One of the city’s most powerful union leaders is used to big wins. He wants more.

New York City was still climbing out of the Great Recession when the Resorts World casino opened in Jamaica, Queens, in 2011. Rich Maroko, the president of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, remembers tens of thousands of desperate candidates applying to work “kind of shitty jobs” at the massive complex.  

But the Trades Council, the union representing hospitality and gaming workers around New York and New Jersey, butted their way into the casino’s licensing process and organized Resorts World staff. After a grueling bargaining process, the Hotel Trades Council secured a contract that doubled wages overnight and provided healthcare and retirement benefits. 

“I remember doing the ratification there, and it was really one of the most fulfilling moments in my professional career,” says Maroko, the union’s general counsel at the time. “People were just so stunned by what the union had delivered.” 

That focus on rapid, transformative change has helped make Maroko one of the most powerful union leaders in the city. Since ascending to HTC president in 2020, he’s shrewdly supported mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, Governor Kathy Hochul and various city and state legislators. In turn, those allies helped weaken competition from non-union lodging, codify hotel safety standards and expand the state’s gaming industry. 

With another mayoral election approaching and three new casino licenses on the way, the Hotel Trades Council will once again play a crucial role in New York politics in 2025. Instead of hedging behind their growing power, Maroko and HTC are doubling down. 

Sitting in his fifth floor office at the union’s modest Midtown headquarters, Maroko remembers his time as a frustrated labor attorney in Syracuse. The son of politically progressive immigrants from Brazil and Poland, he had turned down more lucrative corporate jobs out of law school to make a difference, but soon wondered what difference he was actually making. 

“The process was just not designed to provide any sort of real justice or real change for working folks,” Maroko recalls of his time in litigation.

When he left for HTC in 2002, he learned unions are more his speed, which is to say, fast. 

“It was not just fighting on the right side,” he says. “But it was fighting, you know, with a team that allowed you to actually win.”

‘We’re at the zenith’

New York politicos and Maroko himself credit his predecessor Peter Ward with building a crack political operation at HTC, which, at around 40,000 members, is among the largest New York unions. Maroko built on those efforts, notching a series of wins at City Hall and in Albany that he isn’t shy talking about.

“We are really at the zenith of our political influence,” he says. 

Most notably, HTC endorsed Adams — a longshot candidate — in the 2021 Democratic primary and donated $1 million for campaign ads. 

“You have been my first major union endorsement,” Adams told HTC workers that year at a victory rally. “I never forget my first. You are my love." 

He certainly hasn’t forgotten. Since Adams moved into Gracie Mansion, he reportedly helped block the conversion of hotels into affordable housing at HTC’s behest. He also backed HTC-endorsed legislation such as the Safe Hotels Act, a hotly contested 2024 law that mandates certain security precautions for both patrons and workers at city hotels.

Maroko credits that success to HTC’s smart endorsements and strategy, but also to its members. “Our membership is very engaged, very sophisticated, very militant,” he says. “They understand the importance of the political process to the union and to themselves as working people. And so they show up.” 

The union represents all workers in any given hotel, regardless of their trade. This structure breeds solidarity, says Adams’ campaign lawyer, Vito Pitta, who has lobbied for the union and is the grandson of a former HTC president, who was also named Vito Pitta.

Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who has watched the union grow into a powerhouse over the decades, agreed, but added one other explanation: “They also have a checkbook. Checkbooks matter.”

Following its donations to Adams in 2021, HTC emerged as an early backer of Hochul in her 2022 race for a full term, contributing half a million dollars through political action committees. Now, the union is involved in the bidding process for the three downstate casino licenses that Hochul’s New York State Gaming Commission is expected to issue in 2025. 

HTC is staking plenty of resources, thinking and political capital on those casinos. The union even changed its name in 2022 from the Hotel and Motel Trades Council to put gaming on the crest. Maroko’s bet is that full-service gaming in New York City will be another one of those big wins he covets. 

“Casinos create really, really good, solid middle-class jobs,” Maroko says, speculating the casinos could create as many as 15,000 new positions. “That's life-changing.” 

Resorts World is proof of concept. Workers there reported a 50 percent drop in unpaid medical bills, a 46 percent decline in late housing payments, and an 81 percent jump in after-tax pay in the two years after ratifying their first contract, according to surveys conducted by Stephanie Luce, a professor of Labor Studies at City University of New York.

Maroko has all but ensured new casinos will have union jobs, too. Every bidder will allow workers to unionize under HTC, and the union is now using its political leverage to shepherd proposals through the process, Maroko says. He wants as many candidates as possible to reach the final stage to guarantee the state issues all three licenses. 

“Every license means that many more good jobs,” Maroko explains.

Loyal to Adams?

While the state chooses bidders this year for casino developments that will reshape entire neighborhoods, New Yorkers will head to the polls to choose their next mayor, providing another chance for HTC to use its clout. 

POLITICO reported last month that Maroko met with Adams and offered support if he runs for reelection amid now-dropped federal corruption charges. Maroko declined to endorse anyone, but he didn’t deny the meeting with Adams, who more than 60 percent of primary voters view unfavorably, according to an Emerson College poll from earlier this month. And that’s before the mayor brazenly cozied up to President Donald Trump, whose right-wing Justice Department let Adams off the hook in what many characterized as a quid pro quo deal that may result in the mayor’s removal. 

Sheinkopf won’t be surprised if Maroko sticks by his embattled ally. “If you’re going to do business in the future,” he adds. “You can’t be seen as being disloyal.”

Pitta, meanwhile, thinks the union and Adams have long been a natural couple given the mayor’s working-class background and longtime support for HTC causes. 

“When candidates are such strong advocates for the issues that matter to hotel workers, the union similarly is a strong advocate for those candidates,” he says. 

The grandson of a Brazilian newspaper publisher, Maroko is too media savvy to talk about individual politicians or his opinions on them. But he also gives off the impression that his personal views aren’t that important to the union’s decisions. Neither is any perception that HTC gets special privileges in New York’s famously machine-like political world. 

Maroko is quick to point out that the union’s political cache isn’t an end in itself. The potentially unpopular endorsements, the casinos, the sometimes controversial legislation aren’t about pleasing people outside the union. They’re about securing genuine quality-of-life improvements for workers — the kind Maroko couldn’t achieve as a young lawyer in Syracuse. 

“We are going to do everything we can in our power,” he says slowly, chopping his hand against the table, shaking his Diet Coke can. “To improve the lives of our members. Period, end of story.”