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      ‘A true friend of Turkey’: Eric Adams bribery indictment reveals years of flights and favors

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      US federal prosecutors have accused members of the Turkish government of pulling off a years-long influence campaign to cultivate and secure favors from Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City.In an indictment unsealed on Thursday morning, the US attorney of New York’s southern district alleged that government officials and business leaders with ties to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, showered Adams with thousands in illegal foreign campaign donations and free or heavily discounted luxury hotel stays and flights around the world.In exchange, the indictment claims, Adams executed various favors for the Turkish government, including pressuring a local fire official to bypass safety regulations and greenlight the opening of a consular building, so it could be ready before a visit by Erdoğan.After that alleged intervention, a Turkish government official messaged the soon-to-be mayor calling him “a true friend of Turkey”, according to an exchange cited in the legal filing. Adams allegedly responded by calling the Turkish official “my brother”,Adams, a 64-year-old former police officer and state lawmaker, now faces charges of wire fraud, bribery and soliciting campaign donations from foreign nationals.“The conduct alleged in the indictment, the foreign money, the corporate money, the bribery, the years of concealment, is a grave breach of the public’s trust,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, said in a press conference on Thursday.Despite calls from a growing chorus of elected officials, Adams has vowed not to resign. The Democrat, who ran on a law-and-order message, is the first sitting mayor of New York to be indicted on federal corruption charges.“It’s an unfortunate day. And it’s a painful day. But inside all of that is a day when we will finally reveal why, for 10 months, I’ve gone through this. And I look forward to defending myself,” he said on Thursday.Turkey’s ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comment.The indictment is the product of just one of four apparent federal investigations led by US attorneys for the southern and eastern districts of New York into Adams associates. Other inquiries are reportedly scrutinizing police officials and senior city government officials with ties to other foreign nations.This case focuses almost exclusively on Adams’s longstanding ties to Turkish government and business officials, a relationship that prosecutors say goes back as far as 2015 when the then borough president of Brooklyn twice visited Turkey as part of a trip arranged by government officials there.Over the next three years, Adams visited Turkey again as well as France, Sri Lanka and China, accepting free business class tickets from Turkish Airlines that were worth more than $35,000 as part of an influence campaign organized by a Turkish government official, prosecutors assert.Throughout this period, according to text messages cited in the case, Adams’s staffers actively solicited campaign contributions which they knew came from illegal foreign sources. And in some cases, prosecutors allege Adams, then a mayoral hopeful, was himself aware of the illegality.In 2018, a Turkish entrepreneur, who helped arrange one of Adams’s early trips to Turkey, texted with his liaison about giving Adams an illegal donation through a straw donor with US citizenship, according to the indictment: “We’ll make the donation through an American citizen in the US … A Turk … I’ll give cash to him in Turkey … Or I’ll send it to an American … He will make a donation to you.”The Adams liaison expressed concerns that the future mayor would not get involved in “such games”, but afterwards, the liaison asked Adams if she should pursue the illegal donations, and he directed her to do so, prosecutors allege.Later that year, Adams met with a wealthy Turkish businessman who owned a Turkish university. Though he was a foreign national, Adams texted his liaison that the businessman was “ready to help” and didn’t “want his willing to help be waisted [sic]”.Before Adams’s election in 2021, New York City campaign finance regulators flagged and repeatedly asked Adams’s campaign team to explain who had bundled together numerous suspicious donations for his election run, including a cluster of contributions from a fundraiser hosted by a Turkish American construction business, as the news outlet the City previously reported.Adams’s campaign ignored the regulators’ requests and failed to disclose its bundlers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAccording to the indictment, however, one of the individuals coordinating contributions for the fundraiser behind the scenes was a Turkish government official, who even sent his driver to deliver donations to the event.Vito Pitta, Adams’s campaign counsel, and Evan Thies, a consultant who worked on Adams’s 2021 campaign, did not respond to requests for comment about the indictment.The indictment also details how Adams received lavish benefits from Turkish nationals.The mayor allegedly had an arrangement with Turkish Airlines in which he was upgraded to business class for free on several flights around the world. The arrangement became so routine for Adams that when his partner told him she wanted to go to Easter Island in Chile, Adams told her to check to see if Turkish Airlines flew to the country.Adams is also alleged to have accepted free or significantly discounted stays in opulent hotels in Turkey, including the cosmopolitan suite at the St Regis hotel in Istanbul. During the same 2018 trip, Adams is also alleged to have accepted “free transportation, meals, and entertainment, including a car and driver, a boat tour to the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, a Turkish bath at a seaside hotel, and at least one meal at a high-end restaurant”.Prosecutors also appear to have obtained text messages that brazenly discuss the scheme. In June of 2021, for example, a Turkish airline manager asked an Adams staffer how much to charge for a last-minute flight to Turkey. The manager proposed $50. The staffer replied to charge around $1,000 to make it seem “somewhat real.“We don’t want them to say he is flying for free. At the moment, the media’s attention is on Eric,” the staffer wrote.During the same trip, the staffer also inquired where Adams and his partner could stay in Turkey and the staffer suggested the Four Seasons, a luxury hotel. The staffer said it would be too expensive and the manager replied: “Why does he care? He is not going to pay. His name will not be on anything either.” The Adams staffer simply replied: “super.”At a press conference on Thursday, US attorney Williams said the investigation was not yet concluded.“We continue to dig and we will hold more people accountable,” he told reporters. “And I encourage anyone with information to come forward and to do so before it is too late.” More

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      Revealed: NYPD complaints surge under Adams to reach highest level since 2012

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      The New York City police department’s disciplinary issues are coming to a head during the third year of tough-on-crime Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, with complaints at their highest since 2012, stop-and-frisk encounters soaring and displays of impunity by rank-and-file officers, according to interviews and data from the city’s independent police watchdog agency.Disciplinary records and interviews with sources also reveal a persistent problem with instances of NYPD officers wearing morale patches on their bulletproof vests containing possible white supremacist imagery.This is an uncomfortable echo of four years ago, when the NYPD’s riot squad pummeled protesters and cops openly wore pro-Trump imagery, flashed white supremacist symbols while on duty and were discovered in membership lists of extremist militias.The first public clue of the NYPD’s renewed problem with far-right imagery emerged in the civilian complaint review board’s (CCRB) May monthly report. In December 2022, two officers from Staten Island’s 120th precinct responded to a fight between parents at a public school. One cop refused to provide his name to one of the mothers who also observed a patch with a skull image on the other cop’s bulletproof vests.“The skull patch on subject officer 2’s uniform was a specific imagery commonly used by white supremacist groups. Subject officer 2 stated that the patch was a gift, and the skull insignia did not have offensive connotations. The investigation found that the display of the patch on subject officer 2’s uniform was discourteous and offensive,” reads the summary in the CCRB document.According to sources with knowledge of the investigation, the cop with the offensive patch was Sergeant John J Pedersen, a 38-year-old who joined the NYPD in 2011 and has four sustained civilian complaints against him during his career. Pedersen will face a departmental trial for wearing the offensive patch.Pedersen’s conduct was not isolated: the CCRB has sustained complaints against several other cops for wearing the same sort of skull imagery – which resembles the logo of the comic book superhero the Punisher – while on duty, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. The CCRB has investigated at least 19 cases related to improper morale patches – mostly related to the Punisher skull insignia – since 2018, according to an agency spokesperson.There have been earlier indications of the CCRB’s focus on political patches: Sergeant Dana Martillo lost 40 days of pay after she was disciplined for wearing pro-Trump patches on her bulletproof vest during a February 2021 Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn, including a Punisher logo fashioned after former president Donald Trump. However, the scope of the watchdog agency’s crackdown and its consideration of the Punisher logo as white supremacist iconography has not been previously made public.“The Punisher symbol has since been adopted by several groups, most prominent among them the US military, white supremacists and law enforcement. Between 2017 and 2021, the Punisher logo has been visible on articles of clothing and weapons held at white supremacy rallies,” reads a passage from a closing report from a 2020 CCRB case in which three officers sporting such patches were sustained for misconduct by the review board.“The Punisher symbol represents a character that engages in criminal behavior and violence and has been adopted by white supremacist groups. The symbol is inconsistent with the mission and values of the NYPD, namely those of enforcing the law, treating citizens with respect and valuing human life. Additionally, the ‘Punisher’ logo’s association with white supremacist groups goes against the requirements of [the patrol guide], which prohibit[s] association with any person or organization advocating hatred, oppression or prejudice based on race,” the report reads.The broader problem with morale patches was formally communicated by the independent watchdog agency to the NYPD’s legal bureau last year in an official “risk management bureau” letter informing the NYPD of a persistent discipline problem involving extremist iconography, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.“The CCRB takes all cases involving extremist imagery on uniforms very seriously, and images that invoke white supremacy are no exception,” a spokesperson for the watchdog agency wrote in an emailed statement. “CCRB investigators used the NYPD patrol guide to determine if the uniform modification in question constitutes misconduct.”The NYPD did not respond to repeated requests for comment.Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, expressed alarm at the extremist imagery issue but noted it fit into a longer pattern. “These complaints are not entirely new, we’ve heard similar reports of officers sporting those patches or making white supremacist gestures at protests. Most recently, our monitors have seen really aggressive activity by the department towards the George Floyd and Palestinian solidarity protests,” Sisitzky said.More alarmingly, Sisitzky said, the NYPD’s command staff under Mayor Adams’s term has taken a hard turn to the right.“The adversarial and hostile tone and rhetoric towards New Yorkers from the command staff have been really troubling – figures like [Chief of Department] Jonathan Chell and [Assistant Commissioner] Kaz Daughtry have been using social media to attack members of the city council and judges, recently called out protesters as ‘anti-American’, and are slurring folks as supporters of terrorism.”The behavior of senior NYPD officials like Chell and Daughtry has provoked rebukes from the city council and prompted New York City’s department of investigation to open an inquiry into the use of social media by the police department.Adams, for his part, unequivocally supports the NYPD’s new aggressive approach towards its political opponents.The CCRB, which is the external investigative agency for complaints of NYPD misconduct, is staring down precipitous budget cuts: the current budget calls for a $25.7m cut to the watchdog agency’s budget. In response to prior rounds of cuts, the CCRB has ceased investigating whole categories of complaints if they are isolated incidents, including failure of officers to provide their name and shield number, threats by a member of service, discourtesy, refusal to process a civilian complaint, property seizures, forced hospitalizations or untruthfulness.Yet some 2,355 complaints were made against NYPD personnel as of 1 June, according to CCRB data. That is the highest total number at this point in the year since 2012, when 2,374 complaints were logged against police.Before 2023, complaints against NYPD officers had dropped steadily since 2019, but the Adams administration’s return to stress policing tactics last seen under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly resulted in a huge spike in misconduct allegations last year, as the Guardian first reported last fall. Vehicle stops have skyrocketed 50% as well, without a commensurate increase in seized contraband, arrests, summonses or other legal actions.What’s more, NYPD line officers are not accurately documenting the true number of stop-and-frisk encounters with New Yorkers and appear to face no accountability for this lapse, according to a letter filed at the end of 2023 by the court monitor overseeing a consent decree that ostensibly reins in the NYPD’s conduct on the street per a 2013 settlement agreement.The letter singled out “neighborhood safety teams” and “precinct safety teams”, the terms used by the Adams administration to rebrand the NYPD’s notorious, aggressive anti-crime units that were behind the huge rise in stop-and-frisk encounters during the Bloomberg administration, when hundreds of thousands of mostly Black and Latino New Yorkers were stopped and searched.Lupe Aguirre, a staff attorney at the NYCLU, criticized the budget cuts to the CCRB.“Transparency remains a real issue with the NYPD, and the CCRB is a critical source of insight into the agency’s disciplinary system,” Aguirre said. “Without it, we don’t really have a sense of how the NYPD’s internal accountability systems are working and how problematic cops remain on the force and are held accountable.” More

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      Mayor says New York is world’s greatest city because any day could be a new 9/11

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      Asked to sum up 2023 in New York City, the mayor, Eric Adams, chose to give New Yorkers a bizarre warning that they could “wake up” to another 9/11 terrorist attack on any given day.Asked by the WPIX-TV host Dan Mannarino to sum up a “very eventful” year in one word, Adams offered two: “New York”.Then he said: “This is a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our trade center through a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s about to open.“This is a very, very complicated city, and that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”On 11 September 2001, Islamist terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the towers of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. The death toll was 2,977. Thousands were injured and thousands have since died of illnesses related to crash site toxicity.Hijacked planes also crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attacks fueled 20 years of war, including US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.Adams was not pressed on his bizarre remark to WPIX, though he was later asked what he needed to improve in 2024.“Probably communications,” he said.The Democrat, a former police officer, became the second Black mayor of New York when he took office last year. This month, beset by scandal, he recorded the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a New York mayor by Quinnipiac University polling.Just 28% of respondents said they approved of Adams’s performance.“There’s no good news for Mayor Adams in this poll,” said Mary Snow, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll. “Not only are voters giving him poor grades on the job he’s doing at city hall, their views on his character have dimmed.“As the city faces across-the-board budget cuts while dealing with a migrant crisis, headlines about a federal investigation into the mayor’s 2021 campaign and an accusation of sexual assault leveled against him from 30 years ago are taking a toll.” More

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      New York City mayor Eric Adams accused of sexual assault in 1993

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      The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has been accused of sexual assault in a court filing submitted on late Wednesday.The summons against Adams alleges that the plaintiff “was sexually assaulted by Defendant Eric Adams in New York, New York in 1993 while they both worked for the City of New York”.It was filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York state law which provided a one-year “look-back” window for adult sexual misconduct accusers to file civil lawsuits that previously would have been barred due to the statute of limitations.The window expires on 24 November.The summons adds that the concerns “sexual assault, battery and employment discrimination on the basis of Plaintiff’s gender and sex, retaliation, hostile work environment and intentional infliction of emotional distress”.Asked about the allegation, a city hall spokesperson said: “The mayor does not know who this person is. If they ever met, he doesn’t recall it. But he would never do anything to physically harm another person and vigorously denies any such claim.”The three-page summons does not detail the alleged sexual assault. The Guardian is withholding the name of Adams’ accuser as the allegation involves sexual assault.The summons also names the New York City police department’s transit bureau, and the New York City police department Guardians Association social organization, as defendants.The accuser’s attorney, Megan Goddard, said: “Goddard Law is thankful for the Adult Survivors Act, which has given so many women the opportunity to seek justice. We are immensely proud of our clients and all the women who are seeking justice under the ASA. We are also thankful that the legislature may be considering reopening the window because so many victims of sexual assault are only finding out about the ASA now.”The Messenger first reported the summons.The summons comes as Adams, who was elected in 2021, faces scrutiny from the FBI, which is reportedly investigating his campaign. Its inquiry reportedly focuses on whether Adams’ campaign unlawfully accepted money from the Turkish government in exchange for favors, such as pressuring the New York City fire department to speed up the opening of a Turkish consulate.On 2 November, federal agents raided the home of Adams’ top fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, seizing electronic devices and documents. The FBI also reportedly searched a Turkish Airlines executive’s home, as well as Brooklyn construction company owned by Turkish immigrants; the executive and company had both fundraised for Adams.This is a developing story and will be updated … More

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      Phones and iPad of New York mayor Eric Adams were seized by FBI, report says

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      Electronic devices including at least two mobile phones belonging to New York City mayor Eric Adams were seized by the FBI as the agency escalated a corruption investigation into his victorious 2021 campaign, the New York Times reported Friday.It follows an FBI raid earlier this month on the home of Brianna Suggs, Adams’s leading campaign fundraiser, in which agents reportedly confiscated two laptop computers and three cellphones.Previous reports said Adams and his campaign team repeatedly refused regulators’ request to divulge the source of about $300,000 in donations, although it was not clear whether a violation of campaign finance rules was part of the inquiry.According to the Times, FBI agents earlier this week took “at least two cellphones and an iPad” belonging to Adams, days after the 2 November raid on Suggs’s Brooklyn residence.Sources told the newspaper that agents approached Adams in the street and asked his security detail to step away while they entered his vehicle and seized the devices under the authorization of a court-issued warrant.The paper added all the equipment was returned to him “within a matter of days”, noting that the warrant allowed the FBI to copy data contained on the devices.In a statement issued through a spokesperson on Friday afternoon, Adams, a former New York police department captain, said he had been fully cooperative.“As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation, and I will continue to do that,” he said. “I have nothing to hide.”His campaign attorney, Boyd Johnson, said in his own statement: “The mayor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and continues to cooperate with the investigation.“After learning of the federal investigation, it was discovered that an individual had recently acted improperly. In the spirit of transparency and cooperation, this behavior was immediately and proactively reported to investigators.”Johnson did not elaborate on who the person was or what they were found to have done.The FBI investigation, the two sources told the Times, is looking into whether Adams’s 2021 campaign “conspired with the Turkish government and others to funnel money into its coffers”.The warrant, it said, sought records about donations from Bay Atlantic University, a Washington DC college whose founder is Turkish and is affiliated with a school Adams is said to have visited when he went to Turkey as Brooklyn borough president in 2015.The donations previously reported to be in question came from about 500 different donors, the local New York City news publication the City said.Adams’s campaign counsel, Vito Pitta, said at the time: “The campaign has responded to every notice from [the campaign finance board] as appropriate.”The New York Times said the FBI and the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York declined comment Friday.Immediately after the raid on the home of Suggs, Adams returned to New York from Washington DC, where he had scheduled meetings with White House and congressional leaders to talk about immigration.He said he did so out of compassion for Suggs, a 25-year-old former intern promoted to be his chief fundraiser.“Although I am mayor, I have not stopped being a man and a human,” he said. More

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      New York City public hospitals to offer abortion care via telehealth

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      New York City public hospitals will now offer abortion care via telehealth, placing them among the first public health systems in the US to do so.The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, announced on Monday that abortion pill prescriptions would now be available by telephone or online, adding that such access can happen from “the comfort of your home”.As a result of the move, New York City residents will now be able to connect with health practitioners for those prescriptions, building on previous legislations to protect abortions rights in New York.“If you are clinically eligible, that provider will be able to prescribe abortion medication that would be delivered to your New York City address within days,” Adams said during Monday’s announcement.“We will not stand idly by as these attacks continue and the far-rights seeks to strip our citizens of their basic rights,” Adams added, referring to abortion restrictions being legislated across the country.Abortion rights organizations celebrated Monday’s announcement as an essential step to protect reproductive rights.“Today marks a historic win for abortion access in New York City,” said Wendy Stark, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York.“When we make abortion care more accessible, we empower individuals to make the best decisions for themselves, their families and their futures,” Stark added.The expanded access to abortion care comes after the supreme court’s elimination last year of the federal abortion rights established by Roe v Wade.Since then, at least 20 states have passed restrictions on abortions, the New York Times reports.Fourteen states, mainly in the south, have enacted total bans on the medical procedure.US courts have also limited access to abortion medication. In August, a US appeals court ruled that the abortion pill mifepristone should be regulated according to rules set prior to 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn August 2022, Adams signed legislation protecting the right to abortions in New York City after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.The measures signed by Adams – six in total – also made abortion medication free at all of New York’s department of health and mental hygiene clinics.The New York state legislature has also passed legislation protecting medical professionals in the state who provide abortion pills to patients in places where the procedure is banned, the New York Times reported.Other Democratic-led cities and states have passed similar measures protecting reproductive rights.In January, the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, signed legislation expanding abortion access by allowing more practitioners to provide the medical procedure and mandating that agencies in the state cover the procedure, the television news outlet WTTW reported. More