A rising power in city politics for years reported owning a piece of her parents' home, but now says she was wrong about that.
That's just one of the oddities Crain's found upon examining personal-finance, campaign and property records of Rep. Grace Meng, who is perhaps positioning herself to become head of the Queens Democratic organization.
Reports have suggested that Meng could take over the vaunted party machine from Rep. Joseph Crowley, who lost the Democratic primary for his seat in June to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The nexus of the Meng clan's holdings is the house where the congresswoman's parents apparently reside, at 211-18 34th Avenue. From the first time she ran for her Flushing-based seat in 2012, Meng listed this property—then valued at $500,000 to $1 million—among her assets in personal financial disclosures to the House clerk's office. But on August 14 of this year, Meng filed multiple amendments with the overseer requesting to remove the Bayside home from her official list of possessions, despite having claimed it for the five previous years.
Meng's spokesman said the congresswoman recently confirmed by consulting with her accountant that she never had any ownership stake in the home.
City property records show no change in deedholder for 211-18 34th Avenue since 2002. But they do show an elaborate and idiosyncratic ownership structure, and a network of real estate limited-liability companies involving the congresswoman, her mother Shiao Mei Meng and her father Jimmy Meng.
Jimmy Meng made his fortune as a lumberyard owner and became prominent in his community as president of the Flushing Chinese Business Association. New York politicos remember him as an ex-state assemblyman who resigned amid a voter fraud scandal in 2006 and pleaded guilty in 2012 to soliciting bribes. His daughter served as his campaign manager and later succeeded him in the state Legislature before winning election to Washington with Crowley's support.
Disgraced ex-Assemblymember Jimmy Meng is halfway through his one month sentence, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The 69-year-old father of Congressmember Grace Meng has served two weeks so far in the low-to-minimum security Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Fort Dix, New Jersey. He is slated to be released April 18.
Following his prison sentence, Meng will serve four months of house arrest and two years of probation. He was also ordered to pay $30,000 in fines and serve 750 hours of community service.
Former Assemblyman Jimmy Meng, father of U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, was sentenced to one month in prison this week in a bribery scandal that broke during his daughter's run for Congress, according to NY1.
Meng will also have to pay restitution of $30,000, and will be subject to four months of house arrest.
The sentence was lighter than many other Queens legislators have been forced to serve, including former Forest Hills Assemblyman Alan Hevesi. Hevesi served 19 months for a scam involving the state's pension funds.
Queens Rep. Grace Meng is asking a federal judge to go easy on her father when he’s sentenced for a bribery scheme.
When Jimmy Meng was arrested by the FBI last year, his daughter was in the middle of a race for the congressional seat and never appeared with other family members at court appearances in Brooklyn.
But with Jimmy Meng’s sentencing scheduled for March 12, Grace Meng, a Democrat, is the most prominent letter writer to Federal Judge Allyne Ross seeking leniency for the ex-assemblyman.
“When I first heard about the arrest, my heart felt broken for him,” she wrote on plain stationery with no mention of the political office she holds.
With 2012 just about over, we in New York have reason to hold heads high. We showed over the past year that we remain a leader when it comes to political corruption. It’s not easy staying at the top of your game. But we New Yorkers proved, once again, that
First, let’s raise a cup to those this year who met the lofty standards of George Washington Plunkitt, the turn-of-the-last-century Tammany leader with a worldview that he neatly summed up this way: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”
Here’s to Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx (or maybe Westchester), who used to insist that corruption charges against him amounted to a satanic plot.
Let’s give a cheer to Hiram Monserrate of Queens, another state senator who helped make Albany synonymous with dysfunction.
Yet another state senator, Shirley L. Huntley of Queens, called a new conference in August to announce not that she had a bill to propose but, rather, that she was about to be indicted on corruption charges.
Jimmy K. Meng, once a Queens assemblyman, admitted in court last month that he’d solicited $80,000 to help a friend get off lightly in a criminal case.
Let’s hear it for Larry B. Seabrook, a Bronx city councilman convicted in July of orchestrating a corruption scheme. And for Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez of Brooklyn — Gropez in New York Post headlines — who is under criminal investigation for alleged sexual harassment.
It’s another one of those only-in-New York politics stories.
The daughter of a trailblazing political family is elected to the House of Representatives — just as the family patriarch gets ready to head to the, well, Big House.
Rep.-elect Grace Meng’s (D-Queens) “freshman orientation day” in Washington, DC, this week was bittersweet: Back home, her pioneering father, Jimmy Meng, was pleading guilty in a bribery case.
He’s looking at 20 years — a sad turnaround for the first Asian member of the state Assembly.
(Not that ethnicity necessarily had anything to do with it; Albany is an equal-opportunity destroyer of souls.)
Sadly, Grace Meng’s great day preparing for her first term in Congress next year will instead be memorable in a much more disappointing way: She’s become yet one more member of a politically connected Big Apple clan with a relative serving a term — behind bars.
The first Asian-American elected to New York's state legislature is scheduled to plead guilty this afternoon to charges stemming from a federal bribery case, sources told The Post.
Former state Assemblyman Jimmy Meng, 68, had promised to pay off Manhattan prosecutors who were pursuing a tax fraud case against a Meng associate, the feds say.
Meng — who represented Flushing from 2005 to 2006 — solicited $80,000 in bribes from the associate while promising he could make the case disappear, officials said.
Brooklyn federal prosecutors say that Meng directed the man to place $80,000 in cash into a fruit basket that Meng would send someone to collect.
In late July, the man - who secretly had become an FBI informant - drove to Meng’s Queens lumber yard with a fruit basket containing several thousand dollars, prosecutors said. Meng took it and was arrested by the FBI.
Meng's arrest this Summer marked the broadening of a probe by a team of Brooklyn federal prosecutors and FBI agents that is focusing on public corruption in southeast Queens.
Ex-Queens Assemblyman Jimmy Meng, who is charged in a bizarre scheme to bribe prosecutors, has hired a powerhouse Washington, D.C. lawyer with loads of experience representing scandal-scarred pols, the Daily News has learned.
Meng is now paired with Abbe Lowell, who successfully represented former Sen. John Edwards recently in a federal corruption trial in North Carolina.
Lowell was also the chief Democratic minority counsel for then-President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings stemming the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. His client list also includes former Sen. John Ensign and ex-California Rep. Gary Condit, whose careers were toppled by allegations of wrongdoing.
Meng was assigned a court-appointed federal defender when he was arrested last month, but he owns a lumber business in Queens and does not qualify financially for free counsel.
Shortly after he was released on $1 million bail, ex-Queens Assemblyman Jimmy Meng called the government witness who had secretly taped him soliciting a bribe to fix a criminal case, prosecutors revealed.
Meng didn't even get outside the Brooklyn Federal Court building on Tuesday night before he dialed up the snitch from his cell phone, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Seifan today. Later, an associate of Meng's also “reached out” to the witness, Seifan told Magistrate Cheryl Pollak.
Meng, who had brought along his wife, Shiao, to co-sign the bond posting two Queens properties they own, got a tongue-lashing from the judge.
“It is a violation of this bond to threaten or attempt to influence the testimony of anybody who might be a witness against you in the case,” Pollak said. “If you do it again, you’re going to jail."
Meng’s court-appointed lawyer, Michael Padden, said he had also advised the defendant to refrain.
Jimmy Meng, a former Flushing state assemblyman and father of current Assemblywoman Grace Meng (D-Flushing), was arrested on charges of wire fraud in an FBI sting operation after he accepted a fruit basket containing $80,000 in bribery money Tuesday afternoon at his Flushing-based company, according to federal prosecutors.
In 2011, Meng told an unnamed acquaintance facing charges on state tax crimes that members of the Manhattan district attorney’s office could be influenced into doling out a lesser sentence with an $80,000 bribe, according to U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, who alleged that Meng offered to broker the deal.
But Meng never actually contacted anyone in the prosecutor’s office and instead led the acquaintance into believing the money could influence the case, Lynch said.
The unnamed person eventually went to the government and turned into a witness, wearing a wire since December to record ongoing discussions between him and Meng about the nature of the bribe, Lynch said.
The sting operation ended Tuesday afternoon, when the cooperating witness brought a fruit basket filled with $80,000 stuffed inside, on Meng’s instructions, to Queens Lumber, at 34-47 College Point Blvd., and federal agents arrested Meng.
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