New York Daily News
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NEW YORK — Mayor Adams was charged with bribery, wire fraud and secretly soliciting campaign contributions from overseas donors in a sweeping indictment unsealed Thursday stemming from a wide-ranging federal probe into corruption at City Hall.
The stunning indictment alleges the mayor accepted more than $100,000 in lavish trips, cruises and hotel stays — all paid by Turkish government officials and businessmen who thought Adams’ rising political career would lead the former NYPD cop to the White House.
“I want to be clear. These upgrades and freebies were not part of some frequent flier or loyalty program available to the general public,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a Thursday press conference unveiling the charges.
The grandiose gifts were part of a “multiyear scheme to buy favor with a single New York City politician on the rise,” Williams said. “These are bright red lines, and we allege that the mayor crossed them again and again for years.”
Adams repaid the favors by pressuring the FDNY into fast-tracking the opening of a new 36-floor Turkish Consulate in Manhattan despite serious fire safety concerns, the indictment charges.
Adams is facing the possibility of up to 45 years in prison if convicted of bribery, campaign finance, wire fraud and conspiracy offenses, federal officials said.
The charges stem from an ongoing investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office that has scrutinized allegations Turkey’s government funneled illegal donations into Adams’ 2021 campaign coffers. It comes after revelations earlier this month that authorities were also looking into communications between Adams and the governments of five other foreign countries.
Adams is the first New York City mayor in the modern era to face criminal charges while in office. His administration has been reeling from additional investigations and a series of high-profile resignations in recent weeks.
Scheme allegedly spanned a decade
In the five-count indictment, federal investigators described a scheme that spanned “nearly a decade,” starting when Adams became Brooklyn borough president in 2014. The charges he faces are conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals; wire fraud; two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and bribery.
Adams allegedly accepted “improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the 57-page indictment charges.
Federal prosecutors say Adams proceeded to solicit and accept illegal straw donations from Turkish nationals and once he became mayor, his “foreign-national benefactors sought to cash in on their corrupt relationships with him” by securing favors from him.
Since becoming mayor, Adams has kept this favor-swapping relationship going and has continued soliciting illegal straw donations from Turkish nationals for his reelection campaign, according to the indictment.
It’s illegal to accept campaign donations from non- U.S. citizens. To get around this, Turkish officials allegedly sent the donations through a third party, known as a straw donor, who was a citizen.
Adams allegedly accepted the donations, knowing their origins, and maximized his gains through New York City’s matching funds program — netting his 2021 campaign over $10 million in public funds.
“The foreign money, the corporate money, the bribery, the years of concealment, is a grave breach of the public’s trust,” Williams said, adding that Adams solicited benefits “even though he knew they were illegal.”
No one else was named in the federal indictment. Still, Williams, whose office is investigating several people close to the mayor, said the corruption probe was ongoing, noting, “We continue to dig.”
On Thursday afternoon, Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho, who has been assigned to the case, ordered Adams to appear before Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker on Friday at noon and, again, before him on Oct. 4. Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, requested later Thursday the initial appearance be pushed to next week.
Challenging the evidence
Spiro said the mayor is eager to appear in court, as he challenged several of the prosecution’s key points.
“You can almost picture them trying to cobble this together and try to tell a story so that they could say, ‘Corruption, corruption, corruption,’” Spiro told reporters outside Gracie Mansion Thursday afternoon with Adams at his side. “They do that to tarnish him in your eyes.”
Spiro said there was nothing untoward about the seat upgrades.
“Those were upgrades on open seats,” Spiro said, adding that such upgrades are commonplace and often done for VIPs — and that prosecutors were twisting that narrative “to tarnish (the mayor) in your eyes.” Airlines regularly provide such upgrades when seats are available and any perks Adams received were not gifts or bribes, Spiro said.
Spiro also disputed the notion that the mayor had sought foreign donations. “There are emails with Mayor Adams telling them, telling this staffer, telling all of them, do not take foreign money, period,” the attorney said.
Spiro shared a screenshot of a purported text exchange between Adams and Abbasova in which he writes, “Rana please be aware we can’t take money from people who are not U.S. citizens.”
Spiro also challenged the notion the Turkish Consulate inspection was some sort of payback. The mayor has previously said there was nothing improper about his reaching out to then-FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro in an effort to expedite an inspection at the site.
Spiro reiterated that, sharing screenshots of purported text messages between Adams and Nigro in which the mayor-to-be asks the fire commish to adjudicate an apparent difference of opinion between a Department of Buildings inspector and a fire-alarm contractor on the project.
Flanked by more than a dozen faith leaders outside Gracie Mansion earlier Thursday, Adams proclaimed his innocence — and shot down calls to step down.
“It’s an unfortunate day, and it’s a painful day. But aside of all of that, it’s a day that will finally reveal why for 10 months I will have gone through this. And I look forward to defending myself,” he said. “I look forward to having my legal team handle this as I handle the city of New York.”
Williams said politics had nothing to do with the federal investigation.
“We are not focused on the right or the left — we are only focused on right and wrong,” he said. “We allege that Mayor Adams abused (his) privilege and broke the law. Laws that are designed to ensure that officials like him serve the people — not the highest bidder, not a foreign bidder, and certainly not a foreign power.”
Pressure on FDNY
After accepting the travel perks and free flights, Adams was told by the Turkish national that “it was his turn to repay” him — by pressuring then-FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro to fast-track the opening of the new 36-floor Turkish Consulate, prosecutors allege.
“The FDNY official responsible for the FDNY’s assessment of the skyscraper’s fire safety was told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce,” reads the indictment.
“Some of the people at FDNY thought the building had so many issues and defects that the building was not safe to occupy,” Williams said at the press conference. “So the Turkish official sent word to Adams that it was, quote, his turn, unquote, to support Turkey.”
“Adams delivered and pressured the Fire Department to let the building open,” Williams added. “The FDNY professionals were convinced that they would lose their jobs if they didn’t back down. And so they did. They got out of the way and let the building open.”
When reached Thursday, Nigro said he told the FBI “everything that I know.”
“They have all that information,” Nigro said, adding that Adams’ request to expedite the inspection was unusual.
“It was the first time I had ever heard from him about something like that,” he said. “Whatever he did, he did. It doesn’t involve the Fire Department.”
Besides the consulate issue, the feds charge that the mayor, in return for illegal donations, personally helped an unnamed businessman last year with resolving Department of Buildings issues. The feds also allege Adams has as mayor taken steps to avoid criticizing Turkey’s government, including by not issuing a statement marking the anniversary in October 2022 of the Armenian Genocide, a bloody tragedy long blamed on Turkey.
Earlier Thursday morning, federal investigators converged on Gracie Mansion and executed a search warrant, seizing at least one phone, Adams’ attorney Spiro said.
“Federal agents appeared this morning at Gracie Mansion in an effort to create a spectacle (again) and take Mayor Adams phone (again),” Spiro said. “He has not been arrested and looks forward to his day in court. They send a dozen agents to pick up a phone when we would have happily turned it in.”
Several elected officials and advocates have called on Adams to resign in light of the indictment, claiming he can’t oversee city government while defending himself in a criminal federal case.
Cover-up alleged
Adams first traveled to Turkey in 2015, where he met many of the unnamed foreign nationals who are key to the indictment, identified as a Turkish “official,” a Turkish “promoter,” and a Turkish “businessman” who owns a Turkish university. The trio would spend years pulling together illegal straw donations to Adams’ campaign and bribe him with gifts, the indictment claims.
The Turkish nationals who funneled the money into his campaign coffers and sent him on expensive trips did so believing they weren’t just buying influence with a mayor but a future president, the indictment reads.
“The promoter also celebrated Adams’ prospects with additional people, telling others – including Adams himself – that Adams would soon be president of the United States,” the indictment reads. “Similarly, the Turkish official wrote to (an Adams staffer) that given Adams’ increasing prominence … the foreign minister of Turkey is ‘personally paying attention to him.’”
Adams never disclosed the upgraded flights and hotel stays and “sometimes created fake paper trails to try to cover up the travel benefits he solicited and received,” Williams said.
The indictment alleges Adams falsely suggested, “that he had paid, planned to pay, for travel benefits that were actually free.”
He also “deleted messages with others involved in his misconduct, including, in one instance, assuring a co-conspirator in writing that he ‘always’ deleted her messages,” the indictment reads.
Through it all, Adams would preach about how important fundraising was to winning a mayoral campaign.
“You win the race by raising money. … Have to raise money,” he said in 2018 texts to a person the indictment identifies as “a close supporter.”
“Everything else is fluff,” Adams added, according to the indictment.
The supporter he was texting is “Bling Bishop” Pastor Lamor Whitehead, who was convicted in March of federal wire fraud and attempted extortion charges for swindling a parishioner out of her life savings and other crimes. The same texts are quoted in Whitehead’s federal indictment. The prosecutors handling Adams’ case were all on the team that secured Whitehead’s conviction.
Last year, the feds seized multiple phones and electronic devices from the mayor as part of their corruption probe.
Even with the feds breathing down their necks, Adams and at least two underlings tried to hide information on their phones, according to federal prosecutors.
Longtime aide Rana Abbasova is identified as “Adams staffer” in the indictment and fundraiser Brianna Suggs is identified as “Adams fundraiser.” Their homes were raided on the same day last November.
“After learning that FBI agents had arrived at her residence, but before answering their repeated knocks at her door, (Suggs) called Adams five times, even though the agents had not yet given (her) any indication of the purpose for their visit,” the indictment reads. “When (she) then spoke with the FBI agents, she agreed to discuss many subjects, but refused to say who had paid for her 2021 travel to Turkey.”
When Abbasova agreed to be interviewed by FBI agents, she “excused herself to a bathroom and, while there, deleted the encrypted messaging applications she had used to communicate with Adams, the Promoter, the Turkish Official, the Airline Manager, and others,” the indictment read.
After the FBI raided Abbasova’s New Jersey home, she agreed to cooperate with investigators, the Daily News previously reported.
When FBI agents seized Adams’ phone in November, the mayor “told them he had changed his password and now didn’t remember it and so couldn’t help them unlock the phone,” the indictment reads.
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(With Graham Rayman, Anusha Baaya, Cayla Bamberger, Evan Simko-Bednarski and Josephine Stratman.)
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