NYC Eric Adams Surrounded by Scandal by Appointing His Friends to Power

Though Mayor Eric Adams of New York and his aides have not been accused of any crimes, a swirl of investigations has raised questions about Mr. Adams’s prospects for re-election.Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

 

By Ginia Bellafante

Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture and life of New York City.

 

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In April, the Manhattan Institute polled 700 New Yorkers across political affiliations and demographics — people who were likely to vote in next year’s mayoral race — asking them about elected officials, crime, immigration and the state of the city. Only 16 percent said that they would choose to re-elect Eric Adams as mayor. Of course, a poll is just a snapshot. A lot can happen in the course of a few months. And it has.

Last week, several high-ranking members of the Adams administration were subject to raids by federal investigators looking into at least one possible bribery scheme. Perhaps surprisingly, none of this seemed to have anything to do with a separate investigation, which came to light last year, into whether Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign received illegal donations from the Turkish government.

Neither the mayor, who has repeatedly said that his administration is cooperating with investigators, nor any of his top officials have been charged with a crime. But the optics of this latest sweep are not easily dismissed. If nothing else, the apparent ambush has underscored a tangled kind of nepotism rooted at the center of city governance.

Among the phones seized were those belonging to the schools chancellor, David C. Banks; his girlfriend, Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor; and his brother Philip B. Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety. A third Banks brother — Terence Banks — who runs a consultancy focused on bridging the gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape,” was also relieved of his phone. Other targets of the probe included the police commissioner, Edward Caban, who announced his resignation on Thursday, and his twin brother, James Caban, who according to one report may have sold security favors to nightclubs. 

Even amid the distracting tensions of the presidential race, it is hard not to wonder how all of this will affect Mr. Adams’s prospects for re-election, especially given that three high-profile Democratic challengers — Zellnor Myrie, a state senator; Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller; and Scott Stringer, the previous comptroller — are set to run against him.

With the mayoral primary still months away, no significant polling has been conducted that might reflect the current situation. But years of research by political scientists has suggested that the electoral punishment for actual corruption — leaving aside the semblance of it — is, as one meta-analysis put it, often “rather mild.” One reason that voters tolerate it is that corruption, in all of its shadowy intricacy and need for graphs and bullet points and explainers, frequently seems to elude ordinary understanding. Another, the research tells us, is that voters might prefer a tainted candidate whom they find ideologically compatible to a “clean” one whom they don’t.

Beyond that, corruption has been endemic to municipal politics throughout the history of this country, which has built up certain collective immunities. In 1904, the journalist Lincoln Steffens published “The Shame of the Cities,” a collection of reported essays that examined the graft and outlaw inclinations of civic leaders around the United States. One of his subjects was Doc Ames, the mayor of Minneapolis, who filled the police department with criminals, ran it as a protection racket and hired his brother to lead it. From the 200 slot machines installed all over town, the mayor got a kickback of $15,000 a year.

“All this business was known,” Steffens wrote. “It did not arouse the citizens, but it did attract criminals and more and more thieves and swindlers came hurrying to Minneapolis,” he continued. “Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal politics, whether for good or evil, you can trace it almost invariably to one man.” Nevertheless, the citizens of Minneapolis repeatedly elected Doc Ames, who served four terms.

At the level of city management, recent history provides no better example of a willingness to overlook profound character flaws and wild and illicit backroom dealing than the rise and fall — and rise — of Providence’s former mayor, Buddy Cianci, who died eight years ago. For anyone unfamiliar with the cinematic particulars of his trajectory: Cianci became mayor in 1974 against all odds as a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. He was a former prosecutor who put away the New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca; he ran on an anti-corruption platform. 

And yet, during that first term, 22 people in his orbit were convicted on corruption charges. He stayed in office until 1984, when he was forced to resign after he tortured his estranged wife’s lover, singeing his eyebrow with a cigarette, and was convicted of felony assault. Six years later, he ran again and won.

By the late 1990s, Cianci was at the center of a federal probe known as Operation Plunder Dome. “What was interesting is that more than half the people in Providence thought he was guilty,” said Mike Stanton, who covered Cianci for The Providence Journal and wrote the definitive book on his mayoralty, “The Prince of Providence.” “But two-thirds of the people thought he was a strong leader. His approval rating went up after his indictment.”

What accounts for this sort of rationalization, these acts of political forgiveness and blind loyalty? “The charisma trumps the corruption,” Mr. Stanton told me. “It’s a cynical view of the world that Robert Penn Warren expressed. Everyone is corruptible. Politics is corrupt. But Buddy got things done. He made us feel good about ourselves. He put a second-tier city on the map.”

He also put himself on the map. He was legitimately funny despite everything; he appeared regularly on Don Imus’s radio show; he had a national profile and his own brand of tomato sauce. He once gave a jar to Hillary Clinton, telling her to give the staff a night off and make dinner for Bill.

If a cult of personality and a widely acknowledged record of efficiency is what it takes to survive a scandal (or several), the betting odds for a second Adams term would seem not to look all that good. Without a role at the Democratic convention last month — and no packaged food to call his own — who knows what will happen. Emotional connection reliably excuses a lot. But in the end, Mr. Stanton said, “Adams does not seem very lovable.”