Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, had begun making the rounds for a nascent mayoral campaign when he arrived at a small gathering in spring 2018.
The real estate developer David Schwartz had invited associates to meet Mr. Adams — and cut him a check — at his company’s Manhattan offices. Mr. Adams delivered a short stump speech, talking about his conversion to a plant-based diet and how as mayor he would ensure that schoolchildren no longer ate pizza that resembled cardboard, according to people who were there. He raised $20,000 that day, records show.
Mr. Schwartz’s company, Slate Property Group, had recently sought city permission to erect a tower in Downtown Brooklyn nearly twice as tall as zoning allowed. Six months after the fund-raiser, Mr. Adams endorsed Slate’s zoning change, despite objections from the local community board.
Mr. Adams, 60, a former police officer who is among the leading candidates in the June Democratic primary for mayor, has termed money the “enemy of politics” and called for complete public financing of campaigns. Yet his dealings with Mr. Schwartz offer but one example of how, across his 15 years in elected office, he has used government power to benefit donors and advance his political ambitions.
Mr. Adams’s relationships with his donors, as a state senator and then as borough president, have at times drawn attention and prompted investigations. His ties to developers have increasingly come under fire by critics of the gentrification that is sweeping across Brooklyn and much of the city. He has never been formally accused of wrongdoing. But a review by The New York Times of campaign filings, nonprofit filings, lobbying reports and other records shows that, to a greater degree than is publicly known, he has continued to push the boundaries of campaign-finance and ethics laws.
Since taking office as borough president in 2014, Mr. Adams has cut a wide swath in raising money for his campaign. He has amassed the largest war chest of any of the mayoral candidates, with about $7.9 million on hand, according to the city’s Campaign Finance Board. More than a third of the money he has raised from private sources has come from people associated with the real estate industry.
At the same time, he has promoted Brooklyn and himself through a nonprofit group, One Brooklyn Fund Inc., that has permitted donors to support him without the spending limits city law imposes on political campaigns.
Mr. Adams has taken money from developers who, like Mr. Schwartz, have lobbied him or won his recommendation for crucial zoning changes. In several cases, he appears to have violated city campaign-finance law by failing to report that developers and others have raised money for him. That may have allowed him to obtain public matching funds to which he was not entitled.
He has solicited and received donations from people and entities that sought, and in some cases were awarded, grants from his office’s annual $59 million capital fund. And he has wielded the megaphone of his office for the causes, people and groups he favors, including his contributors.
Mr. Adams has also forged close ties with lobbyists who have registered to influence him for their clients. Two of the lobbyists sit on his nonprofit’s board, and a third was recently hired as a campaign consultant.
Mr. Adams declined to be interviewed but issued a statement about his fund-raising record.
“Black candidates for office are often held to a higher, unfair standard — especially those from lower-income backgrounds such as myself,” he said.
“No campaign of mine has ever been charged with a serious fund-raising violation, and no contribution has ever affected my decision-making as a public official — yet I am still being cross-examined for accusations made and answered more than a decade ago. I hope that by becoming mayor I can change minds and create one equal standard for all.”
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In many ways, Mr. Adams’s mix of money and politics reflects a career spent disregarding established norms in favor of nurturing constituencies that have helped him rise through New York’s civic life. He has gone from gadfly, an outspoken advocate for Black police officers, to political insider in Albany and Brooklyn, from Democrat to Republican and back again. As borough president, he has embraced real estate developers while appealing to public-housing residents and railing against gentrification.
Politics is, of course, inherently transactional, and generations of elected officials have raised money from people with interests before their government. That nexus has traditionally been challenging ground for regulators and prosecutors to police.
That was the case in 2017, when federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York examined episodes in which Mayor Bill de Blasio or his surrogates sought donations from people seeking favors from the city, and then made inquiries to city agencies on their behalf. In deciding not to bring charges, the acting United States attorney, Joon H. Kim, cited “the particular difficulty in proving criminal intent in corruption schemes where there is no evidence of personal profit.” Mr. de Blasio received a warning letter about those activities from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.
Mr. de Blasio, like Mr. Adams, used a nonprofit to raise money. Amid the controversy, he shut it down.
Richard Briffault, a former chairman of the Conflicts of Interest Board, said that while self-enrichment was the primary focus of local ethics laws, soliciting contributions for a campaign or nonprofit from people who stand to benefit from one’s actions would also present ethical issues.
“If somebody is using their public position in order to sway donations, that would certainly be, if not officially barred, clearly unethical,” said Mr. Briffault, who now teaches election law and government ethics at Columbia Law School.
Conflicts of interest can also be more nuanced. Elected officials, he said, may feel an unconscious bias: “It’s reciprocity in some fundamental sense. We want to be nice to people who have been nice to us.”
A Prodigious Fund-Raiser
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Mr. Adams rose to prominence in the 1990s as an outspoken critic of the city’s Police Department from within the ranks, calling out what he saw as institutional racism and arguing for criminal justice reform. He eventually became president of the Grand Council of Guardians, an advocacy group for Black officers, and co-founded a second group, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. Through that activism, he has said, he gained experience raising money for causes across New York.
Mr. Adams further honed that skill when, after 22 years on the police force, he won election to the State Senate in 2005. After Democrats claimed the Senate majority, he was named chairman of the plum Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee. According to a 2010 analysis by Bennett Liebman, then the executive director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, Mr. Adams raised nearly $74,000 that year from racing and gaming interests.
“Has there ever been as active a committee chair receiving political contributions as Senator Eric Adams?” Mr. Liebman wrote.
Mr. Adams soon became embroiled in a scandal after his committee helped choose a purveyor of video-lottery machines at Aqueduct Racetrack. The state inspector general found that he and other Senate Democrats had fraternized with lobbyists and accepted significant campaign contributions from people affiliated with the contenders.
Mr. Adams disavowed responsibility.
“This process — it disturbed me,” he told investigators, according to an interview transcript, adding that “it was created beyond my arrival.”
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But documents from the investigation, never previously disclosed, show that during the bidding process, several contenders were invited to a Sept. 3, 2009, birthday fund-raiser for Mr. Adams at the Grand Havana Room, a Midtown Manhattan cigar bar and haunt of the politically powerful.
“Team, we will absolutely need to be present at this event for Senator Adams,” Andrew Frank, a consultant to the Aqueduct Entertainment Group, wrote in an email to its principals, according to a transcript of his interview with investigators. The company’s lobbyists had recommended going, Mr. Frank recalled in the interview.
With the support of Senate leaders including Mr. Adams, Gov. David A. Paterson selected Aqueduct Entertainment Group for the contract. Among other issues, the inspector general’s report faulted Mr. Adams and other senators for attending a celebratory dinner at the home of a company lobbyist before the contract was finalized. The senators, the inspector general said, had used “exceedingly poor judgment.”
Ultimately, state officials rescinded the contract award and restarted the process. Federal prosecutors investigated but did not bring charges.
For Mr. Adams, though, the episode was both a warning and a prologue.
Promoting His Borough, and Himself
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On the next-to-last day of February 2014, leaders of Brooklyn businesses, schools and hospitals filtered into Borough Hall for a discussion of how they might help “enhance the lives of Brooklynites.” They were handed lists of ready-planned events — a turkey drive, concerts, holiday celebrations — along with fliers featuring corporate logos to show how they would be recognized for their sponsorship.
“I was a little puzzled about what was going on,” said Lyn Hill, who attended as a representative of New York Methodist Hospital in Park Slope.
Their host was Mr. Adams, newly inaugurated to a job, borough president, with limited power — making detailed recommendations, but not deciding, on zoning changes, awarding capital grants and appointing community board members — but abundant opportunity for civic boosterism.
The cheerleading art had been perfected by Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Marty Markowitz, “Mr. Brooklyn,” who had elevated the borough’s profile, and his own, with an array of events. To pay for them, he had created a network of nonprofit groups that raised millions of dollars, much of it from donors with business before the city.
Mr. Adams would follow in his footsteps. To enlist supporters for his new nonprofit, One Brooklyn, he had organized the Borough Hall event, with an invitation list based in part on the donor rolls for Mr. Markowitz’s nonprofits, records show.
One Brooklyn had yet to register with the state, and after the event drew media attention, the city’s Department of Investigation opened an inquiry into whether it had violated conflict-of-interest laws. In an August 2014 memo, the inspector general, Andrew Sein, concluded that Mr. Adams and his nonprofit appeared to have improperly solicited funding from groups that either had or would soon have matters pending before his office.
At least three entities that sent representatives were seeking capital grants from Mr. Adams’s office at around the time of the event, investigators found. There is no indication that those organizations ultimately donated.
Mr. Adams’s office emphasized to investigators that the slip-ups had occurred early in his administration and promised to comply with the law going forward. The Department of Investigation normally refers such cases to the Conflict of Interest Board to determine penalties. Neither agency would comment, but no enforcement action was taken.
Mr. Adams is the only one of the city’s current borough presidents with such a nonprofit, which under city law is permitted to raise private money to augment limited government funding. The group has given out grants and staged dozens of events for Mr. Adams to host, to celebrate holidays, to honor constituent groups, and more. At a candidate forum last week, Mr. Adams said he was proud of that work and had hired a compliance officer to ensure rules were followed.
“I did not go from being a person that enforced the law to become one that breaks the law,” he said.
But One Brooklyn has also proven to be an effective vehicle for him in circumventing the city’s campaign-finance laws. In all, it has reported taking in at least $2.2 million.
Under the campaign-finance laws, citywide candidates cannot accept corporate donations and may take no more than $400 per election cycle from people doing business with the city. Nonprofits like One Brooklyn, however, can accept unlimited contributions, provided they adhere to certain strictures.
To be eligible to accept unlimited contributions, One Brooklyn must certify that it spends no more than 10 percent of its funding on communications for Mr. Adams. The intent is to blunt a nonprofit’s political messaging power.
But Mr. Adams found a workaround — using advertising dollars and taxpayer resources to publicize One Brooklyn’s events and himself.
A newsletter, also called One Brooklyn, displayed Mr. Adams’s picture on some pages six times and featured events staged by the nonprofit and the borough president’s office. The newsletter, last published before the coronavirus pandemic, was funded by advertisers, some of whom are also Mr. Adams’s donors.
The January 2018 issue, for instance, depicted the borough president and his mother on the cover with the headline “How I Got Mom Off Insulin in 30 Days.” Broadway Stages, a film-production company that deals with the city government on permitting and real estate issues, bought a full-page ad congratulating Mr. Adams “for your dedication and commitment to Brooklyn.” The company has given $25,000 to One Brooklyn, and its employees have contributed to Mr. Adams’s campaign fund. A company spokesman, Juda Engelmayer, said the owners had long been friends with Mr. Adams and supported many community causes.
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Mr. Adams has also used his government website to promote One Brooklyn’s events and his nonprofit’s donors.
The city’s conflict-of-interest rules prohibit public servants from soliciting or accepting donations from anyone with a “particular matter” pending before them. On its website, One Brooklyn says the borough president’s office does not accept such donations. But the nonprofit appears to have done so.
Over four years beginning in 2015, Green-Wood Cemetery, a national historic landmark, was awarded three grants from the borough president’s capital fund, totaling $907,000, for an education center and a new trolley and caboose. The cemetery was twice invited to One Brooklyn’s annual gala and donated $5,000 each time. The first gift, in 2017, was accepted; the second was returned because of a possible conflict, Green-Wood’s president, Richard J. Moylan, said by email. Green-Wood’s final grant — for $500,000, to finish the education center — was awarded in 2019, with Mr. Adams announcing the gift with a gigantic mock check.
“Green-Wood is proud of our role as a good corporate citizen,” Mr. Moylan said.
One Brooklyn has allowed campaign donors to support Mr. Adams’s political ambitions far more generously than they can under the city’s campaign-finance law.
Jed Walentas, who runs the development firm Two Trees Management, is limited to $400 in campaign contributions per election cycle, because he is on the list of people doing business with the city. But Mr. Walentas’s family foundation has given One Brooklyn $50,000, records show. (Mr. Adams’s campaign has also received at least $24,000 from other donors solicited by or connected to Mr. Walentas.)
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For his part, Mr. Adams championed a $2.7 billion streetcar plan that Mr. Walentas has promoted through a group he founded, Friends of Brooklyn Queens Connector Inc. The streetcar, Mr. Adams tweeted in 2018, “has real potential to be one of those solutions for our disconnected waterfront.” The project stalled, and Mr. Adams has recently distanced himself from it in the glare of the mayoral race.
The borough president is also in line to issue an opinion on a rezoning request for Two Trees’ next big project, River Ring, a pair of apartment and commercial towers with a waterfront park in Williamsburg. In city filings, Kenneth Fisher, a lobbyist for Two Trees, has identified the borough president as a potential lobbying target.
Mr. Adams, in a recent interview, said he was already “extremely impressed” with the way the Two Trees plan had taken account of rising sea levels. “This is how we need to start thinking,” he added. Mr. Walentas declined to comment.
The lines between Mr. Adams’s nonprofit and his campaign can sometimes blur.
Edolphus Towns, a former congressman and one of two lobbyists on One Brooklyn’s board, has bundled about $7,000 in campaign contributions for Mr. Adams, records show.
Mr. Towns has also registered to lobby Mr. Adams on behalf of Arker Diversified Companies, an affordable-housing developer that worked on the Fountains, a project in East New York that was supported by the borough president, according to city lobbying filings. A political action committee created by Arker executives gave Mr. Adams’s campaigns $6,350 between 2013 and 2016. They declined to comment.
Mr. Towns said he had not lobbied Mr. Adams and did not recall registering to do so. He said they had become friends when Mr. Adams, then in the Police Department, worked with Mr. Towns, then a congressman, on criminal justice issues. “Eric was very helpful in getting rid of toy guns that look like real guns,” Mr. Towns said.
‘What Oil Is to Texas’
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The borough president’s relationship to the real estate industry has become something of a campaign issue, and several other candidates have pledged to refuse developers’ contributions.
Mr. Adams, who owns the small rental building where he lives, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, dismisses that suggestion, arguing that all landlords should not be tarred for the sins of the bad ones. And while he has come out in favor of a number of his donors’ projects, and of development in general, he has decried the gentrification that has displaced longtime residents and businesses.
“Go back to Iowa,” he said in remarks directed at newcomers during a January 2020 event in Harlem. After the comments drew criticism, Mr. Adams tried to clarify: He said he welcomed people from elsewhere but wanted them to invest in their new neighborhoods.
In interviews, several figures in the real estate industry said contributions to Mr. Adams’s campaign were not simply transactional but reflective of his overall support.
