A review of recent mayoral corruption history explains why the latest investigations are so serious.
Municipal corruption scandals are nearly as familiar to New Yorkers as rats in the subway, crosstown traffic jams and Times Square tourists. For mayors, what matters most is how close the scandals get to City Hall, not the scope of the crimes. Some manage to distance themselves from the trouble and maintain their credibility. Others cannot and lose the public’s trust, and sometimes the office itself.
New York’s great mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, took command of City Hall after Judge Samuel Seabury, a special investigator appointed by Governor Franklin Roosevelt in 1930, uncovered bank accounts, brokerage statements, and cash stashed in tin boxes in amounts far beyond anything the moral midgets running Tammany Hall could accumulate through legal means. Mayor Jimmy Walker was in on the graft. With high hubris, he tried to hold onto his office, but former Governor Al Smith told him bluntly, “Jim, you’re through. For the good of the party you have to resign.” Walker took the hint and fled with his mistress to England to avoid prosecution.
New Yorkers elected William O’Dwyer mayor in 1945. The immigrant from the tiny town of Boholo, Ireland, followed a storied career to City Hall. Before serving as a judge, a prosecutor and a brigadier general in World War II, O’Dwyer had walked a Brooklyn beat for the NYPD. As mayor, he grappled capably with a series of crises as New York transitioned from global war to domestic peace. But shortly after his re-election in 1949, a scandal erupted in Brooklyn that led to 188 indictments and 150 convictions of cops and gamblers running an illegal bookie operation. The cops had tapped the bookies’ phones — not to make arrests but to make sure they got their share of the $20 million take. The rot in the NYPD spread wide and deep but never reached the mayor. Still, it happened on his watch, and his reputation suffered.
Former Governor Al Smith told then-Mayor Jimmy Walker bluntly, “Jim, you’re through. For the good of the party you have to resign.” Walker took the hint and fled with his mistress to England to avoid prosecution.
By the time the scandal emerged, O’Dwyer’s beloved wife of 30 years had died and he had fallen in love with a beautiful model. The stress of his job sent him to the hospital with serious heart trouble more than once. He had had enough. He remarried and quit City Hall to become United States Ambassador to Mexico, his resignation forever linked in the public mind with the gambling mess in the headlines.
From Serpico and Lindsay to Manes and Koch
In 1970, after the department’s top brass ignored his charges of corruption for five years, undercover cop Frank Serpico blew the whistle on the front page of the New York Times. The Knapp Commission that Mayor John Lindsay appointed to investigate the claims laid bare a breathtaking network of bribery. But none of it touched City Hall. Sadly, Serpico’s brothers in blue responded by leaving him lying unaided in a pool of his own blood when a bullet pierced his jaw during a drug bust gone bad. He survived, and unsurprisingly retired and moved.
Not long after Mayor Edward Koch’s triumphant third inauguration in January 1986, a police cruiser found Queens borough president and Democratic Party Leader Donald Manes weaving his car dangerously across the Grand Central Parkway with a slit wrist. Within weeks, he plunged a knife into his own chest in the kitchen of his home. In the months that followed, a host of political leaders and government officials were indicted, tried and convicted of bribery, extortion, thievery, influence-peddling and other crimes.
Koch felt betrayed by his cronies, but the people felt betrayed by their mayor. He had maintained close ties to the city’s Democratic bosses and appointed their political workers to responsible government jobs, which they used to loot the city. “If a sparrow dies of a heart attack in Central Park, I’m responsible,” Koch once said of how the public perceived his role. He never recovered from the damage to his reputation the scandal caused, and lost the Democratic primary to David Dinkins in 1989.
Mayor Dinkins, too, suffered a serious scandal on his watch. Suffolk County detectives busted a drug gang run by NYPD officer Michael Dowd, and the United States attorney for the Southern District launched a federal probe. Dinkins appointed former judge Milton Mollen to investigate. The commission he led concluded that pockets of cops engaged in corruption “characterized by brutality, theft, abuses of authority and active police criminality.”
Dinkins proposed creation of a permanent civilian review board to investigate police misconduct. Among other things, it was a way to distance himself from the scandal. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association organized a protest. Some 4,000 NYPD officers rioted in front of City Hall, urged on in vulgar terms by Rudy Giuliani. While hurling racist rhetoric towards the city’s first Black mayor, the rioters blocked traffic, trampled cars, roughed up journalists and behaved like the kind of mob the city normally expects the police to control. Dinkins’ battle with his own police force hurt his stature, but supporters rallied to his cause in response to the cops’ hooliganism. He lost his bid for re-election by the slimmest of margins for unrelated reasons.
From Bloomberg and CityTime to today
When Michael Bloomberg was mayor, a band of thieves used a 21st-century technology project the same way the Tweed ring used its infamous 19th-century courthouse. As long as the CityTime project — designed to migrate municipal workers from paper-based management and old-fashioned time clocks to a more automated system — remained incomplete, fraudulent invoices could be passed through the open contract, nearly $700 million worth. But no one believed Bloomberg, the billionaire, pocketed an ill-gained dime, and, critically, his inner circle had nothing to do with it. So despite federal prosecutor Preet Bharara’s announcement that the crimes were “truly jaw dropping, epic in duration, magnitude and scope,” one of Bloomberg’s deputies dismissed the theft as a “pimple,” and the mayor’s reputation remained intact.
Campaign financing scandals were a perpetual condition of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. Federal and state agencies scrutinized his donors, and indicted and convicted several on bribery charges. In actions that raised eyebrows and headlines, his administration sold property cheap to the mayor’s supporters and bought private properties for higher prices than reports said they were worth from sellers represented by favored lobbyists. The City Department of Investigation and various prosecutors accused de Blasio of violating the spirit of campaign finance laws, but never the letter.
The Adams predicament
Police scandals are a special case of municipal malfeasance. Protecting people and their property is the primordial purpose of government. When the guardians go rogue, the risk to civil society is extreme. That is what makes the current scandals circling ever tighter around Mayor Eric Adams so disturbing.
Heading a police department that is in some ways more professional and more carefully monitored than ever, Commissioner Edward Caban was forced to resign. And federal agents seized the phone of deputy mayor for public safety Philip Banks, an unindicted co-conspirator in two earlier scandals. Banks’ brother David, the schools chancellor, also had his phone taken by Justice Department officials, and they also took the phone of Sheena Wright, the city’s first deputy mayor and his partner. A third Banks brother is rumored to be involved in rigging city contract awards, and Caban’s twin brother is suspected of peddling police protection for profit. This is a plateful of cronyism with a side dish of nepotism not seen since the scandals on Mayor Koch’s watch in the 1980s.
When the guardians go rogue, the risk to civil society is extreme. That is what makes the current scandals circling ever tighter around Mayor Eric Adams so disturbing.
Adams, a former NYPD captain, personally appointed all the public officials who federal agents are now probing in four separate investigations. The Justice Department has seized the mayor’s phone too, and he has stubbornly refused to clean house. So the scandals belong to him. No charges have been filed, and the City’s sprawling government, filled with many competent officials, continues to function. But already two City Council members and three state legislators have called on Adams to step down.
Not since 1950 has a New York City mayor resigned. That was the last time New Yorkers elected a former NYPD officer mayor.