Meet the CIA Asset Who Was Snuck Out of a Utah Jail to Take Down NYC Mayor Eric Adams

A reputed CIA asset, Turkish billionaire Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, is allegedly cooperating with federal officials in the sweeping investigation into New York City Mayor Eric Adams and is expected to take the stand in the former NYPD captain and Brooklyn Borough President's 2025 trial, Los Angeles has learned. 

Korkmaz was indicted in Utah on money laundering charges connected to a scheme run by an LA fuel magnate and a Mormon polygamist cult sect that pilfered a half billion dollars in bogus biofuel subsidies. Prosecutors say Korkmaz helped the unlikely criminal compatriots launder $133 million in stolen taxpayer cash, and when the green energy swindle led to a slew of arrests in L.A. and Utah, the billionaire went on the run. 

Interpol tracked his movements for years and found him in June 2021 getting a massage at a five-star hotel in Austria. Korkmaz was extradited to Utah in 2022, where a judge ordered him held without bail after the government argued he was a flight risk," one with “every incentive to flee the United States” as well as “the financial means to do so.”

However, sometime after he arrived in the U.S., Korkmaz was inexplicably released from a Utah jail and was spotted in New York City this summer distributing food from a Turkish restaurant, a free man despite the litany of criminal charges he continues to face in Utah, and the government's own assertion that he is a flight risk with access to tens of millions of dollars. According to the docket in his federal criminal case, Korkmaz is now slated to go on trial in November 2025, four years after his arrest. 

Korkmaz, who court records call a man with"longrunning entanglements with domestic and foreign governments," has now been identified as "Businessman #3" in the 57-page federal indictment that charges Mayor Adams with accepting luxury travel and foreign cash from bad actors in Turkey.

Adams' relationship with Turkish officials and the country's wealthiest occupants began in 2014 when he was elected as Brooklyn's Borough President, federal prosecutors say. Over the next decade, according to the indictment, he "sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel including from wealthy foreign business people and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him."

Korkmaz, who counts former CIA Director James Woolsey as a friend, was once a keynote speaker alongside Adams and members of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's administration during the United Nations General Assembly in 2017. Then, during a trip to Istanbul in 2019, and against the advice of a Turkish official who warned Korkmaz was "under suspicion of wrongdoing," Adams met with the "Businessman-3," now identified as Korkmaz. The two discussed Kormaz making a $50,000 campaign contribution to Adams' 2021 Mayoral campaign, "believing he [Adams] might one day be the President of the United States," according to the indictment. 

Because Korkmaz is a foreign national, the discussion turned to the use of straw donors in the U.S., which would make the contributions illegal. 

Before those monies could prop up Adams' campaign, prosecutors unraveled a money trail that led to the Turkish billionaire, saying, "Korkmaz and his co-conspirators allegedly used the biofuel fraud proceeds to acquire luxury homes and assets, as well as businesses such as Biofarma, the Turkish airline Borajet, a yacht named the Queen Anne, a hotel in Turkey and a villa and apartment on the Bosporus river in Istanbul."

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As this complicated and bizarre case was unwinding in Utah, Adams cut off contact with Korkmaz and refused to meet with the indicted billionaire in New York City, according to his indictment. He never accepted the troubled businessman's contribution, the indictment states, because "Businessman-3's legal troubles in Turkey and the United States became public." 

Adams, the first sitting New York City Mayor to be indicted, has pleaded not guilty and refuses to step down as he insists on his innocence.

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When he became Mayor, the indictment says, Adams agreed to ignore Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in 2022 after a Turkish official "repeatedly" demanded Adams bypass any statements of condolences to its victims in deference to Turkey's ongoing denial of the atrocities that began in 1915 when the Ottoman Empire began a targeted decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The systematic killings continued until 1923, when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey.

On Monday, attorneys for Adams filed a letter with a federal judge requesting an early trial date so that the Mayor could push his reelection bid. In it, his attorney wrote that Adam's scheduled March 2025 trial date will impede his campaign schedule. "It is likely that many New Yorkers will cast their ballots on the first days of early voting, which begins on June 14, 2025. An earlier trial date will ensure that Mayor Adams’s speedy trial rights are upheld, that the Mayor will be able to fully participate in his reelection campaign, and that this City’s voters can be rid of the distraction of this misguided indictment," he wrote, adding criticism for federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

"The prosecutors could have indicted Mayor Adams on a timeline that did not interfere with the campaign or waited until after the election. But, they chose to proceed him knowing that their preferred schedule would put the trial right in the middle of the Democratic primary."