Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
Eric Adams is accused of a decadelong bribery scheme that federal prosecutors say powered his campaign to become mayor of the nation’s largest city, featuring more than $100,000 worth of gifts and a river of illegal political donations from overseas. The 57-page indictment, unsealed in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday morning, alleges that before and after he became mayor, Adams used his political position in a criminal conspiracy that saw him not only accept but solicit both perks and political donations from Turkish nationals in exchange for favors, such as pressuring the Fire Department to allow for a new Turkish Consulate to be opened without a completed safety inspection.
Adams is charged with five counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors. In a defiant press conference minutes before U.S. Attorney Damian Williams detailed his office’s case, the mayor, speaking over hecklers, declared his innocence and vowed to fight the charges, refusing calls that grow by the hour for him to resign.
The indictment lays out a campaign of criminal deception with Adams, an unnamed staffer, and a group of Turkish officials and businesspeople coordinating efforts they knew were illegal, according to federal prosecutors. The goal, they say, was to gain Adams’s help for the Turks’ business and political priorities by backing his own political ambitions and currying favor with him through undisclosed travel perks and campaign contributions disguised as legal donations through straw donors.
Adams, for his part, told a close supporter during his first mayoral campaign, “You win the race by raising money … Everything else is fluff,” according to the indictment.
He started raising that illegal money in 2018 with $7 million as his target, the indictment reads. Adams texted one supporter that he had “a clear plan” to reach his goal and that “each night we are out executing the plan.”
The indictment also describes the sometimes frantic efforts by the alleged conspirators to conceal their actions once federal investigators got involved. In one remarkable scene, an Adams staffer stepped into a bathroom and deleted her encrypted messaging apps after federal agents showed up at her home in November.
Beginning in 2014, shortly after his election as Brooklyn borough president, Adams allegedly solicited and received luxury travel packages paid for and arranged by “wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him.” Two of the businesspeople were quoted saying they believed Adams might one day become president of the United States.
“As Adams’s prominence and power grew,” the indictment reads, “his foreign-national benefactors sought to cash in on their corrupt relationships with him, particularly when, in 2021, it became clear that Adams would become New York City’s mayor.”
The arrangement allegedly continued into Adams’s first term as mayor and as he prepared to run for reelection; among other things, it helped to secure his silence on a matter of importance to the Turkish government: the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1916, when as many as 1.2 million Armenian Christians living in what was then the Ottoman Empire were murdered. In 2022, an Adams staffer assured an unnamed senior Turkish diplomatic official that the mayor would not make a statement of any kind on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the indictment alleges.
The Bentley Suite at the St. Regis hotel in Istanbul.
Photo: Eric Adams Indictment/Southern District of New York
The Cosmopolitan Suite. Photo: Eric Adams Indictment/Southern District of New York.
The Cosmopolitan Suite. Photo: Eric Adams Indictment/Southern District of New York.
The same Turkish official and other figures lined up free or discounted luxury travel for Adams and his companions on Turkish Airlines, the country’s national carrier, to and through Turkey to France, India, China, Ghana, and Hungary, with “free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment” while in Turkey, the indictment reads.
The diplomatic official also facilitated the use of Americans to conceal the foreign origin of the contributions to Adams’s mayoral campaign. Federal law forbids foreign nationals from giving to federal, state, or local political races. Once the money was in his campaign account, according to the indictment, Adams allegedly parlayed those straw donations into matching public funds that are available to city candidates, totaling $10 million. Prosecutors say this amounted to fraud against the city and theft of public funds.
On visits to Istanbul arranged by another figure, a Turkish entrepreneur referred to as “the Promoter,” Adams accepted heavily discounted and free stays at named suites in the St. Regis Istanbul. His two nights in the Bentley Suite in 2017 should have cost him $7,000, according to the indictment, but Adams paid only $600. A free two-night stay in 2019 at the same hotel’s Cosmopolitan Suite was worth $3,000.
Adams did not list either trip in the annual financial-disclosure forms he filed as borough president, the indictment notes. There were six Turkish Airlines travel packages in all between 2016 and 2021 valued in the six figures that Adams either did not disclose as required under New York law, or for which he created a “false paper trail” suggesting he had paid his own way, the indictment says. Another planned trip to Turkey in 2021 was said to have been arranged and then canceled.
Prosecutors allege Adams played troubleshooter for his Turkish benefactors and secret donors doing business in the city: One businessman texted him in February 2023 lamenting the “hard time” he was having getting the Department of Buildings to lift a stop-work order on a project. “Let me look into this,” Adams replied. Several days later, the businessman wrote, “Mayor, brother I want to thank you for your help. DOB issue partially resolved and they promised to expedite the process. Thank you, you have my continued support.”
Last year, Adams “directed his staff to devise a plan … to secretly obtain illegal foreign donations offered by the Promoter,” the indictment says. In exchange for the Promoter’s help raising money from abroad by using straw donors in the U.S. and then reimbursing them, Adams attended an event with “the true foreign donors,” in what the indictment describes as a kind of Potemkin fundraiser.
The gathering took place in a private room at a Manhattan hotel last September and was billed as a dinner hosted by “International Sustainability Leaders” to discuss “Sustainable Destinations.” It cost $5,000 to attend and was not publicized on the mayor’s public calendar, according to the indictment. However, it appeared on his private calendar as a reelection fundraiser with a goal of $25,000, according to the indictment, of which he collected $22,800 beforehand.
Soon after, the arrangements began to unravel. The first signs of trouble for Adams in his dealings with the Turkish government came on November 2, 2023, in a round of raids targeting three people close to City Hall — the same day the federal investigation into Adams became public knowledge. While Adams was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a White House meeting with mayors about the migrant crisis, FBI agents were executing search warrants at the homes of three Adams associates, including that of his chief fundraiser, Briana Suggs.
One target of the raids fits the description of the unnamed “Adams Staffer” in the indictment who deleted her messaging apps: Rana Abbasova, a protocol officer and liaison to Muslim countries for the administration. Abbasova’s home in New Jersey was one of the three raided by FBI agents. She was said to be cooperating with investigators. The others who had phones confiscated were Cenk Öcal, a Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor-elect’s transition committee, and Suggs, the fundraiser. She called Adams five times.
Alerted to the Suggs raid by a staff member, Adams turned around after landing in D.C. and boarded a flight back to New York. Four days later, FBI agents approached him as he left an event at New York University and confiscated two cell phones and an iPad in his possession. This Thursday morning, federal agents arrived at Gracie Mansion, where his attorney said they seized the mayor’s phone once again.
He was not carrying his personal cellphone, “the device he used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment.” Adams turned it over the next day in response to a subpoena, but it was locked. He was quoted telling investigators that he had changed the password a couple of days earlier, from four digits to six, to keep members of his staff from accidentally or intentionally deleting its contents. But he’d already forgotten the new password, the indictment says, “and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone.”
On Thursday morning, federal agents descended on Gracie Mansion where his attorney, Alex Spiro, said they seized his phone once again. “They send a dozen agents to pick up a phone when we would have happily turned it in,” Spiro said in a statement.
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