This story originally appeared on THE CITY and The Guardian.
In a campaign that pulled in more than $10 million in public matching dollars from the taxpayers of New York City, the August 2021 fundraiser on Long Island for then-mayoral nominee Eric Adams was a standout.
It booked 231 donations, many of them from supermarket cashiers, delivery people and other low wage workers at the New World Mall in Queens, each listed as having made contributions of $249 or $250.
Their contributions were worth far more thanks to the matching funds program, which was designed to root out the influence of big money in elections by matching the first $250 of contributions from New York City residents eight times over with public funds. The campaign sought $362,000 in matching funds on the basis of the $55,000 it raised, entirely in small donations.
But a video recently discovered on YouTube and reviewed by THE CITY and The Guardian reveals an event, hosted by New World Mall president Lian Wu Shao and his family at their Long Island mansion, that doesn’t appear to have been a grassroots fundraiser.
Instead, it was a private affair for a few dozen people replete with caviar, Remy Martin cognac and $400 bottles of wine. A team of chefs in crisp uniforms sliced sashimi and seared cuts of meat with a blowtorch. Servers passed around platters of sushi and uni hors d’oeuvres.
After the initial mingling, with a professional DJ livening the party, the guests sat down amid bouquets of pink roses to eat lobster and raised glasses of 2017 vintage Opus 1, an esteemed Napa Valley red, to toast Adams.
The campaign has claimed that the house party cost less than $500 — and that it’s exempt from rules that require hosts spending more than that to claim the expenses as an in-kind contribution. They also require the hosts to take responsibility for the integrity of every donation as a named “intermediary” for the funds. Shao, the host, had already given the maximum permitted to the campaign, disqualifying him from further contributions.
The video suggests few of the 231 donors, most listed as city residents, were present at the $4 million Glen Head mansion party, more than an hour and a half by public transit from the mall. One of the listed donors, interviewed by THE CITY and Documented last year — and not present at the event — said they were reimbursed by mall management, while three others said they did not give at all.
Adams, following a tight victory in the decisive Democratic primary, was the beaming guest of honor and showered his fellow guests with thanks before sitting down for the meal in a wood-paneled dining room.
“Tonight is not a fundraiser only, this is also an opportunity to say thank you to some old friends,” Adams effused.
Behind the event was an increasingly tangled history involving the campaign’s fundraising. At Adams’ side was his liaison to Asian communities, Winnie Greco, who resigned last month as part of a wave of departures of Adams administration officials under federal investigation.
The 25-minute video shows Greco center stage in a tailored white jacket, welcoming Shao and his family, stage-managing and joining photo ops with Adams, and clearing food from Adams’ table. Her niece Angel Cheng, who was with the campaign, and Gladys Miranda, an Adams staffer from his office as Brooklyn borough president, are also present. Both currently work in the Adams mayoral administration; a spokesperson said the pair attended “in a personal capacity.”
Addressing his well-wishers, Adams credited his razor-thin primary victory to backing from the Chinese community, where Greco focused her volunteer fundraising efforts.
“I thank you so much for your support,” he said, “and I will never, never, never forget what you did for me.”
Greco played a central role in Adams fundraisers at the New World Mall, including two earlier 2021 fundraisers, both held at the mall’s Royal Queen restaurant, where large numbers of mall workers were among the donors, many giving precisely $249.
Earlier this year, the FBI raided her two homes in the Bronx on the same day that agents also raided the office of the New World Mall.
A separate federal criminal probe led to Adams’ indictment earlier this year for allegedly soliciting and accepting illegal donations from wealthy Turkish nationals, who passed their money through small “straw” donors in order to yield Adams additional public matching funds.
Adams, who faces charges of wire fraud, bribery, and soliciting campaign donations from foreign nationals, has pleaded not guilty.
His campaign attorney, Vito Pitta, in response to detailed questions about the barbecue and its sponsorship, sent a statement to THE CITY and The Guardian.
“Our campaign always explains the rules that govern fundraising events to event hosts and relies on those individuals to document the costs of events and provide them to the campaign. The campaign then reports those details in its filings,” he wrote.
“We are currently working with CFB on the post-election audit. As part of the standard post-election audit process, we are reviewing the details of this event, to determine which costs are attributable to the campaign as fundraising costs. Our understanding is that there was a preexisting all-day social gathering that was unrelated to the campaign, and costs must be allocated accordingly.”
A Drip of Straw Donor Allegations
It’s been close to 18 months since allegations began to build about Adams’ 2021 fundraising.
They first erupted in an indictment of six people by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg last June, including a high-ranking former cop Adams had known for years. They eventually pleaded guilty in a “straw donor” scheme where two dozen people were reimbursed for their contributions.
In between that indictment and Adams’, reporting by THE CITY, The Guardian and Documented zeroed in on the New World Mall — and on Greco, who worked out of an Adams campaign office in the mall.
The Adams campaign held a string of fundraisers at the mall’s Royal Queen banquet hall, including events in April and June 2021 where many of the donations came in from workers at the J-Mart supermarket and other mall businesses.
The campaign reported dozens of mall workers as small-dollar contributors and submitted their donations to the Campaign Finance Board, the independent, nonpartisan agency that oversees election spending and the public matching funds program. It sought matching funds, despite glaring irregularities in its filings.
Last summer, THE CITY and Documented set out to find some of the cashiers, waiters, deliverymen and other workers the Adams campaign had reported making $249 donations connected to the barbecue in Glen Head.
Unusually for campaign donors, almost none of the “barbecue” event contributors could be found in voter registration rolls. When THE CITY and Documented did locate contributors based on home addresses listed on their donation cards, few were willing to speak with reporters.
Three said they did not donate to Adams, including a woman who was listed in Adams campaign records as a “deliveryman” at a restaurant that doesn’t do delivery and that she says she never worked for.
A low-level employee at the Bensonhurst J-Mart, whose check and paperwork were signed a few days after Shao’s event, also said he had not donated to Adams. The handwriting on the payment line of his check to “Eric Adams 2021” is distinctly different than on the dollar amount.
Another purported barbecue donor who works at the mall said they donated at the behest of their employer at the mall, and received reimbursement in cash for the contribution then and there, as THE CITY and Documented previously reported. Such reimbursements are forbidden, as stated on the English and Chinese-language Campaign Finance Board contribution forms signed by donors.
“I don’t really know how the donation process works,” the employee said. “But I gave the person my identity, and that was it — to use my identity, and they pay the money.”
A Mall Mogul
For Shao, the bustling multi-tiered New World Mall is more than an anchor of Flushing’s Roosevelt Avenue corridor. It has been a crowning success.
In a court deposition he described his education as ending in middle school in China before he immigrated to the United States in 1990 and obtained his green card. He said soon after arriving he worked at a restaurant, then at a garment factory, and later as a supermarket manager before launching the mall in an old Alexander’s department store building that he and another shareholder lease from the owner of the site.
Shao and his wife, Tai Li Huang, were at one point listed in court records as 50% owners of J-Mart, the sprawling supermarket that anchors the mall, and Huang was named as a minority owner of the Royal Queen banquet hall.
Campaign records show the Adams team spending more than $50,000 on seven events at the Royal Queen. Expenditure reports show that the campaign spent more than $35,640 on food menu items for the first two Royal Queen events, serving a total of 1,055 guests, in April 2018 and January 2020. Yet campaign records report just 82 donations from those two events, totaling less than the campaign spent.
The two later Royal Queen fundraisers, in April and June 2021, opened a cascade of funding for the Adams campaign, boosted by the donations attributed to workers at J-Mart and other mall businesses. Few of those employees had ever registered to vote, much less given money to a candidate before.
All told, they raised nearly $47,000, and the Adams campaign submitted a request based on them for $182,216 in matching funds.
Then came the “barbecue” on Aug. 8, 2021, at Huang and Shao’s 7,500-square-foot home in Glen Head.
Standing in front of American flag-themed balloon arrangements and a wall-size campaign banner with “Eric Adams for Mayor” in Chinese and four other languages, Adams gave a five-minute speech, promising to fight anti-Asian violence and open five new high schools equivalent to Stuyvesant, and thanking the guests for helping him in the highly competitive primary.
Shao and Huang could not be reached for comment. A person who picked up the phone at the New World Mall’s main number said he did not want to comment, then hung up.
In a draft audit on the Adams campaign, the Campaign Finance Board found 24 of the 231 donations to the barbecue “preliminarily deemed invalid” for matching funds because of bad addresses, undisclosed employers or other irregularities.
The campaign has repeatedly obtained extensions to deadlines to respond to the draft and now has until November 29 to submit proof the claims are valid or withdraw them.
In addition to questioning the 24 donations at the “barbecue”, the CFB flagged hundreds of others filed by the Adams team that they suspected were gathered by undisclosed intermediaries campaign finance records obtained by THE CITY in 2023 showed. The draft audit of the campaign found that his team didn’t document $2.3 million in expenses.
A Lingering Barbecue Question
To help ensure that donors at fundraising events actually spend their own money, as required by law, the Campaign Finance Board requires hosts of house parties to sign on to all donations there when the parties cost $500 or more.
The Adams campaign previously told THE CITY that the barbecue cost less than $500, even as the event claimed 231 donors.
Reporting any more than that would have invited problems. If a host spends more than $500, every dollar spent on a house party has to be reported as an “in-kind” donation to the campaign and counts toward the host’s total donation limit, according to the handbook all candidates in the public financing program must follow.
Lian Wu Shao had already donated the maximum permitted to the campaign, $2,000, in January 2021.
What’s more, hosts who spend more than $500 have to register as an “intermediary” personally responsible for every donation brought in. The required “intermediary statement” reads: “I did not, nor to my knowledge, did anyone else, reimburse any contributor in any manner,” and notes that violation may be a felony.
After publication of an article in THE CITY a year ago documenting what the Campaign Finance Board staff suspected were unreported intermediaries, a spokesperson for Adams’ campaign said the board had receipts on file that would document Shao’s spending on the barbecue and show that it cost less than $500.
THE CITY filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the Campaign Finance Board. The board replied that it has no documentation of expenses for the event.
Additional reporting by Bianca Pallaro.
