Frank Carone in September 2024.
Early on Wednesday morning, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s allies celebrated a sweep in the Democratic primary, one of former mayor Eric Adams’s top allies was taken into custody. In an indictment unsealed on Wednesday, Adams’s former chief of staff Frank Carone was charged with bribery and money laundering for allegedly accepting $120,000 in payments to steer a migrant shelter contract toward a developer in Queens.
According to the indictment, Carone, when he served as Adams’s chief of staff, arraigned for a $6.8 million contract for a migrant shelter to be handed to Long Island City hotel owner Yan Po Zhu. In exchange, Carone received $10,000 per month payments that were disguised as legal fees for his brother, Anthony Carone. His brother, the hotelier, and a hotel employee were also charged in the scheme.
The indictment claims that the Carones and Zhu “devised and executed a scheme to exploit the city’s migrant crisis for profit.” The hotel in question in Long Island City was rejected by the city because it was too small, and because of its proximity to a larger shelter nearby. After Carone allegedly orchestrated the deal to make Zhu’s hotel a shelter anyway, he received the bribe payments through September 2023. By the next year, the indictment states that he became aware of an investigation into the payments — at which point he tried to hide the scheme, writing a bogus promissory note and backdating it to 2022.
