A Brooklyn businessman was sentenced to one year of probation on Friday for conspiracy to commit wire fraud after making illegal donations to Mayor Eric Adams’s 2021 campaign.
The businessman, Erden Arkan, pleaded guilty in January as part of a sprawling corruption case unveiled against Mr. Adams last year. President Trump’s Justice Department moved to abandon the charges against the mayor weeks after Mr. Arkan’s plea.
Mr. Arkan, who is Turkish American, has close ties to New York City’s Turkish community and owns KSK Construction, a local building firm. He pleaded guilty to soliciting funds from 10 of his employees and to making straw donations to Mr. Adams’s campaign. The charges grew out of an investigation into the mayor conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the F.B.I. and the city’s Department of Investigation. Prosecutors said Mr. Arkan gave $1,250 apiece to the employees to donate to Mr. Adams’s campaign.
At a hearing at Manhattan federal court on Friday before Judge Dale E. Ho, Mr. Arkan said he accepted responsibility for his actions.
“I feel profound sadness for the choice I made,” he said, adding: “I’m deeply sorry to New York City taxpayers.”
Judge Ho said that the actions he pleaded guilty to were not a “victimless crime,” and that if donors circumvented the limits imposed by law, it would breed cynicism in the system.
Mr. Arkan’s actions, however, appeared to be out of character with his “otherwise exemplary life,” the judge said, and he urged Mr. Arkan not to let himself be defined by “this mistake.”
As part of his sentence, Mr. Arkan will have to pay $18,000 in restitution and a $9,500 fine.
Mr. Arkan’s sentencing followed another development in the investigations into Mr. Adams this week. Mohamed Bahi, Mr. Adams’s former chief liaison to the city’s Muslim community, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to the same charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Mr. Bahi, who was also accused of instructing witnesses to lie to F.B.I. agents conducting a corruption investigation into the mayor, is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 18.
The recent developments highlight the specter of corruption that hangs over the mayor’s administration in the midst of his re-election campaign, even after the Trump Justice Department abandoned the charges against him in April over the objections of Manhattan prosecutors. A five-count indictment against the mayor accused him of bribery, fraud and conspiring with the Turkish government to solicit and accept illegal foreign campaign donations. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Mr. Arkan and Mr. Bahi are just two of several people in the mayor’s orbit who have been swept up in the federal investigations into Mr. Adams and his dealings. The inquiries, by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn, engulfed City Hall in chaos last year as a cascade of Mr. Adams’s closest allies and aides resigned.
In December, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who was the mayor’s chief adviser and one of his closest allies, in a bribery scheme. Also, in recent weeks, four former high-ranking police officers sued Mr. Adams, accusing him of enabling corruption in the Police Department. And a former interim police commissioner, Thomas G. Donlon, is suing Mr. Adams and a former top aide for defamation. Mr. Adams, a former police captain, ran for mayor on a law-and-order platform.
The disorder in the mayor’s administration has continued to spill into public view as Mr. Adams has struggled to gain momentum in his campaign. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic primary in June, has a formidable lead in polling.
Recent polls show Mr. Adams, a registered Democrat running as an independent, hovering at around 10 percent support. Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate in the race, has been polling better than the mayor in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.
The request by top Justice Department officials earlier this year to dismiss the mayor’s case led to accusations that they were ignoring the corruption allegations against the mayor in order to advance the president’s agenda.
In a sentencing submission this month, Mr. Arkan’s lawyer criticized the fact that their client had faced conviction and sentencing even as Mr. Adams’s case was dismissed.
Mr. Arkan’s prosecution had “everything to do with a media campaign to buttress a beleaguered prosecution of Mayor Adams against the perceived headwinds” from the Trump administration, the lawyer said.
“The Adams case was the centripetal force which dictated every turn in this case,” they added.
On Friday, Mr. Arkan’s lawyer, Jonathan Rosen, doubled down, saying that the Justice Department’s actions “can only be described here as an unprecedented and unfair exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”
However, Judge Ho, who also presided over the Adams and Bahi cases, was not receptive to the lawyer’s argument, asking Mr. Rosen if he was “impugning the character of the prosecutors?”
“It’s true that there is some incongruity between its treatment of Mr. Arkan’s case and of Mayor Adams’s case,” Judge Ho said, referring to the team of prosecutors. “But that doesn’t suggest that Mr. Arkan’s is being handled inappropriately.”
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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