It was just on Tuesday of this week, in one of his increasingly limited open-ended interactions with the city’s press corps, that Mayor Eric Adams was lamenting about how no one understood how difficult his job is, or how complicated the city he runs is.
“How many of you have seen the mini-series Madam Secretary?” he said, referring to the steamy Téa Leoni series on CBS about a former CIA agent turned secretary of state, as his chief aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, nodded beside him. “Her one day — multiply that by ten for being the mayor of New York. Her one day, she deals with one or two crises; you multiply by ten. This city, every day, all day, something is jumping off.”
Not two days later, the mayor was sitting on the tarmac on his way to the White House to again make his case for more federal aid for the city to deal with the influx of migrants — a case that he has made so often and with such ferocity that it has led to the dissolution of his one-time close relationship with the president of the United States — only to suddenly abort. He learned that FBI agents had raided the home of Brianna Suggs, his former chief fundraiser to his campaign, as well as homes and businesses across the city, as part of an investigation into a potential sprawling straw-donor scheme involving his 2021 campaign, a Brooklyn construction company, and Turkey.
As pulp melodramas go, it was hard to beat: Here was one of President Biden’s foremost critics from within his own party, scrambling back from a prescheduled sit-down because federal agents were carting off campaign materials from the home of someone who has been described as the “political goddaughter” of Lewis-Martin.
The news blew up what had been a city political scene caught in the question of whether anyone serious would mount a challenge to the mayor in two years and led some who had all but ruled out a run to take another second to think it over.
The PR play, in such situations, is rather obvious: Continue on with your business as if nothing has happened, remind the press that you are not the target of the investigation, express disingenuously unctuous gratitude to the investigators for keeping an eye on things. Instead, by all accounts, the mayor panicked, canceling his White House meetings and racing back to the city, making an investigation about a young aide into something that, in the public’s mind, is now going to be all about Eric Adams.
He has been investigated for misconduct throughout his political life. As a state senator, he was accused of showing favoritism to a gaming company that had donated to his campaign while trying to land a lucrative slot machine contract at a Queens racino. As Brooklyn borough president, he fended off allegations that he sought cash for a sham nonprofit tied to his office. And as a candidate for mayor, he was accused of using the offices of a law firm connected to the Brooklyn Democratic Party without paying for the space as is required by campaign-finance regulations.
And now in his less than two years in City Hall, it has been more of the same: Eric Ulrich, the head of the buildings department who was a close ally of the mayor and who had an admitted gambling problem, was charged for accepting $150,000. (Ulrich told investigators that Adams tipped him off by warning to “watch your phones.”) There’s the appointment of family members, friends, and his partner to lucrative government jobs. And then, most seriously of all until this week, an indictment by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg of six people who conspired in another straw donor scheme to illegally funnel money to the mayor’s campaign.
Early Friday, a day after the raid, Adams had prescheduled conversation with business leaders, and according to people who spoke to the mayor, he maintained that his campaign kept to the highest ethical standards and he had done nothing wrong. Those people said he seemed subdued though, as if aware of the fact that a sizable change had just occurred in the future of his administration.
Among the well-wired denizens of city government and politics, there is a divide over the raid. One group is quick to point out that even though many mayors, and governors, and lower-level elected officials in city and state government have been investigated for corruption before, a full-blown FBI raid is an extraordinary step, one federal prosecutors in Manhattan would be reluctant to take unless there was serious evidence of wrongdoing that went far beyond whatever a 25-year-old fundraiser could cook up. The other group points out that indeed there have been many officials investigated for corruption, and, more often than not, they end with bad headlines and, maybe, a few low-level aides admitting wrongdoing.
In the short and medium term, however, Adams faces some real problems. An agenda, which he has had trouble moving through Washington, Albany, and the City Council, is likely to face more resistance as his fellow elected officials seek to distance themselves from the taint of corruption. The press smells blood in the water. An administration that has long suspected that their opponents are out to get them is only going to get more paranoid. And the people who became mayoral allies, because he was the one in charge, are likely to start looking for another meal ticket.
This investigation also comes just as would-be contenders who have been looking to challenge the mayor in 2025 need to decide if they want to run. People who have seen private Adams campaign polling say that even before the news of the raid, the mayor’s approval rating was in dangerously low territory, as the migrant crisis continues to spiral out of control and the mayor’s promise to clean up the city remains largely unfulfilled.
But for now, his problem is not politics or public perception. It is legal, and it is serious.
