Welcome to Black Sheep, a spin‑off of my serialized memoir, SMIRK. If you’re looking for SMIRK, here’s the link to the complete book. Black Sheep is where I now follow similar themes of fraud and folly in other companies, industries, and individuals.
For some reason, taxi and Uber drivers like to regale me with their conspiracy theories while I’m in the back of the car, a captive audience. Most are cliché: 9/11 was an “inside job,” elites do mind control through 5G, etc. Yet one guy, a South Asian native, driving me home from LaGuardia in 2023, told me a yarn that sticks with me: He claimed that if he paid off a certain city official, he could get a green card.
Now, anyone who knows on a basic level how our government works would find this assertion laughable. No municipal bureaucrat, no matter how powerful, can direct the workings of federal immigration agencies and get paperwork approved. But when I posed these counterpoints to the young driver, he provided an oddly reasonable response: He said he didn’t know exactly how the official accomplished this task, but greasing the right wheels was certainly part of it.
Looking back, what made this unlikely quid pro quo seem plausible was that it occurred during former NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. Based on the corruption allegations that emerged as he continued to cling to his office in disgrace in 2024 and 2025, I got a nagging sense that something was fundamentally wrong in how the administration operated. But it was impossible to tell, from the surface, how far and deep the rot might go.
As if I’d had a mystery novel snatched out of my hands, I was disappointed when the Justice Department dropped its indictment against Adams in February 2025. The decision caused several federal prosecutors to quit in protest, as they believed it was influenced by President Trump (a new ally of Adams). But the Feds found a way to breathe new life into the case. In June 2026, they brought charges against Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone. Let’s take a closer look.
[Want more of my take on the Adams debacle? See previous Black Sheep posts on our former mayor’s continuing shenanigans after leaving office (free) and a mysterious side-character involved in the Turkey-related charges (paid).]
The first thing I couldn’t help but notice about the accusations against Carone was that they had virtually no overlap with the scheme Adams had been charged with. Adams was accused of offering favors to the Turkish government in return for free vacations and heavily discounted business-class airline tickets. Instead of finding an offshoot of that mess involving Carone, prosecutors pieced together a whole new alleged scheme involving the former chief of staff: He had supposedly taken $120,000 in kickbacks in exchange for helping a hotel owner secure a contract for housing migrants.
Adding more intrigue to the situation, the hotel in question, a Microtel in Long Island City, Queens, was owned by….
