By Hurubie Meko

Sept. 7, 2024

When federal agents seized the phones of some of New York City’s highest-ranking officials this week, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, already reeling from other legal problems, was further destabilized.

The agents took the phones of the city’s police commissioner, the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and others. They also searched the home and seized the phone of a consultant who is a brother of the schools chancellor and one of Mr. Adams’s deputy mayors.

The actions were separate from the corruption inquiry that has been focused at least in part on whether the mayor and his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal donations.

Here is what we know about the searches and phone seizures this week and the investigations.

Which officials are now embroiled in federal investigations?

The latest round of searches, seizures and subpoenas focused on five people in Mr. Adams’s orbit. Neither the mayor nor those people have been accused of a crime.

On Wednesday, agents seized the phones of the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright, and her partner, David C. Banks, the schools chancellor. Mr. Banks’s brother, Philip Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety, also received a visit from agents who seized his phones, as did Timothy Pearson, a senior adviser to Mr. Adams and one of his closest confidants.

The investigators also searched the home of a consultant, Terence Banks, a third Banks brother who formed a government and community relations company to close a gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape.”

The agents also seized the phones of Edward A. Caban, the city’s police commissioner, his chief of staff and a chief in Queens and two precinct commanders.

What about the other investigations?

Over the past year, federal investigators have searched the homes of several people close to Mr. Adams.

In November, the Brooklyn home of Mr. Adams’s then chief-fund-raiser, Brianna Suggs, was searched by federal agents as part of an inquiry into whether Mr. Adams and his 2021 election campaign had conspired with the Turkish government.

The same day her home was raided, federal agents also searched the New Jersey homes of Rana Abbasova, a former liaison for Mr. Adams to the Turkish community, and Cenk Öcal, a former Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor’s transition team. Ms. Abbasova has turned against the mayor and is now cooperating with the investigation.

In February, two houses in the Bronx owned by Winnie Greco, a close aide to Mr. Adams, were searched as part of a separate investigation led by a different U.S. attorney’s office.

The focus of that inquiry was unclear, but Ms. Greco is a longtime ally of the mayor’s and a prominent fund-raiser for his campaign with close ties to New York’s Chinese community. Mr. Adams appointed her as his director of Asian affairs.

What are the authorities examining?

There appear to be at least four separate inquiries being conducted by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The actions by federal agents on Wednesday appear to be connected to two investigations. The precise nature of the inquiries is unclear but one is focused on the senior City Hall officials and the other on the police commissioner and one of his brothers. Those inquiries are both being conducted by prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan.

The same office is also conducting the investigation into, among other things, whether Mr. Adams and his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign donations during the 2021 election. The full scope of the investigation is unclear.

Mr. Adams has started a legal-defense fund to pay for expenses related to the election inquiry.

The search of Ms. Greco’s homes was conducted as part of a separate inquiry by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn.

How does it all relate to the mayor?

Mr. Adams has tried to distance himself from the investigations and from those in his circles who have been charged. On several occasions he has said that he is cooperating with the investigations.

Days after the F.B.I. searched Ms. Suggs’s Brooklyn home, agents seized phones and other devices from Mr. Adams as he left an event in Manhattan.

Not long after, Mr. Adams was asked at a news conference about his potential for being charged with a crime.

“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 am annoying,” he said.

Last year, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, obtained an indictment charging six people, including a retired police inspector who once worked and socialized with Mr. Adams, with conspiring to funnel illegal donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.

Eric Ulrich, Mr. Adams’s former buildings commissioner and senior adviser, was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on 16 felony charges, including conspiracy and taking bribes. He and three others indicted alongside him helped organize a 2021 fund-raiser for Mr. Adams.

Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York region. More about Hurubie Meko

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 8, 2024, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Details on Inquiry Into New York City Officials. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Turkish Airlines, Eric Adams, Philip Banks III, David C. Banks, Brianna Suggs

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48061937)

Adams on the Breakfast Club admitted he was sending homeless shelter contracts via "our people" ie NIGGAS. i found that comment veddy suspect, he is funnelling money thru NIGGAS left and right. this is why niggas never were in high office in big cities for most of US history

this shit is happening all over country, theses NIGGAS are funnelling money to other NIGGAS in the name of DEI and shit but its pure corruption

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48061979)

thanks, Democrats

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062023)

https://archive.ph/KeS9z

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062554)

By Steve Lopez

Columnist |

Sept. 7, 2024 3 AM PT

You know what the problem is with California?

Democrats—or so I’m told.

If I write about broken sidewalks in Los Angeles, readers write to say it’s the fault of Democrats.

Homelessness, crime on public transit, poverty — in every case, blame the Dems.

Recently, I wrote about the owner of Langer’s Deli, who’s considering retirement because of problems in MacArthur Park.

GOLDEN STATE with a rising/setting sun in the middle

California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.

Read his other columns

“Good, I hope he closes and flees the state,” a reader named Thomas wrote. “Your governor, your mayor and the Democrats have run your state into the ground.”

Former President Trump also loves bashing the Golden State. He is branding Vice President Kamala Harris as a home-grown radical, if not a Communist. He says she destroyed San Francisco as district attorney, destroyed the entire state as attorney general, and will turn the whole nation into a hellhole like California, as my colleague Mark Barabak recently noted.

A reader named Steve summed it up this way: “The democratic experiment has failed,” he wrote. “Study history, you’re stuck in the liberal mud.”

OK, I’m game. Let’s study history — and current events.

\

First off, I admit that Democrats deserve to be on the hot seat.

They hold every statewide elective office and dominate the Legislature in a rich state that stands as the fifth largest economy in the world (not bad for a hellhole). And yet California has massive rates of poverty, cuckoo housing costs that are forcing people to flee, and a shameful number of homeless people, many suffering from addiction, mental illness or both.

But none of that happened overnight, nor did it happen exclusively under Democratic leadership.

“Major problems and issues surrounding us locally, statewide and nationally are more complex than simply looking at and blaming those now running the political shows,” said Jaime Regalado, former director of Cal State L.A.’s Pat Brown Institute. “Historical context is important.”

I grew up in the San Francisco suburb of Pittsburg so long ago that the state population was 10 million (today 10 million people live in L.A County alone). Many of the people I went to school with ended up working for the local industrial giants — U.S. Steel, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical and Johns Manville.

Those jobs paid them enough to buy houses, raise families and send their kids to California’s well-funded junior and state colleges. But they also existed in part because much of the world was in ruins after World War II and the United States had little competition. Over the next several decades, due largely to shifting global economics and cheap foreign labor, domestic blue collar jobs in industry, manufacturing and aerospace dried up.

The new economy — primarily technology and service — has widened the income gap, and neither Democrats nor Republicans in California or beyond have found a recipe for rebuilding the middle class.

“There’s a simply unrealistic expectation about what various levels of government can do — particularly local government,” said Jack Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. “You can have the greatest mayor in the world, and that mayor is not going to be able to solve the problem of poverty.”

Not that we should let Karen Bass off the hook, or give her a pass on homelessness. But again, those problems began way upstream from L.A. City Hall.

For decades, through Democratic and Republican leadership, California made the mistake of not building enough housing to keep up with the flood of people who moved here to fill jobs in the state’s burgeoning economy. It’s one of many factors in rising home prices and homelessness today.

Another reason is that in the 1960s, civil libertarians and others argued that people with mental illness were being neglected and abused in the state’s mental hospitals. Three California state legislators, one Republican and two Democrats, produced theLanterman-Petris-Short Act, signed by Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan, which put limits on involuntary psychiatric treatment and led to the closing of hospitals.

But the promised community treatment centers didn’t materialize, so for decades, untreated mentally ill people have landed in jails and prisons, on the streets and in the morgue. Federal mental health funding was gutted by Reagan when he became president, even as local governments struggled with the impact of Proposition 13, the property tax relief initiative that drained municipal treasuries.

“We so rarely talk about the crisis of homelessness in the ‘80s under Reagan,” said Regina Freer, who teaches urban politics at Occidental College. “We always want to flatten and simplify what are really complex challenges. That’s why I’m in the classroom — because I don’t want my students to fall into some of those same traps of over-simplification.”

Another over-simplification is that Democrats alone are responsible for the number of undocumented immigrants in California and elsewhere.

Many of them come here to work in the largely conservative agri-business industry, which looks the other way while writing campaign checks to GOP lawmakers. Many more come to escape narco-violence in Mexico, where as many as 70% of the guns are sourced from the U.S.

It’s more than a little bit hypocritical to bash crazy, reckless California on public safety when no amount of carnage in the nation, including mass shootings at shopping malls and schools (on Wednesday it was two students and two teachers dead at a Georgia high school), can loosen the gun lobby’s death grip on GOP lawmakers.

“What’s changed about our society is that instead of people sitting down and trying to solve problems… it’s all about a blame game,” said Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California. And people blame “the party or political group they’re not part of” for everything.

So maybe you’re reading this and saying, “OK, but Reagan and Nixon and economic shifts are old stories. California’s Dems have been in the driver’s seat for years, and they’re soft on crime and the border, full of empty promises and way too woke.”

Fine, but if that’s your perspective, whose fault is it that in California, Democrats are in charge?

I have the answer for you.

It’s Republicans.

In a state that proudly celebrates inclusion and leads the resistance to the politics of race-based scapegoating, climate change denial and the stripping of women’s reproductive rights, the out-of-touch GOP has been hell-bent on shrinking its tent. Reagan, who signed an abortion rights bill as governor and an immigrant amnesty bill as president, would be booted out of today’s GOP.

The California GOP alienated many Latinos in the 1990s with Proposition 187’s ban on services for undocumented immigrants and Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s “they keep coming” TV ad. At the GOP’s fall convention last year, an attempt to remove opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage from the party platform was shot down.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, left Sacramento in 2011 and no GOP candidate has won statewide office since then. None of them has offered winning solutions to deep-seated problems, and it might be too late for a party resurgence because as the electorate has grown more diverse, GOP voter registration has dwindled to roughly 25%.

You can’t blame Democrats for that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062723)

But but but the Koth brothers!!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062598)

https://www.ktvu.com/news/east-bay-officials-say-increase-copper-wire-theft-threatening-infrastructure

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062499)

This level of quasi-corruption is so common across Dem cities nationwide.

These fuckers take power and then give do-nothing, high paying jobs to their family and friends.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062586)

seems weird to me that he would feel the need to stress this baseline concept so urgently, but maybe i simply don’t care about the rule of law as much as eric adams.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062697)

Seems like they have bigger issues...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48062695)

Responses to the post vary widely:

Obeezy critiques the investigation as biased, suggesting it’s part of a broader pattern of targeting certain political figures while neglecting others, particularly Republican mayors.

elmer attributes the investigations to Adams’s stance on immigration, implying that his policies may have drawn federal scrutiny.

AZNgirl lecturing abt Niggas at White Frat House makes highly offensive and racially charged comments, asserting that corruption is widespread among certain racial groups and citing Adams’s remarks about homelessness as evidence of wrongdoing.

Arschbacken expresses a view that the U.S. is descending into corruption similar to South Africa, attributing this to Democratic leadership and racial dynamics.

LathamTouchedMe argues that the current investigations are minor compared to historical corruption in NYC, suggesting that being a moderate politician makes Adams a target of both the right and left.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, shares an article critical of the GOP's handling of California's issues, implying that the problems faced by states like California are complex and not solely attributable to one party.

Wallace and Solace offers no commentary but likely engages with other responses or provides additional context.

To be fair (Semi-Retarded) and ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, provide links to further articles, focusing on various angles of the discussion about political corruption and governance.

Overall, the conversation highlights the polarized views on political investigations, with some posters focusing on perceived biases and others delving into historical and racial critiques.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5590652&forum_id=2...id.#48063737)