A former aide to Mayor Eric Adams- who was on the radar with federal investigators last year for allegedly using her position to get perks- is back in the headlines for the wrong reasons. At a campaign event outside Adams’ new Harlem campaign office on Wednesday afternoon, Winnie Greco allegedly handed a bag of potato chips to a reporter whom she asked to meet her in a Whole Foods across the street. According to the reporter, Greco was persistent in offering the bag of chips to her before she finally relented. When the reporter later opened the bag, she saw that the bag contained a red envelope, which held a $100 bill and a few $20 bills.
Katie Honan is the reporter for the website The City who received the bag of sour cream and onion chips; she appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to discuss what happened when she found the money in the bag.
As Honan told host Larry Mendte, her initial reaction was stunned surprise. “As soon as I saw it was money, I just panicked. I immediately called my editor; he didn’t pick up right away. I called Winnie and I said, ‘I can’t accept this at all. Are you still in the Whole Foods? I need to get this back to you.’ She wasn’t, and then once my editors got involved, I just went down to our newsroom and they handled it from there, because I don’t know what her intent was, and I don’t know why she gave me what she gave me, but at this point it’s sort of not up to me to interpret her intent because she shouldn’t have done that.”
Greco casually dismissed the money as a misunderstanding of a cultural token among friends, but if she’s pushing her chips on people buying the explanation, Honan says that’s not the case: “My friends don’t give me money, so it was an odd experience… She was a city employee for two years, at least two years, and they have extensive ethics training- and I believe they probably frown on putting money in a bag of potato chips.”
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