Three years ago, as Eric Adams was running for mayor of New York City, his campaign was raking in donations from a broad range of mysterious sources.
There was the $201,330 delivered by unidentified intermediaries through 57 clusters of donations, some from people working at institutions with ties to Turkey. Their contributions are being scrutinized in a federal investigation focused in part on potentially unlawful foreign money flowing into campaign coffers.
Then there was a set of unknown bundlers who gathered donations tied to Lian Wu Shao, whose family oversees the New World Mall in downtown Flushing, Queens. The mall was raided by the F.B.I. on Feb. 29; that same day, F.B.I. agents also searched two Bronx homes owned by a top Adams administration official, Winnie Greco, who helped organize fund-raisers at the mall for Mr. Adams.
There were also 158 fund-raising events with undisclosed sponsors, including one linked in court filings to ShahidMushtaq, the principal of a construction company in Queens who, along with three associates, pleaded guilty for their role in a straw donor scheme to generate illicit matching funds to Adams’s mayoral campaign.
The questionable donations were cited in a blistering 900-page preliminary audit of Mr. Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign, as investigators with the Campaign Finance Board chronicled numerous missing payments, sham donations and the potential misallocation of up to $2.3 million in taxpayer money.
The audit, which The New York Times obtained via a Freedom of Information request, is still in draft form, meaning Mr. Adams will get the opportunity to respond and potentially resolve some or all of the board’s red flags.
The Adams campaign, in noting that the audit process was ongoing, attributed the errors to misplaced receipts and incomplete documentation.
“This is a draft audit seeking information from the campaign to clarify potential issues, not a binding determination,” said Vito Pitta, a compliance lawyer for the Adams campaign. “The 2021 campaign raised more than $18 million through more than 10,000 transactions, an unprecedented volume that requires an unprecedented amount of paperwork, which we will provide as needed.”
The draft audit, which was first reported by Gothamist, outlines more than just sloppy accounting and routine paperwork errors. It describes hundreds of financial discrepancies and dozens of prohibited contributions, including 11 completely anonymous donations.
It also highlights the mayor’s continuing failure to disclose the names of most of the people who raise money for his campaign, so-called intermediaries who wield outsize influence with him.
The Adams campaign raised over $8.9 million for his 2021 mayoral election, and received over $10 million in public funds, more than any other citywide candidate received that year. It has not been determined if the mayor will face financial penalties or have to give a portion of his campaign donations back.
The audit’s draft findings also point to potential fodder for federal prosecutors as they examine the campaign’s fund-raising methods.
Regulators identified 54 donations from people who either never gave any money or were reimbursed by others for their contributions. A Times analysis shows that those donations amounted to $24,500, which generated nearly $50,000 in matching taxpayer money thanks to the Campaign Finance Board program that provides $8 for every dollar donated for contributions of $250 or less.
The Adams campaign has said that in the criminal cases that involved straw donor schemes, the ringleaders concealed their illegal activities from the mayor and his campaign. The mayor has not been accused of violating the law and denies any wrongdoing.
Mr. Pitta, the campaign’s lawyer, said the straw donations highlighted in the audit were most likely the same ones that have already been revealed by prosecutors and “did not result in any accusations of wrongdoing against the campaign.”
The campaign received the draft audit on May 31 and was given a deadline of July 1 to respond. But the Campaign Finance Board, run by members appointed by Mr. Adams and the City Council speaker, granted the mayor an extension to Aug. 30.
The preliminary audit has provided new ammunition for the growing number of mayoral hopefuls who accuse Mr. Adams of mismanaging the city and wasting tax dollars.
“You clearly can see that they have a problem with basic governing and with basic paperwork,” said Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who is challenging Mr. Adams in next year’s Democratic primary. “The audit also shows a massive disregard for the rules of the road.”
The mayor’s campaign was previously assessed $19,600 in penalties for campaign finance violations related to its transition to City Hall, and Mr. Adams was previously fined $1,870 over his run for the Brooklyn borough presidency.
The Adams campaign provided evidence that roughly 77 percent of its spending, or $7.8 million, went to qualified expenditures. His campaign must offer sufficient documentation for the remaining $2.3 million in order to avoid repaying that to taxpayers.
The audit also found that in the 2021 general election, Mr. Adams exceeded the spending cap — set at about $18 million for the primary and general elections combined — by about $400,000. If the numbers are not disputed, the campaign could face fines of over $500,000, according to a Times analysis based on the penalty guidelines.
In some cases, the missing documentation seems minor, even if it involved large sums. For example, the campaign failed to list the details of some of its television ad buys, some costing $1 million or more — an oversight that drove up the misallocated spending total.
Another expenditure lacking documentation was a $35,000 payment to Suggs Solutions LLC, a consulting company run by Brianna Suggs, a fund-raiser whose home was raided by the F.B.I. last year. As part of that sweep, Mr. Adams’s phones were also seized.
The campaign did not provide a 2021 employment agreement or detailed invoice for Ms. Suggs’s company, and the campaign’s bank records did not record the payment as having been made, according to the audit.
Another $26,000 was given to a consultant who went on to become Mr. Adams’s closest adviser at City Hall, Ingrid Lewis-Martin. The payment was flagged as a potentially unqualified expenditure because the campaign has not provided a copy of the canceled check or any documentation from 2021 showing what she did for the money.
Mr. Adams’s campaign did not immediately respond to specific questions about the use of fund-raising intermediaries and its failure to identify them, or provide the reason that they have not given investigators the employment details for Ms. Suggs and Ms. Lewis-Martin.
“I’m not surprised that the Adams campaign is reluctant to provide information to the C.F.B. as to those donations, because there are various criminal proceedings, and anything that’s submitted to the C.F.B. could impact that,” said Aaron Foldenauer, chair of the election law committee of the New York County Lawyers Association, who also ran for mayor in 2021.
For the 2021 race, regulators are pressing Mr. Adams to identify, among others, the bundlers behind donations tied to Mr. Shao, whose family is connected to the Flushing mall raided by the F.B.I.
Mr. Shao is described in court records as the owner of Jmart, an Asian supermarket and the Queens mall’s most prominent tenant. Supermarket employees donated $33,140, triggering $180,152 in matching funds to the mayor’s 2021 campaign. Auditors faulted the Adams campaign for not identifying who gathered those donations, and for not saying who paid for the fund-raiser hosted at Mr. Shao’s home on Aug. 8, 2021.
Calls to Mr. Shao were not immediately returned.
The use of fund-raising bundlers is common in political campaigns: One of Mr. Adams’s primary opponents in 2021, Kathryn Garcia, reported 40 bundlers who drove $270,628 in donations — part of an overall haul of $2.1 million.
The Adams campaign raised $8.9 million in private contributions in 2021, yet reported only four intermediaries for $37,520 in donations. So far, Mr. Adams’s 2025 re-election campaign has gathered over $4 million. It has disclosed six bundlers.
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