Top official for Mayor Adams crashed at hotel shelter housing ex-cons that donated money to his re-election

 

THE CITY 

 

Three contributors to Mayor Eric Adams’ 2025 re-election campaign recounted in interviews in the past month how they — and in two cases their spouses — were reimbursed for a total of more than $10,000 in donations by hotel and construction executives in violation of state law.

The interviews came during a joint investigation by THE CITY, Documented, and The Guardian US into the presence in the mayor’s current campaign of illegal “straw” donations — contributions paid for by undisclosed sources in a way that masks their identity. Suspicions of such donations spurred the indictment by the Manhattan district attorney of a fundraising group involved in Adams’ 2021 race, which has led to two guilty pleas, and are part of an ongoing federal investigation into whether they’ve been used to veil illegal donations from the Turkish government.

A representative of the mayor’s campaign has decried the use of straw donations generally and said that if any were made to Adams 2025, they had eluded a vetting procedure designed to flag illegal gifts. 

Three of the five reimbursements were linked to the owners of a hotel in Fresh Meadows, Queens, where the mayor’s director of Asian Affairs, Winnie Greco, lived for a number of months in late 2022 and the early part of 2023 — even as the site was operating under a city government subcontract as a shelter for formerly incarcerated individuals.

City Hall spokesperson Charles Lutvak said Greco stayed at the hotel “for parts of late 2022 and 2023, as she recovered from a medical procedure” and that she paid for the room out of her own pocket. He didn’t address how much she paid or why, out of all the alternatives, she recuperated at a shelter funded by city dollars.  

Developer cash flows into Crowley campaign from shady PAC

 

THE CITY 

Elizabeth Crowley, a Democrat running for state Senate in a district that runs from Astoria to Williamsburg, has pledged not to take any money from big real estate developers.

But on Monday, NYC Forward, an independent expenditure committee running ads to support Crowley, a centrist Democrat, received $150,000 from real estate interests, campaign finance records show. 

That committee was founded this month by District Council 9, the painters’ union that’s counted Crowley as a member — and took the spotlight in initial news coverage of the group. 

But state campaign finance records show the majority of contributions to the committee so far have come from developer interests.

Those include the Real Estate Board of New York, whose campaign spending arm, “Putting New Yorkers to Work,” gave $50,000 to the pro-Crowley committee. So too did A&E Real Estate Holdings LLC, a firm with buildings across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

State Board of Elections records show NYC Forward paid for $198,000 in expenses listed as “promotional” that coincided with the real estate donations. The committee has also spent $48,000 on a “social media campaign.” 

Mayor Adams benefited from his chief of staff's LLC dirty money

 

 THE CITY

In 2018, seven employees of two medical companies in New Jersey began donating thousands of dollars to the campaign treasury of then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.

They worked for two companies — Ridgewood Diagnostic Lab and Interstate Multi-Specialty Group, both in Hackensack, and owned by Dr. Alexandr Zaitsev, who was among the Adams donors.

They each gave what was then the maximum amount, $5,100, or close to it, to the campaign account for Adams between April 19 and Nov. 29, 2018, Campaign Finance Board records show.

At the time, Adams had not officially declared he was running for mayor.

Ridgewood, Zaitsev and two other of the Adams donors are now defendants in a lawsuit filed by GEICO in September 2020, with the insurance company alleging they and other medical groups billed GEICO for more than $4.5 million in fraudulent claims.

The lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court and first reported by Bloomberg News, also lays out the two medical companies’ connection to Adams chief of staff Frank Carone, who was a part owner of two limited liability corporations that helped finance their launch.

The employees donated $40,600 to the campaign by the end of 2018.

They were all later refunded more than half of the money after the Campaign Finance Board made changes to the maximum amount for donations when a candidate takes part in a matching-funds program.

GEICO’s lawsuit alleges that Carone, along with his former law partners, father and son Howard and Jordan Fensterman of the firm Abrams Fensterman LLP, used limited-liability companies to advance money to Zaitsev and other medical companies as they waited for insurance claims to process.

After fronting the money, the LLCs would be paid back with interest when GEICO paid the no-fault claims, the company alleged in its suit.

The companies that fronted the cash to the medical groups, Financial Vision Group LLC and others with similar names, are owned by Zaitsev and Daniel Kandhorov, according to court documents.

Kandhorov, who lives in Queens, could not be reached for comment.

During his mayoral campaign, Adams opted to take part in the new 8-to-1 matching-funds program — which allows $2,000 per person, with city-funded matching dollars for New York City-based donors.

A spokesperson for Adams, Max Young, said that Carone had nothing to do with the contributions from the mostly Jersey-based donors.

“Mr. Carone was a passive investor in these LLCs, didn’t solicit these donations, never met the donors in question, and had no knowledge that they donated, then or now,” said Young in a statement.