The owner of a Long Island City hotel accused of bribing a high-ranking member of previous Mayor Eric Adams’ administration in exchange for a city contract can go to the World Cup finals in New Jersey later this month, a federal judge in Brooklyn said Wednesday.
Yan Po Zhu appeared in court along with co-defendants Frank Carone, Anthony Carone and Crystal Chen a week after they pleaded not guilty to bribery, money laundering and other federal crimes. Prosecutors say Zhu and his business manager, Chen, gave Frank Carone $120,000 and that the Adams aide, in turn, directed a city official to give him a multimillion-dollar contract for a migrant shelter.
Here’s a brief rundown of what happened in court:
Judge grants Zhu permission to go to the Meadowlands
Zhu is under the most restrictive pretrial conditions of all the defendants, with an $8 million bond and electronic monitoring. His defense attorney told Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in court Wednesday he already had tickets to the World Cup on July 19 and asked if he could go to New Jersey for the occasion.
Matsumoto allowed Zhu to attend the match, which will be the highly anticipated final. Tickets are currently selling for thousands — and in some cases even tens of thousands — of dollars on websites like StubHub and SeatGeek.
Tentative trial date set
The federal trial could start as early as Aug. 24, if Matsumoto sticks to the tentative trial date she set Wednesday. But the judge acknowledged in court that date was not necessarily realistic, given the complexity of the case.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Winik said prosecutors plan to share a “voluminous” amount of discovery, including 4 terabytes’ worth of data. The defendants will have millions of pages to review, she said. Some materials still have yet to be extracted from devices that investigators seized more recently, she added.
So much information could delay the trial.
This is a developing story and may be updated.