Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a former police captain who ran on a law-and-order platform but whose tenure has been consumed by accusations of corruption, spent years accepting free airline tickets, lavish overseas accommodations and illegal campaign donations from Turkey, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.
In return for the gifts and donations, Mr. Adams used his influence as Brooklyn borough president and later as mayor to assist Turkish officials with issues they were facing in the city, prosecutors said — most notably in obtaining safety clearances from the Fire Department for a new high-rise Turkish consulate building.
Thursday’s dramatic events began with the startling sight of federal agents marching into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York mayors since World War II. And shortly before noon, prosecutors unveiled the first federal indictment in the city’s modern history of a sitting mayor.
Mr. Adams was charged with five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He was ordered to appear in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Friday for an arraignment before a magistrate judge.
“This was a multiyear scheme to buy favor with a single New York City politician on the rise: Eric Adams,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference.
Mr. Adams, at his own chaotic news conference outside Gracie Mansion, vowed to stay in office and fight the charges. The city’s second Black mayor, he was flanked by Black allies and religious leaders who wound up in a shouting match with protesters as Mr. Adams spoke.
“My day-to-day will not change,” the mayor said. “I will continue to do the job that I was elected to do.”
Elsewhere, the indictment was met by a cascade of calls for his resignation.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove the mayor, indicated in a statement on Thursday night that she was keeping her options open.
While she did not call on Mr. Adams to step aside, she characterized the indictment as “the latest in a disturbing pattern of events” and said she expected the mayor to “review the situation and find an appropriate path forward to ensure the people of New York City are being well-served by their leaders.”
If convicted of all five counts in the indictment, the mayor faces a maximum penalty of 45 years in prison. But under federal sentencing guidelines, he would probably receive a much shorter term.
The charges reflected a precipitous fall in the rags-to-power rise of Eric Leroy Adams, the son of a house cleaner and a butcher who once patrolled the city’s streets. He retired from the Police Department at the rank of captain and pursued his long-held political ambitions, first as a state senator, then as Brooklyn borough president and, finally, as the city’s 110th mayor.
Those ambitions are now threatened by what prosecutors described as Mr. Adams’s single-minded pursuit of campaign funds — “Everything else is fluff,” he told aides, according to the indictment — and his fondness for luxury hotel suites, free overseas flights and business-class perks like plush, lie-flat seats and gourmet meals with vegan options, served by candlelight on porcelain dishes.
The indictment, at 57 pages, describes the gifts and contributions in detail.
Flights overseas for $50, or free
Mr. Adams’s earliest known dealings with Turkey began in 2015, when he was Brooklyn borough president, the indictment says. That year, two trips to the country were paid for by officials or business people there. He flew for free and reported the trips properly on financial disclosure forms, the indictment says.
The reporting of free flights would not last, and Mr. Adams enjoyed free or heavily discounted trips on the largely government-owned Turkish Airlines all over the globe for years without reporting them, prosecutors charged. His destinations included India in 2016; France, Turkey, Sri Lanka and China in July 2017; and Hungary in 2018.
Prosecutors said the mayor had accepted luxury travel worth well over $100,000, largely in business class, the carrier’s highest class of available seats, which the airline says include “award-winning dishes, the latest in-flight entertainment system and comfortable seating.”
Turkish officials also gave Mr. Adams free or steeply discounted stays at luxury suites in Turkey with spacious bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms, according to the indictment.
Mr. Adams went out of his way to fly Turkish Airlines even if that meant an inconvenient layover, the indictment states. “You know first stop is always instanbul,” Mr. Adams texted his longtime girlfriend in 2017, misspelling Istanbul, the indictment states.
When the girlfriend, Tracey Collins, wanted to travel with Mr. Adams from New York to Chile, he asked her to first check if Turkish Airlines flew there, the indictment states. It did not.
Around the time of the Democratic primary in 2021, a member of Mr. Adams’s staff who was booking a trip to Turkey for him asked a Turkish Airlines manager where Mr. Adams should stay while in the country. The airline manager mentioned the Four Seasons, and the staff member said it was “too expensive.”
“Why does he care? He is not going to pay,” the airline manager responded. “His name will not be on anything either.”
“Super,” the staff member replied.
The airline manager expressed concern that the flight would be “very expensive” because it was last minute. Nevertheless, the airline manager suggested Adams pay only $50.
The deal was perhaps too good: The staff member suggested that the airline manager charge something “somewhat real,” the indictment said.
“We don’t want them to say he is flying for free,” the indictment quotes the staff member as saying. “At the moment, the media’s attention is on Eric.”
In the end, he paid $2,200 for a pair of tickets that should have cost more than $15,000, the indictment said. (Mr. Adams canceled the trip before leaving and was refunded only what he had paid.)
Timothy E. Sini, a lawyer for the carrier, said in a statement that the airline “has been complying with law enforcement’s requests for information, and at no point has been accused of any wrongdoing by the Government.”
‘Might cause a big stink’
The indictment describes multiple instances when Turkish business people, barred by law from contributing to a mayoral campaign, found “straw donors” — U.S. citizens — to give Mr. Adams their money instead, the indictment says.
A Turkish business person, Arda Sayiner, identified as a “promoter” in the indictment, suggested donating money to Mr. Adams’s mayoral war chest through a U.S. citizen in a text exchange with a skeptical Adams staffer in 2018, the indictment states.
“I think he wouldn’t get involved in such games,” the staffer replied. “They might cause a big stink later on.”
But the staffer found little hesitation from the candidate. “Adams directed that the Adams Staffer pursue the Promoter’s illegal scheme,” the indictment says.
The illegal donations were enlarged by the city’s public matching-funds program for small donations. “Adams’s campaigns applied for matching funds based on known straw donations, fraudulently obtaining as much as $2,000 in public funds for each illegal contribution,” the indictment says.
In addition to the Turkish contributions, the indictment describes similar schemes by non-Turkish donors, including an unidentified construction executive who wanted to give Mr. Adams’s mayoral campaign $10,000. The prospective donor was told the limit was $2,000, and instructed to give that much and ask employees to donate and to reimburse them to hide the total sum, the indictment says.
Political favors in return
In exchange for the gifts and contributions, prosecutors said, Mr. Adams granted political favors while in office in Brooklyn and as mayor.
The most elaborate favor described in the indictment involved Mr. Adams using his influence as the likely incoming mayor to fast-track the inspection and approval of a new Turkish consulate building in Midtown Manhattan despite safety concerns.
Specifically, the Turkish officials asked Mr. Adams to push the Fire Department to approve a safety assessment required before the building could be occupied. A department inspector was disturbed by the state of the building — “not safe to occupy,” the inspector wrote in an email to a supervisor — but the supervisor was told he would lose his job if he did not approve the building.
The indictment said the warning had come from a Fire Department official, not from Mr. Adams himself. At the time, Mr. Adams had already won the Democratic primary and was virtually certain to become the city’s next mayor.
When Mr. Adams relayed to Reyhan Ozgur, the Turkish consul general in New York at the time, that the building would be approved, the official replied, “You are Great Eric,” according to the indictment. “You are a true friend of Turkey.”
The indictment says that after Mr. Adams was inaugurated as mayor on Jan. 1, 2022, he “continued his corrupt relationships.”
On April 21, 2022, the indictment says, a Turkish official noted to an aide to Mr. Adams that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching, and asked for assurances that Mr. Adams would not make a statement about the Armenian Genocide.
“Adams did not make such a statement,” the indictment says. The remembrance day commemorates the mass killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks more than a century ago, an exceptionally sore point in Turkey, which denies that the genocide occurred.
‘You elected me to lead this city’
Before dawn Thursday morning, just hours after news of the indictment broke, federal agents arrived at Gracie Mansion, and men and women wearing dark suits and carrying bags and briefcases spent hours inside the historic home as aides and allies of Mr. Adams arrived throughout the morning.
The events followed weeks of upheaval in the Adams administration. This month, federal agents seized phones from some of his administration’s most senior officials, including a top mayoral aide, the schools chancellor and the police commissioner. The commissioner, Edward A. Caban, and the schools chancellor, David C. Banks, later announced their resignations. None of the individuals were named or referred to in the indictment.
Mr. Adams’s administration has struggled to drown out the drone of investigations and return its focus to his promises to reduce crime and improve living conditions, from filling vacant office space to culling the city’s rat population.
His lawyer, Alex Spiro, speaking to reporters on Thursday, dismissed the case presented in the indictment as a “story.”
“You can almost picture them trying to cobble this together and try to tell a story so that they could say ‘Corruption, corruption,’ at this press conference,” Mr. Spiro said. “They do that to tarnish him in your eyes.”
In a video message posted online the night before, Mr. Adams had offered his signature “swagger.”
“You elected me to lead this city,” he said, “and lead it I will.”
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