Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Mayor Eric Adams was charged Thursday morning with bribery, fraud, and the solicitation of illegal foreign campaign donations. Over the past decade, federal prosecutors allege that Adams accepted over $100,000 worth of free flights and hotel stays from Turkish officials and businessmen, who banked their influence over the Brooklyn politician for favors — like when Adams allegedly leaned on the fire department to approve a new Turkish consulate despite glaring safety issues. Thanks to straw donations from various Turkish figures, Adams was also able to collect millions in matching funds that helped bankroll his successful campaign for mayor. Below are all the bribes Adams accepted, as alleged in the indictment.
In 2015, prosecutors claimed that Adams became friendly with a Turkish entrepreneur whose job it was to connect Turkish businesses to “politicians, celebrities, and others whose influence may benefit the corporations.” Adams, who was Brooklyn borough president at the time, received free business-class tickets to Turkey. Adams reported the trip — and another free visit arranged by a Turkish official — to the New York City Conflict of Interest Board. But Feds say he didn’t disclose trips after that, which included:
- A 2016 visit to India on Turkish Airlines in which he and a woman identified as his domestic partner were given free upgrades worth $15,000.
- A summer 2017 trip to France, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and China in which Adams accepted business-class tickets worth more than $35,000 for him and his staff.
- An October 2017 trip to Nepal in which Adams accepted free business-class tickets worth over $16,000.
- A January 2018 flight to Hungary in which Adams and his domestic partner accepted free business-class upgrades worth more than $14,000.
- A November 2021 flight to Ghana in which Adams received two business-class tickets for $14,000.
Adams’s Turkish benefactors were generous enough to comp his hotel rooms and lavish excursions once he was in the country, including:
- A 2017 stay at the St. Regis hotel in Istanbul, a $7,000 value for which Adams paid less than $600.
- A 2019 stay at a luxury stay in the St. Regis hotel in Istanbul worth $3,000. (During this trip, Adams also “solicited and accepted” a car and driver, a boat tour in the Sea of Marmara, a high-end restaurant meal, and a Turkish bath at a seaside hotel, per the indictment.)
Adams and his partner, unidentified in the indictment, really loved Turkish Airlines, presumably in part thanks to all the free upgrades they received. In 2017, she texted him asking why he was flying from New York to Istanbul on the way to France. “Transferring here. You know first stop is always ins.tanbul,” he wrote back. While his partner was planning a potential trip to Easter Island, Adams “repeatedly asked her whether the Turkish Airline could be used for their flights” and asked her to call the airline “to confirm that they did not have routes between New York and Chile,” per the indictment.
Adams had spent so much time in Turkey over the years that he began turning down free excursions. In his 2021 trip to Ghana, in a layover in Istanbul, he accepted a free airport driver and dinner, but declined a cruise of the Bosphorus Strait because he had “done the boat tour a few titnes.”
Adams staffers also allegedly created fake paper trails and false invoices to try to cover his tracks, like on a planned June 2021 trip in which a Turkish Airlines manager tried to charge $50 for two business-class tickets to Istanbul worth $15,000.
“No, that wouldn’t work,” an Adams staffer wrote to the airline manager.
“How much should I charge?” the manager wrote back.
“His every step is being watched right now,” the staffer wrote. “$1,000 or so. Let it be somewhat real. We don’t want them to say he is flying for free. At the moment, the media’s attention is on Eric.”
For the same trip, the Adams staffer asked where he could stay. When the airline manager suggested the Four Seasons, the Adams staffer wrote that it was too expensive.
“Why does he care? He is not going to pay,” the airline staffer wrote. “His name will not be on anything either.”
“Super,” the Adams staffer wrote back. The pair planned a trip costing an additional $8,500 — though the whole itinerary, including the flight, was eventually scrapped.
For his 2017 trip, Adams wrote in an email to his scheduler that he left $10,000 in their desk to pay for the flight in cash. But records from Turkish Airlines show that they never received a payment for the comped trip.
While not as salacious as the free flights and hotel stays, the donations from Turkish interests to Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign helped propel his campaign to become mayor in a pivotal way. Feds allege that Adams “solicited and knowingly accepted” straw donations from Turkish businesses.
In 2018, the Turkish promoter identified in the indictment sent a text message to an Adams staffer: “Fund Raising in Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record.” The staffer replied that Adams “wouldn’t get involved in such games. They must cause a big stink later on” — but that they would “ask anyways.” The indictment states that Adams later directed the staffer to try and get $100,000 from the promoter into his campaign coffers.
In 2020, two volunteers of Adams’s campaign, who later became employees in his administration, asked a Turkish businessman to donate $10,000 to the campaign. When the man offered to write a $10,000 check, they advised him that individuals cannot donate more than $2,000 and advised him to disperse the money to his employees to then donate — constituting an illegal straw-donor scheme.
As explained in the indictment, these schemes had a compounding effect on Adams’s campaign contributions:
“Adams’s campaigns applied for matching funds based on known straw donations, fraudulently obtaining as much as $2,000 in public funds for each illegal contribution. New York City has a matching funds program that matches small-dollar contributions from individual City residents with up to eight times their amount in public funds.
Adams’s campaigns applied for matching funds based on known straw donations, fraudulently obtaining as much as $2,000 in public funds for each illegal contribution. ADAMS and those working at his direction falsely certified compliance with applicable campaign finance regulations despite Adams’s repeated acceptance of straw donations, relying on the concealed nature of these illegal contributions to falsely portray his campaigns as law-abiding. As a result of those false certifications, ADAMS’s 2021 mayoral campaign received more than $10,000,000 in public funds.”
Last September, the Feds allege that Adams and his staff concocted a scheme to raise money from Turkish nationals by billing a fundraiser as a $5,000-per-plate sustainability event.” (On Adams’s private calendar, the event was listed as a “fundraiser for Eric Adams 2025.”) Thousands of dollars raised at the event were then routed through straw donors to the campaign. There were plans for more bogus fundraisers that fall, but they were scrapped after the federal investigation into Adams was made public.
