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Updated at 9:25 p.m. ET on March 21, 2024.
On a soggy January day, New York Mayor Eric Adams travels to a theater in the Bronx to deliver his State of the City address. As dignitaries and the odd reporter take their seats, an Afro-Latino jazz band jams onstage, followed by a flamenco dance company, a gospel choir, and a gamut of religious leaders—Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh. “O Lord, in obedience with your holy word, we intercede on behalf of our mayor,” a Latina evangelical minister says, setting the mood. “Bless him with courage like you gave David, wisdom like you gave Solomon.”
Adams, wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit, steps onstage. Union workers raise their arms and sway rapturously. Beaming, he beckons his top aides to stand one by one—all women of color. It’s a stirring display, a power flex by a Black mayor showing off his diverse administration.
Alas, Adams punctuates the scene like this:
“These women, let me tell you something—you may cut the umbilical cord but that fluid that carries you is something that is spiritual and lasts a lifetime.”
“I don’t just like them; I love them!”
The mayor’s amniotic reverie appears to catch one deputy mayor off guard; a forced grin freezes on her face.
Adams himself has a megawatt smile and an ebullient streak, as I saw while following him around the city for a few weeks. The 63-year-old mayor also has a long history of ad-libbing in odd and often self-aggrandizing ways that befuddle his audiences. One day last summer he went before an audience in Brooklyn and proclaimed, “I am the symbol of Black manhood in this city, in this country, and what it represents. I am the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe, and people need to recognize that!” Not long after, he attended an India Day celebration and declared: “I am Gandhi-like. I think like Gandhi; I act like Gandhi; I want to be like Gandhi.” He has insisted that “I am mayor because God gave me the authority to be mayor” and says he designs policy with a “godlike” approach.
Not long ago, in fact, it was as if God had parted the electoral sea for him. In the 2021 mayoral election, elites and liberal-left voters divided their ballots between his closest rivals. Adams, a former New York City Police Department captain who first entered public life as an advocate for Black officers, ultimately eked out a one-percentage-point victory in the Democratic primary.
Two years into his term, though, the mayor’s groove is worn, his once-high poll ratings are sickly, and disrespect from fellow politicians is mounting daily. His mayoralty just might be heading toward a crack-up. For close to two years, a river of asylum-seeking migrants, 175,000 so far, has flooded the city’s streets and shelters. A visibly rattled Adams, who had not previously managed an agency bigger than the largely ceremonial office of the Brooklyn borough president, proclaimed a budget apocalypse in September. “I don’t see an ending to this,” he said then. “This issue will destroy New York City.”
November brought a more ominous turn for Adams. Federal agents waved aside his security team, handed him a subpoena, and seized his cellphones and iPad as part of an investigation into his campaign fundraising. And FBI agents late last month searched two homes of an influential aide to Adams who has also raised money for him.
Adams has not been charged with anything. But the chasm between prophetic destiny and the reality of his mayoralty gets wider and wider. How in the Lord’s name could this have happened?
One frigid morning this winter, I followed him to the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx, a mosque that serves West African communities. Many dozens of men, laborers and taxi drivers and shop clerks, crowded about Adams, laughing and holding up cellphones to film him.
The imam praised the mayor before handing him the microphone. Standing in the adoring midst, Adams galloped off on a passionate, almost angry speech. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he said, he stood with Pakistanis and demanded the release of unjustly detained boys. “No one joined me,” Adams said. “I was by myself.” When a bombing in Lahore, Pakistan, killed 75 people in 2016, he alone wanted to fly to Pakistan and “fight on behalf of these innocent people. I couldn’t get anyone to take a flight with me.”
Each of these anecdotes is at best a concatenation of fact and fiction. Yes, Adams attended vigils after the 2016 bombing. He even discussed joining a group trip to Lahore to meet that city’s mayor, according to a local Pakistani activist with whom Adams’s press office put me in touch. The flight fell through not because others lacked his courage, but because of scheduling conflicts and a State Department travel warning.
The mayor’s claim of leading protests after 9/11 seemed still more grandiose. I wrote in-depth about that community after 9/11, and neither I nor any of the activists I met then recall seeing him at such demonstrations. Adams went to a federal jail on his own to register his disapproval of the detention policy, a spokesperson told me, adding by email that the “mayor does feel that the press should have paid more attention at the time.”
Adams wrapped up his mosque talk pointing at the audience. “You align yourself with those who want to malign me!” he said. Some of the immigrants exchanged puzzled looks. Us?
Adams’s voice rose, and his message became more evident: He suggested that he and his listeners are kindred in a hostile political world. “I was born in this country, yes, but let’s get something clear: I am African. I am African,” he said, adding, “Are we going to allow the enslaver that ripped us away from each other generations ago to rip us again?” He wasn’t talking about how he or his administration might help audience members; he was asking them to stand with him.
What sets Adams apart when things are going well, what makes him sound inescapably different from other New York Democrats today, is his cargo of life experience accumulated in a tough New York far removed from affluent brownstone Brooklyn, the Upper West and East Sides, and the hipster-socialist belt that runs from Williamsburg to Astoria. To be a self-made mayor from the underbelly of an unequal city takes considerable strength and political skill. In a city where some prominent liberal politicians took up slogans such as “Defund the police,” Adams’s background gives him the standing to challenge upscale-progressive truisms.
But as Adams walked into a late-January press conference in City Hall’s elegant mayoral wing, he looked drawn and tired. The left-leaning city council was poised to override his veto of a bill that would require police officers to record the race, ethnicity, gender, and age of every person they talked to during an investigation, even if the conversations were friendly. This legislation, Adams insisted, would drown cops in paperwork and impair crime fighting. He was desperate to defeat it. A day earlier, a sympathetic council member had called Adams. “Eric,” this member said, “you just might be the only Black man in New York politics who opposes this city-council bill.”
The mayor’s impending defeat seemed all the more confounding because the issue should have played to Adams’s strengths. As an ex-cop, he had campaigned as the tough-on-crime candidate. Voters in Black, Asian, and Latino working- and middle-class neighborhoods formed the bedrock of his support, and—unlike the city’s political class—shared his visceral sense of crime’s malignancies. Polls suggest that not only do Black and Latino voters oppose defunding the police, but a majority favor increasing the police budget. Adams touched on this reality often during his campaign. “I challenge you,” he told reporters: “Go through these communities with high crime and you start telling them you are going to pull the police away. You are going to need a cop.”
But at the press conference I attended, he backpedaled. He insisted that compromise remained possible. “I support the concept of this bill, I cannot say that enough,” he said. But, he continued, “I will never do anything or support anything that’s going to erode public safety in the city.”
Later that same day, the city council voted by an overwhelming margin to override his veto. Left-wing members claimed that Adams had ignored Black trauma. They were not elected, said one council member, “to make the NYPD officers’ lives easy or more convenient.”
Lincoln Restler, a tousle-haired white councilman who represents Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and neighboring Greenpoint, rose to explain his vote. A private-school kid and the son of a private-equity investor, Restler grew up in Brooklyn Heights, a genteel neighborhood on a bluff overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. He sounded intent on reeducating the mayor. “I have been deeply disturbed by his misinformation campaign,” Restler said. “I have news that I’d like to share: Racism exists.”
Restler’s declaration could hardly be a revelation for the mayor. Over the years, Adams—who declined multiple requests for an interview for this article—has told of a mother perched on poverty’s edge in South Jamaica, Queens, scratching for dollars to buy food for her six children and to pay the mortgage after her husband left, and a troublemaking teenager who ran with a gang. In some versions of his story, after a 15-year-old Adams and an older brother stole money, or possibly a television, from a prostitute, two white cops pulled them into the local precinct and beat them. As Adams once recalled it: “They asked, ‘Do you feel like a beating?’ like you might ask, ‘Do you feel like a hamburger?’” Eventually, Adams said, a Black cop told the white cops to stop.
Years later, Adams decided to join the police. He spoke of this improbable epiphany to the journalist Juan Williams in 1999, a conversation Williams later recounted in The Atlantic. Adams figured being a cop was a great hustle; cops were more powerful than the petty criminals he admired. He had seen firsthand that a Black officer could even face down two white ones. “That Black guy was able to go among those white guys and stop this,” Adams told Williams. “He got juice—J-U-I-C-E, as the kids would say.”
Adams graduated from the police academy with top grades and headed into the subways, where he was seen as an effective transit cop. The New York City of the 1980s abounded with dystopian menace. Swaths of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn were burned-out ruins. The homicide rate was four to seven times higher than it is today. One night in 1988, a mile from the small brick home where Adams had grown up, in Queens, the police officer Edward Byrne sat in a patrol car guarding the home of a Guyanese woman who had spoken out about drug dealing on her block. Two men walked up; one tapped on Byrne’s window, and the other shot the officer in the head five times. Byrne was among dozens of police officers killed in the ’80s.
The NYPD itself was in turmoil. Adams became the head of two associations of Black officers and rose to captain, all the while challenging his bosses in what was then a majority-white department over racial discrepancies in hiring and promotions, and over police brutality toward civilians. Line cops were expected to keep their lips pressed shut when around reporters, but Adams rarely hesitated to chat with the media. He went on television and testified before the city council about the abuses of the department’s street-crimes unit. Commissioners came to detest him.
His activism, he has maintained, put his life at risk. He has described an incident in 1996, when a dark sedan pulled up beside his car late at night in Brooklyn. A man said his name, and Adams saw a gun barrel sticking out the side window, he recalled three years ago in an interview with The City, a nonprofit local news site. The future mayor hit the gas and heard a shot, and a bullet shattered his back window. He speculated that the shooter might have been a cop but offered no evidence. “When I look back, I’m amazed I was able to get out of the department alive,” Adams told The City.
This tale, as with so much that Adams says, has curious gaps and logical inconsistencies. He told the press that the shooter was Black. But why would a Black officer shoot at a Black captain with a reputation for speaking up for the rights of Black officers? Did a sergeant really advise him, as Adams claimed, not to file a report of the shooting? Adams, who by his own account refused that guidance, told The City that the department simply dropped its investigation. But in fact, A decorated Black detective, Andre Parker, investigated the incident, according to Streetsblog NYC. Although that officer had grown up in the neighborhood where the incident supposedly took place, and knew it well, he could find no corroborating information.
Wilbur Chapman, now retired, was at the time the department’s chief of patrol and its highest-ranking Black officer. He, too, spoke his mind to reporters and was no fan of Adams. “Adams did very little, but he was very good at getting attention,” Chapman told me. When I asked him about that long-ago shooting, Chapman laughed. “Why was he shot at? By whom? I have never heard of a police officer who was shot at and a desk sergeant would not take his report. It’s all one of the mysteries of the 20th century.”
If the police department was one major factor in Adams’s rise to prominence, his religion was the other one. He grew up in the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly Black Pentecostalist denomination. Pentecostalism, a fast-growing evangelical movement, is notable for its emotional services and an outlook imbued with a sense of personal revelation. “There’s a huge emphasis on the work of the spirit as transformative,” Eli Valentin, a political consultant, preacher, and lecturer at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told me. “When the mayor says he is called personally by God, he is speaking quite literally.”
As a young man, Adams was drawn to a particular Pentecostal church, the House of the Lord in Downtown Brooklyn. Its ministry is grounded in activism for the poor; its motto exhorts, “Be ye not hearers of the word only, but doers also.” The church’s pastor, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry Sr., had served time in prison as a young man and loomed large in the cosmology of New York City activist preachers. He helped persuade Adams to become a cop. “Some of us needed to work outside of the system, and some inside the system,” Daughtry told The New York Times when asked about Adams in 2021. “To model what policemen should be about and to find out what’s going on. Why were we having all these killings?”
By Adams’s account, everything came together—his faith, his work in policing—when God told him to enter politics. “Thirty something years ago I woke up, out of my sleep in a cold sweat. God spoke to my heart and said, ‘You are going to be the mayor January 1, 2022,” he recounted during a Father’s Day service last year at Lenox Road Baptist Church, according to an account of the event in the New York Post. “You cannot be silent,” he says that God told him. “You must tell everyone you know.” Adams took this counsel to heart. “I would tell everybody, ‘I’m going to be mayor on January 1, 2022. People used to think I needed medication.’”
Adams has often expressed his admiration for the city’s first Black mayor, David N. Dinkins, a social democrat who believed in multiracial coalitions and was elected to a single four-year term in 1989. But Dinkins’s emphasis on racial amity was not Adams’s jam. In 1993, Herman Badillo, a former Puerto Rican Democratic member of Congress, ran on an electoral ticket with Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican. Adams lashed out at Badillo, saying that if he was really interested in his community, he would have married a Latina. Badillo’s wife was Jewish.
Adams grew close with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a Black nationalist with a long history of anti-Semitic statements. Adams criticized Major Owens, a Black member of Congress from Brooklyn and a liberal icon, for attacking Farrakhan too harshly. In 1994, Adams declared that he would challenge Owens in a primary. But Adams failed to collect enough signatures and implied, without offering evidence, that Owens’s partisans had stolen his petitions.
As a politician, Adams was flailing. He changed his registration to Republican, saying Democrats had failed the Black community on crime. A few years later he reenrolled as a Democrat, perhaps realizing that the Republican Party offered no sure path in a Democrat-dominated city. Finally, in 2006, he gained election to the state Senate. When I interviewed Adams in that era, he came across as a nuanced critic of the police department, if not particularly conversant on other issues.
His senate tenure is best known for a moment of low comedy. In his first year, he gave a speech complaining loudly that senators were underpaid at $79,500 a year—about $117,000 in today’s money. “I deserve to get paid more, and I’m only a freshman, and I’m complaining,” Adams said. “Show me the money. Show me the money. That’s what it’s all about.”
Behind the scenes, he proved adept at the business of back-scratching and ethically dubious campaign fundraising that has long defined the state Senate. He became chair of that body’s Racing and Wagering Committee, and he played a role in selecting a company to operate video slot machines at the state-owned Aqueduct Racetrack. One evening in 2009, when the contract was still under deliberation, Adams threw a birthday party and fundraiser for himself and loudly thanked one of the contract bidders for his contributions. He did so in front of representatives of another bidder, who later felt like they had no choice but to contribute to Adams’s campaign fund.
The manner in which Adams, top legislative leaders, and New York’s then-governor handled the Aqueduct issue triggered a state inspector general’s corruption investigation, in which the birthday party became a subplot. Under oath, the senator testified that he could not recall whether Aqueduct bidders were present that night. His memory lapses and other explanations for his actions, the inspector general’s report stated, “strains credulity.”
During his senate years, Adams also planted himself in the bosom of the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine. When he set his eyes on the Brooklyn borough presidency in 2013, he ran unopposed. His new office was a fiefdom that reformers had all but stripped of its once-formidable power. But it was still a high-visibility seat in the most populous New York City borough. His political makeover was under way. His persona as a cop with a social-justice conscience played well with white liberals. And the man who had embraced Farrakhan came to build alliances with the borough’s large Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. (This January, an Orthodox publication, Shtetl, reported that Adams had sided with members of Agudath Israel, an Orthodox organization, against the state education department’s efforts to demand that religious schools give children a basic education in secular subjects. The poor quality of education at some yeshivas has been a years-long scandal, but Adams urged his audience to fight harder against state oversight. “Where’s our presence in the streets?” he exhorted. “Where’s our outrage when you talk about protecting the foundations of your schools?”)
In interviews, former Adams staffers described him as forever on the move—from a St. Patrick’s Day parade to shopping at Tashkent Supermarket in Brighton Beach, home to many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, to a block party to mosques and churches. No ethnic event was too insignificant. That is good retail politics. But Steve Zeltser, who was hired to be Adams’s man in south Brooklyn, left after becoming unsettled by his boss’s omnivorous flesh-pressing. “No issues seemed to move him,” Zeltser told me. “His ‘vision’ as borough president was how he could become mayor.”
Adams announced his candidacy for New York’s highest office a year after the city adopted ranked-choice voting, which meant that a candidate could win the Democratic nomination without a runoff weeks later against the second-place finisher. He faced three major opponents: the left-liberal MSNBC pundit and former mayoral counsel Maya Wiley, who is Black; the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, an Asian American; and the former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who is white. Race and ethnicity are not determinative in city elections, but they are rarely incidental.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic and a nationwide upheaval triggered by George Floyd’s murder the summer before, press coverage of the 2021 campaign fixed on social-justice themes. Adams obliged, but only to a point: He focused more on crime fighting, and promised to get couch-bound workers back into half-empty office buildings. On occasion, he lashed out. In a speech on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, he condemned those who had moved into gentrifying neighborhoods: “Go back to Iowa. You go back to Ohio,” he said. “New York City belongs to the people that were here.”
Many of those newcomers, younger white renters, leaned to the political left and supported his opponents. When Adams edged out his closest contender in the final tally, he suggested this was a rebuke for a leftward-moving Democratic Party. He doubled down on his campaign message: “If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse,” he said in a speech the night of the primary. “It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities.”
After that, his public messaging became more progressive-friendly. He began to talk of building affordable housing, perhaps with an eye to courting liberals before the general election. Behind closed doors, he tended to his right flank: A few nights after his primary victory, he dined at a former mob joint in East Harlem as the guest of a blustery conservative white former cop and a conservative billionaire supermarket baron.
To peer back over five decades of mayors is to see a parade of definable New York types: Edward Koch, a former congressman, took office in 1978, as the city hovered near bankruptcy. Acerbic, funny, peevish, and commanding, he had a gift for selecting top deputies who understood the city and bragged about making other politicians sweat. Dinkins tried to unify a racially torn city during a deep recession and hired some innovative commissioners. The operatic Giuliani, who yearned to liberate the city from the crime that had scarred it for decades, waved off reporters’ questions as “really actually jerky” and demanded police officers’ obedience by saying, “After all, I’m the M-A-Y-O-R.”
His successor, Michael Bloomberg, an impatient builder of bike lanes and parks and housing, personified the power of pro-business technocracy. Bloomberg reportedly rushed back from Bermuda in a private plane as a nasty blizzard descended on the city and afterward suggested that snowbound New Yorkers should quit complaining—after all, Broadway plays were still full. Bill de Blasio, elected from the Democratic Party’s left wing at a moment of yawning inequality, fancied himself a progressive national leader for the modern age. (He ran for president in 2020 but withdrew before collecting a single delegate.)
Adams’s place in this lineage is not yet evident. He craves power and acclaim, and that’s a start for any New York mayor. But he also struggles with an elementary act of political self-definition: What vision animates his mayoralty beyond the trappings of office and accumulation of power?
Early on, Adams let reporters tag along as he exercised and ate poke bowls and practiced politics. He charmed billionaires and reassured real-estate moguls about taxes and chatted about crime with barbers in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He stayed up as evening bled into early morning. Life was a whirl; why sleep?
Reporters delighted in his metaphysical fixations. Despite his religious upbringing, he espoused the healing properties of crystals and speculated that his girlfriend just might be clairvoyant. Challenged early in his mayoralty about his claims of veganism (he was, it came out, a fish-eating vegan), he told the press: “I eat a plant-based-centered life.”
Governing came less naturally. He values loyalty over management expertise. His hiring is haphazard. He seemed to credit God’s guidance for his preference for “nontraditional people” over experts. “If all the professionals were all that good, then why were we such a mess?” he said, according to the New York Post.
Adams has few close friends in politics. Before a mayoral debate in 2021, as opponents chatted, he sat on a chair behind his podium and meditated. In office, he has drawn his inner circle hermetically tight. Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his closest adviser and de facto enforcer, is married to a man who went through the police academy with him. Philip Banks III, his deputy mayor for public safety, was once the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed official—and a friend of Adams within the department. Banks suddenly resigned from the force in 2014, and a federal prosecutor named him an unindicted co-conspirator in a bribery case. Banks has denied wrongdoing, and Adams has not answered questions about the matter. A mayoral spokesperson told The New York Times that Banks had made honest mistakes.
One can hardly overstate the politically incestuous nature of his administration. Banks’s brother, David, is the schools chancellor and the romantic partner of Sheena Wright, Adams’s first deputy mayor. David Banks has employed the mayor’s romantic partner, Tracey Collins, as a senior adviser to one of his deputy chancellors. When he was borough president, Adams—who has been dogged by questions about where he actually resides—maintained for four years that he was renting a room from a friend in Brooklyn. That friend, Lisa White, reportedly retired in 2019 from a $53,000-a-year job as a 911 dispatcher. When Adams became mayor, the police department hired White as a deputy commissioner at a salary of $241,000. City Hall insists that Adams had nothing to do with her appointment.
Sometimes the Adams administration manages to please his party’s restive left. The mayor committed the city to spending $18 million to help erase medical debts held by working-class New Yorkers. He has—after a very slow start—ramped up production of subsidized housing for the working class, and officials found money for special beds for mentally ill homeless people.
Addressing a problem that affects all New Yorkers, his city-planning department has embarked on an ambitious rezoning effort, generally well received, to allow more housing construction in a city starved for apartments. Also affecting everyone are the subways—the arteries of the city. When violence and homeless encampments rendered trains and stations forbidding, Adams sent cops trooping in, and violent subway crime fell for a time.
Kathryn Wylde, the president of the business group Partnership for New York City, can enumerate Adams’s flaws but inclines toward a friendly accounting. “I have great sympathy for his situation,” she told me. “He’s got guns off the streets, he’s confiscated and destroyed illegal motorbikes, and sanitation service has improved.”
Most reviews from the city’s permanent government are more acerbic. Bloomberg was taken with Adams’s centrist-liberal politics and his ability to advocate for victims of police violence even as he spoke of getting tough on criminal violence. He and his aides have invested time and money into trying to make a success of Adams’s mayoralty. The returns are not overwhelming. “Time is running out to put points on the board for a successful reelection,” Howard Wolfson, a former deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration, told me.
Adams is a micromanager. He demands to sign off on commissioners’ hires and is reluctant to entrust work to subordinates. The wall around his inner circle is not easily breached, and out-of-favor commissioners and deputies email in hopes of snaring meetings. The atmosphere is less New Age than Machiavelli; the mayor believes in crystals, but a knife is handier. “It’s like Succession,” Zeltser, the former borough-president’s-office aide, told me. “You throw daggers to get near him.”
The mayor has created a troop of special advisers: a rat czar, a public-realm czar, a weed czar, an efficiency czar, and so on. This tendency can unsettle senior department leaders who coexist with these free agents. Some czars have impressive résumés, while others are known principally for their fealty to the mayor. Denise Felipe-Adams—no familial relation to Adams—is one of the leaders of his newly created Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets. She worked for six years as a special assistant in the borough president’s office, and last year posted on social media that her “bossman” is the “#Realest #Dopestbrother running this city.” “They are his agents of chaos,” noted a prominent businessperson who requested anonymity in hopes of getting phone calls returned by City Hall.
Adams recently proposed a Department of Sustainable Delivery, to try to impose order on the food-delivery business, whose riders hop on souped-up scooters or electric bikes and spin into the night, often riding on sidewalks and against traffic. Why he did not delegate this task to his Department of Transportation went unexplained.
For all of his misadventures as mayor, the debate over the police bill comes closest to revealing the distance between his vision and his skills. To watch this mayor try and fail to impose his will was instructive.
He held a press conference at NYPD headquarters, a fortified tower just east of City Hall, to criticize the police bill, and tore into an antagonist, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, whose home is on an Army base in Brooklyn. “Like, I find it astonishing that we have a public advocate who pushed for this police bill. He lives in a fort! A fort!” Adams said.
The public advocate was uncowed. The mayor, Williams said to reporters, resembled a “bratty” 5-year-old “throwing a temper tantrum.” With that, Williams sliced to the heart of the mayor’s personal conceit. “Eric Adams is not the messiah for New York City. The same God that elected him elected a lot of us on the exact same day.”
It’s a bad sign for the mayor when his roar elicits only eye rolls. Weeks later, mayoral aides walked into City Hall’s elegant rotunda, the traditional DMZ between the council and the mayoral wings, and tried to abscond with chairs just before a council press conference. When that failed, they declined to turn on the lights. The switches are on the mayor’s side of the building, so the press conference took place in the twilight.
On February 5, a retired police inspector who was a former comrade of the mayor pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge brought by the Manhattan district attorney. Dwayne Montgomery, 65, admitted to raising thousands of dollars in straw donations for Adams’s campaign. This practiced form of New York election chicanery works like this: Wealthy contributors are capped in what they can give to a campaign, so they round up people to “contribute” and then reimburse them. Disguising the source of campaign money is against the law. The City, which has done fine work mining the scandal, noted that Adams’s campaign “has been flagged repeatedly for accepting tens of thousands of dollars in illegal donations.” His campaign has repaid some, although not all, illicit donations, and prosecutors have dubbed some givers unindicted co-conspirators.
No less worrisome for the mayor is the news that a U.S. attorney is examining whether the Turkish government funneled illegal donations through straw donors. Why Ankara cared about this city’s mayoral race remains unclear. In November, the FBI raided the Brooklyn home of the mayor’s chief fundraiser, 25-year-old Brianna Suggs. Suggs—whom Lewis-Martin, the mayoral adviser, has described as a goddaughter—has not been charged. When news broke of that raid on her home, Adams was in Washington, D.C., intending to meet with White House leaders and fellow mayors about the migrant crisis. He canceled those meetings and flew back to New York to comfort Suggs after what he termed her “traumatic experience.” Yet he has since said he did not speak to her that day, because he “didn’t want to give any appearance of interference.”
Criminal investigations are unpredictable. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio emerged legally unscathed from his own fundraising scandal. But as a former federal prosecutor told me, when a judge permits the FBI to seize a sitting mayor’s phones, it’s not a great sign.
Adams is not yet politically bereft. Particularly if the FBI probe fizzles, he could remain a formidable candidate in 2025. Even as much of New York’s political world marches to his left or simply writes him off, he retains a base among Black voters. Especially if he faces strong progressive opponents, Adams might rebound among other New Yorkers who shared his views on policing in 2021.
When people describe Adams as eccentric, they routinely lump together different types of statements. Some things that Adams says are quite idiosyncratic: his bit about umbilical cords, or his recent claim on X that New Yorkers call their city “the Port-Au-Prince of America”—which essentially nobody ever says. By contrast, his mysticism and his claims to be the Lord’s own anointed, while perhaps off-putting to young city dwellers and the secular professional class, are unremarkable to the millions of religiously observant New Yorkers. And even his retailing of conspiracy theories begins to look like a familiar City Hall move, made by politicians from many different backgrounds. It’s the rhetoric of a calculating mayor who is tired of criticism and understands the old politics of them-versus-us.
At a meeting last June, an 84-year-old tenant advocate whose family had fled the Holocaust sharply challenged Adams about why his appointees had supported big rent increases. He stiffened and told her not to point her finger at him. “Don’t stand in front like you treated someone that’s on the plantation that you own,” he said in a video clip that went viral.
In January, Adams met with a multiracial group of senior citizens in Queens. In the overheated community room of an apartment building, the elders greeted Adams with warm claps and smiles. But the migrant crisis was clearly eating at him. “You need to know what they dropped in my lap,” he told his audience. Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles, he continued—what do these cities have in common? He answered his question: Each has a Black mayor and each faces a migrant wave. He suggested that Greg Abbott, the Texas governor who has been busing border migrants to blue states, is trying to embarrass Black mayors and show that they can’t govern. “You see the hustle?” he demanded. But Adams’s account doesn’t add up. Los Angeles has experienced nothing like the migrant flow into New York and seems to be coping; Denver, which Adams didn’t mention, has been overwhelmed by asylum seekers and has a white mayor.
When making public speeches, Adams plays up his pride in his many “chocolate” advisers. “I hear people outside saying, ‘Fight the power,’” he said in a speech in a Brooklyn megachurch last year, his voice scornful. “Negro, we are the power.” But such politics can register as anachronistic. In the midst of his recent battles with the city council, he suggested to its speaker, Adrienne Adams, who is Black and unrelated to him, that two top Black leaders cannot afford to let each other fail. She flashed a sardonic look at her aides afterward. Yes, she went to the same high school as Adams. But her political destiny is not tied to his.
Adams’s setbacks keep multiplying. This week, a former NYPD staffer filed a lawsuit accusing him of demanding oral sex in exchange for helping her obtain a promotion in the early 1990s; the mayor promptly and emphatically denied the claim, saying, “This did not happen—it did not happen.” In the last week of February, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, found that the Adams administration’s issuing of no-bid contracts with companies to deal with the migrant influx had led to “exorbitant” fees that varied “wildly.” The city, Lander found, likely had wasted millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, crime on the subways has rebounded, prompting New York Governor Kathy Hochul to deploy state troopers and National Guard members to help patrol the system. Although New York has recouped its severe employment losses from the pandemic, its growth rate trails that of many other cities. Poverty indicators are rising. Illegal marijuana shops proliferate by the hundreds, and Adams’s handling of the city budget is erratic. As for rats, well, one ran across my feet as I stepped off the Q train recently. No czar in sight.
Adams has become fond of mentioning Matthew 21:12, in which Jesus evicts the money changers from the temple. At the end of January, he visited P.S. 156, in Brownsville, for a public meeting. At one point, he turned the discussion to Jesus, and to himself. “Jesus walked in the temple, he saw them doing wrong.” What did Jesus do? he demanded of an older woman in the audience. Jesus turned the tables over, she replied. Adams nodded happily and made the inevitable comparison: “I went to City Hall to turn the table over!”
It’s fine, I suppose, to feel enraptured with your godly mission. But I kept returning to a more worldly question: Why, other than to confirm his exalted sense of his destiny, did he want to become mayor in the first place? At times, I wondered whether he could pierce the shroud of his own mysteries.
The more he struggles with managing the city, the more everyone else in government defies him, and the longer the investigations drag on, the more his temple looks like the one in need of cleaning out.
This article previously misstated Michael Bloomberg’s whereabouts during a 2010 snowstorm.
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