The "smash-and-grab" era might truly be over for Eric Adams's cronies.
Frank Carone, the longtime Brooklyn fixer and former chief of staff to Mayor Adams, was arrested by federal authorities on Wednesday and charged with taking $120,000 in bribes in a scheme involving his brother Anthony, a friend from Long Island, and a hotel-turned-migrant shelter in Long Island City. Everyone charged has pleaded not guilty.
Carone left City government after one year and immediately began selling his influence to a range of clients, taking meetings at private clubs like Casa Cipriani or on yachts in Florida, his nakedly transactional style garnering him a memorable New York Magazine profile (not to mention a prime seat at the Table of Success). Carone chaired Adams's doomed reelection campaign, helped the former mayor secure a lunch with Eric Trump that preceded the president dropping Adams's corruption charges, and also assisted in the spectacular crypto failure known as $NYCTOKEN.
Carone has been under federal investigation for months; when the New York Times reported on the probe in January, he dismissed the story as a "gossip column."
"As an Italian American who has grown up in the streets of Canarsie and to this day speaks with a full Brooklyn accent, I have withstood and overcome one stereotypical assumption after another for all of my life," Carone said at the time.
According to federal prosecutors, in early June of 2022, Yan Po Zhu, or "Andy Zhu," the owner of the Microtel Inn in LIC, had tried and failed to get a City contract to use the hotel as a migrant shelter. So Zhu, prosecutors say, began using his "burgeoning relationship" with Carone; on June 3, the two hung out at Zhu's Nassau County home, according to these photos included in the indictment:
