Race, ethics and Eric Adams
Eric Adams is not the first mayor of New York City to be accused of corruption — but he was convinced that his problems, which were just wiped away (at least for now) by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, were the product of racial bias.
In New York and beyond, a frequent complaint from Black leaders is that their moment in the sun arrived too late in history, well after reformers and society at large cracked down on the loose ethical standards of the past, when their Irish, Italian and Jewish predecessors ran big-city political machines with an exuberant combination of fraud, force and flair. Notice how they change the rules once we’re in charge? I’ve heard Black operatives lament over drinks.
There’s a kernel of truth to the accusation. In New York, the Tammany Hall glad-handers who had fleeced the city decade after decade had largely been chased out of power by the time Black political power began its consolidation and growth in the 1980s and 90s. A combination of civil service rules, criminal prosecution of party bosses and reforms in ballot-access laws attracted fresh blood and undermined the discretionary patronage jobs that were the lifeblood of party organizations.
It goes without saying that many of the old party bosses ended up in prison or disgrace. And we’re fortunate that no modern Black politician will ever match the thievery of 19th-century grifters like William Magear “Boss” Tweed in New York or the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City. It’s hard to imagine the return of dynastic machine-mayors like Boston’s James Michael Curley, Chicago’s William Daley or Erastus Corning, who governed Albany for 40 years.
But that hasn’t stopped Black pols from grousing that they are on the losing end of a changing morality.
“Black candidates for office are often held to a higher, unfair standard — especially those from lower-income backgrounds, such as myself,” Adams once told a writer from the New Yorker. “I hope by becoming mayor I can change minds and create one equal standard for all.”
Adams lost a lot of credibility on the subject after September 2024, when he was arrested and indicted on charges including bribery, conspiracy and accepting illegal campaign contributions. It didn’t help matters that the mayor, forced to turn his cellphone over to the FBI, has preposterously claimed he forgot the passcode to the device and cannot unlock it.
The question remains: Are Black officials, long locked out of top positions, being held to a more stringent standard than their white counterparts and forebears when it comes to public integrity?
Before Trump’s DOJ ordered the Southern District to drop the case, federal prosecutors claimed that Adams raised campaign money and luxury travel worth thousands of dollars from Turkish businessmen (it is illegal for non-Americans to donate to U.S. campaigns), then disguised the arrangement and did favors for them as part of an illegal quid pro quo arrangement. The mayor pleaded not guilty.
The question remains: Are Black officials, long locked out of top positions, being held to a more stringent standard than their white counterparts and forebears when it comes to public integrity?
The answer is: Yes, Black pols probably get more scrutiny. Which means Adams unwisely tempted fate by dancing close to multiple ethical lines with a smile and a wink.
As far back as the late 1980s, Washington attorney Abbe Lowell — who later became a noted D.C. insider and fixer — wrote about an unusually high level of ethics scrutiny being directed at Black mayors and members of Congress. “A white member of Congress who maintains two houses and sends his children to private school is not considered unusual,” he noted in an op-ed. “When a black does the same, someone wants to know where he gets his money.”
A generation after Lowell’s observation, the number of Black officials in ethical hot water was clearly disproportionate: In 2009, the House Ethics Committee was investigating seven Black members of Congress, and no white ones. A few years later, in 2012, the The Atlantic noted that “African-Americans make up 10% of the House, but as of the end of February, five of the sitting six named lawmakers under review by the House Ethics Committee are black.”
Things got so bad that more than two dozen Congressional Black Caucus members signed onto a failed effort — led by Rep. Melvin Watt of North Carolina — to slash the budget of the Ethics Committee by 40%.
Obviously, ethical shenanigans by politicians of any color are indefensible. But so is racially motivated scrutiny. Historian George Derek Musgrove looked at the phenomenon in a book called “Rumor, Repression and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America.” It chronicles how ethics allegations and investigations were part of a white conservative backlash against the Civil Rights movement. The Nixon administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to target the president’s political adversaries, for instance, included surveillance of 12 out of the 13 members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the time.
We’re half a century past the Nixon years, but the suspicion remains that Black pols are more likely to be targeted. “As we’ve seen with Black mayors in places like … New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., and Baltimore,” says political scientist Christina Greer. “As the mayor of New York City, as a Black man, as a Black politician, you can’t always do the same things that other politicians do.”
Obviously, ethical shenanigans by politicians of any color are indefensible. But so is racially motivated scrutiny.
That makes it all the more puzzling that Adams was so studiously inattentive to ethical concerns since the day he was sworn in. Adams tried to place his brother in a high-paying position as head of his security team (which was nixed by the City’s Conflicts of Interest Board). The mayor also hired an advisor, Tim Pearson, who took a City Hall job while also remaining as security director for Resorts World Casino until The New York Times uncovered the double-dipping arrangement. (Pearson later resigned from the administration after the FBI seized his phones.)
Adams also hired as a deputy mayor Phil Banks, who was an unindicted participant in a corruption scandal a decade ago; Banks recently resigned after the FBI raided his home. And Adams has seen three police commissioners resign, two of them after the FBI seized their phones. His chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, recently quit shortly before being arrested and charged with bribery.
Adams seemingly ignored ethics warnings; a week before he was indicted, his top legal adviser, Lisa Zornberg, an ex-prosecutor, quit. “I am tendering my resignation, effective today, as I have concluded that I can no longer effectively serve in my position,” she said in a terse note.
This is the same mayor who turned heads by hanging a framed photo of ex-mayor Jimmy Walker on the wall of his City Hall office. Walker, who served as mayor from 1926 to 1932, was a charming, well-liked but hopelessly corrupt creature of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine who ended up abruptly resigning and leaving the country as political and legal adversaries closed in on him.
Adams appears to have consciously channeled a bit of Jimmy Walker by adopting a winking, grinning naughty-boy persona. Declaring himself a mayor with “swagger,” he shows up at late-night parties in swanky private clubs and restaurants, including Zero Bond, Rao’s and Osteria la Baia.
The suspicion that Adams was targeted due to his race is complicated, if not nullified, by the fact that Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of New York who indicted him (and is no longer in that post), is also Black. Williams was the lead prosecutor who secured the conviction of Christopher Collins, an upstate Republican congressman, as well as Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the state assembly who ended up dying in prison. Williams also prosecuted New Jersey U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, who was recently convicted on bribery charges. Irish, Jewish, Latino: It seems this Black prosecutor is willing to chase down crooks of every background.
Breon Peace, the Biden-era U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York who was investigating other Adams officials, is also Black. So is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who indicted Lewis-Martin and has secured guilty pleas from Adams allies in a separate campaign finance case.
The suspicion that Adams was targeted due to his race is complicated, if not nullified, by the fact that Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of New York who indicted him (and is no longer in that post), is also Black.
“This is not a Black thing, this is a YOU thing!” protester Hawk Newsome shouted at Adams through a megaphone, disrupting a press conference where the mayor stood with allies in front of Gracie Mansion.
It may also be a hubris thing.
“Eric Adams is going to be the mayor the media always wanted to cover and hasn’t been able to cover for 20 years,” mayoral campaign advisor Evan Thies told The New York Times in 2021. “He's going to sell papers and get clicks. He’s going to be the lovable rogue.”
Adams had an anemic 22% approval rating even before he got indicted; a month after his arrest, a majority of the city said he should resign. His approval ratings are unlikely to recover even though Trump has wiped away his criminal liability — for now. Long gone, it seems, are the days when Tammany machine politicians could simultaneously entertain and fleece the public with a smile and a wink. It turns out that New Yorkers probably aren’t interested in being governed by a rogue.