Frank Carone wants his federal bribery trial to start in August, an unusually quick timeline for a case this size, and the judge overseeing it told his lawyers flat out she doesn’t buy that they’ll be ready. The hearing, first reported by amNewYork, played out July 1 in Brooklyn federal court.
Carone’s attorneys pushed for an August 24 trial start. Defendants almost never do this. Federal law guarantees a trial within 70 days of arrest, but in complicated, high-profile cases both sides usually agree to pause that clock so everyone can gather evidence and show up prepared. Carone’s team went the other way and asked to go fast.
“I don’t think that’s a real date,” U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto told them after they confirmed they wanted August 24.
The charges: federal prosecutors allege Carone worked with his brother, attorney Andrew Carone, to accept $120,000 in bribes from a Queens hotel owner and an employee, in exchange for pushing the then-mayor to award them a nearly $7 million city contract to house migrants during the 2022 migrant crisis. The hotel is the Microtel in Long Island City. City Hall had repeatedly turned it down for the contract, according to prosecutors, because officials kept determining the hotel’s size and location weren’t suitable.
Frank Carone, Andrew Carone, and the Microtel’s owner and staffer, Yan Po Zhu and Crystal Chen, were all arrested, indicted, and pleaded not guilty the previous Wednesday to bribery, money laundering, and wire fraud charges.
Carone’s lawyers argued they don’t need the usual runway because the government has been investigating the Carones for more than two years, and they’d been in contact with prosecutors that whole time. So, they said, preparing shouldn’t take as long as a typical case.
Attorneys for Chen and Zhu, who only joined the defense a week before the hearing, said they didn’t want an August trial and hadn’t been through the same pre-arrest back-and-forth the Carones had. That split leaves Matsumoto with three uncomfortable options, as she laid out: force Zhu and Chen’s lawyers to go to trial even if they say they aren’t ready, declare the matter a complex case and order the Carones to push their date back, or sever the Carones’ case from Zhu and Chen’s.
“Severing is not favored when defendants are indicted together,” Matsumoto said. “I’d appreciate it if we could all be on the same page.”
Government prosecutor Sara Winik said the speedy trial clock should be paused because working through the evidence is a slog. She told the court the government needs to get into more than a dozen electronic devices and sift through what she expects to be four terabytes of digital evidence, a process that could take months, and then hand all of it to the defense to review. Even so, Winik said the government would be ready to go in August if it had to be.
Matsumoto stayed skeptical. “It doesn’t seem too logical to me to think about waiving speedy trial when you don’t have all the documents,” she told the defense. She scheduled the trial, expected to run eight weeks, for August 24 anyway. The parties are due back in court July 27 to talk through their preparation.
The Carones’ side is also going after the indictment itself. Their attorneys said last week they believe the government’s case has “major holes” and would fall apart in court, and they kept at it during the hearing, arguing the government didn’t spell out when and where the alleged bribery happened.
“What is the official act our client is alleged to have done?” Frank Carone attorney Andrew Goldstein asked. Matsumoto told the government to point the defense to where that answer sits in the indictment or to answer the questions directly.
The charging documents lean on text messages from September and October 2022. In them, prosecutors say, Zhu repeatedly asks Frank Carone to press city officials about awarding a contract to his hotel, Carone says he’ll see what he can do, and Zhu writes back, “thank you my big guy.” Other texts from those months, between Carone and unnamed city officials, have the officials telling Carone the Microtel isn’t an approved hotel and that they’ve “taken this as far as it could go,” so they’re “not clear what else you want me to do here.” Later messages between those officials, allegedly after Carone kept pushing, say the Microtel “had come directly from the top” and that they should “assume it is approved.”
High-profile defense attorney Marc Agnifilo, who represented the Alexander brothers in their federal sex trafficking case and Luigi Mangione in his state and federal murder cases, sat in the gallery and stood with Carone’s attorneys outside the courthouse. Court documents don’t yet show whether he’s joined the legal team.
All four defendants have been offered and accepted bail packages. As of the hearing, Zhu was still working out how to secure the $8 million bond set on him.
Featured image: Photo by Isabella Gallo
