The grand jury indictment of Mayor Eric Adams kicks off with a stunning $10 million figure that has captured headlines, dominated cable news shows and prompted the New York Times editorial board to demand his immediate resignation.
That’s the sum Manhattan U.S. attorney Damian Williams alleges Adams improperly obtained “as a result of false certifications” that Adams and those working under him made about their compliance with campaign finance regulations. The campaign, the indictment alleges, knowingly accepted donations from overseas contributors smuggled in through American donors. They then applied for matching funds against some of this money, bilking the New York City taxpayer-funded program that supplies $8 for every $1 raised for city residents’ contributions up to $250.
Many readers of the grand jury indictment concluded that the Turkish donations at the core of the indictment yielded $10 million for Adams. But that figure is actually the entirety of the matching funds granted Adams’ 2021 campaign by the city Campaign Finance Board — more than the $8.9 million his campaign raised in private dollars.
How much did Adams actually get from Turkey?
The indictment lists about $26,000 in allegedly illegal foreign contributions, not counting matching funds the campaign sought — leading Adams attorney Alex Spiro to wave off the prosecution as “not a real case.”
But the small size of the donations doesn’t mean Adams is innocent of the serious charges, which implicate campaign aides and foreign donors as well. Williams’ focus on that total $10 million sum speaks to chillingly far-reaching implications of the Adams campaign’s abuse of the public financing system, which aren’t isolated to the Turkey incidents chronicled in this criminal case.
THE CITY found multiple instances of forbidden pass-through donations that were matched by public funds, where people listed in Adams’ campaign filings said they did not give and had no idea anyone had contributed using their identities. And a circle of Adams supporters have already pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a separate scheme.
So how much money did Adams actually get in matching funds from the Turkey donations?
Certain details are too scant to say for sure — but the dollars that can be traced in public records show an amount less than $5,000, across both the 2021 and 2025 campaigns.
New York City’s public matching funds program is considered a national model and has grown steadily more generous over the years. The 2021 election that Adams won was the first to have both an $8-to-$1 match (up from $6-to-$1 previously) and a $2,100 per-donor limit (down from $4,950), changes pressed by former Mayor Bill de Blasio following his own campaign fundraising scandals.
The program is designed to get big money out of local politics. The indictment alleges that the Adams campaign subverted that purpose by disguising donations from foreign nationals — who are forbidden by federal law to contribute at all — as small donations. Some of those the Adams campaign listed as coming from New Yorkers, which then unlocked public matching funds.
How far did the deception go?
Adams campaign representatives have previously pleaded ignorance when it comes to straw donations — where the actual source of the contributions is hidden from view and the campaign submitted the names of other people to the Campaign Finance Board.
Confronted earlier this year by THE CITY with evidence of straw donations in his reelection campaign, Adams’ election lawyer, Vito Pitta, asserted “it is fairly common for contributors to engage in straw donor actions without a campaign’s knowledge.”
Pitta added: “No one on the campaign has ever or would ever participate in or condone such behavior.”
Now the indictment alleges that Adams in fact not only knew that some funds came from Turkish sources, but approved of routing those donations through U.S. people to disguise them.
The full extent of the schemes may be unknowable. But the Turkey indictment documents Adams’ alleged personal knowledge and involvement in directing straw donations — raising the prospect that he may have been at least aware of other schemes as well.
How much was Adams personally involved?
The indictment lays out a vivid picture of how Adams and his aides allegedly made intentional efforts to obtain foreign contributions and straw donations, while attempting to cover their tracks.
It presents evidence of Adams personally directing an assistant, Rana Abbasova, to work with Turkish nationals who sought to funnel money to the Adams mayoral campaign even after being informed such donations would be illegal — and in one case attempting to solicit such a donation himself while traveling in Turkey.
According to the indictment, Adams also described the matching funds program to a Brooklyn businessman at a dinner with the Turkish consul general; the businessman proceeded to front $1,250 to 10 of his employees with instructions to make donations at an Adams fundraising party.
And in yet another alleged scheme, Adams approved of a plan to funnel contributions from a Turkish university president through straw donors in the U.S. Those donations, which came in after Adams was already the Democratic nominee, got refunded by the campaign.
Straw donations didn’t just come from Turks — or from foreign nationals. The indictment describes another scheme in which Adams campaign workers asked a local Uzbeki-American business leader for $10,000 and directed him to break it into five $2,000 donations to the 2021 Adams campaign, passed through employees. That leader then reimbursed the employees, according to the court filing — and later got assistance from Adams personally in getting clearance to proceed with construction after a safety violation.
Why didn’t the Campaign Finance Board stop this?
These contributions and many more apparent straw donations got past the city Campaign Finance Board, which issued the $10 million in matching funds but has yet to complete its audit of Adams’ 2021 campaign.
About 50 people work on enforcement at the board, which had to handle a record 500-plus candidates in the 2021 elections for City Council, comptroller, public advocate and mayor.
The board’s power to stop illegal exploitation is limited, especially where campaigns effectively cover up their actions. Its staff relies on representations from campaigns, and while they may refuse to give matching funds where paperwork does not show a donor qualifies, or even pull the plug entirely on public funding, cases can drag out for years. For example, a Queens City Council candidate served 18 months in federal prison for crimes tied to a 2010 straw donor scheme but was not thrown out of the matching funds program until this year.
In fact, the Campaign Finance Board first flagged the group of illegal Turkish university donations described in the indictment in October 2021 as coming from “suspected intermediaries.” The board asked the campaign then to explain who bundled the donations — information campaigns are required to provide routinely. But the Adams campaign consistently refused to identify intermediaries.
And it still hasn’t. A draft audit of the 2021 campaign issued by the board in May 2024 continues to seek answers to the same question.
In the meantime, the Williams indictment provided a devastating answer.
Could there be even more illegal contributions to the Adams campaigns?
Yes.
Adams’ 2021 filings to the Campaign Finance Board were rife with questionable fundraising claims, including phony addresses, groups of co-workers making identically sized donations and widespread use of money orders instead of typical credit card contributions.
The campaign also did not disclose most of the intermediaries who supplied groups of donations — claiming, citing rule technicalities, that it was not required to do so.
Last year, THE CITY and Documented set out to investigate suspicious clusters of donations — and found people who said they had been reimbursed by their bosses, even though the Campaign Finance Board warns campaigns and donors not to accept money from third parties. Other contributors said their managers instructed them to give.
In one instance, a donor named in Adams’ campaign records told THE CITY that his signature and his father’s were forged as part of more than a dozen donations submitted in the names of employees of a local appliance store chain serving Chinese communities in Queens and Brooklyn.
“I don’t think it’s OK for them to use my name,” he told THE CITY. “I think it’s fraudulent.”
That chain, AC & Appliances, is among the “suspected intermediaries” now flagged in the ongoing Campaign Finance Board audit — which flagged a pile of donations made on a single day in October 2019, ranging between $100 and $250 each.
An even bigger trove of Chinese community donations came from the New World Mall in Flushing, Queens, where Adams had a campaign office run by his Asian community liaison, Winnie Greco, and held numerous fundraisers at a banquet hall called the Royal Queen.
The March 2024 FBI raid on the mall, and Greco’s Bronx homes, came after the CITY and Documented revealed a straw donor scheme in which the Adams campaign received dozens of donations made by low-wage immigrant employees. Multiple listed donors told THE CITY that their managers asked them to make donations, then reimbursed them.
At the mall, too, a person whose name and home address appeared in Adams campaign filings to the CFB asserting they were a small donor eligible for matching funds told our reporters that the claim was wholly bogus: listed as a restaurant “deliveryman” in an Adams campaign filing that reported a $245 Chase bank check, she said she had never worked at the restaurant, does not bank at Chase and did not recognize the signature on the check.
Each money order or check donation was accompanied by a standard CFB contribution form that said, in either English or Chinese: “I understand that State law requires that a contribution be in my name and be from my own funds.”
As Williams underscores in his Turkey scheme indictment, Adams and “persons working at his direction” had to make their own affirmations to the CFB that their reporting of contributions is “true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”
Yet campaign staff collected phony donations by the handful.
The appliance chain owner told THE CITY that the Adams campaign “sent a lot of people who were specifically responsible for fundraising” to the event he attended at a Brooklyn banquet hall on the date of the AC&C donations, which included the one from the donor who described his and his father’s money orders as “fraudulent.” Greco was among those in attendance.
“They collected all the money,” he said. “We just did what we were asked to.”
Has anyone already admitted to making straw donations to Adams?
Yes, in two separate criminal cases.
In a case brought by Peace, a wealthy Chinese businessman, Hui Qin, pleaded guilty in federal court earlier this year to arranging to funnel straw donations to three U.S. politicians — including Adams. (Prosecutors in that case said that Qin deceived the campaigns into believing the contributions were genuine.) Qin’s wife, former Miss China Emma Liu, has attended Adams campaign and official events, including one at Gracie Mansion.
The first criminal prosecutions tied to Adams campaign straw donations were brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in July 2023, alleging a conspiracy to recruit straw donors through fundraising events by funneling contributions in the names of construction company employees without their knowledge.
A key figure in the scheme was Dwayne Montgomery, formerly a colleague of Adams’ in the NYPD who had also sold a security company to Philip Banks, the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety who is himself under federal investigation in a separate case.
According to Bragg, Montgomery withdrew nearly $40,000 from a personal bank account, then used online cash transfers to supply match-qualifying small amounts to straw donors.
Montgomery pleaded guilty to misdemeanor conspiracy charges, agreeing to a $500 fine and 200 hours of community service. So did brothers Shahid and Yahya Mushtaq. In April, construction company owner Shamsuddin Riza pleaded guilty to a felony count of attempted grand larceny.
One defendant, a retired accountant named Millicent Redick, has refused a plea deal after the DA alleged she took $2,100 from Riza, purchased money orders using the funds, and delivered a dozen $200 disguised donations for Adams in September 2021.
Earlier that year, the Daily News reported, Redick had turned to Riza, a friend of her late husband, as she and her neighbors fought to get repairs to their increasingly dilapidated Harlem middle-income housing complex. Riza in turn contacted Montgomery to arrange a visit from Adams.
In late May 2021, in the thick of his mayoral campaign, Adams visited Redick and some neighbors at her Harlem apartment — and promised he would get them help, she recalled.
Redick told the Daily News that after the meeting she and her friends committed to raising money for Adams. (Redick has refused to take a plea in the case, asserting that the money orders were for legitimate donations from neighbors and that the funds she received from Riza were for accounting services.)
The mayor now claims he has no recollection of the visit.
“I don’t remember everyone who’s in the room,” Adams said when pressed by a reporter. “We had no involvement in what was wrongdoing.”
Redick’s reaction to Adams’ amnesia: “Amazing.”
