New York City Deserves Better Than Eric Adams
The corruption charges against Adams are serious. He needs to resign.
New York City—as its mayor, Eric Adams, is fond of saying—is a very complicated city. A city where anything can happen.
Yesterday, New York got a little more complicated. In a first for the city, federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York unveiled a 57-page, five-count indictment against its sitting mayor, charging Adams with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and bribery. The case focuses on Adams’ decade-long relationship with agents acting on behalf of the Turkish government and with prominent figures in the Turkish business community who were eager to ingratiate themselves with one of New York’s most powerful figures.
Things look bleak for Adams because there isn’t just one open investigation in New York City but possibly dozens. And between them, there is more than enough to force Adams’ resignation.
There are three open federal investigations looking into Adams himself. Then there are also investigations open into the behavior of his hand-picked ally, Tim Pearson, an old cop buddy who was apparently tasked with disbursing lucrative city migrant security contracts. He also stands accused of starting a brawl at a migrant shelter.
There’s a federal investigation into Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Phil Banks, who may have helped to steer city contracts to his brother, Terence. And yet a third Banks brother, David, resigned on Tuesday from his role as Chancellor of New York City Schools. He is also under investigation. NYPD commissioner Edward Caban resigned two weeks ago at the mayor’s behest after having his phone seized by federal investigators, in what is yet another apparent investigation. Meanwhile, the city’s own Department of Investigation is looking into the actions of sheriff Anthony Miranda, another pal from Adams’ decades on the force, who stands accused by his own union head of abusing his remit in the city’s crackdown on illegal smoke shops—Miranda is possibly facing a federal investigation, too. The list goes on.
Taken together, a pattern emerges, one of powerful individuals, all bosom friends of the mayor, apparently enjoying carte blanche to carve up the city into personal fiefdoms in which the law is simply whatever they say it is. Graft is not a bug in this case but a feature of the “Adams way” of running city government, one which necessarily impacts the efficacy of government work, as officials devote more time to securing their share of the take than to overseeing their departments. If Adams did not encourage it, he tolerated it, seemingly indulging his friends at every opportunity. Faced with the choice of either recognizing the gravity of the charges leveled against his inner circle and resigning for the good of the city or fighting it out, Adams has decided to go down swinging, with his populist rhetorical playbook in hand.
Appearing before cameras this week to call the impending, unsealed indictment “entirely false and based on lies,” Adams reached for a well-worn playbook—blaming the feds.
Alleging a conspiracy of retaliation brought in response to his outspoken critique of the White House’s handling of the border crisis, Adams—who has repeatedly likened himself to the biblical Job in recent weeks—tried to sound defiant, citing his lifelong pursuit of justice as what would power him through this latest test: “I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target.”
“And,” he added with a rhetorical flourish, “a target I became.”
The city’s influx of migrants has been his favorite horse to beat since he first got into office. Unpopular budget cuts? The migrants are putting a strain on city services. Chaos and increasing delays in the subway? Guatemalan women are selling sweets down there. His abysmal approval rating? “Washington needs to do its job on the migrants and asylum seekers."
Time and again, difficulties that seem generic to running a municipal bureaucracy as large and complex as New York City’s were blamed on the city’s migrant population. The true responsibility for what happens in city government, meanwhile, rested not with the elected head of city government, but with the White House—never mind that the Adams administration has been beset by federal investigations from the moment he entered office, while, according to the indictment, city resources were spent to help the mayor hide a paper trail: “His every step is being watched right now,” an Adams staffer told a Turkish airline manager just six months into his tenure, according to the indictment.
Little surprise, then, that on Wednesday night, when faced with a more serious charge than incompetence, Adams sang a tune he knew by heart: “Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics.”
They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.
Federal retaliation is a very serious charge, so it bears looking at what exactly the mayor has been accused of.
The indictment picks up in 2015, little over a year after Adams began his tenure as Brooklyn Borough President. Detailing a period leading up to his election as mayor in 2021 and after, the indictment alleges a vast straw donor scheme in which both Adams and his underlings coordinated directly with Turkish agents to funnel illicit money from overseas into small-dollar donations channeled through both American citizens and Turkish nationals holding green cards in the United States. Exploiting New York’s matching program—in which a candidate is eligible to receive up to eight dollars in public money for every $1 received in small donations (up to $250 per donor)—prosecutors allege that Adams and his associates knowingly defrauded New York City of over $10 million during his successful 2021 campaign for mayor.
And that’s just the mayoral race. The indictment alleges the same figures had begun cultivating Adams long before that. Going back nearly a decade, Adams enjoyed lucrative gifts in the form of heavily discounted travel on Turkey’s national airline, often paying a mere nominal fee which amounted to a small fraction of the gifts’ total value. For years, Adams stayed in luxury hotels, enjoyed expensive private entertainment on his regular and frequent trips to Istanbul, and received free seating upgrades and gratis access to private suites replete with free food and other accommodations. For two nights in the “Bentley Suite” at the St. Regis Istanbul in 2017, which would ordinarily cost $7000, Adams apparently paid less than $600.
“New York City is the Istanbul of America,” the mayor said appreciatively at a Turkish flag raising ceremony in 2023. “I’m probably the only mayor in the history of this city that has not only visited Turkey once, but I think I'm on my sixth or seventh visit to Turkey.” It may be that the total value of the gifts exceeds $120,000.
So: Why was Adams so popular in a country so far away?
Simply, because he could be got cheap, was easy to dazzle, and because it was, evidently, smart money: after all, Adams eventually became mayor. Turkey correctly pegged him as a rising star, and it paid many times over to have him on-side in New York to help them project Turkish power and prestige in a city so central to the world economy.
Among other favors, Adams personally bulldozed through the red tape which barred Turkey’s expensive new 36-floor consulate from opening, applying pressure to the Department of Buildings and the FDNY to smooth the way—even as, according to the indictment, a Fire Department inspector wrote to his superiors that, in his opinion, “this building is not safe to occupy.” It opened not long after. (More sordidly, though perhaps with less real-world effect, Adams also offered assurances to a Turkish official that he would not issue a statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which he did not).
There’s little question that Adams was fully aware of the illegality of what he was doing. While planning yet another possible trip to Turkey, as borough president in 2019, an Adams staffer texted him, “To be o[n the] safe side Please Delete all messages you send me.”
“Always do,” responded the future mayor. Later, Adams would claim to FBI investigators that, while he would love to turn over his cell phone for examination, he had misplaced the passcode he himself had changed just the previous day.
New Yorkers may never know just how much time their mayor spent concealing his own alleged misdeeds instead of seeing to city matters. But it would appear that, in his time of need, the embattled mayor has just found a slew of unlikely allies on the Trumpian right, ready to shore up his narrative of retaliation even as they were learning the basic facts of the case.
“Lots of Dems take foreign money,” wrote MAGA-world influencer and Pizzagate hobbyist Jack Posobiec on X. “Look at which one got indicted.”
“It’s one thing to use lawfare against Republicans but when it’s used against one of their own, Democrats will start to wake up,” wrote Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital and prominent Trump donor, on X.
More troubling than a few cranks on the internet is that the New York Post gave over its entire front page to pushing back against the indictment, contending that “there may be less here than meets the eye.”
Some in the media went even further: “All available evidence,” writes Liel Leibovitz in Tablet, “suggests that Mayor Adams is now the victim of a lawfare campaign.”
But what goes unremarked upon by Adams’ new allies on the right is that the fish rots from the head. There is no one under investigation in Eric Adams’s government who was not vetted, vouched for, and ultimately appointed by Eric Adams.
The mayor is correct that New York is a very complicated city, one which faces numerous challenges. The pandemic took a chunk out of its tax base as thousands of Manhattanites moved to the suburbs, while the revolution in remote working smashed revenues even further and leveled the corporate real estate market. He is also correct that the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have arrived over the last five years have strained city government even further, filling the city’s shelters (already stretched to capacity by a large population of unhoused New Yorkers), and then some. Pressed on his administration’s performance, Adams has pleaded these factors repeatedly: Can’t you—the public, the press—see the hand I’ve been dealt?
But the bottom line is this: There is not a single difficulty facing New York City that would not be better handled by a different administration, one whose officials are not consumed in their daily efforts by cat-and-mouse games with federal authorities, the elevation of incompetent cronies, and the ever-multiplying task of carving up the city and its public departments like one giant pie.
Taken on its own, the indictment finds that Adams, while he claimed to be working tirelessly on behalf of New Yorkers, was in fact using much of that time to consult and soothe conspirators, destroy the evidence of his own wrongdoing, and see to the priorities of a foreign government—all for his own personal benefit. Even while traveling to Washington in November 2023 to consult with the White House on the migrant issue—the issue which he claims has kneecapped his administration and threatens even now to “destroy” his city—he canceled his meetings and turned around upon receiving the news that the FBI had raided his chief fundraiser’s apartment. Forced to choose, Adams could not but reveal what mattered to him most. His underlings just play follow-the-leader.
Adams defenders are correct that a corrupt government in New York is nothing new. Neither is an incompetent government. But the two together are just intolerable.
“New Yorkers are angry,” Mayor Adams is fond of saying.
Maybe they ought to be.
Brendan Ruberry is Production Editor and Podcast Producer at Persuasion.
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Elections have consequences.😉
Eric Adams just looks shady.