Construction Firm in Eric Adams’ Campaign Fundraising Investigation Has Historic Ties to Corruption

The Turkey-tied engineering firm at the heart of the federal probe of Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign fundraising is also connected to two other back-to-back corruption scandals involving bribery of city workers in 2007 and 2008, Greg B. Smith reports for The City. KSK Construction delivered more than a dozen donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign that are now a subject of the investigation. It’s CEO, Erden Arkan, ran another company called Kiska Construction that was at the heart of the two other scandals.

In the 2007 investigation, an executive agreed to wear a wire and record himself bribing two of city Department of Transportation bureaucrats, while a New Jersey indictment of 23 defendants with organized crime ties alleged that a foreman on a Kiska contract had ties to the Gambino crime family and had orchestrated a no-show job scam at the jobsite. KSK’s entanglement in a political corruption investigation emerged Thursday when the FBI raided the Brooklyn home of Adams’ top fundraiser, Brianna Scruggs. According to a search warrant obtained by the New York Times, the ongoing probe focuses on whether the mayor’s 2021 campaign received illegal donations from foreign nationals via KSK Construction.