An ambitious hotel developer held multiple, previously unreported fundraisers with the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, and provided benefits to several of the mayor’s longtime associates. She then scored behind-the-scenes favors and millions more in city contract dollars from his administration, a new investigation by the Guardian US, the City and Documented has found.
That fundraiser, Weihong Hu, was previously the subject of a February investigation by this reporting partnership which unearthed allegations that Hu’s family secretly bankrolled illegal donations to Adams’s re-election campaign.
Now a review of thousands of pages of city and business records and interviews with more than 20 sources – including Hu’s former associates and current and former government officials – demonstrates that the businesswoman went beyond suspect campaign donations: she bought her way into Adams’s inner circle and leveraged her newfound political pull with his administration.
For roughly eight months in 2022 and 2023, Hu allowed one of the mayor’s top aides, Winnie Greco, to stay in a suite at one of her hotels in a residential stretch of north-eastern Queens – despite the fact that taxpayers were paying thousands of dollars a month for the suite to be used for a program housing formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, according to business records and two sources with direct knowledge of her stay. An analysis of hotel blueprints and invoices shows that during the period of Greco’s stay, the city was being billed and paid for her room at a cost that probably comes to $50,000 or more.
Hu’s attorney, Kevin Tung, and the mayor’s office have both previously claimed that Greco paid for the room herself. But both have since refused to produce receipts to back up these assertions. In a phone call, Tung also denied that Greco stayed in one of the shelter program’s rooms.
In addition, the mayor’s son, Jordan Coleman, visited the same far-flung hotel in Fresh Meadows, Queens, on at least one occasion in November of 2022 with an unidentified young woman, where the pair allegedly used a taxpayer-funded room, also contracted for the post-incarceration program’s use, according to a former worker at the hotel who said Coleman was pushing a roller suitcase.
Coleman did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Tung denied that the mayor’s son stayed at the hotel overnight.
Along with the hotel stays, Hu hired John Sampson, a longtime Adams friend and former state senator, as her hotel company’s CEO. The job was a boon for Sampson, who was sentenced to prison in 2017 after being convicted of obstructing an investigation into allegations that he embezzled more than $400,000.
Hu also enlisted the help of another trusted Adams ally, a local religious leader named Alfred Cockfield II, to help intervene with city officials on her behalf, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Cockfield made news two years ago after the New York Times reported that a political action committee he was running paid more than $126,000 in wages and consulting fees to Cockfield himself – many times more than it gave to any of the individual candidates it was ostensibly set up to support.
Tung said that the minister approached Hu “saying he might be able to help with this and that”, but that his client never hired him or paid him “any money”.
Hu’s largesse to the Adams campaign and cultivation of his inner circle was matched many times over by city contract dollars and regulatory favors her companies received from the new mayor’s administration.
In two separate cases, when Hu’s projects were cited for construction safety and permitting violations, the fundraiser tapped Cockfield to help her deal with city officials, according to two sources involved in those episodes.
On 8 July 2022, after a city buildings inspector halted construction at one of Hu’s hotel developments on West 39th Street citing a serious safety issue, Cockfield phoned top officials at the New York City department of buildings at about 10pm that night, pushing them to clear the violation and allow work to resume, according to one source familiar with the agency’s operations. Just after 11pm, the agency reversed its stop work order at the site for Hu, department records show.
Andrew Rudansky, the department of buildings’ press secretary, said the agency lifted the stop work order because the site’s safety issue had been resolved. He did not comment on Cockfield.
At the time of Cockfield’s alleged interventions, the New York buildings department commissioner was Eric Ulrich, an Adams appointee who now faces criminal charges alleging that he took bribes in exchange for favorable department decisions. Ulrich has pleaded not guilty.
Ulrich did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
In another episode after Adams entered the mayor’s office, Hu hosted several meetings with Cockfield during which they strategized about how to fast-track another stalled Manhattan hotel development on West 35th Street, according to a person who attended the meeting. That construction snag stemmed from her team’s unauthorized partial demolition of rent-stabilized apartments at a property that she wanted to turn into a high-rise hotel.
Earlier, the previous mayoral administration, that of Bill de Blasio, and local community representatives had pushed Hu to keep affordable apartments at the site. But after her meetings with Cockfield, in late 2022, the Adams administration reversed course, freeing Hu of the stop work order and allowing the developer to build a hotel without any affordable residences.
Cockfield declined comment on what role he played for Hu and didn’t respond to questions sent by email about whether he helped get the stop work orders lifted.
Adams’s deputy press secretary, Elizabeth Garcia, said that the two projects for which Hu won reversals of stop work orders went through standard department of buildings processes for investigating and addressing complaints. At the site that lost affordable housing units, Garcia said, the developer’s eventual compliance with zoning and code regulations and changes in city rules gave the agency “no choice but to allow construction to move forward”.
Hu also pulled in millions in city dollars after the candidate she supported took office.
Between 2022 and 2023, the Adams administration authorized the renewal of Hu’s six-month shelter contract at the Fresh Meadows, Queens, hotel four times, reaping her $6.2m a year in income. It also finalized a second contract that sent $6.3m a year to another Hu hotel in Long Island City, Queens.
Government records show that last year, the city’s department of homeless services twice approved a more lucrative arrangement for the hotel, bumping its potential annual revenue to $7.5m and then to $8.8m, despite complaints about cleanliness and other issues at the hotel during a previous contract, when it was housing homeless veterans.
According to one former city official familiar with the situation, that first substantial pay bump was finalized in May 2023, just a month after Sampson, Hu’s new CEO, committed to helping his boss land a migrant shelter contract for the facility, which had lost its non-profit provider.
The pay-to-play allegations come as several top Adams aides and even the mayor himself have become ensnared in two ongoing federal public corruption inquiries.
Last November, the FBI raided the home of Brianna Suggs, Adams’s former campaign fundraiser who met with and worked with Hu, according to three sources. Suggs did not respond to requests for comment for this story and did not issue a public statement after the raid.
That same month, federal agents seized Adams’s cellphones as part of a reported investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to accept straw donations funneled in from foreign sources.
And this February, the FBI raided two of Greco’s homes and a mall where she organized fundraisers for Adams from which the City previously found evidence of straw donations. Greco did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Adams has denied wrongdoing and said he has “nothing to hide”.
In response to new questions from the reporting partnership, Garcia, Adams’s deputy press secretary, said the administration holds developers and their contractors “to the highest standards of safety”, and that its agencies take steps to enforce city codes “in a uniform, equitable and efficient manner”.
In a phone call, Hu’s attorney, Tung, pushed back on the notion that his client had engaged in any wrongdoing. “All of these are allegations … and most of them, I don’t think they’re true,” he said.
Tung initially denied that Sampson helped Hu win a shelter contract with the city, but subsequently clarified that he did not actually know what Hu’s corporate CEO had done on the project. He said he wasn’t aware of his client’s position regarding Cockfield’s alleged phone call to department of buildings officials about the safety violation.
Hu did not respond directly to questions from the reporting partners.
But government-disseminated news accounts from her native China suggest that playing politics has long been key to Hu’s success.
Around 2007, Hu was reportedly detained just before she could board a plane to the US and “confessed” to paying “millions in bribes” to a Communist party official as part of an investigation into a state-owned company, according to an archived article published by a Chinese local government website. A separate account on a Chinese state website refers to a local developer named “Hu” who gave a gift of cash to a high-ranking Communist party official, and later convinced the official to use his position in the same state-owned company to buy out her share of a joint real estate project at a vastly inflated price.
The prosecutor in the case could not be reached for comment, and the government accounts do not explain what consequences Hu faced after the reported confession. According to Hu’s hotel website, she expanded her business into the United States in 2008. By the late 2010s, she had established contacts with the administration of then mayor De Blasio and began garnering city-funded shelter contracts during the pandemic.
In a phone call, Tung said his client denied ever being arrested or ever engaging in bribery. “That could be wrong information,” he said, referring to the Chinese government account. “Mrs Hu went back to China recently. If she had been arrested, and she escaped, she wouldn’t be able to go back.”
A backroom introduction
Adams and Hu first met in May 2021 in the backroom of a Brooklyn diner, according to two people who were at the meeting.
At the time, Adams was raising campaign money as he showed signs of pulling ahead in the hotly contested Democratic mayoral primary to replace De Blasio.
The two came from opposite sides of the globe. But they shared the ambition that comes from being self-made. Adams grew up in working-class Queens, turning himself from a transit cop, to a state legislator, to Brooklyn’s borough president. Hu came of age in China, starting off as a food vendor and transforming herself into a hotel developer before she ran into legal trouble, according to the news account disseminated by Chinese authorities.
During the half-hour breakfast meeting with Adams, one attendee said, Hu didn’t delve into her past in China but praised the candidate, whom she had just met and repeatedly called “a good man”.
Less than a month later, on 3 June, Hu invited Adams and his then fundraising lead, Brianna Suggs, to her hotel in Fresh Meadows, Queens. There, Hu’s staff offered Adams and his staff wine, stewed lobster and a pile of checks, according to two fundraiser attendees.
The Adams campaign did not report the event to campaign finance regulators. But public records show that a day later, his team took in $34,000 from 17 people who each gave exactly $2,000. These donors included one of Hu’s former business associates and a former commercial tenant in another Queens building she owned.
Adams won the Democratic primary a few weeks later, in effect making him the mayor-in-waiting in blue New York City with plenty of campaign cash left over.
Nonetheless, in September 2021, Adams went back to Hu’s hotel for another fundraiser.
One of the guests at the candidate’s table was Sampson, whom Adams had known at least since their days in the state senate when they were both embroiled in a contracting scandal. An inspector general report accused both of them of showing favoritism to a bidder seeking a contract to operate video slot machines at a state-run horseracing track in Queens. Both denied wrongdoing and Adams fought unsuccessfully to help Sampson keep his chamber leadership position, according to New York Magazine.
Even after Sampson completed his prison sentence after being convicted on unrelated federal charges, he continued to keep up with his former colleague. In November 2021, three months after he was released from federal custody, Sampson was among the guests at Adams’s general election victory party in Brooklyn.
Despite Sampson’s history, Hu made him CEO of one of her hotel companies. The former state senator started helping Hu run her hotel in Fresh Meadows, Queens, according to two former employees. Soon, according to a former Hu associate, he promised he could do more.
Towards the end of 2022, one of Hu’s hotels in Long Island City, Queens, lost its not-for-profit shelter provider, depriving Hu of a steady stream of city dollars. The following April, soon after being made Hu’s corporate CEO, Sampson assured his new boss he would score her a new city-funded shelter contract at the site to house asylum seekers, according to a former city official who was aware of the need for a new service provider.
In May, a month after this alleged conversation, the city’s department of homeless services approved a city-funded contract, which was slated to disburse $7.5m annually to Hu’s facility, the largest city deal she had gotten up to that point, according to a review of her hotel contract records.
Sampson did not respond to a letter asking about the migrant contract left with his office’s building staff. In a brief interaction with a reporter outside Hu’s office, the former state senator said: “I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying, do your homework. I’m not going to do your homework for you. You know I don’t deal with the press.”
A call to Adams officials
Seven months after Adams took office, Hu’s proximity to the mayor’s inner circle proved its value through another longtime confidant, according to a source familiar with department of buildings operations.
On the morning of 8 July 2022, a New York City buildings inspector made a surprise visit to the site at West 39th Street where Hu was building a 34-story hotel and cited the project for a serious safety violation. The inspector flagged a makeshift support structure for a hoist used to lift workers and equipment hundreds of feet into the air, public records show.
Concerned that the unapproved assemblage might not be able to handle the weight of the hoist, as the inspector would later testify at an administrative hearing, he stopped all work above 75ft.
Instead of following the department’s lengthy guidelines for clearing such an order, Hu’s team contacted the department of buildings.
Soon the department sent multiple inspectors to the site. They came that afternoon and early evening, according to public records and interviews with two people who were there that day. Despite the efforts of Hu’s construction team, the inspectors declined to clear the safety violation.
But the day wasn’t over. At about 10pm, Cockfield called two top department of buildings officials and urged them to lift the order, according to the source familiar with department of buildings operations. Just after 11pm, the department rescinded the stop work order, records show.
The agency said it reversed the order only after its team verified the violation had been addressed.
Another fundraiser, another endeavor
Two years after they first met in the backroom of a diner in downtown Brooklyn, Weihong Hu invited Adams to feast once again.
On the evening of 9 June 2023, Hu hosted a fundraiser for her candidate, now running for re-election in 2025, in the common space of her new home, a 92-story glass skyscraper in Hudson Yards where she had recently purchased a $5m condo without a mortgage.
Hu and the mayor, now a familiar pair, both wore blue suit jackets and posed for photos.
“We want to start early and make sure that we have the necessary funds to put on a good, strong campaign,” Adams told the assembled supporters, his hands clasped just above his suit buttons.
Adams’s re-election campaign team declined to say how much it received from Hu’s event. But campaign finance records show many of the $2,000 donations recorded that day came from Hu’s family’s friends and associates, three of whom would later allege to this reporting partnership that they had been illegally reimbursed by Hu’s family.
The setting, enclosed by large windows that revealed the lights of the west side skyline, was a world away from her previous homes in Hubei province and her hotel turned shelter in Queens.
Still, Hu continued to seek new opportunities.
Two weeks after the fundraiser for Adams, the businesswoman registered herself as the CEO of a long-dormant not-for-profit called Urban Purpose for Community Affairs.
The entity’s registration paperwork indicates that Hu wants to go beyond renting out her hotels to city-contracted social service providers. She wants the social service contracts too.
Hu’s not-for-profit has submitted a proposal to run a program housing some of the thousands of asylum seekers who have streamed into New York City, the department of homeless services confirmed. But it has not yet won any city dollars.
The not-for-profit’s original board members, who started the group 13 years earlier, have all moved on.
In their place, the paperwork lists, among other associates, Hu’s son, her daughter-in-law, her lawyer’s law partner and the sister of Adams’s longtime friend John Sampson.
Additional reporting by Katrina Northrop of the Wire China
