Eric Adams is accused of a decadelong bribery scheme, featuring more than $100,000 worth of gifts and a river of illegal political donations from overseas, that federal prosecutors say powered his campaign to become mayor of the nation’s largest city. The 57-page indictment, unsealed in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday morning, alleges that before and after he became mayor, Adams used his political position in a criminal conspiracy that saw him not only accept but solicit both perks and political donations from Turkish nationals in exchange for favors looking to “cash in on their corrupt relationships with him.”
Adams is charged with five counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors. In a defiant press conference minutes before U.S. Attorney Damian Williams detailed his office’s case, the mayor, speaking over hecklers, declared his innocence and vowed to fight the charges, refusing calls that grow by the hour for him to resign.
The indictment lays out a campaign of criminal deception with Adams, an unnamed staffer, and a group of Turkish officials and businesspeople coordinating efforts they knew were illegal, according to federal prosecutors. The goal, they say, was for the Turks to gain Adams’s help for their business and political priorities by bankrolling his quest to become mayor and currying favor with him through undisclosed travel perks such as swanky hotel rooms and first-class plane tickets.
Adams, for his part, told a close supporter during his first mayoral campaign, “You win the race by raising money … Everything else is fluff,” according to the indictment.
The centerpiece of the government’s case involves Turkey’s drive in 2021 to open its $300 million consulate across the street from the United Nations’ headquarters. The 35-story building could not be approved for occupancy until it passed a standard inspection for skyscrapers by the FDNY, which the indictment says it would have failed at the time. After Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor that June, an unnamed Turkish official told him it was time to “repay” favors done for him by making sure the building would open in time for a visit by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Adams allegedly leaned on the FDNY to let the building be occupied without the inspection (according to news reports, he went straight to the fire commissioner at the time, Daniel Nigro). After the intervention, the official responsible for FDNY’s assessment was “told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce,” the indictment says. That September, during the U.N.’s annual meeting, the building opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Erdoğan.
Turkish interests are said to have begun cultivating Adams in 2014, shortly after his election as Brooklyn borough president. He allegedly solicited and received luxury-travel packages paid for and arranged by at least one Turkish government official and several wealthy foreign businesspeople. Two of those businesspeople were quoted saying they believed Adams might one day become president of the United States.
In 2018, when Adams set out to run for mayor, he set a goal of raising $7 million, according to the indictment, texting one supporter that he had “a clear plan” to reach his goal and that “each night we are out executing the plan.”
After he was elected in 2021, the arrangement with Turkish interests allegedly continued. Among other things, it helped to secure his silence on a matter of importance to the Turkish government: the Armenian genocide, in which as many as 1.2 million Armenian Christians living in what was then the Ottoman Empire were murdered during World War I. An Adams staffer assured a senior Turkish diplomatic official that the mayor would not make a statement of any kind on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the indictment alleges.
The same Turkish official and other figures lined up free or discounted luxury travel for Adams and his companions on Turkish Airlines to and through Turkey to France, India, China, Ghana, and Hungary with “free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment” while they were in Istanbul, the indictment states.
On visits to Istanbul arranged by another figure, a Turkish entrepreneur referred to in the indictment as “the Promoter,” Adams is accused of accepting heavily discounted and free stays at named suites in the St. Regis hotel. His two nights in the Bentley Suite in 2017 should have cost him $7,000, according to the indictment, but Adams paid only $600. A free two-night stay in 2019 at the same hotel’s Cosmopolitan Suite was worth $3,000.
Adams did not list either trip in the annual financial-disclosure forms he was required to file as borough president, the indictment notes. There were six Turkish Airlines travel packages in all between 2016 and 2021 valued in the six figures that he also did not disclose or for which he created a “false paper trail,” the indictment says, falsely suggesting he had paid his own way. Another planned trip to Turkey in 2021 was said to have been arranged and then canceled.
Prosecutors allege Adams played troubleshooter for his Turkish benefactors and secret donors doing business in the city: One businessman texted him in early 2023 lamenting the “hard time” he was having getting the Department of Buildings to lift a stop-work order on a project. “Let me look into this,” Adams replied. Several days later, the businessman wrote, “Mayor, brother I want to thank you for your help. DOB issue partially resolved and they promised to expedite the process. Thank you, you have my continued support.”
Last year, as he was preparing to run for reelection, Adams “directed his staff to devise a plan … to secretly obtain illegal foreign donations offered by the Promoter,” the indictment says. In exchange for the Promoter’s help raising money from abroad by using straw donors in the U.S. and then reimbursing them, Adams attended an event with “the true foreign donors” in what the indictment describes as a kind of Potemkin fundraiser.
The gathering took place in a private room at a Manhattan hotel last September and was billed as a dinner hosted by “international sustainability leaders” to discuss “sustainable destinations.” It cost $5,000 to attend and was not publicized on the mayor’s public calendar, according to the indictment. However, it appeared on his private calendar as a reelection fundraiser with a goal of $25,000, according to the indictment, of which he collected $22,800 beforehand.
It was all part of a scheme that prosecutors say was to conceal the foreign origin of the contributions to Adams’s mayoral campaign. Once the money was in his campaign account, according to the indictment, Adams allegedly parlayed those illegal donations into matching public funds available to city candidates. Prosecutors say this amounted to defrauding the city and stealing $10 million worth of public funds.
Soon after, the arrangements began to unravel. The first signs of trouble for Adams in his dealings with the Turkish government came on November 2, 2023 — the same day the federal investigation into Adams became public knowledge — in a round of raids targeting three people close to City Hall. While he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a White House meeting with mayors about the migrant crisis, FBI agents were executing search warrants at the homes of three Adams associates, including that of his chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs.
The indictment also describes the sometimes-frantic efforts by the alleged conspirators to conceal their actions once federal investigators got involved. In one remarkable scene, an Adams staffer stepped into a bathroom and deleted her encrypted-messaging apps after federal agents showed up at her home. That person appears to be Rana Abbasova, a protocol officer and liaison to Muslim countries for the administration, who is reportedly cooperating with investigators. The others who had phones confiscated were Cenk Öcal, a Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor-elect’s transition committee, and Suggs, the fundraiser.
Alerted to the Suggs raid by a staff member, Adams turned around after landing in D.C. and boarded a flight back to New York. Four days later, FBI agents approached him as he left an event at New York University and confiscated two cell phones and an iPad in his possession.
Adams was not carrying his personal cell phone, “the device he used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment.” He turned it over the next day in response to a subpoena, but it was locked. Adams was quoted telling investigators that he had changed the password a couple of days earlier, from four digits to six, to keep members of his staff from accidentally or intentionally deleting its contents. But he’d already forgotten the new password, the indictment says, “and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone.”
On Thursday morning, federal agents descended on Gracie Mansion, where his attorney, Alex Spiro, said they seized the mayor’s phone once again: “They send a dozen agents to pick up a phone when we would have happily turned it in.”
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