How matching-fund crooks tried to match Adams: Ripping off the campaign finance program to curry favor [New York Daily News]

New York Daily News, The (NY)

After federal probes loomed over his first term, Bill de Blasio cruised to reelection once prosecutors reluctantly announced that they wouldn't be charging him or his top aides even as they publicly scolded him for breaking "the intent and spirit" of the law by soliciting campaign money from donors with business before the city and then contacting city agencies on their behalf.

That was a separate scheme and set of Friends than The One With the Elves, where de Blasio bribers ended up locked up for paying off the mayor not to mention dressing up to home-deliver Christmas "gifts" to the wives of NYPD brass when they weren't flying some of those top cops on a private plane with a prostitute on board.

One of those top cops -- Phil Banks, who retired from the NYPD in the midst of the feds' probe -- is back now as Eric Adams' deputy mayor for public safety.

De Blasio got off the hook thanks to a terrible Supreme Court decision that defined corruption down so that the elected official has to not only perform a government act on behalf of their briber but explicitly state that the official act is a payoff for that money.

Those reruns aired again in my brain after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged a group of people -- including a former cop, Dwayne Montgomery, who Adams has crossed paths with over 20 years and who was a principal at some point in the private security firm Banks founded after leaving the NYPD -- with a "major campaign finance fraud scheme" to steer public money to Adams' mayoral campaign hoping to land public contracts in his administration.

Bragg appears to have bumped into what he called "major campaign finance fraud" and "a deliberate scheme to game the system in a blatant attempt to gain power" wiretapping one of the defendants, Shamsuddin Riza, who went to prison decades back for violently extorting construction managers and who's reportedly related by marriage to Montgomery.

Riza was on the wire in a separate case allegedly falsely claiming to have worked as a subcontractor for the owner of a construction firm also charged with PPP fraud, insurance fraud and public assistance fraud so that firm could bid on public contracts only eligible to businesses that are or that work with city certified minority or women owned business enterprises.

The M/WBE program, of course, has some things in common with the matching funds program, in which small-dollar contributions get matched eight-to-one by public dollars from the Campaign Finance Board:

They're both built to be cheated, and it's hard to catch those cheats if they don't boast where prosecutors can hear about how the goal was to get paid off in an Adams administration with -- quoting from the indictment -- "Safety , Drywall , and Security one project but we all can eat ! Please show to him before Event it will start when he's in office."

They didn't get that contract and almost every story about the new charges mentions somewhere high up that there's "no indication Adams is involved" or implicated in this alleged scheme, and as its various alleged participants have pleaded not guilty.

As The News reported on Saturday, the firm at the center of the allegations lost a contract expansion and was blacklisted from doing business with the city days after Bragg's indictment landed.

While there is nothing indicating that Adams or his administration are under investigation, the indictment shows that Montgomery worked together in August of 2020, before Adams had even officially launched his campaign, with Campaign Representative-1 to organize a fundraiser that included contributions from straw donors who were then repaid for their supposedly independent donations.

Just after that event, Montgomery emailed Campaign Representative-1 a receipt of one of those straw donors' checks to be sure he'd be credited with that money and the matching funds it was intended to generate.

Later in the campaign, Montgomery, Riza and others were invited to meet with Adams, and held a second fundraiser for him.

That was after Riza instructed another member of the alleged conspiracy about how to avoid campaign donation limits for people with business before the city, writing that "because we're sponsoring the event, we're going to do just like the white boys."

He added: "You could use a straw man."

Again, none of this means Adams did (or promised or intended to do) anything for these guys, however hard they may have been trying to make that happen.

But that is not the same thing as stating that the mayor "in no way implicated."

Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.