Winnie Greco, a longtime fundraiser for New York Mayor Eric Adams and an unpaid volunteer on his 2025 re-election campaign, was suspended after giving a journalist a potato-chip bag containing cash, Adams’s campaign said late Wednesday. According to the local news outlet THE CITY, Greco asked its reporter Katie Honan to meet her after a Harlem campaign-office opening on 20 August. Inside a partly opened bag of Herr’s Sour Cream & Onion chips that Greco insisted the reporter keep, Honan later found a red envelope holding at least one $100 bill and several $20 bills. The publication alerted the city’s Department of Investigation, which then passed the material to the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office. Greco apologised, calling the episode “a mistake,” while her lawyer Steven Brill said giving money in red envelopes is a Chinese gesture of friendship rather than an attempted payoff. Adams’s spokesman said the mayor had no prior knowledge of the encounter and that Greco is barred from further campaign activity. The incident adds to mounting legal scrutiny of the mayor’s inner circle. Greco resigned from City Hall last year after FBI agents searched her homes in an inquiry involving campaign fundraising. On Thursday, former senior adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin was separately charged with taking $75,000 in bribes.