In the days before President Trump’s administration moved to drop Mayor Adams’ corruption indictment, federal authorities raided the upstate New York home of Dwayne Montgomery, a former NYPD inspector who was friendly with Adams, as part of an expanding investigation into alleged crimes linked to Adams and his campaigns, according to bombshell new records released late Friday.
The Jan. 23 raid at the Middletown home was part of a flurry of previously unknown law enforcement actions detailed in a trove of 1,785 of pages of search warrants and other materials from the years-long federal corruption investigation into Adams.
The materials provide a glimpse into what prosecutors may have laid out had the case gone to trial. In addition to the revelation about Montgomery and the feds suspicion about another straw donor scheme, the documents reveal that FBI agents accused Adams of lying about his personal cell phone.
After being intercepted by the FBI near Washington Square Park in a highly-publicized episode, Adams said through his lawyer, that he didn’t have that phone on his person and that he had forgotten the password — since he had changed the code the night before — and left it at City Hall that day. He told his scheduler to help him bring the phone to the Apple Store to get access back but he ultimately did not do so, Adams said through his lawyer.
But the phone’s location tracking showed that the phone was not stationary at City Hall but actually traveled from City Hall, past Washington Square Park, and then north to 29th Street before it was either put in airplane mode or turned off, the documents say.
“I respectfully submit that there is probable cause to believe that Adams made false statements about the location of the Adams Personal Cellphone through his attorney, thus committing certain of the Subject Offenses…” an agent wrote in March 2024.
The agent added that that violation constitutes “evidence of consciousness of guilt.”
The case against Adams mostly revolved around allegations that he took illegal campaign cash and bribes from Turkish government operatives in exchange for political favors. Adams has consitently denied those charges.
“Today’s unsealing of documents affirms what we have long known—Mayor Adams did nothing wrong. These documents also show that federal authorities made false, reckless accusations with absolutely no evidence in a relentless, shameless assault on the mayor,” Todd Shapiro, a spokesperson for the mayor’s reelection campaign, said in a statement.
The new documents, which were unsealed Friday afternoon at Manhattan Federal Court Judge Dale Ho’s order, reveal the feds were expanding their investigation in the days before Trump’s Department of Justice intervened and ordered prosecutors on Feb. 10 to dismiss the case.
Trump’s DOJ officials secured the dismissal because they said the indictment inhibited Adams from helping in the president’s “mass deportation” agenda.
That move ignited a sharp backlash and set off waves off resignations inside the Southern District of New York — including that of former U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who wrote in her resignation letter that Adams had entered into a corrupt quid pro quo. Prosecutors has indicated in court and in filings that they had intended to pursue further charges for the mayor before the DOJ pulled the plug on the case.
Montgomery, a retired NYPD inspector who worked with Adams in the Police Department, pleaded guilty last year to state charges alleging he orchestrated a straw donor scheme in which he financially boosted the mayor’s 2021 campaign by giving money to it in the names of others, unlocking illicit public matching funds. Those charges came out of an investigation conducted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that did not implicate the mayor in any wrongdoing.
The new search warrant records unsealed Friday reveal the feds suspected Montgomery had also engaged in a separate, but similar straw donor scheme involving Adams’ 2025 reelection campaign. Montgomery’s name is redacted in the records, but information about the circumstances of his guilty plea spelled out in the federal documents, including the date and charges and his home address, point to him.
The feds seized two phones from his home. He was never charged with any wrongdoing as part of the federal probe nor were additional charges brought against Adams.
The feds wrote in the newly-unsealed records they had reason to believe Montgomery was implicated in the 2025 scheme as he and Adams had continued to be in touch with each other about campaign fundraising after Adams became mayor in January 2022.
“Because [Montgomery] remained in contact with Adams into 2023, there is probable cause to believe that evidence of criminal activity by [Montgomery] relating to the 2025 campaign also exists,” an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit seeking to pull data from Montgomery’s phones confiscated during the search of his home.
Other records reveal the feds were able to get their hands on texts between Montgomery and Adams in which they referred to each other as “brother” and “Boss man.”
In one exchange from January 2022, Montgomery asked Adams to be appointed a deputy mayor. “Deputy mayors are in charge of several agencies. Not a small task,” Adams texted back, according to the new records.
Montgomery was ultimately never made a deputy mayor.
An attorney for Montgomery didn’t return a request for comment Friday. Kayla Mamelak, Adams’ spokeswoman at City Hall, referred comment to the mayor’s criminal attorney, Alex Spiro.
“This case – the first of its kind airline upgrade ‘corruption’ case – should never have been brought in the first place and is now over,” Spiro said in a statement.
The new records reveal other previously unknown law enforcement actions.
A judge signed off on a warrant to search the Fort Lee, N.J. condo that Adams shares with his longtime partner, former Department of Education official Tracey Collins. While the warrant did not directly name Collins, it described her job and said that she was Adams’ partner. She has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
They also include a December 2024 raid at the Woodside, Queens home of an executive of a health care company who allegedly reimbursed employees to donate money to Adams’ campaigns, an example of illegal straw contributions, an affidavit from an FBI agent states. The raid at the unidentified health care executive’s home was authorized by a judge after a person phoned in a tip to the FBI, according to the affidavit.
The tipster alleged being “a victim” and being “forced to make straw donations myself along with many others” to Adams’ campaigns “along with campaigns for other politicians,” according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.
The trove of documents came a week later than originally expected, with the feds asking for an extra week for more time to gather everything together.
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