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. Mr. Qin and Ms. Liu are hosting a 60th birthday celebration 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.
The purported corruption ran from the grand scale of global politics to the most parochial, penny-ante payoffs. Ingrid Lewis-Martin, a former top aide whom Mr. Adams describes as his “sister,” was indicted on money laundering and bribery charges for allegedly calling in favors in exchange for a bit part in an MGM+ streaming show and cash that her son used to buy a new Porsche.
And it swept up almost every department in Mr. Adams’s administration — especially, and most importantly, the New York Police Department. The culture of impunity described in dozens of lawsuits, indictments and whistle-blower complaints was so widespread that one of the mayor’s own former police commissioners sued him for enforcing what the commissioner characterized as a culture of “lawlessness.”
The mayor has not been convicted of any crime. He has said that he “never violated my role as the mayor,” and that his only mistake was placing his trust in people who disappointed him. But it’s hard to deny that Mr. Adams’s tenure has become an object lesson in how corruption left unchecked can build on itself.
The implications extend far beyond the five boroughs of New York City. They ripple through law enforcement offices and legislatures and courthouses across the nation, all the way up to the highest office in the land.
Even if Mr. Adams broke no laws, he has been the flywheel for a corrupt machine. Each turn of the gears moves us further from the ideal of public officials who observe the rule of law. The most wrenching turn of all was how the Trump administration ordered prosecutors to make the case against Mr. Adams disappear.
Over the past few decades, courts and legislators have made it harder to fight dirty money and dirty deals. Dropping the case against Mr. Adams advanced that process dramatically. A great many observers say it was designed to soften New York City up for Mr. Trump’s sweeping deportation raids, and to turn the mayor into a puppet on the president’s string. That would mean that in that one deal, Mr. Trump’s corruption enabled Mr. Adams’s and Mr. Adams’s corruption enabled Mr. Trump’s.
In response to detailed questions, Mr. Adams’s press secretary told me that while critics “have tried to paint his relationship with the federal government as anything other than beneficial to New Yorkers, the fact is there is absolutely no truth or evidence to support that claim.” His good relationship with the president, she says, helps the city in many ways.
But the Adams deal didn’t just insulate the mayor. It cracked the Justice Department’s public integrity section and undermined the proudly independent Southern District. It sent a clear signal to prosecutors everywhere that the Department of Justice won’t pursue these cases anymore, unless someone gets on Mr. Trump’s bad side. And it functionally killed Mr. Adams’s credibility, and his chances at a second term, despite a record that in many other ways — fewer shootings, cleaner streets, more housing — has been solid. So lately there’s been talk of another possible deal, this time for Mr. Adams to drop out of the mayor’s race and join Mr. Trump’s administration.
When the original deal came to light, I worried it might be part of a larger push to normalize corruption. Seven months later, there is no longer any reason to doubt that it was. It was Chapter 1 in a new playbook in Washington. Chapter 2 has already led to the Trump family’s pocketing billions of dollars. Chapter 3 could be the real smash-and-grab.
Politics is grimy. Politics is transactional. Politics is whom you know. And for too long, sanctimonious prosecutors tried to criminalize this kind of ordinary give-and-take — all while generating a demand for their $2,000-per-hour services when they became white-collar defense lawyers. So goes an argument that’s been made by more than one ally of the president. Besides, they say, if you look hard enough into any politician’s past, you can probably find some ticky-tack violation of campaign finance rules or civil service procedures. Honking your horn is illegal in this town, too.
You can hear that logic loud and clear from people in Mr. Adams’s circle. On her lawyer’s radio show, Ms. Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s “sister,” said, “We have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the D.A.’s office to investigate us.” Which is a far cry from saying they did nothing illegal.
The Supreme Court has given this bare-knuckle view, as current now as it was in Boss Tweed’s day, a kind of intellectual framework. For almost 20 years, the justices have consistently ruled against efforts to keep corporations and the ultrawealthy from flooding politics with their money. For instance, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in 2008 that a law trying to rein in campaigns by rich, self-funded candidates constituted an unfair “burden” that is “not justified by any governmental interest in eliminating corruption or the perception of corruption.” If billions of dollars in donations lead to unfair elections or special access to donors, so be it.
The resulting gusher of cash “left us with the situation that allows virtually unlimited wheeling and dealing,” said Daniel Weiner, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public-interest law center.
While the Supreme Court opened the sluice, it also narrowed the definition of what qualified as fraud and bribery. Much of what had been considered corruption was now legal. In 2016, the justices struck down the bribery conviction of a governor who arranged official meetings for the chief executive of a dietary supplement company in return for more than $170,000 in gifts and loans; the justices unanimously ruled that bribery could involve only a government official’s “official acts,” and that those meetings did not qualify. In 2024, a 6-to-3 opinion shrank the definition of bribery even further, tossing the conviction of a small-town mayor who’d taken a kickback payment from a local truck dealership. Because the money didn’t come until after the mayor had steered more than $1 million in public money to the dealership, it didn’t count as a bribe, the court ruled; it was merely a “gratuity.”
The Trump administration is eagerly using these arguments to defend itself and its allies. Under past presidents, “EVERY TIME DOJ has pursued expansive theories of public corruption, the Department has been rebuked by the Supreme Court,” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, posted on X. “The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgment.” And of course by advancing the idea that the mayor was the victim of lawfare, Mr. Trump’s supporters advance the idea that the president was, too.
In the summer of 2021, federal investigators began looking into Mr. Adams’s foreign connections. They examined ties to the governments of Qatar, Israel, South Korea, Uzbekistan, China — and Turkey, where they quickly found what they considered to be evidence not just of influence-peddling, but of a criminal conspiracy.
When the charges against Mr. Adams were announced, however, some members of the legal community were underwhelmed. Flight upgrades in exchange for pressuring the Fire Department to waive an inspection of the Turkish consulate? Was that the best the feds had on Mr. Adams? And whatever Mr. Adams was accused of, he did it before he was actually elected mayor. How could that be an “official act”? Even within the Justice Department, there was serious debate. On the other hand, low-level city employees are prosecuted for pocket-change bribes, so why should the mayor get a free pass?
But travel perks were never the whole story. Prosecutors said in court papers that Mr. Adams had accepted campaign donations that had been broken up into small denominations and falsely attributed to other people, to avoid local limits on contributions. Those are known as straw donations, and they are one of the few ways that you can still break federal campaign finance laws. Another way is to knowingly take contributions from foreigners. Prosecutors allege that Mr. Adams did that, too.
It’s not just a matter of accounting. In total, Mr. Adams’s first mayoral campaign unlocked $10 million of New York’s exceptionally generous, 8-to-1 program of public matching funds. If some of that was based on deceptive donations, that’s fraud. And $10 million could go a long way in a race he won by just 7,197 votes.
There were strong indications that even more charges against Mr. Adams were coming. A few days after the mayor’s indictment, one of Mr. Adams’s aides was charged with trying to get witnesses to lie to investigators and destroy evidence. According to court papers, he said he did it with Mr. Adams’s full knowledge.
A challenge when it comes to prosecuting a case like this is that the Supreme Court has increasingly reduced “corruption cases to this B-movie paradigm” of “the paper bag of money being exchanged,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, who has written extensively on the court’s public integrity doctrine. “The real world doesn’t involve the kind of simplistic exchanges that the doctrine seems to demand.” Not even when the bag in question is a potato chip bag.
An interested party with even a bit of sophistication may look for something more subtle: steering a public conversation, getting into the right rooms, investing early in power players on the rise. There’s no need to make big demands. The friendship is the favor. And Eric Adams is always willing to make new friends.
On one of Mr. Adams’s upgraded trips to Istanbul, he is reported to have met with Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, a wealthy Turkish businessman. According to the indictment, during the meeting, Mr. Adams asked him for money, and he agreed to “contribute $50,000 or more” to the mayor’s campaign, “believing that Adams might one day be the president.”
The big payment never arrived. Mr. Korkmaz was arrested and extradited to Utah on charges he was part of a billion-dollar scam that involved a biodiesel firm, a former C.I.A. director and a polygamist “blood cult.” His trial date, however, came and went without further notice on the federal docket. This summer, social media showed Mr. Korkmaz enjoying himself in New York City.
Mr. Korkmaz had been getting ready to testify against Mr. Adams, Los Angeles magazine reported, until Mr. Trump pulled the plug on the mayor’s prosecution. The wheel of corruption turns again.
However advanced Turkey’s persuasion program is, China’s is an entirely different class. It’s been especially active in New York City, where the Chinese diaspora is over 600,000 people strong and émigré politics are particularly intense. According to prosecutors, the Beijing government stalked a former Tiananmen Square protester who ran for Congress in Manhattan, steered millions of dollars to the family of an aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Kathy Hochul and tricked a former New York Police Department officer into helping surveil enemies of the Chinese state.
Mr. Adams said in 2019 that during his years as Brooklyn borough president he made seven trips to China. At least three of them were with Winnie Greco, who has been by Mr. Adams’s side for more than a decade — as an adviser, a community liaison, a $196,000-per-year city employee — despite being connected to one scandal after another.
Many figures like this are in Mr. Adams’s orbit. What makes Ms. Greco different is her connections to Beijing and its network of so-called “United Front” cultural and charitable groups. She is reported to have consulted for a provincial association funded by the Chinese government, attended numerous Communist Party events, and did work for an affiliate of a Chinese propaganda outfit.
During one of Mr. Adams’s trips with Ms. Greco, he handed the Chinese government a win by praising its controversial Belt and Road initiative in interviews with state-backed news agencies. On another, he met with Lu (Harry) Jianwang, who was later indicted on charges he operated a clandestine Chinese government police station in Lower Manhattan. When he became mayor, Mr. Adams skipped a reception with the Taiwanese president after the top Chinese diplomat in New York asked him to, in the name of “friendship.”
All the while, Ms. Greco acted as one of Mr. Adams’s most aggressive fund-raisers. Ms. Greco hosted a soiree at the 7,500-square-foot Long Island home of Lian Wu Shao, the operator of the New World Mall in Flushing. Caviar was passed; a D.J. kept the party going; lobster and $400 bottles of wine were served. The event brought in 231 donations. Each contribution was for $249 or $250 — right at the city’s upper limit for its generous matching funds. That meant the evening’s haul was $55,000, which the Adams campaign used to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in public matching funds. Many names listed as contributors belonged to cashiers and delivery people at the mall. Three of those people told The City they had never given to Mr. Adams, suggesting the kind of arrangements that prosecutors have, in other cases, labeled illegal straw donations.
Ms. Greco maintains she is innocent. People around her keep getting indicted — charged with skimming more than a million dollars off a contract meant to help migrants in need, with buying a townhouse for a city official who was responsible for granting lucrative government contracts. Hui Qin was arrested after an incident involving an ax and was accused by his wife of strangling her. The F.B.I. raided Ms. Greco’s two homes in the Bronx and the New World Mall office where she ran her fund-raising operation.
Some members of the team working the Adams-Turkey case — who requested anonymity out of fear of political retribution — told me they kept wondering when the Eastern District would charge Ms. Greco. If it had happened before Mr. Adams was indicted, it could have bolstered their case against the mayor. But despite what they considered to be a mountain of publicly available evidence, the charges never came.
Corruption is sometimes described as a victimless crime, just skimming from a bottomless pool of government cash. The story of the New York Police Department under Mr. Adams should put that idea to rest.
Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has called himself the department’s “overbearing dad.” He installed his former cop friends at the top levels of the department and of his administration generally. Many of them padded out their entourages and gave their buddies cushy assignments and huge overtime payouts. That added to the pressure on other cops, who were often forced to work supplemental shifts on top of their regular duties.
“Something’s got to break here,” Kevin O’Connor, a former Police Department assistant commissioner, told me last December. “You’re running your personnel out so bad that they become ineffective to some point.” In the four months that followed, 1,400 cops quit.
None had a better reason to leave than Lt. Quathisha Epps.
Lieutenant Epps entered the public conversation last November, when the tabloids called her out for earning more than twice her salary in overtime for a desk job, $403,000 in all. She responded with a shocking accusation in a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Her boss, the chief of department, Jeff Maddrey, had pressured her into serving that overtime with him at 1 Police Plaza, where he repeatedly sexually abused her. “I keep saying, ‘stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.’ And he just kept on,” the lieutenant, a 19-year veteran of the force and a mother of three, recalled, heaving with tears, in a televised interview last March. “This guy is a monster.” She said Chief Maddrey, a friend and an ally of Mr. Adams’s for more than 20 years, demanded a kickback from the overtime pay and even told her to pay for a vacation for him and his wife. He Maddrey denied any wrongdoing, claiming his relationship with Lieutenant Epps was merely an “office fling.”
After the lieutenant came forward with her accusations, nude videos of her circulated on police group chats. Then the Police Department tried to claw back the overtime money that her predator boss allegedly coerced her into taking.
Mr. Adams’s first police commissioner had tried to discipline Mr. Maddrey over an unrelated matter. The mayor overruled her, and she quit not long after. Mr. Adams brought in a replacement; after 14 months, that commissioner resigned amid an investigation into his participation in a scheme to shake down local bars and nightclubs. When the mayor brought in Tom Donlon, a former F.B.I. official, to take over as interim commissioner, he said he needed someone with a “clean record” to take over.
It took only hours on the job, Mr. Donlon recently told me, to learn that Mr. Adams not only favored his own cronies, he considered them his best guys, and expected Mr. Donlon to give them maximum latitude. In a remarkable federal lawsuit, Mr. Donlon described a culture of corruption that Mr. Adams personally enforced. Top officers “knew they had this pipeline right to Adams and could do whatever they want, Maddrey in particular,” he told me. Within months, Mr. Donlon was pushed out.
You don’t have to believe, as Mr. Donlon alleges, that all of this makes Mr. Adams the head of some vast racketeering enterprise. And you can give him some credit for hiring the current police commissioner, who appears to operate by the book. But the ballooning overtime, the accusations of selling of promotions, the attempts to neuter internal investigations — that’s all on Mr. Adams. He ran for mayor on a public safety pledge. His tolerance for his corruption undercut that. It endangered people, even police officers, like Quathisha Epps, who were supposed to keep the rest of us safe.
The day Eric Adams was indicted, Donald Trump held a news conference at his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. He cast Mr. Adams as a fellow victim. “I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city,” Mr. Trump recalled. “And I said, ‘You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year.’”
Addressing New Yorkers, Mr. Adams took a more nuanced tone. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target,” he said. Mr. Adams’s overtures to Mr. Trump grew more direct over time, eventually becoming so intense that the president’s aides were openly laughing at how “embarrassing” they were.
Despite Mr. Trump’s comments, some people involved in the Adams prosecution thought they could still sell the new administration on the Adams case. “I believed going into the Trump administration that we’d be able to persuade them that this case was righteous, and that we were doing the right thing, and that we had the goods, and that everything was fine, essentially,” says a source with direct knowledge of the legal proceedings. “In retrospect, obviously, I feel like a dummy for having thought that.”
The prosecutors continued to work at a feverish pace, even as Mr. Trump got ready to take power. They were preparing a fresh indictment of Mr. Adams for obstructing justice. Then Danielle Sassoon, the prosecutor who had just been installed as the Southern District’s top attorney, heard from Emil Bove. Mr. Trump’s acting No. 2 at the Justice Department.
Mr. Bove saw the Adams case as exactly the kind of criminalization of ordinary politics that sparked the prosecution of Mr. Trump. Summoning Ms. Sassoon and the mayor’s lawyers to Washington, Mr. Bove repeatedly asked the defense lawyers to describe how the indictment might interfere with the mayor’s ability to help with the coming immigration crackdown. They obliged. “Mayor Adams has always been laser-focused on addressing the migrant crisis,” they wrote in a letter memorializing the conversation, “But the simple reality is that there is only so much one man can hope to do while also fighting for his liberty.”
In public, Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams insisted that the dismissal of the case did not constitute some kind of shady deal. The White House told me it’s “restoring integrity and fairness to the Department of Justice, which was weaponized under the Biden administration.” The mayor’s allies say his relationship with the president has spared New York from the high-profile influx of federal forces we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles and Chicago.
But even if it was a quid pro quo, some observers asked, so what? “Would you rather have the New York City mayor help the administration expel dangerous migrants, or would you rather have him go to jail for taking Turkish Airlines upgrades?” asked Mike Davis, founder of the MAGA advocacy group The Article III Project and one of the Trump administration’s most vocal allies in the legal profession.
“Would they rather have the Justice Department lie to them like they’re children, and make up a bullshit reason why they dropped the charges?” Mr. Davis continued. “We’re not canonizing saints, especially not in New York City.”
The thing is, corruption actually is a matter of faith — it corrodes what little of it the public has in our government. It teaches people to expect less of public officials, thereby opening the door to more cynical self-dealing, and precisely the kind of score-settling that the Trump administration has pursued in numerous investigations targeting its political enemies.
Mr. Trump wasted no time in remaking the Justice Department and dismantling anticorruption efforts nationwide. On Inauguration Day, the head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section quit after being reassigned to a “sanctuary cities working group.” Days later, the department fired a dozen prosecutors who had worked with the special counsel Jack Smith, who had led the federal investigations into Mr. Trump. The attorney general, Ms. Bondi, who had been registered as a lobbyist for Qatar, disbanded the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force. A handful of public corruption cases have been allowed to continue, but an elite F.B.I. unit dedicated to investigating such crimes at the highest level has been dismantled.
The dismissal of the Adams case was the clearest signal yet that the old guardrails were gone. For decades, the Southern District had taken on dirty politicians — and it had done so by exercising its own judgment. Now it was clear, the so-called Sovereign District of New York would have to follow the White House’s directives. That sent a message to the other U.S. attorney’s offices: Don’t bother going after a high-profile public official, because unless the official is a foe of Mr. Trump’s, your case has no chance. Ms. Sassoon and several of her colleagues quit in response. So did three more members of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, an office that has now dwindled to just five people from 30.
The judge in Mr. Adams’s case ruled that the grounds for dismissal were bogus, but he admitted that there was nothing he could do to force the Justice Department to finish what it had started.
Mr. Trump and his family have begun a self-enrichment campaign on a scale unrivaled in American history: Eight-figure payments from companies like Meta, Disney and Paramount to settle sham lawsuits. A nine-figure jet from Qatar, that Mr. Trump says he’ll donate to his presidential library after he leaves office. Ten figures in crypto acquisitions by Trump Media & Technology Group. The New Yorker magazine put the running total for that and a lot else at $3.4 billion.
Mr. Trump has fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general, politically independent officials whose mission includes investigating corruption. He nominated Mr. Bove to a lifetime seat as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. When a whistle-blower — one of three — filed a complaint trying to block the confirmation, an inspector general “lost” the complaint for two months.
It seemed like a coda to the whole Adams affair. Then the song started all over again.
On June 26, Mr. Adams began his re-election campaign on the steps of City Hall. Winnie Greco and Ingrid Lewis-Martin are once again a part of the team. As though the past 12 months had never happened, people listed in public records as Adams donors are once again saying they never gave.
The first day of September was Eric Adams’s 65th birthday. This time the mayor headed to Florida for what his spokesman said was a personal trip. Turns out he was meeting with Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul who is Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy. The last time they had gotten together in Florida, it had been with Mr. Trump, back in January, shortly before the administration took the first steps to deep six Mr. Adams’s case. This time, a new transaction was in the air: Members of Team Trump wanted Mr. Adams to drop his re-election bid, to help clear the field for Andrew Cuomo, a rival for City Hall who had been the subject of his own criminal investigations.
Mr. Witkoff was pushing the idea of Mr. Adams as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. When word got out, the mayor issued a statement saying he would “always listen if called to serve our country.” Shortly after, he proclaimed he was going to be mayor for “another four years.” The front pages of the New York City tabloids framed it as a negotiation: What kind of payoff would it take to make him go away?
It felt at once both shocking and familiar, another in an endless round of deal-making and scandal. The Trumpists are right. Politics are transactional. They do bend toward corruption. But only if you let them.
Noah Shachtman, a former editor in chief of The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone, has reported extensively on corruption in New York City and Washington, D.C.
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