The Mystery of the Authorship of the Anonymous Letter of New Rochelle Part I
This is Part I in a 4-Part Series
DUBLIN, IRELAND (August 1, 2024) — For as long as anyone can remember, the City of New Rochelle has never acted on anonymous complaints. That changed last summer.
On or about July 21, 2023, the seven members of the New Rochelle City Council received an undated Anonymous Letter, postmarked July 18, 2023. The letter targeted City Manager Kathleen Gill and Development Commissioner & Deputy City Manager Adam Salgado with a page and a half of unsupported allegations of criminal conduct and malfeasance based on hearsay, coupled with vague claims and insinuations of fostering a toxic workplace.
Instead of discarding the letter, Mayor Noam Bramson, Democratic Mayoral Nominee and Councilmember Yadira Ramos-Herbert and Councilmember Sara Kaye sanctimoniously seized on the Anonymous Letter to push for an ethics investigation, the hiring of an outside counsel and a referral of a criminal complaint to law enforcement.
If that sounds familiar it is because it is: Bramson, Ramos-Herbert and Kaye are the same three people who opened themselves up to perjury charges during their depositions as part of the 2022 New Rochelle Board of Ethics investigation into sustained charges that Bramson violated the City Charter (misdemeanors) by pressuring City Manager Charles B. Strome to hire him as Development Commissioner and to rescind Strome’s appointment of Kathleen Gill as Deputy City Manager.
Anyone familiar with Bramson’s history of Machiavellian maneuvering to surreptitiously accomplish his ends would certainly notice that the Anonymous Letter conveniently targeted Adam Salgado, the person given the job Bramson believed was rightfully his, and Kathleen Gill, the person who Bramson believes is the reason Strome passed him over for that job. They might also notice Bramson pursued an identical path — seeking an ethics complaint, the hiring of an outside counsel, and a referral to law enforcement.
Not long before the Anonymous Letter arrived, Noam Bramson told people at City Hall that he had been contacted by Robert Yamuder, the former Human Resources Commissioner, who was fired (not unexpectedly resigned) in March 2023. Bramson said Yamuder claimed he was mistreated and wanted to get back his original job as Risk Manager.
Bramson should have known better than to take such a call as his getting involved in matters of the hiring and firing of municipal employees was precisely the Charter violations he had committed a year earlier leading to an ethics investigation, sustained charges, and a 6-month investigation by the District Attorney.
On March 25, 2024, I published Part I of what was intended to be a 4-part series about the Anonymous Letter:
SEE: Anonymous Letter Rocks New Rochelle City Hall
SEE: How 2023 Anonymous Letter Played Out in New Rochelle in 2024
I never got around to completing that series, including the part on sorting out who may have written the Anonymous Letter.
Four hours after the first Anonymous Letter article was published, New Rochelle Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert moved to fire City Manager Kathleen Gill, and all hell broke loose at City Hall. The rush of events overwhelmed my Anonymous Letter series. I never went further than publishing Part I and a catch-all follow-up article. I did continue to work quietly on what was to be Part IV, unmasking the anonymous author. That effort continued from March 2024 until today.
Upon reason and belief — which I will get into in future articles — I came to believe that the author of the Anonymous Letter was more than likely Robert Yamuder.
Yamuder was fired by City Manager Kathleen Gill in March 2023 and the Anonymous Letter attacking her arrived a few months later. In between, Noam Bramson was talking to Yamuder shortly before the Anonymous Letter arrived.
Yamuder came to work in New Rochelle after he was unexpectedly resigned from his position as Village Manager in Mamaroneck in October 2018. He has a history of being unexpectedly resigned. He was hired by Chuck Strome as Risk Manager in the New Rochelle Department of Human Resources in March 2019. He was promoted to New Rochelle Commissioner of Human Resources in March 2022 after Christine Dodge was unexpectedly resigned as a result of my ethics complaint against her related to a conflict of interest in negotiating a 7-year contract with the New Rochelle PBA. Yamuder, in turn, was fired from his position as New Rochelle Commissioner of Human Resources after he declined an offer to be allowed to resign. He spent several more months fighting to be restored to his former position as Risk Manager. When this failed, Yamuder accepted the position of Village Administrator of Dobbs Ferry, NY and was appointed by the Village Board on July 11, 2023.
The following week, during a 6-day period, from July 18 to July 24, the Anonymous Letter was put in the U.S. Mail and postmarked July 18, 2023, the seven members of the New Rochelle City Council received the undated Anonymous Letter, on or about July 21, 2023, and Yamuder started his new job as Village Administer in Dobbs Ferry, NY on July 24, 2023.
On March 15, 2024, I reached out to Yamuder at his new job in Dobbs Ferry via email. Receiving no reply, I tried again on March 19. I tried again on March 22. I also made phone calls to Yamuder. To this day, he has never replied to me.
After my final attempt to speak with Yamuder, having decided to proceed with publishing my article, I received a series of emails from an attorney representing Yamuder. The lawyer said I had asserted “false and defamatory claims” and that if I wrote or even suggested Yamuder was the author of the Anonymous Letter, he would file a defamation suit against me in New York State Supreme Court.
She said he denied being the author of the Anonymous Letter; she subsequently sent numerous additional legal threats, including just hours ago when I informed her and Yamuder that I was proceeding to publish this article.
SEE: How a Computer Program Helped Show J.K. Rowling write A Cuckoo’s Calling
Years ago. I read a fascinating article about how J.K. Rowling was shown to be the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, a crime novel published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. In 2013, The Sunday Times newspaper got a tip that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith. To confirm the tip, they hired Patrick Juola, an expert in “forensic linguistics” to use his Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program (JGAAP) to determine authorship of the book. Confronted with the JGAAP report, Rowling admitted she was “Robert Galbraith”.
In considering how best to determine the authorship of the Anonymous Letter, I thought if forensic linguistics could do that in 2013, there were far more advanced options today given massive improvements in computer processing power and Artificial Intelligence since. There were — many.
Flint AI is an Artificial Intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, CA, which specializes in Authorship Determination. FLINT Systems released the first linguistic tool designed to detect whether a document was authored by its attributed author. According to their website, “its AI detection tools apply forensic linguistic methodologies to create a digital linguistic fingerprint of an individual's writing style. It then creates a linguistic fingerprint of the document in question and compares the two.”
FLINT Systems Chief Linguistic Officer Professor Robert Leonard is a pre-eminent forensic linguist, whose clients include the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Director of National Intelligence, NYPD, UK's MI-5 and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Leonard's methodologies have been accepted by federal and state courts across the nation.
To use the FLINT Systems linguistic tool to compare the Anonymous Letter, I would need a reference document as an exemplar. I thought the best way to do that was to get emails written by Yamuder through a Freedom of Information request. As I will detail in Part II, I was slow-walked by Dawn Warren, New Rochelle’s increasingly obtuse Corporation Counsel, so it was not until three months later that I obtained 20 emails written by Yamuder from his time working in New Rochelle.
After all her slow-walking, it was not until the end of June that I had enough writing samples from Robert Yamuder to create a single document of about 1,200 words, more than enough for a statistically significant comparison to the Anonymous Letter which contained a bit over 700 words.
In my research into forensic linguistics. I was particularly attracted to Professor Leonard’s client list of serious organizations like the FBI, DNI, NYPD, MI-5, MI-6 and the Joint Terrorism Task Force,
To use the Flint AI software, I converted the emails from the Yamuder FOIL into a single document: Yamuder Author. I converted the Anonymous Letter FOIL into a single document: Unknown Author.
I uploaded both documents to generate an Authorship Determination report: Flint AI Report on Unknown Author and got this summary result:
Based on the documents you uploaded for this analysis, our findings are within an 80% — 85% level of certainty that the submission was authored by Robert Yamuder, the reference author.
After reading the report, I contacted Flint AI. I sent them the documents linked above and asked them if they thought I had taken a reasonable approach to comparing a known to an unknown author.
A company spokesperson told me my approach appeared valid.
I sent the report to Yamuder and his attorney advising them I would soon publish this article and seeking comment.
Yamuder’s attorney responded with renewed and expanded legal threats, again stating that Yamuder denied he was the author of the Anonymous Letter.
Readers can review the report and draw their own conclusions.
Flint AI Report on Unknown Author
This is Part I in a 4-Part Series
Part I: Introduction and use of Linguistic Analysis on the Anonymous Letter (Free)
Part II: Dawn Warren slow-walking production of exemplar emails (Paid Subscriber)
Part III: Legal threats to deter my publishing (Paid Subscriber)
Part IV: Authorship of the Anonymous Letter (Premium)
