Maybe you saw the Onion headline, the one people were sharing on Wednesday night after news broke that New York City Mayor Eric Adams would be indicted on federal corruption charges. The headline is a fake but revealing quote from New York’s real onetime mayor, the chronically unpopular Bill de Blasio: “Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy To Find A Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?”
Hard, indeed. Harder than it should be, for the biggest and best city in America, which rarely gets the leadership it deserves. Not since the mayoralty of Michael R. Bloomberg, which ended in 2013, has the city had what might be called a truly competent chief executive. And given the lackluster bunch of candidates eager to replace Adams, that inauspicious streak is likely to continue. Adams himself, meanwhile, has made no indication that he will resign, despite growing calls for him to do so; if he doesn’t, he will run for re-election next year.
“We had a lot of warning going in,” former top Bloomberg aide Bradley Tusk told me in an email, pointing out that Adams had a history of flirting with corruption. A top Democratic strategist who spoke to me before the indictment said he was unsurprised by how the Adams administration had unfolded. “In a lot of ways,” said the strategist, “the chickens are coming home to roost.”
“Why were the warning signs so roundly ignored?”
But if the dangers of electing Adams were so obvious, why were the warning signs so roundly ignored?
New Yorkers elected Adams, a former New York Police Department officer, because they had had enough of the testy, arrogant de Blasio. They were tired of homeless encampments and shuttered storefronts and people getting pushed in front of subway trains, and if de Blasio wasn’t really to blame for all this, he wasn’t doing enough to fix it, either.
Adams promised to fix it, to fight crime in particular. He didn’t have deep managerial experience, the way Bloomberg did, or share de Blasio’s fierce conviction in progressive ideology. He wasn’t a former prosecutor like Rudy Giuliani. He had grown up poor in Queens, worked what were at the time tough Brooklyn precincts as a beat cop. As a New York state senator, he launched a campaign, “Stop the Sag,” urging young black men to pull up their pants. By the time the coronavirus struck, he was Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial position. He lived in his office for a time.
Then, as the pandemic began to subside and New Yorkers began to wonder what their city would look like, with the rich having decamped to the Hamptons and Midtown cleared of office employees who were now working from home, Adams decided that there was another office he wanted: that of Hizzoner, the mayor of Gotham.
The Democratic primary field to replace de Blasio was crowded, and Adams didn’t, at first, do much to distinguish himself. Progressive attorney Maya Wiley was a darling of Manhattan liberals, while Andrew Yang appealed to the kinds of non-ideological technocrats who pined for Bloomberg. But what Adams had, and they lacked, was consistency of message. The message was simple and viscerally appealing: “The prerequisite for prosperity is public safety,” he said over and over.
“People were, I think, less pro-Eric Adams than they were anti-Bill de Blasio,” Melissa DeRosa, a political strategist who served as a close adviser to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, told me. There is always that danger to the politics of exhaustion, when voters simply want change. You can’t blame them, but change alone is rarely sufficient.
Federal agents entered Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence tucked away on the leafy edge of the Upper East Side, early Thursday morning. According to Adams’s own attorney, Alex Spiro, they were there to seize a phone. A few weeks before, they had also seized the phones of several of his top administration officials, including the schools chancellor and police chief. Many of them promptly resigned, plunging City Hall into a state of shocked paralysis.
Adams is now being investigated for foreign influence and improper campaign fundraising, though other investigations are still open. Most of the allegations point to evidence of plain old corruption: shaking down nightclubs (that would be the police commissioner’s brother, and possibly the commissioner himself); rigging bids for city contracts (the schools chancellor, possibly, and possibly also his fiancée, top City Hall aide Sheena Wright); and sexual harassment (Timothy Pearson, another top aide). As for Adams himself, he may have ruined his political career for better seats on Turkish Airlines.
“I do not think he will resign,” Tusk, the former Bloomberg adviser, told me. “I think he’ll insist he’s innocent, pivot the campaign completely to be about race and persecution (has worked for other pols in scandals), and stay in office and on the ballot.” The video Adams released on Wednesday night, disputing the forthcoming allegations against him, makes clear he intends to do just that, staking his chance on the black middle-class neighborhoods of eastern Queens, outer Brooklyn, and the Bronx, all of which propelled him to victory in 2021.
“I think winning under indictment is nearly impossible,” Tusk said. And the race could be scrambled if former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who resigned from office, enters the race. People close to the former governor say he intends to do just that. He has recently been visiting black churches, in a sign that he is willing to take the fight directly to Adams’s home turf.
Adams, meanwhile, is trying to soldier on, but even before his own indictment, the top ranks of his administration had been depleted by scandal. The legal challenges Adams and his top aides (some of whom remain at City Hall) face “would make it nearly impossible to do the 24-hour-a-day, demanding job that the public expects them to do,” DeRosa told me. “If you can no longer serve the public, it’s time to go.”
“A fall from grace? This is more like a plummet.”
A fall from grace? This is more like a plummet. Adams won the Democratic primary—and, effectively, the general election—at a time when national Democrats were struggling to talk about spiking violent crime, pandemic-era school closures, and related issues that seemed to fall into a difficult limbo between politics, culture, and society. At what looked like a grim time for the party, he looked like a happy warrior.
“Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic Party,” a victorious Adams said after fending off a late rally from Wiley. Three weeks later, he went to Washington for a gun-crime summit with President Biden. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper ahead of the meeting, he criticized the “misplaced” priorities of the Democratic Party. “I don’t believe we should be suing officers who are doing their job,” he said as others in the party were still struggling to distance themselves from the previous summer’s “defund” rhetoric.
The same media outlets that had dismissed Adams as a lightweight (and something of a weirdo) now cast his primary win as a watershed moment, and not only for the Big Apple. The pollster Nate Silver deemed Adams a credible post-Biden presidential contender. Silver clearly wasn’t the only one. In May 2022, the New York Post reported that, just a few months into his mayoral tenure, Adams was already eyeing the White House. “Eric has told me repeatedly that he thinks that he has a platform to run for national office, for president in 2024,” a City Hall insider told the Post. Today, that seems less like a sign of Adams’s own political prowess than the growing establishment desperation about the possibility of Biden running again. But you know what they say about hindsight.
“These guys were always small-ball players,” the Democratic strategist told me. Not unlike some early members of the Trump Cabinet—remember Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt and his fondness for private jets, or the time Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke paraded through downtown Washington on a horse?—they seemed to think that public office entitled them to boundless self-enrichment.
“They run the city like it’s their own fucking fiefdom,” the leading Democratic strategist told me. Early in his administration, Adams tried to hire his brother for a high-ranking City Hall post. That effort failed, but Adams hired plenty of other figures—the Banks brothers, who served as schools chancellor (David) and deputy mayor for public safety (Philip), and former NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban—with whom he was close.
“He only seems to hire people he went to high school with and doesn’t seem to place any rules or restrictions on what they do,” Tusk said. Adams is the city’s second black mayor, after the courtly but ineffectual one-termer David N. Dinkins, but in temperament he is an old-school Tammany Hall poobah who sees corruption as part of his job. And perhaps, in an earlier age, New Yorkers could forgive occasional graft, as long as the subways were clean and potholes on the Major Deegan weren’t the size of Arizona. Adams, however, didn’t have that luxury.
About three months after the publication of that intriguing Post tidbit about an Adams presidential run, on Aug. 5, 2022, a bus pulled up to Gate 14 in the cavernous Port Authority bus terminal in Hell’s Kitchen. Inside were about 50 migrants, many of whom had fled Venezuela and other Latin American nations. They had crossed into the United States through the border with Mexico. Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, decided to ship them north, to Democratic cities including Chicago, Denver, and New York.
Back in the fall of 2021, Adams had tweeted: “We should protect our immigrants. Period. Yes, New York City will remain a sanctuary city under an Adams administration.” But as thousands of migrants kept arriving in New York, that position proved untenable. The Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown was converted into an intake center. Outside, on the sidewalk, barbers gave haircuts.
Neighborhoods objected to sheltering migrants, including progressive enclaves such as the Upper West Side. Integrating migrant children into the city’s educational bureaucracy also proved a challenge. Men joined the brutal, exploitative DoorDash economy, delivering food on mopeds via apps. Members of the exceptionally violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua began to arrive, as well.
Most of this wasn’t Adams’s fault. But it was his problem. In early 2023, Adams told me he was “extremely frustrated” that the federal government wasn’t doing more to help cities who were spending billions to house migrants. I relayed that frustration to the White House, which, in return, effectively said that Adams was on his own.
Critics of the president argue that his lax border policies made the migrant crisis much worse than it should have been. In June, Biden issued an executive order implementing stronger border security measures, in what could be seen as a tacit admission that those critics had a point.
But by mid-2024, it was too late for Adams, who was continuing to struggle with an influx that had reached 200,000 migrants. Throughout 2023, the budding friendship with Biden steadily soured. The midterm congressional election had proved that crime wasn’t as salient an issue for voters nationwide as it was in New York and a few other cities. And besides, by 2023, violent crime had started to fall. And the mayor’s demands for more migrant funding only served as a reminder that the problem was ultimately a federal one. This was true, of course, but also exceptionally inconvenient.
The most vivid sign of their rift came in Chicago, last month, during the Democratic National Convention. Adams, who had been the subject of presidential rumors, was ethically compromised and politically toxic. He had been celebrated as a rising star of the party. Now, he was on the sidelines, sans speaking spot.
The 57-page federal indictment against Adams focuses mostly on the “improper valuable gifts” Adams had been taking for years from Turkey. It was brought by the Southern District of New York, led by Damian Williams, who has sent FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and hip-hop impresario Sean “Puffy” Combs to jail. In fact, they share a dormitory at a detention center in Brooklyn. On social media, some have joked that Adams could soon join them. What a trio that would be.
“High-priced attorneys will do everything they can to stymie the proceedings.”
Adams, however, isn’t going to go down easy. High-priced attorneys will do everything they can to stymie the proceedings against him. And the Supreme Court’s decision in McDonnell v. United States, a corruption case involving the former governor of Virginia, stipulates that bribery has to involve an “official act” to pass legal muster. (When it comes to Adams, the government’s theory of the case will likely involve permitting for the new Turkish consulate in Turtle Bay.)
Politically, though, he is in as weak a position as any mayor since Dinkins in the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots, which he was charged with not quelling quickly enough. “The ad writes itself,” the Democratic strategist told me. The mayor who promised to be a crimefighter turned out to be the city’s most prolific criminal. “This cuts to his whole reason for being elected.”
Another Democratic insider was more blunt about Adams and his prospects for a second term: “It’s over.”