Eric Adams Has a Foreign Corruption Problem. New York’s Is Way Bigger

Eric Adams wanted to see the world, to see it in style. But he wasn’t a rich man, just a former cop and rising politician in a largely ceremonial job, Brooklyn Borough President. Luckily for him, there were a number of benefactors who federal prosecutors say were ready to help him travel in a manner benefitting the position he was angling for: mayor of New York City.

According to a sprawling, 57-page indictment unsealed on Thursday, there was the chairman of a Turkish university; a promoter “whose business includes organizing events to introduce Turkish corporations and businesspeople to politicians, celebrities, and others whose influence may benefit the corporations”; and a senior official in the Turkish government, who, prosecutors say, “later steered illegal contributions and improper gifts to Adams to gain influence with and, eventually, to obtain corrupt official action from Adams.” 

Adams in the summer of 2017 went with his son and a staffer to Nice, Istanbul, Sri Lanka, and Beijing, flying business class the whole way. In October, he went again to Istanbul and Beijing, and then on to Nepal. Those tickets were, all told, worth $51,000. But he got it all for free. 

The relationship deepened from there, as Adams began to run for mayor in earnest. The Turks allegedly funneled money to his campaign through false entities, or “straw donors.” Accepting such donations is against the law — and Adams allegedly received public matching funds based on these contributions. Adams allegedly returned the favor, in part by pressuring the fire department to allow the opening of a $300 million, 36-story glass tower to house the Turkish consulate, just off of First Avenue and 45th Street, without an inspection and “in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey‘s president” — a diplomatic coup for a man who’s functionally a dictator.

Adams has vigorously denied all of the charges. And at least one Adams ally I spoke with in the immediate aftermath breathed a quarter-sigh of relief — this person was expecting even more, and more serious, charges. “It’s obviously not great but this is weaker than I thought it would be,” the source tells me.

But that exhale assumes that the federal charges against Adams begin and end in this document. They almost certainly do not, with at least four more federal probes reportedly targeting his inner circle and FBI agents searching the mayor’s residence shortly before the indictment was announced. It also assumes that the Turks were the only government to allegedly turn Adams into an unregistered foreign agent. That, too, could prove to be a dangerous supposition — especially given the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn’s pursuit of Chinese influence in New York. 

In the last four years, that federal prosecutor’s office alone has charged a dozen separate criminal cases of covert Chinese government interference in U.S. politics, business, and civil society. An aide to New York’s governor was indicted as a foreign agent on Sept. 3. An ex-corrections officer got 20 months for harassing an artist who lampooned Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Two more men were arrested for operating a secret Chinese police station out of the Manhattan headquarters of a group for expats from Fujian province. 

The examples spiral out from there. In July, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted Robert Menendez, a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey, of taking bribes and acting as Egypt’s agent. In August, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged a hitman with trying to assassinate Donald Trump, allegedly on Iran’s orders. In September, prosecutors in Manhattan revealed an alleged Russian plot to funnel $10 million to MAGA influencers. This is a partial list. A snippet of a list, really. And all of these developments happened in just the last few months, just in and around this one metro area, where a wide array of foreign actors are looking to turn New York into something like Spy City.  

The 20 experts, officials, and activists I spoke to couldn’t agree on whether these cases represent a major escalation in this covert activity, an increase in Washington’s willingness to combat it, or both. But they all agreed that such efforts are widespread and being directed by countries across the globe. And while it might be tempting to speculate about what this says about the various foreign policy strategies in foreign capitals, the clear takeaway is that malicious actors around the world see America as pliable, and influence as something that can be bought on the cheap. In other words, the most disturbing part about these covert foreign pressure campaigns is what it says about our politics, our society. About us. 

ONE OF THE MORE disturbing foreign influence cases to recently come to light begins 35 years ago, in Beijing. Yan Xiong was a student activist there, jailed for being part of the big Tiananmen Square protests. When he got out, he made his way to America, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and eventually served two tours as a chaplain in Iraq. By 2021, Yan was running for Congress in lower Manhattan. He could tell that something was off. He’d show up to candidate forums, and then wouldn’t be allowed to speak. He’d try to raise money, no dice. There was an old man who wouldn’t stop taking pictures of Yan’s campaign. Yan would go out to his driveway late at night and find a car there, headlights blazing. It was unnerving, but Yan was used to looking over his shoulder.

Nevertheless, Yan was shocked when, in March of 2022, federal prosecutors revealed that he was being targeted by the Chinese government. The goal: to surveil and sabotage the chaplain’s long-shot campaign. “Go deep and dig up something. Right? For example, past incidents of tax evasion… if he used prostitutes in the past… if he had a mistress,” a member of China’s Ministry of State Security allegedly told a private investigator here in the U.S. If the private investigator couldn’t come up with — or make up — any dirt, the P.I. was encouraged to use other means to take Yan out of the race: “In the end, violence would be fine too.” 

In the end, Yan’s campaign netted him only 750 votes — not great, but 50 percent more than former Mayor Bill De Blasio received. The P.I. hired by the Chinese government never found any dirt on Yan, or physically attacked him. But the attempt to ratfuck Yan’s campaign continues to leave a wound. Yan’s getting ready to move for the fifth time in two years — in part “for safety, for psychology.” In August, prosecutors unveiled another layer to the alleged plot against him. The old man who’d been taking all those pictures? He was a former Tiananmen Square veteran, too — one who was now accused of working as an unregistered agent for Beijing. To Yan, he’s another “victim” of a regime that’s all-too-willing to extend its reach here. “It’s a tragedy, that’s my opinion,” Yan tells me.

And Yan’s case isn’t the only one in which there seem to be shadowy figures just out of frame. Shujun Wang, another longtime Chinese dissident, was convicted in late August of working as Beijing’s spy. The other day, I called his lawyer to ask about a member of the defense team, a man listed in court documents as a paralegal, who was, in fact, a Florida realtor, recently acquitted of rape. What was he doing there? Who was he? “He is nobody,” the lawyer answered.  

These influence campaigns by foreign governments, prosecutors allege, reach all the way down to the lowest levels of state and local government. Take Linda Sun, who started in 2012 as one of the more junior aides out of 200 or so in Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office. The former beauty pageant contestant and Barnard grad, who had come to New York from Nanjing when she was a kid, put in the work as a liaison to the borough of Queens and the state’s Asian American community. She’d help connect constituents to government services, make appearances at Lunar New Year events, write up proclamations, and liaise with foreign consulates. Over the years, she gained leverage. Cuomo’s communications shop — described by one former colleague as “95 percent Caucasian” — relied on Sun to tell them how a state proclamation or press release might resonate in Asian communities.

“She did her job. She went home. Didn’t cause any trouble, never caused any drama. But in hindsight, [there was] a lot of trust in that particular position. Because when you ask her opinion about how something plays, we were asking how it plays in, you know, [the Chinese American neighborhoods of] Sunset Park and Flushing. Not how it played in Beijing,” that source tells me.

By 2015, Sun had a willing ear in Kathy Hochul, the new Lieutenant Governor, who was iced out of Cuomo’s inner circle — and eager to build up her own political constituency. Hochul made sure to attend Chinese American community celebrations and events to promote trade with Beijing. (A Hochul aide notes that she interfaced with all kinds of foreign officials, including a half-dozen such meetings just with the Canadians in 2016.) Sun made sure there were all sorts of meetings Hochul wouldn’t take, wouldn’t even know were offered. For example, prosecutors allege, when officials from the rival government of Taiwan tried to get together with Hochul in D.C. in mid-2016, Sun scheduled talks with Beijing’s representatives instead — and then bragged to the Chinese consulate about what she had done. Hochul began to be quoted favorably and often by Beijing’s official state news agency. Sun started to receive gifts from Chinese officials, prosecutors say: tickets to Carnegie Hall, then a wire transfer for $47,895 for travel expenses. 

As Sun’s responsibilities increased, her profile grew. She worked with legislators when Korean American nail salons were revealed to be serially underpaying their workers. She helped steer money to Asian American groups as threats to them rose during the pandemic. 

By 2021, Hochul was governor. Sun had a bigger title, deputy chief of staff, and was displaying sharper elbows. “She felt very emboldened with making sure that there was a focus [on] protecting mainland China’s agendas,” State Assemblyman Ron Kim, who previously held Sun’s community liaison job, recalls. “That was universally understood, because when myself and other[s] carried certain resolutions to celebrate U.S.-Taiwan relations, I got calls from the governor’s office letting me know that the Chinese consulate is very upset with you, and they would prefer if I don’t do such resolutions again.” (Sun has pleaded not guilty to charges she acted as an agent of the Chinese government, and her attorneys declined to comment for this story.) 

This might seem arcane and sort of small-ball. Who cares if some local pol doesn’t issue a Taiwan proclamation? But it’s part of a strategy, says Bethany Allen, author of Beijing Rules, echoing the sentiments of several U.S. officials. “If this is done extensively, consistently, quietly across many states, many state capitals, many state governments, local governments,” Allen tells me, “it can shape the debate. Have a strong downward pressure on the things that China wants to quiet.” 

And it’s a strategy that Beijing is willing to pursue over the long haul — to influence people at the lowest levels of local government, and let those folks rise over time. Back when she was a reporter, Allen broke the news of a suspected Chinese spy in California who cultivated relationships from the political to the romantic with city councilmen, small-town mayors, and at least one Congressman. The spy’s true motivations weren’t uncovered until that Congressman, Rep. Eric Swalwell, was on the verge of joining the House Intelligence Committee and gaining access to some of the nation’s better-protected national secrets. (Swalwell denied any romantic relationship, and a House ethics panel decided to take no action against him after a two-year investigation.)  

Linda Sun’s case never reached that kind of crisis point. But her value to Chinese officials was clear. The wire transfers were in the millions by 2021. The Chinese Consul General in New York — a sharp, genial diplomat named Huang Ping — sent Nanjing-style salted ducks to Sun’s parents, a half-dozen at a time. According to one source, she started showing up with a fresh tan and a new, high-end handbag to every community event. “People were definitely talking about how she went from rags to riches overnight,” Kim tells me. “Her parents lived in a one-bedroom apartment… She was trying to get a mortgage to buy a condo in Flushing, and she could barely get that. But all of a sudden, now she’s living in a mansion.” And in a sweet vacation home, too. Around the same time Sun and her husband bought a $3.6 million home in Syosset, New York, they also, according to prosecutors, purchased “an ocean-view condominium on the 47th floor of a high rise building in Honolulu, Hawaii, currently valued at approximately $2.1 million.”

SUN AND ADAMS ARE the first local officials to be charged with acting as agents of a foreign power. They probably won’t be the last, or even the last in New York. (“What you saw with the governor in New York, that’s going to be scratching an itch that tickles in a lot of different places,” Bill Evanina, who spent seven years as the federal government’s top counterintelligence official, tells me.) The place has long attracted spies and clandestine power brokers, and not just because of the UN, or Wall Street, or all the corporate headquarters. America’s best city is, not coincidentally, also its most diverse; more than three million of the eight million-plus people living here are foreign-born. Those diasporas are often of intense interest to the countries from which they spring, especially if the countries in question are ruled by authoritarians. The revolutionary movements that took down the Czar, the Chinese Emperor, and the Shah were all incubated overseas. 

These diasporas also can wield outsized power in local politics, too. New York’s election laws are so labyrinthine and complex, with elections held on off-years and on strange dates, that they’re practically designed to keep people from voting. (Ron Kim has 115,000 people living in his district in Queens, for example; fewer than 3,200 of them voted in his contested primary race, which is the only race that matters in a one-party town.) So if any one group gets behind a single candidate, or gins up turnout, or dumps in a lot of money, it can swing an election. Kim faced off against a primary opponent backed by a well-known local community leader who is openly supportive of the Chinese Communist Party. They each poured more than $600,000 into that tiny-turnout primary race. “I felt this was a clear effort to get a political seat for a person who is loyal to their agenda,” Kim says. “This isn’t about lawmaking in [the state capital of] Albany, but it’s about being the power broker of Flushing that will give them credibility and access.”

This is all happening in a place where the politics are — there’s no other way to put this — corrupt as fuck. The five federal investigations reportedly swirling around Adams and his closest associates involve everyone from the police commissioner to the schools chancellor to his top fundraisers to a pair of deputy mayors. Adams’ immediate predecessor, de Blasio, dodged indictment for violating campaign finance laws, but not by much. After leaving office, former mayor Rudy Giuliani took money from a North Korean gangster and then worked with a man he admitted was likely a Russian spy. Long Island’s George Santos was expelled from Congress after less than a year; he recently pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud. One of Santos’ bigger Republican critics on the Island, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, was just exposed for giving Congressional jobs to his lover and his fiancée’s daughter. 

You get the idea: plenty of politicians with their hands out; elections practically designed to be swayed by small groups; those small groups susceptible to foreign infiltration and pressure, because they’ve all got family back home. “New York would be at the top of the list in terms of foreign governments, foreign regimes wanting to target,” says Casey Michel, author of the newly published Foreign Agents. “Especially New York City. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the major investigation into a municipal authority as a target of potential foreign influence is Adams.”

So let’s talk about the mayor. Adams has been ducking corruption allegations — and playing diaspora politics — for more than 15 years. According to the New York Times, a grand jury in July issued subpoenas related to Adams’ ties to six different countries: China, Qatar, South Korea, Israel, Uzbekistan, and, of course, Turkey. In his role as Brooklyn Borough President, Adams attended almost 80 events connected with Turkey, and at least 50 more celebrating China. Some of those events actually upset his Turkish government contacts, according to the indictment. In 2016, a Turkish official told Adams that a community center he used to visit “was affiliated with a Turkish political movement that was hostile to Turkey’s government… If Adams wished to continue receiving support from the Turkish government, Adams could no longer associate with the community center. Adams acquiesced.”

Adams also met multiple times with Huang Ping, the Chinese Consul General who prosecutors later identified as Linda Sun’s handler. And the politicking seemingly continued overseas. Adams took 13 separate trips to Turkey and China, which is a lot of travel to those two specific nations, considering borough presidents don’t really have foreign policy roles. “It’s totally appropriate,” he said after the first of the trips to China, in 2014. “I’m not going to be a MetroCard borough president — I’m going to be a passport borough president.”

City Hall won’t say what all of the trips were for. (They didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story.) The alleged purpose of the Turkey trips, at least, is now less murky after the indictment’s release. When it comes to the others, here’s what we can say for sure: We know that one of Adams’ China travel partners, his longtime Asian community liaison Winnie Greco, had her former campaign office and several of her homes raided by the FBI. We know that Greco and another Adams crony met separately in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, with the man later indicted for operating that secret Chinese police station out of a Fujianese expat society in Manhattan. We know that Adams and Greco appeared onstage at a gala for that charity — the American Changle Association, named for a famed neighborhood in Fuzhou — shortly before it was exposed as a secret police front by the New York Post. We know Adams was with Association bigwig Lu Jianwang days before Lu was arrested in the secret police affair. We know, thanks to local news outlet The City, that 121 workers at the New World Mall in Queens, the site of Greco’s 2021 campaign office, made donations to Adams of precisely $249 each, one buck below the limit for eight-times public matching funds. Several donors said they were reimbursed in cash, or had no idea they had been listed as contributors at all. This has all the hallmarks of illegal straw donations, as Adams’ team surely knows. One Chinese billionaire who gave money to Adams (and hosted his 60th birthday party) recently pleaded guilty to such charges. 

MAYBE ALL OF THESE connections were on the up-and-up. Maybe Adams’ trips to China and extremely odd donations from his campaign office in Flushing were no more nefarious than the 70-plus flag-raising ceremonies for various countries he’s attended in his two-and-a-half years as mayor. Maybe it’s an accident of scheduling that Huang Ping, the Chinese Consul General, asked him to blow off a banquet with the Taiwanese president and Adams wound up doing just that. Adams may have rubbed elbows with people who were later indicted as foreign agents in groups like the American Changle Association, where voters gather for an old-country meal or speak in their parents’ dialect. There’s hardly an elected official in New York who didn’t make such a visit, or get his picture taken at some point with Ping. Of course they did. Ping was a gregarious, effective, charming diplomat. He may be accused of secretly handling alleged agents like Linda Sun, but chatting up local politicians was most definitely Ping’s job.  

You don’t have to be some kind of simp for Beijing to find this kind of criminalization of foreign influence a little hypocritical, given all the governments the U.S. helped overthrow in the past century. You’re not necessarily an abolish-the-police type if you think the feds have gone overboard in their hunt for Chinese agents. “We’re not China. We’re supposedly a free country, and the government should take more care in prosecuting and, in turn, persecuting people,” John Liu, a state senator from Queens, tells me. This is personal for him. While he was gearing up to run for mayor more than a decade ago, the FBI ran a sting on him and his donors, part of a straw-donor probe he says was oh-so-subtly named “Operation Red Money.” They did find some straw donors, and a top aide did go to jail. But Liu himself was only fined $26,000 — proof, he says, that the whole investigation was overheated. Nor is it a one-off. Liu points to cases like Baimadajie Angwang, the cop accused of spying for China, only to have the charges dropped without explanation. By that time, the NYPD had fired him. “You know what? It wouldn’t be so bad if the government pursued these cases, made them as visible as they intentionally make them, and actually had a pretty good record of success,” Liu says. “It bothers me that there’s no accountability of any kind. You know, the government does this, and it doesn’t matter how many lives are ruined [or] the impact on the wider community.” 

There’s no question there’s been overreach, including horror stories of Chinese Americans interrogated by the FBI, seemingly for no reason at all. “We should absolutely oppose any effort by any foreign government to undermine our American society, our way of life, our democracy,” says Rep. Grace Meng, who hired Linda Sun when she was in the State Assembly and now represents a large part of Queens in the U.S. Congress. But “there’s a lot of fear right now in the Asian American community,” she adds. “Every day, young, professional Asian Americans are really scared that these harmful stereotypes are being fueled… [by] questions that are asked only of us.”

As overzealous as some prosecutors may have been, though, and as ugly our recent turn toward anti-China and anti-immigrant politics, there are too many of these foreign influence cases, tied to so many different outside actors, to brush off. A former Republican Congressman is under indictment for covertly working for Venezuela’s dictator. A major Trump fundraiser pleaded guilty to doing the same on behalf of the Chinese and Malaysian government officials, in a case so weird and sprawling, a member of the Fugees wound up with a foreign agent conviction as part of it. Things are so bad, the guy that’s supposed to be leading the investigations into these cases in New York — the head of the state’s FBI counterintelligence division — was himself sentenced earlier this year to federal prison for doing the bidding of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. The MAGA crowd can whine all they want about the #resistance obsession with “Russia, Russia, Russia.” Folks on the political left can roll their eyes at what feels like a Trumpy obsession with Chinese influence, or another red scare. It takes a kind of willful blindness not to see a pattern here. Liu, for one, called on Adams to resign after prosecutors unveiled their indictment which showed just how deep the mayor’s ties to Turkey went.

“This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democratic problem — it’s completely bipartisan,“ Michel tells me. “And as we’re now seeing, it’s not just one level of government these regimes are targeting. It’s everyone.”

For half a century, the American government hardly bothered to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires influence-peddlers to disclose their overseas clients, at least. That changed after the 2016 election, when Trump recruited the O.G. of scummy foreign lobbying, Paul Manafort, to run his campaign and publicly begged for a dictator’s help to win. The Department of Justice went on to prosecute Manafort and so many others — from the Russian troll farm to the white-shoe law firm Skadden, Arps — for breaking that law. Brandon van Grack, who oversaw many of those prosecutions as head of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit, says the apparent surge in cases we’re seeing, eight years later, is a result of that 2016 wake-up call. He credits “greater resources and tools to identify and disrupt those influence operations than an increase in the operations themselves,” adding, “Foreign influence is not novel.”

It’s not exactly dying down, either. A few years ago, you might have thought that prosecuting folks like Manafort would at least serve as a warning shot. The sheer range of regimes trying to influence the 2024 election paints a different picture, and I don’t just mean the fact that Manafort is a free man and doing Fox News hits from the Republican convention. “I would say that a couple things are true in this specific situation. Yes, there are more investigations, because there are allowed to be. And I think our adversaries are more brazen than they have ever been,” Evanina, the former counterintelligence chief, tells me. 

There’s a good argument that the number of prosecutions isn’t even the right metric to gauge foreign influence. Registering as an overseas lobbyist — dodging a FARA charge — that’s the easy part. More than 1,000 foreign principals have done so since 2016, spending more than $5.5 billion to whisper in lawmakers’ ears. At least 90 former members of Congress have registered since 2000 to push another government’s agenda. Scores of U.S. generals and admirals have taken jobs with foreign governments in the last decade, with Saudi Arabia alone hiring 15 retired flag officers. Biden talked in 2020 about banning former officials from lobbying for foreign powers. It was just talk.  

The Supreme Court in recent years has radically raised the bar on bribery cases, and functionally removed any restrictions on campaign spending. That’s allowed Americans closely aligned with foreign governments to make enormous investments in shaping U.S. policy. The best known of these are the lobbyists pushing the agenda of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave over a million dollars to the now-convicted Sen. Menendez, even after he was indicted, and spent millions more on successful primary campaigns to knock out two of Israel’s few critics in Congress. None of this violates any laws. But maybe that’s beside the point. The real foreign influence scandal, Michel tells me, is how much of it is “perfectly legal.” 

If you’re mad at outside actors for exploiting America’s system, don’t be. The United States is still the world’s biggest power; of course every other nation is going to try to pull us in their direction. Try directing your anger a little closer to home. All of these politicians on the take, we voted for them. The bullshit China or Iran pumps out on TikTok? It’s downright factual compared to the nonsense we Americans push one another. And if you think a guy like Eric Adams is an outlier with his, shall we say, open-minded approach to campaign finance and outside influences, allow me to introduce you to the Republican nominee for president and his inner circle. The Congress we elected has bottled up nearly every attempt to close these foreign-funding loopholes. The campaigns we supported went along with the Supreme Court’s decision to make elections a feeding frenzy. This is a choice. Collectively, we made it.

IN THE HOURS AFTER Linda Sun and her husband were charged as Chinese agents on Sept. 3, Gov. Hochul urged the U.S. government to expel Sun’s alleged handler, Consul General Huang Ping, and a State Department spokesperson claimed that Ping had “rotated out of the position.” Yet on the night of Sept. 5, at Manhattan’s storied Plaza Hotel, Huang Ping appeared onstage at the China Institute’s $2,500-per-ticket Blue Cloud gala, looking rather dapper in a well-tailored tuxedo. Pictures were posted to the consulate’s website two days later. “Consul General Huang Ping is performing his duties as normal,” read a statement sent out to reporters.

A few hours after he was indicted, Ping’s longtime interlocutor Eric Adams promised to do much the same. “My attorneys will take care of the case, so I can take care of this city,” he said. “My day to day will not change.”