The Eric Adams Indictment: A Tragedy in Two Dimensions

The first thing that makes this moment in New York City history so sad is that so many people saw it coming right down Broadway. When Eric Adams ran for mayor, even those who liked him couldn’t ignore his penchant for raising money from suspect sources and for keeping company with people who treated rules as loose suggestions.

I was the editorial page editor of the New York Daily News when we endorsed Kathryn Garcia in the 2021 mayoral primary. Adams was our second choice; we generally approved of his politics but thought he had “too many entanglements with people looking to profit by doing business with the city.” When we backed him in the general election against a doomed-to-lose Republican, we warned that he was “tight with characters like Frank Carone, the Brooklyn attorney and party power broker with a finger in every pot,” and recalled how Adams had “used an affiliated nonprofit to vacuum up cash from donors with business before the city,” as well as how he had “traveled around the world on the dime of countries with checkered human rights records.”

The November before he took the oath, I wrote a somewhat admiring assessment of the then-mayor elect that pointed out “Adams has become a formidable force in New York politics in no small part by collecting cash from connected people and businesses and giving them at least access in return,” adding that “Adams has been especially brazen in pocketing donations from developers and lobbyists looking for favors from government…That transactional side hasn’t yet really come back to haunt him, perhaps because, as a state senator and Brooklyn borough president, he hasn’t yet had much real power to scratch backs back.”

This didn’t count as prescience. It was college-kid-caliber punditry. Everyone who followed New York City politics knew these things, even as the average voter didn’t really care.

In December 2021, Daily News columnist Harry Siegel, now also a Vital City contributing writer, wrote about the mayor’s somewhat admirable but mostly troubling habit of giving second chances to shady characters he counts as friends. That included deputy-mayor-of-public-safety-in-waiting Philip Banks, an old Adams family friend who in the mid-2010s had gotten wrapped up with donors who were lavishing NYPD brass with cash and tempting them with prostitutes. Fingers wagged, warning Adams that he ought not put this man in charge of overseeing his central public policy priority, reducing crime and rebuilding police-community relations. He went right ahead and did it anyway.

So while everyone talks about how shocking and unprecedented it is to have the first sitting mayor in New York City history indicted, keep in mind that what is unfolding now in Manhattan federal court was actually pretty predictable. (Also remember he’s innocent until proven guilty, essential information that left-wing progressives routinely remind us of when arguing for cops and prosecutors to have a lighter hand in routine criminal cases.)

The second reason the moment is sad is that Adams could’ve been a genuinely important figure in New York City and beyond. Many extremely online people have been dunking on political prognosticator Nate Silver for having tweeted, just after inauguration day, “I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for “who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?’” But there were indeed reasons to hope for big things even as there was deeply understandable wariness about Adams’ proclivities.

He’s a former cop and longtime police critic who professed to believe in criminal justice reform; the second Black mayor of New York, after David Dinkins, a one-termer widely viewed as a good man who just couldn’t lead; a Giuliani-era Republican with a left-wing streak who understands middle-class New York better than many true-blue progressives. Unlike billionaire Bloomberg or sanctimonious de Blasio, Adams seems to love the city and its people, and doing the job of running it. Though caricatured for running a race about nothing except bringing down crime, he actually ran on decent ideas about making basic government functions more efficient and cost-effective, creating a unified portal for New Yorkers to access city services, strengthening police-community relations and building a lot more housing. Once in the job, he’s been doing more than most recent mayors to improve the quality of instruction in the public schools, especially the reading curriculum, and to deal more sanely with seriously mentally ill New Yorkers who don’t seek the help they need, and to attack the rat problem and to rezone the city so people can live and do business more easily here.

None of it excuses his administration being chaotic, or makes it less eyebrow-raising that he seems to think he was chosen by God for his position (and that everything started going downhill when kids stopped praying in schools), or the obnoxious way he routinely uses race as a shield against legitimate criticism. 

Eric Adams has made many, many management mistakes, and perhaps we should’ve expected as much for someone who never oversaw more staff than the relatively small number who worked in the Brooklyn borough president’s office.

But the guy did have promise and talent, and he was and remains right about a lot. The city is now set back. That’s lost in the almost gleeful first-draft commentary led in no small part by people who hated Adams’ politics from the start, and it may well be lost in the history books yet to come.