Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday that the city’s Department of Investigation is reviewing findings by THE CITY, Guardian US and Documented that his son and a senior mayoral aide stayed in taxpayer-funded rooms at a Queens hotel owned by a major mayoral donor.
The hotel, a Wyndham Garden in Fresh Meadows, was serving as a city-funded shelter for formerly incarcerated individuals at the time that Winnie Greco, the mayor’s director of Asian Affairs, lived there in a two-room suite from November 2022 to June 2023, according to an investigation published last week by THE CITY, Guardian US and Documented.
That report found that the cost of the two-room suite to taxpayers topped $50,000. It also found that the mayor’s son, Jordan Coleman, stayed at the same hotel on at least one occasion, according to a former worker at the hotel, which is owned by a prominent donor to Adams’ political campaigns, developer Weihong Hu, and her husband, Xiaozhuang Ge.
Declining to answer reporters’ questions about their stays, Adams said, “DOI is looking into, they’re doing a review of all of those things that you’re talking about. And I’m going to let them do their job.”
The mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, added that “there are protocols that we must follow when DOI is reviewing something, and we’re following them. And they’re doing their review.”
Asked to confirm that the two matters were being investigated, a spokesperson for the Department of Investigation said only: “These are ongoing matters.”
Greco was already under investigation by DOI following reporting by THE CITY published in November in which two people described incidents where they say she tried to benefit personally from her position in city government. One involved an Adams campaign volunteer who said Greco required him to oversee renovation work at her home for two months, unpaid, as a condition for landing a city job.
Greco’s extended stay at the hotel was first reported by a February article from THE CITY, The Guardian US and Documented about a number of donors to Adams’ 2025 campaign who claimed they were each reimbursed $2,000 by members of Hu’s family. Such reimbursements are illegal under city campaign finance rules.
Later in February, the FBI raided two homes that Greco owns in The Bronx as well a Queens mall where she was involved in multiple fundraisers for Adams during the 2021 campaign.
Greco went on leave from her city job for about six weeks following the raids, but was restored to her government role earlier this month at a salary of $196,000.
A mayoral spokesperson told THE CITY late Tuesday, in response to a request for clarification of the mayor’s comments: “As we have said multiple times, there is an ongoing DOI review involving Winnie Greco, so we cannot comment on any matter involving her. That’s all he meant.”
‘That’s a Foul’
The joint CITY/Guardian/Documented investigation published last week traced the transactional relationship between Adams and Hu since the pair first met in a Brooklyn diner in May 2021 during the Democratic mayoral primary.
The project found that Hu hosted multiple fundraising events with Adams — including two at the Fresh Meadows hotel — while enlisting two close associates of Adams’ to assist her as her firms worked to complete two major hotel developments in Manhattan.
The Adams associates were former state Sen. John Sampson, whom Hu named as CEO of one of her hotel companies in early 2023, and the Rev. Alfred Cockfield II, who according to two sources worked to help get the Department of Buildings to allow construction to proceed at Hu’s Manhattan developments despite deviations from existing work plans and an affordable housing agreement.
On Tuesday, Adams didn’t respond directly to a question about his son’s presence in an unlikely setting, instead saying that he and his son don’t get into each other’s business.
“Every time I stop Jordan and ask him about his music, hey Jordan, who are you dating? ‘Mind your business, Dad.’ My son tells me, ‘Mind your business, Dad,’” Adams said Tuesday when asked how his son ended up at a taxpayer-funded hotel owned by a mayoral donor that was closed to regular paying guests at the time. “We have this great relationship of minding each others’ own business.”
On Friday, a reporter for THE CITY had also attempted to ask Adams about Greco’s and Coleman’s stay in the city-funded hotel, following a press conference related to the city’s lifeguards.
The mayor, who insists on only addressing reporters’ “off topic” questions on Tuesdays, blew a lifeguard whistle as he walked into City Hall and said, “That’s a foul.”
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