In October 2023, Mayor Eric Adams showed up for the opening of a new office of a big personal injury law firm, Morgan & Morgan, smiling and posing for selfies in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. The firm made sure to post photos of the mayor’s seemingly random visit on social media.
The visit, however, was anything but random.
A few months earlier, Adams himself had recruited one of the firm’s lawyers to raise campaign donations for his re-election bid and had granted the lawyer an exclusive in-person sit-down arranged by his chief fundraiser. The lawyer then bundled $21,000 worth of contributions for the mayor.
None of this was in the public eye.
That’s because of a loophole in the law that says campaigns do not have to disclose bundlers as intermediaries — money-raisers who choreograph multiple donations to campaigns — if they’re doing this fundraising in connection to an event paid for, in part or whole, by the campaign. In this case, it was a performance of the musical “New York, New York” the Adams campaign had arranged at the St. James Theater off Broadway, forking over some $75,000 for seats.
The personal injury lawyer was hardly alone. An investigation by THE CITY has found that Adams did not disclose an army of these secret bundlers to the city’s Campaign Finance Board — a lapse that is legal, but ethically dubious, campaign finance experts say.
Hundreds of pages of texts with Adams’ chief fundraiser Brianna Suggs covering both the 2021 and 2025 campaigns that were released recently reveal the identities of these apparent bundlers as they exchanged detailed lists of potential donors they had identified for her and, in some cases, promised to raise six-figures worth of donations.