that went way beyond being an advocate for teenaged offenders,” her filing read.

Ruhani was quickly promoted to a director position, and Zeno increased his salary by $100,000, according to the filing. She also authorized the hiring of several of Ruhani’s friends and family members for low-show or no-show jobs – Zeno also hired a number of family members, including her son and daughter.

Ruhani also allegedly charged up to $76,000 for personal expenses on a company credit card not long after receiving it, Zeno alleged.

Zeno claimed that Ruhani was “in full emotional pursuit” of her when he began working at the nonprofit, “convincing her to marry him in a religious ceremony, and thereby also giving him full access to her personal finances and lines of credit.”

“These circumstances are not brought to the attention of the court to avoid or deflect Lori Zeno’s criminal responsibility for criminal conduct that she willingly engaged, but rather for the court to have insight into her state of mind, the relative culpability of the participants in the criminal conduct and her potential to rehabilitation and redemption,” the filing read.

The theft got more brazen when the two married, Zeno alleged.

Though prosecutors said that Zeno and Ruhani made many of the illegal purchases together, Zeno characterized them as Ruhani’s ideas. She claimed he used the credit card to buy a $96,000 BMW and charged Queens Defenders for the apartment in Astoria. Zeno said she didn’t need either the car or the apartment – she was happy driving her 10-year-old Toyota RAV4 and owned a home in Garden City.

Zeno also alleged that Ruhani raided her personal bank accounts and forged her signature on a $5,000 check that he used to “cover his lifestyle of luxury clothing and expensive luxury vehicles, and to pursue his romantic interests.”

Ruhani’s side of the story

According to Ruhani, it was Zeno who was the first to initiate their romantic relationship.

Though the pair didn’t know each other that well, Ruhani alleged that Zeno referred to him as her “husband” early on in his employment. His filing claims that he was later told by two colleagues to “watch out” for Zeno, who had been telling others about her romantic interest in him.

The two entered into a relationship in 2024, around the time Ruhani was given a promotion and access to the organization’s funds.

Having spent the last quarter of a century in prison, Ruhani said that he was ignorant about how his use of the organization's money would affect Queens Defenders – the company card was his first credit card, the filing alleges.

“Mr. Ruhani was unfamiliar with the inner workings of a law firm, let alone a not-for-profit provider of indigent legal services with government contracts,” the filing reads. “He was ignorant of conflict of interest disclosures, employment practices, fiduciary duties and fiscal responsibility.”

Ruhani said that the couple rented the Astoria apartment for a legitimate reason – to house a teenage boy from a troubled home that Ruhani and Zeno adopted. Zeno made no mention of the teen in her filing.

He also defended the fact that he got jobs at Queens Defenders for his friends and family members, including his daughter and a woman he had previously married.

Prosecutors said in their sentencing memo that Zeno had a part to play in the hires, as well.

Several months after the fraud began, directors at Queens Defenders began questioning the roles of the new workers but were quickly shut down by Zeno.

“[Employee-1] has informed me that you instructed her to ‘send you her [expense reports]’ BEFORE sending it to [the Organization’s Director of Finance], so that you can ‘check it,’ especially when it comes to the charges that Rashad Ruhani uses,” Zeno allegedly told one of her colleagues. “That is ABSOLUTELY NOT acceptable!!! You do not supervise my Executive Assistants and you do not supervise Rashad Ruhani’s expenses!”

Prosecutors were less concerned about who was to blame for the more than half a million dollars stolen from Queens Defenders.

In a filing submitted earlier this week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York characterized the theft as a joint venture between Zeno and Ruhani.

“Ultimately, through their misuse of the organization’s credit cards, fraudulent reimbursement requests, and low-show or no-show jobs, [Ruhani] and Zeno together embezzled or misapplied hundreds of thousands of dollars that were meant to fund legal services for indigent residents of Queens County,” prosecutors said.