FBI agents stopped Mayor Eric Adams on the street this week and confiscated his electronic devices, just days after the bureau raided the home of his top fundraiser, The New York Times reported Friday.
The Times described an encounter in which g-men approached Adams on the sidewalk, requested his NYPD detail step off, and boarded the mayor’s official SUV with him, where they took custody of two phones and a tablet, as authorized in a new federal warrant.
The move marks the latest escalation in the government’s investigation of the Adams campaign following the FBI sweep of consultant Brianna Suggs’ residence. The federal government has since returned Adams’ devices.
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That warrant revealed the agents are probing a potential straw donor scheme that may have illegally channeled Turkish government money into the Adams campaign, including through the leadership of a Brooklyn construction firm.
The Daily Beast discovered that the building concern in question, KSK Construction, has received millions of dollars in loans and credit lines from a Turkish state-owned bank.
The co-owner of KSK, Erden Arkan, personally donated $1,500 to Adams and threw him a lucrative fundraiser in May 2021.
KSK works closely with a development firm called the Agime Group, which served as guarantor on the loans from the Turkish state-owned bank, The Daily Beast can report. Arkan sits on the Agime Group’s advisory board alongside an attorney who represented the Republic of Turkey in the construction of the country’s new Turkevi Center in Manhattan. The Agime Group did not respond to a request for comment.
Both Adams and his International Affairs Commissioner Edward Mermelstein have attended events at the Turkevi Center, which towers near the United Nations. The mayor has repeatedly visited the Mediterranean country, and attended numerous Turkish cultural events.
The feds are also prying into contributions the mayor received from a Turkey-linked college in Washington, D.C., according to the Times. Adams, for his part, has adamantly denied any wrongdoing.
