Political contributions to the New York mayor, Eric Adams, totaling more than $10,000 were secretly bankrolled by business people tied to the city’s hotel and construction industries, according to three individuals listed as donors in government records.
These gifts to Adams’s 2025 re-election fund appear to be illegal “straw donations” masking the identities of the people who actually paid for the contributions, a joint media investigation by The City, Documented and the Guardian US has found.
Three Adams donors said in a series of in-person interviews with the media partners that they – and, in two cases, their spouses as well – made contributions of between $2,000 and $2,098 to the mayor’s re-election effort at the request of three business people. They said the businesspeople then reimbursed all five donors for their contributions – a tactic that appears to violate state law and allows shadow donors to flout campaign contribution limits.
Three of the five alleged reimbursements were linked to the owners of a hotel in 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.
Greco, who is currently under investigation for allegedly using her position in the Adams administration for personal gain, did not respond to a request for comment.
The new revelations about the mayor’s campaign contributors come as Adams, a former NYPD captain who once declared himself “the future” of the national Democratic party, has suffered a dramatic decline in opinion polls with the onset of multiple law enforcement investigations relating to his successful 2021 campaign.
Last November, the FBI seized Adams’s cell phones as part of an investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to accept donations funneled in from foreign sources. Last June, the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced it was prosecuting six Adams campaign supporters – including a former NYPD colleague of the mayor’s – for allegedly conspiring to gin up straw donations for the then candidate in an attempt to score future government contracts.
After news of the indictments broke, a spokesperson for Adams’s campaign said his team always held itself to “the highest standards”.
Those government investigations have focused on the conduct of Adams’s supporters during the course of his first mayoral run four years ago.
This joint media investigation has unearthed evidence indicating for the first time that illegally refunded donations may have also benefited Mayor Adams’s current re-election campaign. And unlike previous media investigations into suspicious donations to the mayor, this account includes the names of some of the people the donors say reimbursed them.
One of the donors, an architect’s assistant from Long Island, told reporters that she and her husband were each reimbursed for their $2,000 donations to Adams by Xiaozhuang Ge, one of the owners of the Queens hotel that housed Greco, the mayor’s adviser. According to a city spokesperson, the adviser paid out of pocket to stay at the hotel at the same time as it was housing formerly incarcerated individuals.
In an email, an attorney for Ge called the architect assistant’s account “entirely not accurate”.
Another donor, a nurse from Queens, said a woman named Lan Mei, a business associate of Ge’s family, reimbursed his family in cash for another $2,000 contribution to Adams. City campaign finance records appear to show the nurse signed an affirmation declaring that the donation came from his own funds and that he wasn’t reimbursed. But he said he doesn’t recall filling out any form and that the signature on the document isn’t his.
In an interview, Mei denied reimbursing anyone.
As burgeoning developers and hotel operators, Ge and his wife, Weihong Hu, have had numerous interactions with city agencies vital to their business interests.
Ge and Hu’s Queens hotel, which previously housed Greco, the mayor’s adviser, scored a multi-million dollar subcontract with the city to shelter formerly incarcerated people. Another family property is currently sheltering asylum seekers. Two other hotels owned by the family are currently under construction and have racked up dozens of building code violations.
A third donor, who said he and his wife were reimbursed, works for a Bronx-based heating, ventilation and air conditioning firm. He said his boss paid them back a few days after they each donated $2,098. That donor declined to name his boss, but city and state records list his firm’s principal as a woman named Hung Yau, who also donated $2,098 to Adams the same day.
Last November, less than six months after the flurry of donations, Yau’s company registered to become a city government contractor.
In response to a detailed inquiry about the donors’ assertions, Vito Pitta, an attorney for Adams’s re-election team, said that “no one on the campaign has ever or would ever participate in or condone such behavior”.
“Unfortunately, it is fairly common for contributors to engage in straw donor actions without a campaign’s knowledge, and very difficult for a campaign that receives thousands of contributions to weed out every bad actor, especially when they legally attest to following the rules,” said Pitta.
Saurav Ghosh, director of the Campaign Legal Center’s federal finance reform program, said the attorney’s answer sounded like a “cop out”.
Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission enforcement attorney, pointed out that campaign teams, like journalists and law enforcement officials, can mine campaign finance data to identify suspicious contributions and then reach out to donors to ask whether they were being reimbursed. He noted that now, as the Adams campaign finds itself at the center of multiple campaign finance scandals, its approach should be extra vigilant.
“It seems like they’ve gone the opposite way, saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do here,’” said Ghosh. “That effective shrugging of the shoulders is the wrong culture to have to promote voters’ interests.”
In previous public comments, the mayor has defended his team’s ethics.
“I cannot tell you how much I start the day with telling my team, ‘We’ve got to follow the law. Got to follow the law.’ Almost to the point that I’m annoying,” Adams told reporters last November.
‘I did her a favor, and then she gave me the cash’
The contributions that Adams donors say were reimbursed came during a six-week fundraising blitz that reached its apex last June, weeks before the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced indictments charging six Adams supporters with conspiring to send the then candidate straw donations to earn credit with his team.
One of his biggest single-day hauls for that period, $88,246, came on 9 June when dozens of Adams supporters, many of them business associates of Ge and Hu, gathered to meet the mayor at a 92-story glass skyscraper in Hudson Yards where the hotel operators own an apartment. The Adams campaign reported receiving more than a dozen $2,000 checks that day, including one from Eddie Fung, the nurse from Queens.
But when Fung and his wife, Shangyi Liu, opened their door to reporters on a cold night in early January, they said they had heard about a fundraiser, but didn’t attend. According to the couple, Fung donated to the Adams campaign as a favor to a family friend. Both said repeatedly that they do not support the mayor, who they believe has done a poor job on public safety.
“The truth is we donated because my friend asked me to,” said Liu. “She told me to write a check, I did her a favor, and then she gave me the cash.”
According to Liu, that friend, the businesswoman Lan Mei, asked her to make the donation. Liu said Mei “knows” the mayor and referenced a party at an apartment building “around Hudson Yards”, but didn’t know too much about what her friend was after.
“I know they have some family business, that’s all I know,” said Liu, who is not registered to vote. “We’re not really political.”
Campaign finance contributions made by check in New York City require donors to sign a form affirming that they understand that state law prohibits reimbursements for contributions. In the case of Fung’s donation, the Adams campaign submitted a form to the New York City Campaign Finance Board which contains a signature purportedly from Fung.
But after reporters obtained the form through a public records request and presented it to Fung in a second in-person interview, the nurse and his wife said that they had never handled or signed such a form, likening the situation to “identity theft”. According to the couple, their only role in the donation was cutting the check and handing it to their family friend, Mei.
Standing at his door, Fung compared the signature on the form to the signature on his check to Adams, which he said he actually signed. After looking at both closely, Fung concluded the affirmation signature was not his.
“It doesn’t look like my handwriting,” he said. “The whole signature, it looks similar, but it’s not mine.”
Fung and Liu said going forward they would never accept reimbursement for a campaign donation.
“To me, this just tells me, ‘Next time don’t do this,’” said Fung.
Mei, interviewed at the door of her large, brick home in Great Neck, Long Island, denied reimbursing anyone in cash for a $2,000 donation to the mayor’s campaign last year.
“I didn’t do it. I don’t know why they’re saying that,” she said.
Mei didn’t respond subsequently to a letter that requested her response to the claims made by Fung and Liu.
The hotel architect
City vendor records list Mei as the owner and CEO of the firm Meiqiao LLC. That company shares an address with the Queens hotel owned by Ge and Hu that previously housed the mayor’s adviser.
During an interview last month at her house on Long Island, Sui Mok, the architect assistant who donated to Adams, told reporters that she and her husband, Chang Tan, each donated $2,000 after being asked to do so by Ge, a client of theirs.
Standing behind the glass door of her split-level brick house in Albertson, Mok said that Ge reimbursed her and her husband with a check.
But in a text conversation a week later, Mok modified her story.
“Actually the donation that we gave is part of our design fees that Mr Ge supposed to pay us and we used that for the donation. I forgot to tell you in detail,” Mok wrote, asserting that Ge owed them $4,000 for design services, and that they used that money for the donation to Adams.
Mok declined to provide any records of the design work or a copy of Ge’s check. “Sorry this is Confidential,” she said in a text message.
In an email, Kevin Tung, Ge’s attorney, claimed that his client’s account department couldn’t find any record of a check sent to Mok’s family “for the amount of $4,000 for reimbursement of donation”. He added that any payment made by his client was for “professional services”.
A flyer for the 9 June event, hosted at Ge’s wife’s apartment building, lists Brianna Suggs, the chief fundraiser for Adams’s 2021 campaign, as a contact for donors who wished to pay by check.
Five months later, the FBI raided Suggs’s home as part of its investigation into the Adams campaign’s finances.
‘I’m not a political person’
The other cluster of suspicious donations identified by the Guardian and the other media partners came to the Adams’s campaign last May.
That day, four people listed as managers for the Bronx-based heating and air conditioning company SB HVAC Services Corp attempted to donate more than $14,500 to Adams via credit card.
But according to one of those four, at least two of those contributions were straw donations.
Sunny Yau, an SB HVAC Services Corp employee, said that his “boss” had him and his wife, Nora, each donate $2,098 to Adams, then reimbursed them later that week.
Campaign finance records list Sunny Yau as having contributed $4,196 via credit card, half of which was returned by the campaign for exceeding campaign finance limits. He said he was only aware of one donation in his name, and at one point indicated that he thought the payment was made via check.
Standing behind his door, Sunny said he did not ask his boss why they were making the donations.
“Actually, I’m not a political person,” said Sunny.
Asked if he would ever donate to Adams without being reimbursed, Sunny chuckled and said, “Maybe”.
Last November, less than six months after Sunny and his wife made the donations, SB HVAC Services Corp and another firm led by the firm’s principal, Hung Yau, completed the process to become vendors for New York City’s government’s contracts.
Hung Yau tried to make three separate donations to Adams on the same day as Sunny’s, city campaign finance records show. Reporters tried to reach Hung Yau at her home and business and by phone, but the businesswoman declined to be interviewed.
“About this, I don’t need to talk about it. Bye!” she said on one brief phone call before hanging up.
