Key player in Adams campaign straw donor scheme takes plea
Provision in state budget talks aims to boost street safety
Shamsuddin Riza pleaded guilty Thursday to helping orchestrate a straw donor scheme that prosecutors say pumped illegal cash into Mayor Adams’ 2021 campaign coffers with an aim to secure political favors.
Riza is the fourth defendant to plead guilty after being charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office with facilitating the straw donor scheme.
A construction company owner, Riza entered his plea during a Thursday morning court hearing in Manhattan to one felony count of attempted grand larceny in the third degree related to his efforts to use fraudulent donations to illegally secure public matching funds for Adams’ campaign.
The count is the most serious any of the defendants in the straw donor case have pleaded to so far; the three others copped to lower-level conspiracy charges.
Riza also pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying business records in a separate case unrelated to the straw donor scheme.
Prosecutors said Riza facilitated the donations in hopes it would put his firm, United Construction Brothers Services, in line for lucrative city contracts once Adams became mayor.
Neither the mayor nor his campaign are implicated in or accused of having known about the scheme.
Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Althea Drysdale told Riza in the hearing she expects to sentence him to three years of probation during a hearing next month. As part of his plea deal, he’s also prohibited from hosting fundraisers for any political candidates, deliver contributions to any candidates or engage in any other form of political fundraising for three years.
“You can have no association whatsoever with campaign in any way, shape or form, do you understand?” Drysdale asked.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Riza replied.
After the hearing, Riza declined to answer questions.
According to their indictment, between at least August 2020 and November 2021, Riza and his five co-defendants reimbursed people for giving money to Adams’ campaign and donated themselves in the names of dozens of others who didn’t know their identities were being used for that purpose.
Both practices — known as straw donating — are illegal and can generate illicit public matching funds and violate caps on how much money an individual can donate, the indictment charged.
Riza’s plea comes as Adams’ 2021 campaign is facing a separate federal investigation into allegations that Turkey’s government funneled illegal straw donations into its coffers.
Dwayne Montgomery, an ex-NYPD inspector, Adams friend and alleged ringleader of the straw donor scheme prosecuted by Bragg, pleaded guilty to his role in February. He told Riza in an intercepted July 2021 phone call that “[Adams] said he doesn’t want to do anything if he doesn’t get 25 Gs,” according to court papers.
Riza was caught in intercepted communications instructing two of his other co-defendants, brothers Shahid and Yahya Mushtaq, how to use the names of employees of their construction safety firm as straw donors. He told them to use nonsequential money orders, which are difficult to trace, to make the illegal Adams campaign contributions, prosecutors say.
The Mushtaqs pleaded guilty to their roles in the scheme in October as part of a deal that required them to cooperate with prosecutors.
With Riza’s plea entered, only two cases prosecuted as part of the scheme remain open, against Ronald Peek and Millicent Redick.
In making the case that Riza and his co-defendants angled for city government business as part of their scheme, prosecutors pointed to an email Riza sent Montgomery in summer 2021 before a fundraiser for Adams.
In the message, Riza shared details about a Brooklyn construction project he was hoping his contractor firm could work on, according to court papers.
“Please show to him before Event,” Riza wrote to Montgomery about the project, a reference to Adams, the indictment says. “It will start when he’s in office.”
Legislation moving control of New York City’s speed limits from the state to the city has been folded into the overdue state budget — in a long-sought win for street safety advocates — lawmakers said Thursday.
The measure would allow the city to set speed limits as low as 20 mph on most streets and as low as 10 mph on some streets, said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who has sponsored the legislation in the Assembly the past two years.
“It’s a great victory for all the families who’ve had a member tragically ripped from them through car crashes,” said Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat.
The insertion of the legislation, dubbed Sammy’s Law in honor of a 12-year-old killed by a driver in Brooklyn over a decade ago, was secured as lawmakers began to authorize portions of the budget on Thursday.
Gov. Hochul had pushed for the inclusion of Sammy’s Law in the budget, which was due April 1 and repeatedly pushed back as lawmakers negotiated the details. The final version of Sammy’s Law is on track to differ slightly from past drafts: Six-lane roads and one-way, three-lane roads outside Manhattan would remain at the current default city speed limit of 25 mph.
Last June, Sammy’s Law passed the state Senate in a 55to-7 vote. But the measure ran aground in the Assembly. A year ago, activists launched a 99-hour hunger strike in support of the legislation.
After versions of the bill failed to pass the Legislature for three straight years, Hochul used the budget process to get the measure across the finish line.
The governor, a Democrat, cast the development as a success in her broader effort to empower local governments.
“A lot of these decisions shouldn’t be made in Albany,” Hochul, a former upstate town board member, told reporters in Manhattan.
She said she was looking forward to signing the bill with the family of Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who was cut down by a van as he chased a soccer ball onto Prospect Park West in Park Slope in October 2013.
His mother, Amy Cohen, has been a driving force behind the measure.
State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Manhattan Democrat who has sponsored Sammy’s Law in his chamber, said the inclusion of the legislation in the budget was a “testament” to Cohen’s “fierce” advocacy.
“I’m just thrilled,” Cohen said. “It was a huge fight, and we’re just grateful to everyone who made it happen.”
A spokeswoman for Mayor Adams, Liz Garcia, said in a statement that City Hall was hopeful the measure would “prevent senseless tragedies while honoring the life of Sammy Cohen Eckstein.”
The city’s current default 25 mph speed limit was set in 2014, marking the first citywide reduction in a half-century. The 2014 shift was pushed by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and approved by the Legislature and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
On Thursday, final elements of this year’s $237 billion New York State budget were still coming into focus.
As they blew past the yearly deadline for the spending plan, the governor and the Legislature hammered out an intricate housing deal aimed at securing tenant protections and spurring development through tax breaks.
Even as lawmakers approved budget legislation on Thursday, some policy elements in it remained under last-minute discussions, including a possible two-year extension of mayoral control of New York City schools — another priority for Hochul.
State Sen. John Liu, the Queens Democrat who is chairman of the New York City Education Committee, has said he expects the extension to land in the budget. But he said Thursday evening that the issue was not fully pinned down.
“There’s a couple of pins already in the ground,” Liu said, adding that the extension would include a measure preventing the city from reducing its funding for public schools.
Without an extension, mayoral control is due to expire at the end of June.