Mayor Adams Groomed from Early on By a Chinese National

She had groomed and stayed with him all the way back when he was running for Boro President. This is the way that Nationals working for their government, mainly China, Russia, and Israel tend to find a weak link they can prop up with money and know-how of the American Voter. 

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Alice Fang

By Jay RootBianca PallaroEmma G. FitzsimmonsMichael Forsythe and Karina Tsui

This story is based on dozens of interviews thousands of pages of records and an online account. Edited by Adamfoxie Blogspot

The New York Times

 

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Mayor Eric Adams was riding high in the fall of 2022 when Winnie Greco, one of his best fund-raisers and a top adviser, led him into a glittering ballroom in Flushing, Queens, the heart of the Chinese diaspora in New York City.

Mr. Adams met with a New York nonprofit operator named Harry Lu in 2014 while on a trip to China with Ms. Greco. Last year, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Lu set up an overseas police station in Manhattan to monitor and intimidate Chinese dissidents. Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

 

She and Mr. Adams took their seats at the head table of the event, an anniversary celebration for a nonprofit with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and watched as the host, Jimmy Lu, rose to address the crowd.

 

Mr. Lu bragged in Mandarin about opening a Chinese government police station in the offices of the nonprofit in Lower Manhattan — an illegal outpost that federal authorities would later say was used in a sprawling transnational repression scheme. The police station, Mr. Lu said, his remarks being translated into English, would help “implement the motherland government’s policy of benefiting the overseas Chinese.”

Then it was Mr. Adams’s turn. Taking the same stage, he began to praise Mr. Lu’s group. “This is such an important organization,” the mayor said, “to empower our Chinese American community.” 

Later, after Mr. Lu’s brother Harry was arrested in connection with the police station and charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government, Mr. Adams’s aides would not respond to questions from reporters about whether he heard Mr. Lu talking about the police station, or knew of its alleged role in spying on Chinese dissidents.

The episode underscores Ms. Greco’s close and abiding ties to the People’s Republic of China and the perils that connection has posed for Mr. Adams. And while the federal corruption charges Mr. Adams now faces after being indicted last month are not centered on his ties to China, prosecutors have recently demanded information from him and his staff about that country and others. They have also indicated that more charges are likely — both for Mr. Adams and others in his orbit.

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Few aides to the mayor have been more vital to his campaign fund-raising than Ms. Greco. A New York Times examination of her dealings over the past two decades has found numerous instances of close collaboration with people and groups linked to the Chinese government, and a willingness on her part to guide politicians toward pro-Beijing narratives.

Time and again, she led visits to China with Mr. Adams and other city officials and businesspeople — including a 2017 trip with Mr. Adams in which she took thousands of dollars in free travel, federal prosecutors said in indicting the mayor last month. 

Her homes were searched earlier this year by the same office that charged Mr. Lu — one that has specialized in cases targeting illegal Chinese influence in the United States.

She has appeared on at least 20 occasions with a former aide to Govs. Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo who is now accused of acting illegally on behalf of the Chinese government.

And like the former aide, Linda Sun, did in the governor’s office, Ms. Greco in her city post has steered Mr. Adams away from officials from Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory. In 2016, when Mr. Adams was Brooklyn borough president and Taiwanese officials asked him to attend a reception, Ms. Greco nixed the idea.

“He shouldn’t go,” she said in an email to his scheduler. “He must be very careful with Taiwanese events.”

 

Ms. Greco, in a blue dress, and Linda Sun, in a flowered dress on the right, both served as liaisons to the Chinese community and appeared at many of the same events, often mingling with Chinese government officials.Credit...Business Wire, via Associated Press

Ms. Greco, who has also moonlighted as a consultant for an affiliate of a Chinese state-run news outlet that spreads Communist Party propaganda, declined to comment. 

Her lawyer, Steven Brill, said in a statement that she was a “trusted aide to the mayor” before resigning from City Hall on Monday. He added that months had passed since the F.B.I. searched her home and still there had been no charges filed against her.

“For the last 25 years, Winnie Greco has dedicated her life to the betterment of New Yorkers, and particularly the Asian community,” he said.

Despite some similarities with Ms. Sun, Ms. Greco has fared differently in her government job. Ms. Hochul cut ties with Ms. Sun well before federal prosecutors accused Ms. Sun of taking millions of dollars in payoffs in exchange for furthering China’s agenda. Ms. Sun has pleaded not guilty.

By contrast, Mr. Adams appeared to bring Ms. Greco deeper into the fold after the searches of her homes — and after the city opened an investigation into whether she improperly used a city employee to help renovate her house. That investigation remains open. 

Mayor Eric Adams stands raises his arm in the air while standing next to people in costume.

Mr. Adams has worked with Ms. Greco since he became Brooklyn borough president in 2014.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

When Ms. Greco resigned last week, Mr. Adams issued a brief statement through a spokesman thanking her for her service to the city.

Last month, the mayor’s chief counsel, a former federal prosecutor named Lisa Zornberg, had given him an ultimatum: Cast out Ms. Greco and other aides who were under federal investigation or risk losing Ms. Zornberg herself. When the mayor refused, she resigned on a Saturday night.

But the scrutiny of Ms. Greco’s actions has occurred amid growing concerns about Chinese influence efforts in New York and across the United States. Apart from the recent indictment of Ms. Sun, and the ongoing Chinatown police station case, federal prosecutors have accused numerous others — including a former New York police officer and a scholar-turned-spy — of stalking or spying on Chinese dissidents on behalf of China.

Mr. Adams’s office, citing the ongoing investigation, referred questions about Ms. Greco to the mayor’s lawyer, who did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

John Liu, a state senator from Queens whose own mayoral campaign was derailed by a straw donor scandal in 2013, said he has known both Ms. Sun and Ms. Greco for years. He acknowledged that they served in similar roles for the governor and mayor but cautioned against a rush to judgment.

“Winnie strikes me as a person who doesn’t engage in what she does for pecuniary gain,” he said. “It’s more for prestige and community respect.”

An honorary ambassador

About a month after being elected Brooklyn borough president, Mr. Adams posted on Twitter about a new addition to his team.

**“Tonight,” he wrote, “I’m naming #SunsetPark’s Winnie Greco to be the first of Borough Hall’s honorary ambassadors, representing our #Chinese community!”

For Ms. Greco, it was both a continuation and expansion of her previous role at Brooklyn Borough Hall, where she had worked as a volunteer for Mr. Adams’s predecessor while being “chartered by multiple Chinese municipalities to represent their investment interests” in the United States, according to a memo a business consultant wrote while Ms. Greco was pitching a business venture in New York’s Hudson Valley 

The deal involved buying part of a recently shuttered prison complex in Warwick, N.Y., as the site of an agriculture-based trade venture with China, and town officials were thrilled at the prospect.

She eventually made a down payment of about $200,000 to buy part of the prison. But, almost as quickly, the deal collapsed, and she walked away, having lost the down payment, said Michael Sweeton, the town supervisor. Almost a decade later, a judge ordered Ms. Greco to pay almost $23,000 owed to a local law firm — a sum that remained unpaid as of mid-September, court records show.

When Mr. Adams took over as borough president in 2014, he and Ms. Greco wasted little time in promoting another project meant to cement Brooklyn’s position as a center of Chinese American culture: a giant archway in Sunset Park that would bestow honor and dazzle on the entrance of one of the fastest growing Chinese enclaves outside of Asia.

Mr. Adams traveled to China with Ms. Greco and other borough representatives to promote the project, with the cost split between the municipal governments they visited and a nonprofit Ms. Greco formed to further the archway project, city records show.

 The exterior of a building that housed a Chinese government police station in Manhattan, viewed at dusk.

Mr. Adams met with a New York nonprofit operator named Harry Lu in 2014 while on a trip to China with Ms. Greco. Last year, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Lu set up an overseas police station in Manhattan to monitor and intimidate Chinese dissidents. Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

In China, in May 2014, Mr. Adams signed two sister city agreements and visited schools. But he also met with Harry Lu, who was chairman of the nonprofit group, the America Changle Association NY, whose offices would later house the illegal Chinese police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown. 

Mr. Lu was also part of a delegation, led by Ms. Greco, that visited the newsroom of The Fujian Daily in China. The outlet falls under the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus, and in 2016 it was reported to have given her a consulting job for its U.S.-based affiliate.

All told, Mr. Adams took at least six trips to China as an elected official, according to news reports, though it’s not clear if Ms. Greco accompanied him on all of them.

During a trip in 2017, Mr. Adams handed the Chinese government a propaganda victory by praising its Belt and Road Initiative, according to a Chinese language news account. The initiative, a global infrastructure and development strategy, was designed to strengthen China’s international reach, but American officials have called it coercive diplomacy that will saddle developing nations with debt.

 

In 2018, Mr. Adams and Ms. Greco signaled that they would at least have something to show for all their foreign travels when they signed an agreement to accept Beijing’s gift, a 40-foot “Friendship Archway” to be built in China and installed by New Yorkers in Sunset Park. But two years later, this project, too, fell apart. In 2022, a few months after Mr. Adams was elected mayor, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt charter of the nonprofit Ms. Greco had created for the archway project for failure to file required paperwork.

Chinese American businessmen who donated to the nonprofit have complained that their money was wasted. But Robin Mui, the chief executive of the Sing Tao U.S. newspaper — who traveled to China with Mr. Adams and Ms. Greco in 2014 — is now in charge of trying to reactivate the nonprofit. He said that of the $200,000 or so raised since its inception, about a quarter remains in an escrow account. He said once he gets I.R.S. approval to reopen it, he will open the books for public inspection and “every penny will be accounted for.”

“I guarantee you that no one pocketed any money,” he said.

The parent company of Mr. Mui’s organization, Sing Tao News Corporation, publishes a pro-Beijing newspaper from Hong Kong. In 2021, Mr. Mui registered Sing Tao U.S. with the United States Justice Department as a foreign agent acting on behalf of the parent company.

Mr. Adams’s successor as borough president, Antonio Reynoso, said he was wary of any efforts by the Chinese government to influence him. He has worked on a rebranded archway project that will honor Brooklyn’s Chinese diaspora without Ms. Greco’s “convoluted system” of public and private funding.

“I don’t know why we need Chinese investors,” he said.

A knack for fund-raising

The failure of the Sunset Park archway did not dampen Mr. Adams’s enthusiasm and support for Ms. Greco. Whatever her failings in the arena of U.S.-China exchanges and business deals, Ms. Greco knew how to raise money. 

Her uncanny ability to deliver small-dollar campaign donors from New York’s vast Chinese American community helped Mr. Adams unlock hundreds of thousands of dollars in matching taxpayer funds under a generous program designed to reduce the influence of money in politics — one that gives candidates $8 in public money for every dollar raised, up to the first $250 per donor.

In April 2018, she began tapping into her vast network of Asian American organizations to bring in donors who would open the spigot for Mr. Adams.

She organized the first major fund-raiser of his mayoral campaign at Royal Queen, a restaurant in Flushing’s New World Mall, where 500 attendees dined on lobster and shrimp. Campaign records show that Mr. Adams received at least $64,000 from donors with Chinese surnames that day, unlocking about $100,000 in taxpayer money through the matching funds program.

Ms. Greco put together at least five other fund-raisers with a clear strategy: Maximize matching funds by seeking small contributions. Before Mr. Adams was elected mayor, she raised another $96,000, netting him more than $405,000 in matching funds.

 

 

Ms. Greco also requested dozens of meetings with Mr. Adams on behalf of Chinese businessmen and government officials, including the Chinese consulate general, according to Brooklyn borough president’s office records.

Some of those businessmen later hosted fund-raisers for Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign. A real estate developer whom Ms. Greco connected with Mr. Adams held an event in August 2021 that raised $32,686 in private funds and brought in $93,600 in taxpayer money.

After the election, Ms. Greco immediately turned her fund-raising prowess to Mr. Adams’s inauguration. She helped haul in another $400,000 for his transition and inauguration account — almost half of all the money he raised for it — through an entity called the Alliance of Asian American Friends, multiple Chinese-language newspapers reported. The group, a coalition of Asian associations whose president has been described in the news as the “head of Adams’s Flushing campaign,” features Mr. Adams in several photos on its website.

Almost a dozen of these events were held at the same Flushing New World Mall, a busy intersection of Chinese culture and politics and a source of donations from low-level employees who boosted Mr. Adams’s campaign account by more than $200,000, most of it in matching funds. Many of these turned out to be straw donations — meaning the listed donors illegally used someone else’s money to unlock matching funds, according to the nonprofit news organizations The City and Documented.

The mall, where Ms. Greco kept an office with two campaign volunteers, was raided by the F.B.I. on the same February day that agents searched her Bronx homes. 

Federal officials on the stairs outside a home owned by Winnie Greco.

Ms. Greco’s lawyer noted that her homes were searched months ago and still she has not been charged with any crime.Credit...David Dee Delgado for The New York Times

Once Mr. Adams was in office, Ms. Greco, by then a paid city employee, kept fund-raising for his 2025 re-election campaign, prompting questions over whether she was using her position in city government to help donors.

One donor who attended a major fund-raiser for Mr. Adams with Ms. Greco was soon after able to wrest control of a contract to run the East Broadway Mall in Lower Manhattan from another businessman, Terry Chan, whose family had operated it since 1988, The City reported.

“We lost our bid quite quickly after the fund-raiser,” Mr. Chan said in an interview. “We didn’t have a chance.”

Once installed in City Hall as Mr. Adams’s director of Asian affairs, Ms. Greco saw her portfolio and annual salary expand — to $196,000 from $100,000. From that post, she exercised broad authority as one of only about 100 “policymakers” in the mayor’s office, acting as a liaison to Chinese American power players, records show. 

At Mr. Adams’s victory party on election night, she was by his side onstage and was one of a handful of friends with him the night he was sworn in in Times Square. Ms. Greco is also close with Mr. Adams’s son, Jordan Coleman, and the mayor’s longtime aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who has called Ms. Greco “my sister.”

A party at Gracie Mansion

Then the federal searches of Ms. Greco’s homes happened, and she disappeared from public view.

Months passed before she finally re-emerged, at a high-profile political event on Sept. 12 — a celebration of the annual Mid-Autumn festival the mayor hosted at Gracie Mansion. It was a hot ticket for connected members of New York City’s Chinese community on the eve of another city election year.

The event, however, was unusually subdued. The mayor, who was sick with Covid, did not attend. And though Ms. Greco had spoken at the previous two-holiday events, she spent most of the evening at this one backstage — ushering around performers and speakers while occasionally stepping out to greet guests and take photographs.

 

When The Times asked Ms. Greco about her involvement in the tangle of federal investigations surrounding Mr. Adams, she did not appear to be in the mood to talk about it.

“No, no, no!” she said. “Thank you.”

Then she slipped back behind the curtain.