A longtime ally of Mayor Eric Adams pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy charges, admitting that he raised thousands of dollars in illegal “straw” donations for the mayor’s 2021 campaign aimed at yielding public matching funds by shielding the true source of the contributions.

Dwayne Montgomery, a former NYPD inspector who has known Adams for years from the mayor’s days in the police department, pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor conspiracy charge, and agreed to pay a $500 fine and perform 200 hours of community service.

In his deal with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Montgomery, 65, will do no jail time, although the charge he admitted to carries a potential one-year sentence. He also pledged that he will not organize or host any political fundraisers or solicit donations on behalf of any candidate for a year.

In October 2023, brothers Shahid and Yahya Mushtaq also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor conspiracy charge as part of the larger case brought by Bragg.

On Monday the mayor declined to comment on Montgomery’s plea, saying he had not communicated with him since his old friend was indicted in July. Adams, however, has to date declined to detail his communications with Montgomery during the 2021 campaign and before the indictment.

“Dwayne was an inspector in the police department. We came up through the ranks. He was a member of the Guardians,” Adams said, referring to the fraternal organization of Black police officers. “In life people make decisions that they would like to regret. It appears he made a decision that he wanted to regret. He pleaded guilty and I hope he goes on with his life.”

Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign has been flagged repeatedly for accepting tens of thousands of dollars in illegal donations funneled through so-called straw donors who are reimbursed for their contributions, with the true source of the money masked. 

A week after the indictment was unsealed in July, the Adams 2021 campaign refunded $8,700 from 33 donations tied to those two fundraising events, all from contributors identified by prosecutors as straw donors, records show.

Several more donations totaling $5,000 from individuals identified by prosecutors as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Montgomery indictment have not been refunded.

Bragg is not the only law enforcement authority to take interest in Adams’ 2021 fundraising. In November, federal prosecutors raided the Brooklyn home of the mayor’s chief fundraiser, then seized the mayor’s cell phone and other devices in an ongoing investigation into whether his 2021 campaign received illegal donations from the Turkish government via a straw donor scheme. 

One donor who gave toward an Adams fundraising event under scrutiny by the federal probe told THE CITY they were reimbursed by their boss — and that they were not a U.S. citizen.

THE CITY has uncovered several other cases of donors to Adams’ campaign admitting that they were reimbursed, most recently with three donors to the mayor’s 2025 re-election campaign saying they had their contributions paid for by hotel and construction executives with potential business before City Hall.

Neither Adams nor anyone in his campaign has been charged with wrongdoing.

On Monday, Vito Pitta, an attorney the Adams’ campaign hired to perform election law compliance, said the campaign is now looking into those donations due to the “serious questions” raised by THE CITY’s report. 

In a statement, Pitta said: “Whenever serious questions are raised about a contributor potentially violating the law, the campaign does an internal review to determine whether or not action needs to be taken on top of its exhaustive system of checks. The campaign has proactively returned thousands of dollars in contributions when violations were substantiated, and those actions did not conflict with ongoing investigations. In this case, we will complete our internal review and continue to work with authorities as needed to address any improprieties found.”

Pitta declined to detail the “exhaustive” system of checks.

In an apparent reference to Montgomery’s plea, which did not directly implicate Adams or his campaign officials, Pitta added, “As we have seen from recent cases, when it has been determined that contributors participated in straw donor schemes, the campaigns were often unaware and not involved in those schemes.”

Funds Flagged

The straw donor ruse was at the heart of the Manhattan District Attorney’s prosecution of Montgomery, who prosecutors allege kept a spreadsheet of all the donations he raised and the amount of matching funds he believed were generated for Adams as a result. The scheme, they charged, was to “use the contributions as leverage in potential future requests of the Mayor’s Office.”

In his plea Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court, Montgomery admitted to conspiring with a relative and co-defendant, Shamsuddin Riza, to reimburse donors and structure donations to trigger public matching funds to Adams’ campaign. Candidates enrolled in the Campaign Finance Board’s matching funds program get $8 for every dollar up to $250 per contribution from New York City residents who do not have business before city government.

In court papers, prosecutors said Montgomery told a representative of Adams’ 2021 campaign, identified as Rachel Atcheson, an employee of then-Brooklyn Borough President Adams, that he wanted to be “credited” for raising a significant amount of money for Adams.

Prosecutors said Montgomery raised $16,000 during an August 2020 Zoom fundraiser, an event that he worked with Adams’ aide Atcheson to coordinate. Prosecutors say most of the money raised at that event came through straw donations that Montgomery secretly funded. In his plea, for instance, Montgomery admitted he’d transferred $260 via Cash App to an unidentified individual, who then made a $260 “contribution to Adams’ campaign.

Montgomery’s relative, Riza, hosted an Aug. 25, 2021, event at a Sunnyside, Queens, restaurant that used the same approach to raise $26,850, prosecutors say. Riza, who has pleaded not guilty and is proceeding to trial, allegedly purchased eight $400 money orders and four separate locations that he submitted as individual donations in the names of others, including several of his relatives.

The mayor and his campaign have repeatedly insisted that they performed significant due diligence to ensure that they were accepting only legal contributions, noting that all donors are required to certify in writing that they are the source of the donation and were not reimbursed.

But some of the donations referenced in the Montgomery prosecution were suspicious enough to have triggered the Campaign Finance Board to reach out to the Adams campaign at the time they were reported to the board. CFB, for instance, declined to issue matching funds for any of the donations funded by the eight $400 money orders prosecutors say Riza paid for.

The Adams campaign never responded to the CFB’s inquiry about those donations, and records show the Adams’ campaign did not refund those donations until a week after Montgomery was indicted in July.

On Monday during his weekly off-topic briefing with the press, Adams again insisted that his campaign officials did all they could to prevent fraud, and refunded any donation deemed suspect.

The mayor told reporters that the campaign “spent thousands of dollars on a compliance attorney who matched signatures and we returned tens of thousands of donations that did not follow that muster. The campaign did its job.”