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.
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).
