“Congressman Crowley has been a staunch supporter of middle-class families and will continue to support policies that help keep New Yorkers in their homes,” said Alex Florez, a spokesman for Crowley. “The work the lawyers do on behalf of their clients is independent from the work they put in as volunteers in our effort to help elect good Democrats in Queens.”

Sweeney’s firm was never known as one of the largest and most notorious players in the foreclosure business, according to attorneys who have gone up against it in court. “This firm is pretty much like other foreclosure firms we see doing foreclosures in Queens,” said Mark Weliky, the executive director of the Queens Volunteer Lawyers Project. “In fact, they are probably a little better than some of the firms we would call ‘foreclosure mills.’ ”

The so-called foreclosure mills sprang up across the country during the financial and housing crises, representing banks and financial services trying to foreclose on the millions who had defaulted on their loans. In New York, the worst actor was probably Steven Baum, known for bringing cases without verifying the bank he represented actually owned the mortgage. Facing public and legal pressure, Baum shut down his firm in 2011. Sweeney, Gallo, Reich and Bolz took on one of his cases afterward, a not-uncommon practice after thousands of banks and lenders lost a prominent advocate.

The law firm saw a major uptick in business as the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 bled into the catastrophic crash of September 2008. In a matter of a year, it came close to doubling its caseload. In 2008, the firm handled 441 cases. A year later, that number was 863. In 2010, they handled 858 cases before seeing a significant drop-off to 293 in 2011. (Caseloads pushed north of 700 again in 2013 and 2014.)

“I remember seeing them in the collapse right around 2007, 2008,” said Donna Dougherty, the attorney-in-charge and director of JASA/Legal Services for the Elderly in Queens. “If you were in that business at the time, you were doing high volume.”

With its large swath of working-class homeowners, Queens was arguably New York City’s ground zero for the housing crisis. As recently as last year, Queens was the borough with the most foreclosures in the city, according to a PropertyShark report.There were 898 first-time foreclosures in Queens in 2016, compared to 410 in Brooklyn.