search warrant

NEW YORK — A chief of staff to former New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with accepting more than $100,000 in bribes to steer a lucrative migrant shelter contract to a Queens hotel, according to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday.

Frank Carone’s arrest Wednesday was the latest in a string of corruption allegations that have rocked the one-term mayor and his inner circle. And it came the same day federal authorities executed search warrants related to a separate bribery investigation involving high-ranking police officials under Adams, the latest sign that prosecutors are continuing to hone in on the previous administration.

In the indictment, returned June 12, prosecutors accused Carone of leveraging his position as Adams’ chief of staff to commit multiple acts of bribery, wire fraud and money laundering. His brother, Anthony Carone, as well as the Queens hotel owner, Yan Po Zhu, and Crystal Chen, an employee of the hotel, were also charged.

They were expected to appear in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon.

Prosecutors said Carone accepted a series of bribes from Zhu and Chen in order to steer a multimillion dollar shelter contract to their hotel, which city officials had said was smaller than two other proposed hotels and could house fewer migrants. The contract was awarded amid an influx of migrants to New York that overwhelmed the city’s homeless shelters.

Frank Carone’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, called the new indictment “not worth the paper upon which it is printed.”

“Today’s indictment is a sad day for our criminal justice system,” Aidala said in a statement. “It epitomizes the government first finding a target and then spending three years and enormous taxpayer resources to find a crime.”

Frank Carone known for link to Sabrina Carpenter church controversy

Carone, a longtime Brooklyn power broker, is widely credited as one of the architects of Adams’ political rise. Among the wider public, he is perhaps most notorious for his role in an episode that led to a Brooklyn pastor being stripped of his duties partly for allowing pop star Sabrina Carpenter to film scenes for a provocative music video at his Roman Catholic church.

The church was later subpoenaed by federal investigators seeking information about business dealings between Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello, who approved the video, and Carone.

Adams himself was indicted on bribery charges in 2024 for allegedly accepting illegal campaign contributions from Turkish officials and others in exchange for political favors. The case was tossed by the Justice Department, which said it was distracting Adams from assisting in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Adams has denied wrongdoing but abandoned his campaign for a second term last year.

The former mayor was not accused of wrongdoing in Carone’s indictment.

A lawyer for Zhu, Stephen Scaring, said the hotel owner “will be entering a plea of not guilty and is anxious to establish his innocence.”

Chen’s lawyer declined to comment. Messages were left for Anthony Carone’s lawyer.

Hotel at center of alleged bribery had been rejected by city

In total, Frank Carone was paid around $120,000 by Zhu and Che for the emergency shelter contract, prosecutors said. The money was passed through a law firm owned by his brother, Anthony Carone, according to the indictment.

The city’s Social Services Department had initially rejected the hotel’s application to house migrants due to growing resistance to the high number of shelters already operating in the neighborhood, the indictment said.

Carone then interceded on the hotel’s behalf, prosecutors allege. In one text exchange in September 2022, Zhu wrote: “Thank you my big guy,” according to the indictment.

The Carones and Zhu socialized frequently and attended gatherings at Zhu’s Long Island home, the indictment said.

In a separate statement, Todd Shapiro, a spokesperson for Adams, said Frank Carone “dedicated decades of his life to public service, the legal profession, and helping countless individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations throughout New York.”

Carone played a key role in Adams’ campaign for mayor in 2021 and served as Adams’ chief of staff in 2022. In 2023, he formed a political consulting firm. He also was a one-time lawyer for the Brooklyn Democratic Party.

Separately Wednesday, federal agents searched the homes of current and former New York Police Department leaders as part of a bribery investigation that grew out of an inquiry into Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department under Adams, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the searches.

As part of that inquiry, the FBI and the NYPD executed warrants on the home of NYPD Chief of Manhattan South James McCarthy and former Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard, according to the person, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Maddrey’s home was also searched by federal agents, the person said.

The searches were not related to the arrest of Frank Carone, according to another person familiar with the matter who also spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the case. There is no public indication of any arrests as part of those searches.

Once the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, Maddrey resigned in late 2024 over allegations that he demanded sex from a subordinate in exchange for opportunities to earn extra pay.

An inquiry to his attorney was not immediately returned. Attorney information for Sheppard and McCarthy was not immediately available.

Collins, Offenhartz, Sisak and Richer write for the Associated Press. Collins reported from Hartford, Conn., and Richer reported from Washington.

WASHINGTON  — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.

He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.

What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.”

Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.

Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.

“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.

But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.

Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”

Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.

The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.

Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal on April 27.

The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.

The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.

This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.

Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.

Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.

(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.

The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.

Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”

Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.

“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.

He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.

Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.

Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.

Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.

Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.

The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.

After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.

The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.

That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”

The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.

By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.

The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.

The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.

But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.

In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.

The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.