Brooklyn businessman pleads guilty to Adams campaign straw donor charge

MANHATTAN (CN) — Erden Arkan, a Turkish-born Brooklyn construction company owner, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy in Manhattan federal court on Friday afternoon, admitting to signing checks on behalf of his employees who then made illegal straw donations to the Eric Adams 2021 mayoral campaign.

Pursuant to a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, Arkan acknowledged he’d facilitated 10 separate straw donations to Adams’ campaign funds.

“When I wrote the checks, I knew the Eric Adams campaign would use the checks to apply for public matching funds,” he said.

Arkan, co-owner of the KSK Construction Group in Williamsburg, is the first of several co-conspirators implicated in Adams’ sprawling bribery and illegal campaign finance indictment to plead guilty during a public hearing.

Federal prosecutors said the Adams campaign used those donations to access matching public funds from a municipal program that matches small-dollar contributions from New York City residents with up to eight times their amount in public funds.

Arkan mentioned the Eric Adams campaign by name several times during his plea hearing. Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, instead referred to the city’s current mayor only as “Official-1”.

According to prosecutors, Arkan met a Turkish government official at a restaurant in 2021. He subsequently arranged a fundraiser event at his construction company’s office, where ten employees placed donations to the Adams mayoral campaign fund.

The conduct described by both Arkan and prosecutors on Friday aligns with “Businessman-5” in Adams’sindictment, whose construction company provided $1,250 per employee to ten of its employees, after he met with a Turkish government official and an Adam staffer.

“The Turkish Official sent Businessman-5 a message asking, ‘how much is the total?’ to which Businessman-5 replied, ‘I think I got to 22[.J He just left[.] The girls, [Adams’s] assistants, were very happy’,” prosecutors wrote in the Adams indictment.

While Arkan, 76, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, he agreed in his plea deal to not contest a sentence of six months or less.

Pursuant to the plea deal signed last month, Arkan also agreed to pay $18,000 in restitution and up to a $250,000 maximum fine.

Adams, who was indicted on a five-count federal bribery and corruption indictment in September 2024, is scheduled to stand trial in April in the Southern District of York.

U.S. District Judge Dale Ho consented to holding off Arkan’s sentencing until after the Adams trial concludes. While cooperation was not explicitly mentioned at Arkan’s plea hearing, the scheduling of his sentencing allows for him to potentially testify against Adams at trial.

Adams is accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions facilitated by a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment, who also arranged for Adams and his companions to receive free or discounted travel on Turkey’s national airline to destinations including France, China, Sri Lanka, India, Hungary, and Turkey itself.

Adams, a first-term Democrat mayor and former NYPD captain, pleaded not guilty to the federal indictment. He denies any illegal wrongdoing.

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