A Brooklyn federal judge gave Yan Po Zhu, a hotel owner charged with bribing former Eric Adams chief of staff Frank Carone, permission to leave the five boroughs to attend the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, the New York Daily News reported.
Zhu, who also goes by Andy Zhu, is out on $8 million bond while awaiting trial on charges he manipulated the city’s migrant crisis for financial gain. His release conditions otherwise bar him from traveling outside the five boroughs, Westchester, or Long Island. Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Kiyo Matsumoto granted the exception after Zhu’s lawyer made the request during a status conference Wednesday, according to the Daily News.
Carone is accused of taking $120,000 in bribes to steer an emergency shelter contract to the Microtel, a 75-room hotel Zhu owns on 40th Ave. near 29th St. in Long Island City. Zhu, Carone, Carone’s brother Anthony, and Zhu’s employee Crystal Chen were all indicted about a week before Wednesday’s conference and have each pleaded not guilty, the Daily News reported.
Wednesday’s status conference was about scheduling. The Carone brothers want to move quickly to trial and are opposing any pause to the federal court’s 70-day speedy-trial clock. “We do want the court to set a trial date as soon as the court is available,” Frank Carone’s lawyer, Andrew Goldstein, said, according to the Daily News.
Zhu and Chen’s defense teams pushed back. Chen’s lawyer, Deirdre von Dornum, noted that prosecutors still need to hand over four terabytes of discovery material totaling roughly a million pages, and argued that her team lacks the resources of the Carones and has not known about the investigation for as long. “I think it’ll be highly unfair for Ms. Chen to put her into that position,” von Dornum said, the Daily News reported.
Matsumoto set a tentative trial date of Aug. 24 but said she does not expect it to hold. “It doesn’t seem logical to me to think about a speedy trial if you don’t even have the documents yet,” she said, according to the Daily News.
Zhu, a Chinese citizen, also came up in the separate trial of Linda Sun, a former aide to Governors Cuomo and Hochul who was accused of acting as a foreign agent and steering New York’s official policy toward Chinese interests. Zhu and Sun were videotaped together at a July 2019 protest against the Taiwanese president’s visit to New York, and Zhu obtained a ticket for Sun to a Beijing event celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, an FBI agent testified at that trial. Sun’s case ended in a mistrial in December, according to the Daily News.
