The aide, Winnie Greco, was also facilitating Chinese delegations’ visits to New York City, NR has learned.
The aide, Winnie Greco, was also facilitating Chinese delegations’ visits to New York City, NR has learned.
T he indictment filed against New York mayor Eric Adams last week revealed a previously undisclosed trip he took to Beijing in 2017. He was accompanied by a key aide who has numerous ties to Chinese-regime entities.
While an October 2017 trip to the Chinese capital had already been reported on in Chinese and U.S. media, that he had taken another trip just before it was not previously known.
The trips make up part of an extensive series of exchanges between his team and Chinese officials throughout his tenure as Brooklyn borough president. The aide who traveled with him on both those trips was Winnie Greco, a longtime Adams ally and fundraiser who ultimately became a senior aide to the mayor at City Hall.. During Adams’s time in Brooklyn, she held the unpaid volunteer title of “Asian affairs adviser.” Throughout 2017, she corresponded with several Chinese municipalities to set up meetings with Brooklyn officials, documents obtained by National Review show.
There’s nothing necessarily inappropriate about Greco’s having helped facilitate Chinese officials’ access to Adams, or about a city’s interactions with Chinese municipalities. But it’s highly unusual that an unpaid volunteer tasked with outreach to a local ethnic community focused so extensively on courting foreign government officials.
The Justice Department’s case against Adams in the Southern District of New York involves alleged kickbacks he received from the government of Turkey and its proxies, partly in the form of free Turkish Airlines business-class tickets.
In July and August 2017, the indictment states, Adams traveled to France, Istanbul, Sri Lanka, and Beijing with free Turkish Airlines tickets, worth over $35,000. Accompanying him were a relative and a member of his staff described as “liaison to the Asian American communities” in New York, evidently referring to Greco. It’s not clear what Adams and Greco did in Beijing that month, and there are no Chinese-language reports about that trip.
Prosecutors last week alleged that Adams and Greco “traveled to Nepal through Istanbul and Beijing” in October 2017, using free business-class tickets worth more than $16,000. That appears to correspond to a trip Greco and Adams made to the Chinese capital at the invitation of ICN Overseas Chinese Radio, a Mandarin-language station that broadcasts in New York. A report from the outlet said that Adams and Greco visited a CCP-controlled organization called the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), meeting officials from the group and discussing with them the development of “sister-city” relationships. Prior to last week’s indictment, the Epoch Times and the New York Post reported on Adams’s October 2017 meetings described in the ICN report.
According to ICN and correspondence that NR has reviewed, Adams and Greco also met officials from the city’s Fengtai district and visited a bike-share company. ICN claimed that Adams told a Chinese state propaganda outlet that he endorses the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global infrastructure plan. In an email about the trip, a Greco associate wrote (using the previous name for that plan): “Borough President also shared his thoughts on ‘One Belt, One Road’ and cooperation ideas.”
ICN also claimed that Adams had made six visits to China. Besides the trip in July or August of 2017, the only other documented trip took place in 2014, soon after his election as Brooklyn borough president. On that trip, which was partly funded by a group founded by Greco called the Sino American New York Brooklyn Archway Association, he signed multiple sister-city agreements, NR has previously reported.
The October 2017 trip appeared to focus partly on Greco’s efforts to build a “friendship archway” over Sunset Park in Brooklyn. Upon Adams’s and Greco’s return from China that month, Fanny Lawren, who described herself as a “consultant” to the archway group in her email signature, forwarded to the borough president’s office an email from Tan Linkun, the director of the foreign-affairs office for Chaoyang, a Beijing district and Brooklyn sister city that promised to donate the archway structure. Tan, in a note addressed to Adams while he was still in Beijing, said that he looked forward to meeting but that Chaoyang’s government was “very busy” and instead requested a meeting with Brooklyn’s leaders toward the end of December.
The correspondence suggested that Greco, in her capacity as an unpaid volunteer, was negotiating the text of an agreement on behalf of Adams’s team. Lawren wrote in the email that Tan had written to Greco suggesting “some changes on the memorandum” ahead of a ceremony unveiling the structure. Lawren further invited “your district’s leaders and representatives to come to New York to co-host the ceremony.” Lawren did not respond to a message from NR earlier today.
Emails obtained by National Review also show that Greco contacted Brooklyn officials to set up a December 2017 meeting between Adams and a delegation representing Beijing’s Xicheng district. She coordinated with the Chinese consulate general in Manhattan to facilitate the meeting, forwarding to an Adams aide a note from an official at the consulate’s trade section.
In June 2017, Greco also asked Brooklyn officials to meet a delegation from Nanping, a city in Fujian Province, at borough hall. She emailed borough-hall staff to ask if Adams was available to take the meeting and to reserve room space for the group. It’s not clear if the meeting with Adams occurred, though a delegation from the city visited Brooklyn and met Greco and Adams aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin two years later. Neither Greco nor City Hall responded to NR’s requests for comment.
As part of a federal probe reportedly run by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, federal agents raided two houses that Greco owns in the Bronx this year. The reason for the raids is not known, and Greco has not been accused of wrongdoing. An EDNY spokesman declined to comment. The Eastern District recently brought charges against Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul alleged to have acted as an unregistered foreign agent under the control of the Chinese consulate general.