Why Adams’s successor in Brooklyn returned 10 gold tea sets from Turkey

When Antonio Reynoso succeeded Eric Adams as the borough president of Brooklyn, he followed Adams’ lead and began to engage in activities one might not normally associate with his local office: international relations.

When foreign consulates reached out, he took meetings, holding as many as two to three a week. When consulate officials and local leaders asked him to lead ceremonial events celebrating their countries’ heritage, he agreed.

But over time, Reynoso’s discomfort grew, he said. Modest gifts had come in from foreign consulates: a bottle of wine, a bookmark. But then Turkish officials began to increase their generosity.

They offered junkets to Turkey and wanted Reynoso to raise their native country’s flag over Brooklyn Borough Hall. Ten gold-plated tea sets arrived as a gift from the Turkish consulate. Reynoso said he promptly returned them.

“As much as we are grateful for these gifts, I have been advised by my counsel that I must return them to you,” Reynoso wrote in a letter in March 2022 to Reyhan Özgür, the former Turkish consul-general in New York.

Soon after, at the suggestion of the Mayor’s Office of International Affairs, Reynoso met with FBI officials, who warned him to be wary of officials representing particular foreign countries, including Turkey.

The gifts and offers of free travel from Turkey seem consistent with the pattern described in a 57-page federal indictment that charged Adams with five counts of fraud, conspiracy, bribery and soliciting campaign donations from the Turkish government.

The indictment, unsealed last week, accused Adams of accepting luxury travel benefits worth more than $100,000, as well as soliciting and receiving illegal campaign contributions from Turkey that enabled him to improperly qualify for matching funds. In return, prosecutors said, the mayor granted political favors to Turkish officials.

Özgür, who sent the gifts to Reynoso, was a prominent figure in the indictment against Adams. He was accused of helping arrange free and subsidized travel on Turkish Airlines for the mayor and his associates and of facilitating illegal straw donations from foreign nationals for Adams’ campaign.

Özgür also asked Adams to pressure the Fire Department to allow the new Turkish high-rise consulate in midtown Manhattan to open before the arrival of the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2021, according to the indictment.

Adams has denied any wrongdoing. But his friendly treatment of Turkish officials seemed to begin while he was borough president, when he accepted free or discounted fares on the largely government-owned Turkish Airlines to India, France, Turkey, Sri Lanka, China, Hungary and Ghana.

The junkets and the flag-raising ceremonies were a staple of Adams’ borough presidency, a tradition he has carried on as mayor. As of this month, Adams has held more than 80 flag-raisings, honoring nearly 50 countries, some twice.

Reynoso, in an interview before Adams was indicted, said that the offers of free travel seemed extravagant and irrelevant to his job. He added that he did not begrudge Adams his choice of priorities when in office. Many borough presidents continue to engage with local consulates in an effort to connect with local constituencies.

But Reynoso said that he found that dealing with the outreach from foreign officials was a time-consuming distraction, especially the ceremonial flag-raisings.

“It was every single week, we had a new request, and sometimes twice a week, and we were just doing these flag-raisings and it consumed a significant amount of my operations time,” Reynoso said.

As soon as he saw an exit ramp from the flag-raising merry-go-round, he took it.

The opportunity materialized in October 2022, 10 months into Reynoso’s term. Overwhelmed by the demand for flag-raisings, Reynoso sought a meeting with the mayor’s international affairs office.

The office’s commissioner, Edward Mermelstein, was listed in records as among those scheduled to attend the meeting. Rana Abbasova, the office’s director of protocol whose home was searched in November, and who later began cooperating with federal prosecutors and the FBI, was not listed as among those scheduled to attend.

During the meeting, City Hall officials told Reynoso that it was technically illegal to raise foreign flags at Borough Hall — a law that Adams ignored while borough president.

Reynoso had found his way out. That January, he denied a request from the consulate of St. Lucia to hold a flag-raising at Borough Hall, as the country had done the year before.

“We were recently reminded by the Mayor’s Office of International Affairs that as a city owned government building, Brooklyn Borough Hall is unable to raise flags of any foreign nation over it,” Reynoso wrote to St. Lucian officials in an email. “Please note that flag-raisings are taking place with the mayor in Downtown Manhattan.”

Word of the shift in Brooklyn spread rapidly among Caribbean consulates and soon reached the ears of Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s chief adviser, who sent an email to Reynoso.

“The Office of International Affairs and I have received a bunch of calls asking why the mayor has prohibited flag raising on city office buildings,” Lewis-Martin wrote, according to email records obtained by The New York Times through the Freedom of Information Law. “Please let your team know that the law which prohibits flag raising on city buildings is a New York State law and not under the jurisdiction of the office of the mayor.”

Adams was not the first borough president of Brooklyn to cultivate relationships with foreign countries; his predecessor, Marty Markowitz, said he did the same and saw nothing wrong with the arrangement, which he said helped him cultivate relationships with the borough’s ethnic groups.

“What possibly could I be pressured to do?” Markowitz said in an interview before the mayor’s indictment. “What power does a borough president have?”

But in 2011, Markowitz was fined $20,000 by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board for accepting free travel for his wife for three overseas business trips funded by foreign governments, including two to Turkey.

The international affairs office advised Reynoso to meet with the FBI to review best practices when dealing with foreign officials. And he did.

According to notes kept by Reynoso’s chief of staff, the FBI agents advised Reynoso to be wary of officials from China and Turkey, among other countries, and warned that offers of trips to foreign countries posed the greatest risk. Adams visited both China and Turkey as Brooklyn borough president.

The FBI warned him that foreign countries target local officials, with the expectation that those officials would ultimately rise in the political hierarchy. They said he should be wary of gifts from foreign consulates, since those gifts can be used as leverage and might also be bugged.

They also warned that political operatives from those countries should not be left alone in city offices because they could plant listening devices, and that foreign spies often pose as diplomats or businesspeople.

One person with knowledge of the FBI’s visit and discussions with Reynoso and his staff, as well as similar meetings provided to local and state officials and businesspeople, characterized them as routine “defensive briefings” aimed at reducing what the agency calls malign foreign influence.

A spokesperson for the New York FBI office declined to comment both on the specific briefing of Reynoso and the general practice.

After the meeting, Reynoso said he ordered some security precautions. He had his staff remove a computer from the waiting room and issued guidance that foreign dignitaries should not be left alone in the office. An area once used to host receptions after flag-raising ceremonies is now used to process asylum applications for migrants who recently arrived in New York.

Gifts valued at under $50 are still on display in Reynoso’s office, but even those received scrutiny.

“We went back and checked every single gift we received from a foreign country,” Reynoso said, “to make sure it was not bugged.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.