Hotel Developer Reportedly Reimbursed Donors To Eric Adams' 2025 Campaign
Five people who donated to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ reelection campaign were secretly reimbursed, three of them by individuals linked to the owners of two hotels in Queens, a joint investigation from The City, Guardian US and Documented revealed.
Xiaozhuang Ge, his wife, Weihong Hu, and Hu’s relative and business associate Lan Mei were all named by donors in on-the-record interviews as having reimbursed them thousands of dollars for donations to the 2025 campaign, in apparent violation of campaign finance law.
Ge and Hu also own the Wyndham Garden hotel in Fresh Meadows and the Howard Johnson by Wyndham Long Island City, which rakes in millions of dollars through a shelter subcontract from the city to act as a migrant shelter, the publications reported.
Hu is also a managing member of LLCs responsible for two Manhattan hotel developments, according to The City, including a 25-story project on West 35th Street in the Garment District.
A nurse from Bayside, Queens, and an architect assistant and her husband from Long Island told The City, Guardian US and Documented that they donated $2K apiece after being asked to and that they were reimbursed by Ge, Hu or Mei.
Mei was named by donors as one of the people who asked them to donate and reimbursed them in cash. Public records unearthed by the publications show Mei is the CEO of Meiqiao LLC, which lists Hu as the LLC’s owner and the Wyndham Garden hotel in Fresh Meadows as its address.
During former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, the Fresh Meadows hotel was a shelter for formerly incarcerated people released during the pandemic. The six-month city subcontract with nonprofit Exodus Transitional Community, worth $3M, was extended twice under Adams.
In December 2022, the Adams administration hired a different nonprofit, Housing Works, to continue to provide services, still at the Wyndham Garden hotel in Fresh Meadows.
The 152-room Long Island City hotel also had city government contracts, serving as a migrant shelter since 2023, The City reported.
The interviews with the five individuals who donated add to previous reporting by The City and Documented that revealed evidence of straw donations to Adams, in addition to investigations by the Manhattan district attorney and federal prosecutors into Adams’ campaign finance track record.
The maximum amount an individual is allowed to donate in a NYC mayoral race is $2,100. Once that amount is reached, an individual isn't permitted to contribute more. Foreign nationals aren't legally allowed to donate to U.S. political campaigns.
In NYC, matched funding for candidates adds $8 for every dollar of the first $250 contributed, paid out of taxpayer funds. The Adams campaign potentially netted an additional $6K of public money when it submitted three of the five donations for matched funding, according to the investigation.
“If, in fact, these contributors knowingly participated in a scheme to reimburse contributions, then they lied to us and violated the rules that the campaign clearly explains to all donors,” Vito Pitta, an attorney for Adams' reelection campaign, told The City. “No one on the campaign has ever or would ever participate in or condone such behavior.”
Adams' office didn't immediately respond to Bisnow's request for comment. Attempts to reach Ge, Hu and Mei for comment were unsuccessful.
The report follows an FBI raid on Adams in November, when the agency seized an iPad and two cellphones in their investigation of whether Adams broke campaign finance rules in his 2021 mayoral campaign, according to previous reporting from The New York Times. Adams hasn't been accused of wrongdoing as part of that investigation.
Ties to NYC’s real estate industry have also emerged during the investigations around Adams' administration and campaign.
Adams’ first Department of Buildings commissioner, Eric Ulrich, was indicted on five counts of bribery in September. Allegations included attempting to influence the Department of City Planning on a rezoning attempt for a project by a developer who gave Ulrich several months of free rent in a luxury apartment. Ulrich pleaded not guilty.
In November, a lawsuit revealed that the FBI was looking into a list of politically connected developers who had allegedly been allowed to skip the line for fire inspections, at Adams’ request, to open their buildings sooner.
An order to fast-track fire inspections at Related Cos.' 50 Hudson Yards came directly from Adams' office, according to an internal FDNY email previously reported by The City. A dozen inspections were canceled to make way for the 77-story tower’s inspection, including at a public school in Brooklyn, The City reported.
