In June, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed a thirteen-count indictment against Frank Carone, who ran Eric Adams’ City Hall as chief of staff, along with his brother Anthony and two Chinese nationals, Crystal Chen and Yan Po Zhu — the developer who goes by Andy Zhu. All four pleaded not guilty.
The allegation is plain. Between October 2022 and September 2023, Zhu and Chen paid the Carone brothers roughly $120,000. In return, prosecutors say, Carone pressed the Department of Social Services to hand Zhu’s Long Island City hotel a $6,825,000 emergency shelter contract to house migrants. Most of the money allegedly went to personal expenses: travel, meals, a gym membership, clothes, groceries. Carone did not report it to the IRS. He did not report it to the Conflicts of Interest Board while he was serving in City Hall.
Zhu’s bail was set at $8 million. Carone’s at $2 million. The gap is the government’s assessment that Zhu can reach a country that will not send him back.
The part that is documented
The Daily Caller News Foundation reports that Zhu holds posts inside the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. He has appeared on stage with its chairman. He attended the seventieth-anniversary festivities in Beijing. He gave $100,000 in 2018 to the America Changle Association, whose former chairman was convicted this May of running a police station in Manhattan for the Chinese government.
That is a real record, and it is on paper.
The part that is a characterization
The headline calls him an intelligence official. He is not charged with espionage. He is not charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The word rests on a chain of inference: he holds a united front post, a congressional commission describes the united front apparatus as serving intelligence functions, therefore he is an intelligence official. Every link is defensible. The chain is still an inference, and the expert carrying it in that story is a witness whose other public claims are heavily contested.
Strip the label and nothing softens. A man with deep ties to a foreign party’s influence apparatus allegedly bought access to New York’s shelter procurement, through the mayor’s own chief of staff, during a migrant emergency, for nearly seven million dollars of public money.
The best argument for using the word anyway is that united front work is intelligence work by design, and waiting for a FARA charge means waiting forever. I take that seriously. It is still not what the grand jury found.
What the record can carry
Adams was indicted in 2024 and that case was dismissed. He is not accused here. Carone is presumed innocent. So is Zhu. Both should be.
But procurement is where a city is actually governed, and this one was allegedly for sale. That is the finding. It does not need improving.
Add your perspective
Left: the CCP framing is doing xenophobic work that the underlying corruption charge does not require, and Chinese-American civic groups get smeared by association every time this story runs. Right: united front penetration of American city government is precisely the threat, and demanding an espionage charge before naming it is how the infiltration succeeds. Center if the bribery case should be tried on its own terms and the influence question handled separately, by counterintelligence, not by headline.
