Winnie Greco just wanted to be friends. But that’s not the job of a City Hall reporter.
Listen in on a conversation between Epicenter NYC and Katie Honan, a reporter for the City and co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast, who was covering a routine campaign event that turned bizarre.
As Honan details in this account, Greco—an Adams aide and once-liaison to the Asian community who resigned under scandal last year—asked Honan to meet her across the street from Adams’ newly announced campaign office. Her texts and communication, according to Honan, kept saying “we can be friends.” They entered a Whole Foods where Greco insisted Honan take a bag of Herr’s sour cream-and-onion potato chips. Once at the 125th Street subway station, Honan looked inside and saw an envelope of cash.
A few hundred dollars seems a very low amount to buy off such a dogged, veteran reporter. We’ve known Katie Honan, a fellow lover of Queens and parm, for about 15 years now and her take didn’t surprise us: “Even if it was $10,000, I would have responded the same way. It just would have been a heavier bag.”
Watch or listen here to see what happens next. Also, Honan discusses
- the racial dynamics of a mostly white press corps covering NYC’s second Black mayor,
- other investigations into the Adams administration,
- and how the campaign is going. (Check out our Q-and-A too.)
The Adams administration has suspended Greco as a volunteer. For her part, Greco apologized and said “it’s a culture thing” to give reporters money. It’s actually not; as Democratic strategist and AAPI expert Trip Yang ‘grammed: “To be clear, this is not a Chinese thing. This is, at minimum, being a Dumb@ss.”
