Brianna Suggs

Brianna Suggs has close family connections with Eric Adams’s inner circle. Ingrid Lewis-Martin reportedly refers to Suggs as her goddaughter, and her father, William Suggs, was a member of Adams’s mayoral transition committee. Suggs began working under Adams as a 19-year-old intern in 2017 and then as a $20-an-hour “community associate” in 2018 when she was a 20-year-old college student and Adams was Brooklyn borough president. 

Along the way, Suggs got her college degree from Brooklyn College. Then things got extra weird: As Adams launched his campaign for mayor, he named Suggs—then a 23-year-old with no campaign finance experience—to be in charge of his campaign finances. Recently, Adams has portrayed the move as part of a social-justice agenda: “Often, young African American ladies don’t get the opportunities that others receive in this business of politics,” he said. Adams’s 2021 campaign brought in more than $8 million in private donations. 

Not everyone was impressed with Suggs’s suitability for the role. “She’s like a kid,” one source told Politico, adding, “She’s not meticulous.” A source told the Post, “She’s a close person [to Adams and Lewis-Martin] who might not be qualified for the job, that was the vibe.”

Nevertheless, Suggs took the opportunity and ran with it. She made $50,000 working on Adams’s first mayoral campaign, and has made almost $100,000 over the past two years working for his reelection campaign. She made another $100,000 over that time as the sole fundraiser for a political action committee close to Adams, Striving for a Better New York. Adams steered donors to the PAC, whose stated purpose was to support Adams by backing state candidates aligned with his agenda. But after raising more than $1.3 million last year, the group spent more money on its founder, Brooklyn pastor and convicted interstate drug runner Rev. Alfred L Cockfield II and his charter school—than it did on political funding.

On top of her gig as Adams’s campaign rainmaker, Suggs raised cash for the Brooklyn Democratic Party, and registered as a lobbyist. In 2022, the lobbying firm 99 Solutions, run by real estate lobbyist Jacqui Williams, contracted Suggs to lobby Adams—her campaign boss—on behalf of the owners of the East Broadway Mall, according to state lobbying records.

Then, on November 2, FBI agents raided Suggs’s Crown Heights brownstone, seizing electronic devices and files and offering the public the clearest indication yet that Adams’s campaign was under federal criminal investigation. Subsequent reporting suggested that the feds were interested in alleged straw donors with possible ties to the Turkish government.

Suggs did not respond to questions posed through her professional website, LinkedIn, and her lawyer.

When the FBI raided Suggs’s home, Adams immediately cut short a visit to Washington, where he had planned on lobbying federal leaders to do more to help with the City’s migrant crisis. Adams told the press later that he came back because he wanted to comfort his young campaign finance manager after her traumatic experience, but, when pressed, admitted that he didn’t speak with her that day at all.

Regardless, Adams said he was sticking with Suggs. “I have full confidence in her,” he told PIX11 the next day. “She has done an amazing job. She will stay with the campaign team.” A few weeks later, Adams clarified that while Suggs was staying on with the campaign, she was no longer in charge of fundraising. In mid-December, he clarified that her role on the campaign is to be “part of processing” the campaign’s “administrative paperwork.”

In January, two months after the FBI raid on Suggs’s home, it was reported that the Adams campaign had been paying her on commission, an unusual arrangement for a campaign fundraiser. Her cut amounted to almost 10 percent of the nearly $3 million dollars she brought in over an almost two-year period. 

Sometime in the spring of 2024, Suggs retained Henry Mazurek, a lawyer who has developed a specialty representing people caught up in government corruption investigations. Mazurek’s previous clients include Chaim Deutsch, the former New York City councilmember who pled guilty to tax fraud in 2021, and Hui Qin, a Chinese billionaire who earlier this year pled guilty to a straw donor scheme to make illegal contributions to a host of candidates for elected office… including Eric Adams.