Putting Gotham in context
The case against Eric Adams is dismissed for now, but it still looms over the 2025 mayoral race. It, along with a long list of other investigations and accusations against Adams administration officials, from his former police commissioner to his former chief advisor, forces us to ask: Is this mayoral administration an aberration, or are there reasons to believe that corruption is more systemic in New York City and state than elsewhere in America?
Ranking city corruption
It’s not an easy question to answer. There’s no real apples-to-apples way to compare corruption from municipality to municipality and state to state. It’s true that Chicago, Providence, Newark and other places have reputations for being especially corrupt, but reputations are just reputations. Corruption is notoriously difficult to monitor systematically.
Still, federal criminal prosecutions for corruption, in which U.S. attorneys apply the same sets of laws across jurisdictions, do give us a general picture of corruption across cities. Since 1978, with the passage of the Ethics in Government Act, the Department of Justice has made data on corruption convictions available through its Public Integrity Section’s Annual Reports. Analyzing total convictions in federal districts from 1976 to 2021, New York’s Southern District — which covers Manhattan — is ranked the third most corrupt federal judicial area in the United States, only surpassed by Los Angeles and Chicago. However, if New York’s Eastern District — which includes Brooklyn — is included, New York City has far more corruption convictions with 2,285, compared to Los Angeles’ 1,625, and Chicago’s 1,824.
We can’t say for certain whether this means that more corruption is happening in New York City than in other places, or whether its federal prosecutors are just more zealous at pursuing cases, or both. But the high volume of cases suggests New York may well have more entrenched corruption than other big cities.
Of course, New York City is more than twice as large as Los Angeles or Chicago. With a larger population — and more public officials handling more money — more criminal convictions are expected. Adjusted for population, Manhattan is the most corrupt area, followed by Chicago, then Los Angeles, then New York’s two boroughs, and finally Brooklyn.
In addition to the caveats already mentioned, there are other reasons to be cautious about drawing definitive conclusions from these numbers. While the statistics measure the frequency of convictions, they do not measure the number of charges or the severity of the crimes. A city that has a small clique of high-level officials who engage in serious corruption for an extended period should probably be considered more corrupt than one with a dozen low-level public servants who engaged in one scam for a brief period.
Despite these shortcomings, the numbers provide a general picture of an area’s corruption and allow for some useful comparisons, especially over time.
Decline in corruption convictions
The comparison table shows another significant trend: Federally prosecuted corruption has seen a significant drop in most of America’s major cities — particularly in Manhattan. If the total number of convictions is one’s guide throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Manhattan was the most corrupt jurisdiction in the country. However, beginning in the 1990s, the number of corruption convictions there began to rapidly decline, so much so that by the beginning of the 2020s, Manhattan’s position relative to other areas had flipped. It now boasts the fewest corruption convictions of any major city area.
Why the drop? It could have something to do with FBI operations in the 1980s and 1990s such as Operation Greylord, which disrupted the Democratic Party’s political machine in Cook County, Illinois; Abscam, which was run out of New York’s Eastern District and led to the arrest of six members of the U.S. House of Representatives, one U.S. Senator and the mayor of Camden, New Jersey; and the ongoing investigations and eventual prosecution of “Mafia Cops” within the New York Police Department.
In New York City, the Parking Violations Bureau scandal, which was prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, led to a fundamental reorientation of the city’s politics. What began as an investigation into a bizarre scenario where Queens Borough President Donald Manes was found injured in a city car in the middle of the night, soon spiraled into a multilayered scandal that revealed that Manes’ wounds were self-inflicted, that officials inside the Parking Violations Bureau were engaging in bribery, and that the debt collection agency that worked with the Bureau received crooked contracts through secret backroom deals.
In the wake of the scandal, policies regarding contracting City services were rewritten, and the Department of Investigation was given greater latitude to scrutinize City agencies.
The New York State Capitol in Albany is known as one of the most corrupt in America — and plenty of the state officials who’ve been arrested and convicted of various forms of graft, from former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to State Sens. Malcolm Smith and John Sampson — hail from the five boroughs.
In response to these and other scandals, Albany legislators have engaged in sporadic attempts to clean house, overhauling their ethics codes and strengthening their oversight agencies. Nobody believes that work is done.
Fighting corruption
While corruption is difficult to fight, its mitigation is possible. But doing so requires understanding its patterns and sources.
First, corruption frequently begins in law enforcement. Ideally, law enforcement would be the last place a corruption scandal emerges, but often it is the first. New Yorkers who lived through Frank Serpico’s exposure of corruption in the NYPD can’t be too surprised by the steady drumbeat of allegations about Eric Adams’ Police Department, at least until the appointment of new commissioner Jessica Tisch. Unlike many of its European counterparts, which can require years of education before becoming an officer, Americans accept pitifully low standards for police. Police officers here are socialized in their profession through quasi-mentorships, which include an informal code that encourages officers to remain silent in the face of misconduct, including participation in corruption. Rooting it out requires looking unflinchingly at potentially bad behavior within law enforcement itself.
Second, corruption creates, and in turn can be created by, excessive bureaucracy. It is often difficult to distinguish between a wasteful government and a corrupt one because the two go together. Excessive and unnecessary government positions create opportunities for graft, while a byzantine system of administration discourages accountability and confuses everyone except insiders.
For New Yorkers, the problem may be particularly problematic because the one branch of government that is known for being the most labyrinthine is its court system. Legal scholar Evelyn Malavé has referred to New York’s judicial system as a “courteaucracy” for its confusing rules, backroom appointments and lack of transparency. This may lead at least some corrupt officials to expect that, as long as they are sufficiently connected, they can avoid accountability.
Third, public officials should be extremely wary of the influence of private businesses on government operations. Much of the municipalization of urban services during the Progressive Era occurred not out of a critique of private industry but as good government measures against corporate malfeasance. Scholars of corruption make a distinction between “patronage” and “spoils” systems. Patronage systems operate through individual bribes, crony appointments and private extortions. Spoils systems operate through crooked contracts, crony privatization plans and other favorable business schemes. Most people agree that “patronage” is always wrong, but there is less consensus — especially among the wealthy — regarding “spoils,” since cities are expected to work with the private sector to promote economic growth. However, excesses in the latter often lead to occurrences in the former.
The ultimate antidote to corruption is an aware and vigilant public, which often starts with a vigorous and engaged press. Corruption might appear impenetrable, but it weakens when brought out into the harsh light of public scrutiny. The city’s recent regression into an allegedly corrupt government should be a wake-up call to New Yorkers. In the end, if they value their city, then they need to fight for it.