Companies they’ve been related to owe a minimum of $1.7 million in unpaid taxes, penalties and curiosity, and they’ve been accused of failing to pay one other $1.5 million in lease, largely through the coronavirus pandemic.
Some of these companies took out $1.8 million in federal loans supposed to protect jobs through the pandemic, however interviews with individuals acquainted with the companies increase questions in regards to the accuracy of employment figures said within the mortgage purposes — which are actually underneath evaluation by federal investigators, officers stated.
And in 2019, they recruited Frank Carone, who’s now Mr. Adams’s chief of workers, and others to finance the acquisition of a debt-ridden laboratory in Texas. The enterprise in the end collapsed, costing Mr. Carone and the opposite backers vital cash.
There isn’t any indication that Mr. Adams has ever achieved enterprise with the brothers or has any perception into their practices. But his shut friendship with them underscores his penchant for surrounding himself with people who have troubled pasts and ignoring any ethical questions that such relationships would possibly pose, even when his associates might need one thing to achieve.
“That’s why people buy time with presidents and mayors,” stated John Kaehny, government director of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany. “It’s because they want to be associated with their power, and it is brand-building. It is validation.”
As Mr. Adams has ascended, the Petrosyantses — 41-year-old Armenians from Turkmenistan — have risen, too. Having immigrated to the United States as youngsters in 1996, they now function 5 eating places and have described plans for 2 extra. Mr. Adams, 62, has spent many evenings at their showpiece, Osteria La Baia on West 52nd Street, visiting 14 times in June alone. Often, he was ushered in after different prospects had gone dwelling.
In an interview, Robert Petrosyants stated he didn’t consider that he or his brother had achieved something incorrect since their convictions, though he acknowledged that others would possibly chafe at their practices within the rough-and-tumble restaurant enterprise. Far from being helped, he stated, the brothers’ enterprise pursuits had been negatively affected by Mr. Adams’s election as mayor, which he stated value them a lease for a deliberate venue as a result of of reporting on the federal indictments that “crushed our world” years in the past.