Payments to Adams’ aides among $2.3M in improperly documented campaign spending: audit

Payments to Mayor Adams’ chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, and other top staffers are among the $2.3 million in spending by the mayor’s 2021 campaign that the city’s election watchdog has found his team failed to properly document, according to records obtained by the Daily News.

The findings, contained in the city Campaign Finance Board’s draft audit of the Adams’ 2021 mayoral bid, raise the specter of hefty financial penalties as the mayor is looking ahead to his 2025 reelection bid.

The 901-page draft audit, obtained by The News via a Freedom of Information Law request, was sent on May 31 to the mayor’s campaign, which has until the end of this month to respond to the CFB’s findings before the board finalizes the document and assess whether fines should be levied.

Vito Pitta, Adams’ campaign attorney, declined to comment, but told Gothamist “this is a draft audit seeking information from the campaign to clarify potential issues — not a binding determination by CFB.” He told the outlet the campaign “always followed the law to the letter.”

Adams’ 2021 campaign raised nearly $20 million, more than half of which was public matching funds, taxpayer dollars that are given to candidates to match donations from city residents. CFB spokesman Tim Hunter declined to comment.

As first reported by Gothamist, the draft audit shows the $2.3 million in unaccounted-for spending included a $35,000 payment on Oct. 14, 2021, to Suggs Solutions, a consulting firm run by Brianna Suggs, Adams’ top political fundraiser whose home was raided by the FBI last year as part of a federal investigation into the campaign’s ties to Turkey. The audit paperwork says the Suggs payment was issued without a required supporting contract explaining the reason for it, and the debited amount also didn’t show up in the campaign’s bank records.

The audit paperwork obtained by The News also shows the unaccounted-for campaign spending included a $26,000 wage payment to Lewis-Martin, Adams’ longtime political confidant who serves as his chief adviser at City Hall, and an $18,000 fee to Shapiro Consulting Group, a firm that was ran at the time by Menashe Shapiro, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff.

The Sept. 19, 2021 payment to Lewis-Martin was issued without a “contemporaneously signed copy of the consultant or employment agreement describing the scope of the work, period covered and rate of pay” for her, the audit says. The Sept. 22, 2021 payment to Shapiro was also issued without such supporting documentation, according to the auditors.

Shapiro declined to comment Friday, and Lewis-Martin could not be reached for comment.

Beyond the unaccounted-for spending, the draft audit lists various other potential violations by the Adams campaign, such as not properly reporting so-called “intermediaries” — individuals who bundled donations to the mayor — failures to refund illegally large contributions in a timely fashion and unreported in-kind contributions.

The audit says there are also a number of donations the campaign accepted from individuals who wrote in supporting paperwork that they were giving on somebody else’s behalf, a practice known as “straw donating,” which is illegal.

Straw donors are reportedly at the heart of the feds’ investigation into whether Turkey’s government pumped illegal foreign donations into Adams’ 2021 campaign coffers. They were also the subject of an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that resulted in a guilty plea from former NYPD Officer Dwayne Montgomery, a friend to the mayor.

The mayor hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing in either probe.

Additionally, the draft audit questioned whether there was a legitimate campaign purpose for Adams’ team to spend thousands of dollars on repairing a car at a Brooklyn auto dealership due to a vehicle crash.

Marty Connor, a former Brooklyn state senator and veteran campaign finance expert, said the $2.3 million gap in accounted-for spending is one of the largest ones he has ever seen for a city campaign. However, he said Adams’ team could likely account for a large chunk of that, as the draft audit shows much of it was spending on TV ads, which he argued should be easy enough to find documentation for.

Still, Connor said the audit could result in “serious” fines.

Aside from any fines, Danielle Willemin, CFB’s auditing director, wrote in a letter to the Adams campaign obtained by The News that it will likely need to repay the $509,000 in matching funds it had in its bank account after the 2021 election.

Connor said the draft audit illustrates that Adams’ 2021 campaign should’ve been more sophisticated in its bookkeeping practices.

“It’s clearly sloppy,” he said. “Whoever was in charge of handling all the records on this was either overwhelmed or not doing the job.”

Originally Published: August 5, 2024 at 7:01 a.m.