Winnie Greco

For years, Eric Adams had promised the Chinese American community in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a “Friendship Archway,” to be gifted from China to Brooklyn’s Chinatown. “Bringing New York City’s first-ever Friendship Archway to Brooklyn has been a labor of love,” Adams said in a press release in 2017, touting the new arch alongside then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. 

The “Friendship Archway” was the brainchild of Winnie Greco, who was an unpaid fundraiser for Eric Adams while he was Brooklyn borough president. (Greco’s last name was previously Zheng.) In 2014, Greco’s nonprofit reportedly paid for Adams to go to China, ostensibly to get him on board with the archway plan. Greco then spent the next several years using her organization, the Sino-America NY Brooklyn Archway Association, to fundraise for the arch, amassing $221,000 between 2013 and 2018, according to tax records. 

As borough president, Adams set aside $2 million in City funding for the archway, which was to be built by the Chinese government and then shipped over to the U.S. But despite de Blasio giving his blessing for the project, the deal fell apart—in 2020, the de Blasio administration announced that the arch wasn’t coming, with Adams’s office blaming worsening relations between China and the U.S.

The apparent demise of the arch project didn’t stop Greco from fundraising for Adams, however. After securing his second term in Brooklyn Borough Hall, Adams set his sights on City Hall—and Greco began holding major fundraisers for the candidate within the Asian American community. After Adams came out in favor of abolishing the entrance exam for the City’s specialized high schools, a move deeply unpopular with certain segments of the city’s Asian American community, some Adams fundraisers were canceled. Greco assembled a meeting to smooth things over between the borough president and Asian American community leaders—and eventually, Adams reversed his stance on the tests. 

Greco was one of a handful of people on the dais in Times Square when Adams was inaugurated on New Year’s Day 2022, and immediately found a job in City Hall as a “Special Adviser to the Mayor and Director of Asian Affairs,” with a salary of $100,000. (Her niece also found a well-paying job in City Hall’s press office.) 

In her current role, Greco acts as an official Adams administration liaison to various Asian American neighborhoods and organizations, organizing and showing up at various parades, visiting grieving family members as a City Hall representative, and helping to host a variety of community meetings on crime and public safety.    

According to The CITY, Greco asked a campaign volunteer to help remodel her Bronx home and promised him a job at City Hall. When asked about these findings, the mayor deflected and downplayed his relationship to Greco, saying he hadn’t spoken to her about the allegations. “When I see her, I say ‘ni hao.’ You know, that’s ‘hello,'” he told the press. 

A City Hall spokesperson said Greco “strongly denies” the reporting by the CITY. 

Greco has also raised eyebrows for her involvement in the City’s handling of a new leaseholder for the struggling City-owned 88 East Broadway Mall, underneath the Manhattan Bridge. The consortium that eventually won the potentially lucrative lease for the mall, called Broadway East Group (BEG), LLC, is connected to a family group that held an event in San Francisco in March. That event was attended by Greco; Wade Li, the head of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of New York (CCCNY); and Eric Adams’s son Jordan Coleman, according to Documented. It’s unclear whether Greco was there on City business, but, according to Wade Li, CCCNY has two board members who are involved with BEG, LLC, the new operator for the mall, leading to accusations from other groups vying for the lease that Greco helped to steer it to BEG, LLC. 

City Hall did not respond to a request for comment directed to Greco. 

In November of 2023, the City’s Department of Investigation announced that it was opening an inquiry into Greco’s work for City Hall. While DOI did not specify what conduct was being reviewed, it seems likely that it had to do with her asking the campaign volunteer to help remodel her home. (The CITY noted that the investigation came after “a referral from the mayor’s office.”) But the DOI investigation didn’t discourage City Hall from keeping Greco close to the mayor—in February, she was added to a list of the mayor’s top policy aides, made up of those who have “major responsibilities” and exercise “independent judgment in connection with determining important agency matters.” And she was given an $11,000 pay raise in May, boosting her salary to $196,000.

But this spring, Greco’s legal troubles got a lot more serious—on February 29, the FBI raided two of her Bronx homes, during which she suffered what a City Hall source told the CITY was a “medical episode,” resulting in Greco being taken away from the scene in an ambulance. According to the CITY, the raids were part of a DOJ investigation, stemming from the Department of Justice’s Eastern District, looking into possible straw donor donations made by employees at Flushing’s New World Mall, an alleged scheme in which employees were asked to donate to Eric Adams’s 2021 campaign, and then were paid back the same amount by the mall’s owners. In 2021, Greco did work for the Adams campaign out of an office in the same mall.

And then there’s the somewhat strange story of Greco and Weihong Hu. In May, an investigation by the CITY, the Guardian, and Documented found that Greco had been living in a taxpayer-funded hotel suite for more than eight months in 2022. The hotel belonged to Hu, a hotel operator and developer who was making millions in City contracts providing hotel rooms to the recently incarcerated and migrants. Eric Adams’s son Jordan Coleman also stayed at that same hotel in a taxpayer-funded room for at least one night, along with an unidentified woman, a former worker at the hotel told reporters. Hu also hired one of Adams’s best friends, former State Senator John Sampson, who had been released from federal custody (he was imprisoned in 2017 after being found guilty of obstruction of justice and making false statements to an FBI agent, related to the alleged theft of $400,000 from the sale of foreclosed homes) a month before Hu hired him. 

That investigation also reported that in 2023, Hu hosted a fundraiser for Adams at her $5 million Hudson Yards condo. Greco reportedly was present and “trailed the mayor closely.”

Greco took a medical leave following the FBI raid, but last month, she was back at work at City Hall. During a press conference, Eric Adams said he was the one who decided that Greco could ultimately come back to work: “The final decision is up to me, and that’s the final decision we made.”

Last updated: 9/9/24 by Hell Gate