There are ten bathrooms in the connected penthouses atop The Plaza hotel, and an 82-foot-long terrace that looks north over Central Park from 21 floors up. A winding staircase descends from the upper floor to a level filled with mirrors and skylights and a pair of kitchens. An in-unit elevator drops down to three of the triplex’s seven bedrooms. Presiding over all this on an evening in September 2020 are Emma Duo Liu, a former Miss China, and her husband, a billionaire who first made his money in a Beijing nightclub and movie theaters.
The name he’s using on this night is Hui Qin, though he has frequently operated under an alias, given to him by a Chinese government official. Qin and Liu are hosting a 60th birthday for Eric Adams. He is Brooklyn’s borough president, but everyone has higher aspirations for him. The cake, which is in the shape of a box of Cohiba cigars, prominently bore the word “mayor.”
Many of the 70 or so guests stay out on the giant terrace smoking actual cigars and snapping selfies. They include Eric Ulrich, who will later be indicted on bribery charges as Mr. Adams’s buildings commissioner, and Winnie Greco, who will come under intense scrutiny for her ties to the Chinese government, her luxe fund-raisers that allegedly included fake donors, and her attempt to give a City Hall reporter a wad of cash stuffed into a sour cream and onion potato chip bag. As for Mr. Qin, he went on to serve seven months in a U.S. prison for immigration fraud and illegal campaign donations, including to Mr. Adams, and then was forced to leave the United States. In all, 27 people in Eric Adams’s orbit — donors, allies, top aides — have been indicted since that birthday party. Then there’s number 28: the mayor himself.
The indictment, unsealed by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York on Sept. 26, 2024, accused Mr. Adams of defrauding the city, accepting illicit donations and taking bribes from the Turkish government.
It was a startling development. But those charges, which included accusations that Mr. Adams accepted upgraded flights and hotel suites in return for municipal favors, are just a fraction of the corruption that is alleged to have pervaded the Adams administration, and of the questionable deals that prosecutors were investigating.
A second U.S. attorney’s office, in the Eastern District of New York, was already probing a different covert influence campaign — undertaken not by Turkey but by China. National security and public integrity prosecutors from that office were looking into Ms. Greco. Local news outlets such as The City uncovered evidence of illicit contributions on a much greater scale than anything in the Southern District’s indictment.
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The post Eric Adams, Donald Trump and the Case That Broke American Justice appeared first on New York Times.
