Is Eric Adams Impervious to Scandal?
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Three years ago, Eric Adams was a rising Democratic star on the brink of being elected New York City mayor. I believe in this city. I love this city. And the people of this city, they know me. And most importantly, I know them. But now that he's in office, Mayor Adams is teetering on persona non grata within his own party.

as his administration is hit by wave after wave of political scandal. The investigation, which has been going on for nearly nine months, is looking into potential corruption, including whether Adam's campaign illegally received foreign donations from the Turkish government. Agents seized the mayor's iPhones and also an iPad.

in what appeared to be part of the probe. We're talking about a massive operation here. The FBI raiding the homes of at least five people in Mayor Eric Adams' administration, including two of his deputy mayors, the school's chancellor, and even reportedly the NYPD commissioner. Is the mayor destined for indictment? And even if he is, is it possible that he could still win re-election?

I sat down this week with New Yorker staff writer Eric Latch to discuss the state of the Adams administration and the upcoming mayoral election. You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Hey, Eric. How are you doing, Tyler? I'm good. How are you? You know, good. I just literally ran over here from...

City Hall, so I'm just chugging water, trying to cool down. Tell me everything. What was this? So you just came back from an Eric Adams press conference. Yeah. What was that like? So once a week on Tuesdays, Eric Adams has what they call at City Hall an off-topic press conference where the press is just allowed to ask him whatever they want. When Adams took office in 2022—

They did this intentionally to try to like kind of limit the exposure and the distraction from reporters. They were basically like you can't at events that the mayor would go to during the week when reporters are there. They were like don't ask him about something that's like not on the ball. You know, just wait for the Tuesday quote unquote off topic press conference. And that was sort of done to kind of like keep—

keep things as, you know, as he likes to say, focused and sort of like no distractions. But now that these like multiple overlapping federal investigations have like engulfed his administration, it's now actually kind of like a weekly, like kind of humiliating ritual for him where he has to just go in and talk to the reporters and just get bombarded with these questions all in one place, you know, at one time and just sit through like

An hour plus 90 minutes of just like question. I mean, today. So he just he opened it by being like, I am not going to answer the same question over and over again. And then he just proceeded to get the same question over and over again. Which was, are you under investigation and for what? And when are you going to be indicted? Yeah, it's like, what did you know? When did you know it? Some version of that again and again and again, you know, and it's sort of like backsliding.

But because there's so many different permutations of that question, it sounds like different questions, but it's basically that over and over. And he's just kind of finding it impossible to say anything really kind of compelling about what's swirling around him and kind of what it might mean for his administration and for the city. So that is the exact topic of this podcast.

What is swirling around Eric Adams? And is there a way, I mean, I feel like we hear the news stories here and there, but it's very hard to actually make sense of them and to figure out how they fit together, if they fit together at all. So this isn't a complete list, but it's like the principal list. There's sort of three investigations, apparently, that we know of so far coming out of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan. The first involves, in some form, the relationship between

Eric Adams, his campaign, his administration, and the Turkish government. The second involves, in some form, the Banks brothers, who are David Banks, the school chancellor, Phil Banks, deputy mayor for public safety, and Terence Banks, their brother, who is not a member of the administration, but seems like he was involved in some kind of potential lobbying or quasi-lobbying in some way. And then the third...

involves the now former police commissioner, Edward Caban, and his twin brother, James Caban, who was apparently involved in some kind of potential fee for service involving police department or the city government. Last year in the fall, you know, FBI agents stopped the mayor on the street outside some event. It was like on a sidewalk and

They asked his security detail to like step aside and then they like went into the mayoral SUV with the mayor and took a couple of his phones and an iPad, I believe. And that was like this just like extraordinary kind of like –

in some ways unprecedented act of aggression from the feds towards City Hall. Definitely in the cell phone era, no mayor of New York City has gotten his cell phone taken. And that was sort of like the biggest and most dramatic surfacing of what was originally thought to be one investigation, which was looking at Eric Adams' mayoral campaign's relationship with the Turkish government, with donations that may have come

come or been aided by the Turkish government and then potential favors that the Adams administration or the city government may have done for the Turkish government once Adams took office. What the feds were really looking at were like fast-tracked permits for occupancy that are given out by the fire department for a new Turkish consulate building. And then there was reporting that there were – Eric Adams has taken –

As borough president in Brooklyn, took multiple trips abroad that arranged for him by foreign governments. This sort of came up during the campaign as sort of a weird sort of potential sort of sub-story. Didn't he initially say like, I'll be the first Turkish mayor of New York City? Like he's had a thing for Turkey for a while.

Yeah. It was only after the FBI took his phones and the story came out that people started going back, looking at these old comments and realizing that maybe they weren't just weird, which is like the word that we, you know, have come to associate with Adams, but actually indicative of something bad. Yes. So there was this kind of like these sort of relationships that he had, these trips that he took that were like sort of junkets plus, you know, kind of just seemed like really –

But then the reporting was like he accepted or may have accepted like first class upgrade tickets. You know, like it was – there was very unsatisfying elements to the scandal. I think it was like if he was – you know, if the mayor of New York City is getting indicted for like airline – like, you know, for accepting first class tickets. It was just – it was hard to see how that was really going to –

totally sink or subsume a mayoral administration. And then also the other thing that happened is that like the FBI took the mayor's phones and then nothing happened for months and months and months. But what happened last week? Because there were more, there were resignations in Adams' cabinet, but it seems like that was unrelated to the Turkey stuff. It's a different thing. Yeah, let me, let's try to like walk through this in some kind of order. So basically after like a long period of dormancy, last week,

Yeah.

The way to break it down is like sort of which set of brothers are you talking about is one way to think about this. So Adams is very close with the Banks family. He likes to remind people when Eric Adams was in the NYPD, he served under a lieutenant who was the father of these three brothers, David, Phil, and Terrence Banks. Two of them are brothers.

top officials in his administration, David and Phil Banks, and are very close to Adams. And David Banks, who's the school chancellor, is also his partner, his fiancee, Sheena Wright, is the first deputy mayor. You know, so this is like a family that is integral to the Adams administration. The most sort of detailed reporting suggests that, so there's this third Banks brother who is not a member of the administration, Terrence Banks,

who was being investigated for similar things to sort of what the Turkish investigation involved, kind of fast-tracking permitting or fast-tracking of sort of city favors or kind of city government actions in exchange for money. Over the weekend, there was a bar owner in Coney Island who spoke to the local NBC station and said –

Yeah. I had this bar. I opened it up. It was struggling. It was getting all these noise complaints from neighbors. And so the cops were coming all the time. And then this guy who said he was from the mayor's office came and said, you've got to talk to the brother of the police commissioner. This gets us to the second set of brothers. You know, like that you got to talk to the brother of the police commissioner who for a fee basically can make all these problems go away.

He said, $2,500 and, you know, basically like this guy knows the police commissioner and we can like sort this out. We'll deafen everyone in the neighborhood. Exactly. You know, you just won't have any more problems with the cops. That's what sort of come out. The Caban brothers, James Caban, the brother of the police commissioner, Edward Caban. And the reporting is that the police commissioner has a brother named James Caban who— A twin brother, right? A twin brother. Yeah.

was basically helping make problems go away for people who had problems with the police for a fee.

That's like – that's its own thing separate from the Banks brothers. And then there's a – you know, we haven't even talked about the investigation that's apparently ongoing in the Eastern District, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn that's looking at an Adams fundraiser, an aide named Winnie Greco who is a liaison with Chinese-American communities in the city and that has to do – So that's like the Turkish thing but instead it's the Chinese-American community. Right. Okay. Right. And then finally sort of try to wrap up this very messy sort of overview. Basically after –

We've had more than a year of federal investigations, subpoenas, raids, people's phones being taken, people getting lawyers. Just in the last couple of days, the first arrests that have touched this city government, which I think are pretty significant, it's these two top officials at the fire department who oversaw the permitting of sprinkler systems and fire safety systems in buildings.

had basically gone into business with this buddy of theirs who had retired from the department who was for a fee helping businesses, hotels, restaurants, apartment buildings get their permits quicker than they otherwise would. And so these fire chiefs were arrested. And then finally over the weekend, Adams had—

General Counsel at City Hall, who he had hired, Lisa Zornberg, who was the former chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District. She abruptly quit. The news broke at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday night.

You know, was not seen as a great sign. I hate it when my lawyer quits it, you know, late on a Saturday night. I mean, that really, it's like a great boost of confidence, you know. There's like Friday afternoon news dumps and then there's like my lawyer quit on a Saturday night. It's like a totally different kind of thing. So I should note that the Banks brothers, the Caban brothers and the two fire chiefs you mentioned have all denied any wrongdoing.

But it basically seems like we have two groups of scandals here that we're talking about. There's the ones that could implicate Adams more directly, like the Turkey stuff, where he specifically is being investigated for something. And then there are the ones that are more centered around people who he elevated to positions of power. And you might blame Adams for elevating those people, but it's not like he himself is necessarily under investigation for that stuff. That being said...

You know, when you have this thing with his chief legal advisor resigning, that does seem suggestive of something deeper. I agree. It's almost like the first thing that has really touched him. Obviously, the FBI agents taking his phones touched him, but that was a while ago, right?

And these investigations have yet – none of the reporting, nothing that has come out has sort of suggested that like the mayor was involved in some of these schemes that have sort of surfaced or sort of alleged schemes that have surfaced or that he knew about them. We just don't know any of that. But then his general counsel at City Hall resigning is a pretty big deal. Yeah.

I mean, what do you think the public should take from that? Like, it's been a year since we first kind of got wind of federal law enforcement circling Adams. And as you said, that there was this period of kind of nothing happening. And now we get these, you know, kind of key resignations, you know, just over the weekend. I mean, does that indicate to you that things are ramping up? I think to sort of pivot that question a little bit, like, I think

Adams likes to remind people that like every administration gets investigated by – like I just – we just alluded to – You mentioned de Blasio. De Blasio was – had U.S. attorneys circling him and – but I think the reason why this is so dangerous for this particular mayor and why there's so much attention and kind of heat off it even though no one has yet alleged that the mayor has done anything wrong is

is that several of the key people who seem like the feds are looking at very closely, close advisors to Adams, like Phil Banks, are people who have had past problems, legal problems or ethical problems. And when Adams appointed them to begin with, many people in the city government raised questions about the judgment of appointing those people. Phil Banks is a former top cop who—

Shirley knows lots and lots about law enforcement and how law enforcement in New York City works. And, you know, is a close friend of Adams for a long time. Like you could see why he might want him in an administration. But he was also a guy that got the past administration to a lot of trouble and who had, you know, this real taint on his record. And Adams appointed him deputy mayor for public safety.

Despite a lot of criticism of that and a lot of skepticism of that. And now fast forward two years to have that very person at the center of a major federal investigation. There's a lot of kind of righteous indignation in the city in city political circles right now. Like this is this. These were avoidable or at least predictable kind of problems that in some ways to the extent that a federal investigation is ever predictable.

Could you even say the same thing to a certain extent about Adams himself, where it's like while he was running for mayor, there was all this speculation about like, does this guy even live in New York City? I mean, when he was running, it's not like he was the, you know, super squeaky clean. That's what I'm getting at, too. You know, it's like there was a debate. I remember Andrew Yang said to Adams during the primary season,

And, you know, you've been investigated for corruption at every level you've been. In the police department, in the state senate when he was borough president, you know, like Adams dismissed that and dismissed that as kind of undue criticism and unfair. And I do think that that, you know, one of the reasons why right now he's really tangling with the press and trying to get untangled from these questions. The press are lobbying him, but the press has been watching him the whole time and they

feel in some ways sort of that a lot of the suspicions that have been swirling around him all along are being vindicated right now. And so that's why this is such a live and sort of real story. And yet he might still be reelected, which is what I want to talk about next. More from the political scene after this.

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So, Eric, you wrote back in August that despite all of the political scandals stemming from the Adams administration and despite the mayor's record low approval numbers, there is still a decent possibility that Adams could be reelected. Granted, you wrote this before the recent slew of resignations that we just talked about, but...

Do you think this is still the case? And if so, how? Why? Adam said something. He was asked about this this week, something about like kind of reelection and running. And he said something like, listen, 700,000 people voted for me, for me to be mayor. Like that was where he drew his power from, you know, and that was the mandate that he had. But like in context, like that's 700,000 people in a city of 8 million people.

You know, the job of mayor of New York is a big job. You're in charge of a government with 300,000 employees and $100 billion budget and a huge impact on the way cities operate, not just locally but nationally and even across the world. It's a huge power attached to that job.

It's also just part of a sort of political system in the city that's like pretty insular and small, you know, compared to the scope of New York City as a whole. The vast majority of people in New York City don't vote. Most of the people who do are sort of plugged in in particular ways, different ways, you know, but just have a reason to vote.

And nobody seems to really want the job of mayor. You know, it's like it's easy to forget that like Michael Bloomberg was like not a very well-known guy when he was first elected mayor. It's not like Michael Bloomberg today is like this huge figure, but it's like he was not the brand name and the famous name that he is today.

And de Blasio, you know, was also like, you know, he was the public advocate, you know, it's a kind of citywide office, but like not one that, you know, most people just have famous scene in that the Anthony Weiner documentary where, you know, Anthony Weiner is sort of at this at this parade and Bill de Blasio sort of in the background, like, you know, just marching, just nobody paying attention to him. Just that's, you know, months before he died.

becomes mayor. It's a big job that comes out of like a very small political process. Why does no one want this job? I mean, being mayor of America's largest city, that seems, I guess it's maybe I just explained it with that description, but I don't know. I mean, I guess we kind of talk about this or we talked about this a little bit too when it was Trump versus Biden. It was just like,

Why are these the only guys like who could be president? Like this is the – it seems like the job that everyone – you know, you dream of being president or you dream of being New York City's mayor. Yeah, but you think – Until you don't. But you think back, you know, to the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries or even the 2016 Republican primaries that Trump won. And it's like you do have a kind of a whole host of prominent and interesting figures presenting themselves, whether you like them or not, chasing this thing. Yeah.

And in the city government, it's just a lot smaller, even though the job is huge. It's just a lot smaller kinds of jobs.

forms of power and kind of constituencies and sort of figures that are sort of trying to lock together those interest groups. So Adams has, you know, he has a couple of challengers already that are going to run against him next June. But they're not yet people that, like most New Yorkers, know their names. Who are they? Like, I know, like, Scott Stringer is running. Right. Scott Stringer, the former controller who ran last time, is running. Brad Lander, the current controller, is running.

There's a state senator in Brooklyn, Zelner Myrie, who is running. Jessica Ramos, another state senator, is running. There's a couple more names. And what happened in 2021 when Adams won, it was like there was also like eight people in the race who were like not unqualified but like also that was a ton of people. There's no way people are – we're going to learn who all those eight people were and how to parse the differences like between them.

And Adams was in some ways, you know, depending on how you considered Andrew Yang, the most famous person running in the race sort of locally. He was sort of he'd been around a long time, been in the news a long time in New York City. And that was enough to sort of win despite many of these questions that we're talking about today sort of being very live at the time.

Who among the people who you just mentioned do you think has the best shot of ousting Adams? Or is there another local politician who hasn't thrown their hat in the ring who you think would actually have a pretty good shot at basically taking support away from Adams? I don't know what that – if it's like another former cop or –

then I think that that, you know, materially changes sort of Adams' standing with voters. Maybe enough to say, like, probably people are going to want someone else. But short of that, I still think it's hard to see how exactly a primary campaign works.

enough attention and energy to unseat Adams. Putting Adams's scandals aside for a second, which is hard to do because I feel like most of the time when you come on the podcast to talk about Adams, it's about either something weird that's going on in his administration or it's about one of his cronies. But I mean, what would you say Adams's like biggest accomplishments have been as mayor? Like when he's running for reelection, assuming that he's not indicted, you know, between now and then, what's

What can he point to as proof that he deserves another term? Because I just feel like we don't even really focus on like what he's doing politically anymore. It's just about his like political controversies. So they put out this week what's called an annual report called the Mayor's Management Report. It's like a scorecard. It's like a report card for the administration over the last year. And like, you know, even though it was the thing that they did to try to like change the subject from all these like really, really bad news, it's

pretty mixed bag in there in terms of like how they're managing the city. You know, I think like the migrant crisis, the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals that came to New York over the last couple of years and sought out city services was in many ways a disaster for the city. And Adams did himself no favors by talking about it as a sort of disaster and a problem. But they really did move a lot of people through city shelter systems and got

thousands and thousands of kids enrolled in school and all kinds of – there was all kinds of efforts made to sort of situate and at least kind of triage a real humanitarian crisis, which was just like very – people in very hard-up situations showing up in New York City and just not knowing where to turn.

It's often hard to give Adams credit because he was whining the whole time about how hard it was, how nobody was giving him credit and how it was just, you know, everybody was focusing on the negatives. But he was also simultaneously talking about the migrant crisis as like an issue that could, quote unquote, like be the end of New York City, subsume the whole city.

I'm not trying to like be unduly harsh, but it's like the rest of it just seems like they've just been managing stuff. I mean, you know, it's like it's, you know, 6% increases here, 10% increases here. They, you know, they really tout how much affordable housing they're kind of green lighting. And one of the things that they do get a lot of credit for in sort of wonky city government circles is kind of like rezoning initiative efforts.

called City of Yes that is about kind of just basically encouraging housing and density to try to do something about the like acute

crunch that the city is experiencing. The timeline on, you know, the success or failure of that kind of work is measured in decades, not in months, and it's probably going to be hard for him to claim immediate credit for as sort of median rents keep going up at record levels and as sort of everyone in the city sort of feels squeezed in some way.

Eric, I'd like to talk to you more about the future of the Adams administration. But first, we're going to take another break. You'll hear more from the political scene in just a moment.

by the magazine's celebrated artists.

Visit store.newyorker.com and enjoy 15% off with the code NEWYORKERPOD at checkout. That's store.newyorker.com. Adams is a famously bizarre guy. I mean, he's...

There's just so many quotes, like, all my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success. It's one of my favorites. He's written a book about veganism. He claims to want to retire to Israel when his political career is over. I could truly go on all day. And he's

You know, I'm wondering how his like weird public presence affects his reputation and kind of helps or hurts him politically. I mean, we mentioned earlier, you know, we made a comparison to Trump. And I'm wondering if he kind of is like Trump in the sense that he's kind of become immune to the kinds of political attacks or allegations, you know, that would normally sink a politician. But I'll tell you one place where he's not like Trump is that he won't fire these people.

You know, it's like he... Such a good point. You know, it's like in some ways it's like the opposite of the scandals of the Trump administration, which often had to do with the kind of crazy revolving door kind of thing where it's just like who's in charge when people are just going in and out like every day. And with Adams, I think at his core, it's just like he has this...

sort of philosophy of like loyalty above everything else. He's ride or die. He's ride or die. It'd be awesome if he were anything besides mayor of New York City. Yeah. You know, like it's a good quality to have if you're in a position that isn't this one. He won't drop someone. And in fact, when they get in trouble, his, his,

Seems to be to draw them closer. And the problem is that when people are either doing shady things or being investigated adjacent to shady things that are being done and you're drawing them closer, it's just it's just like natural political transitive property. Like people are just like that seems shady. So today at the press conference, there's a lot of attention on an administration official named Tim Pearson. Yeah.

who is another old cop buddy of Adams's. Adams says he brought in to his administration to oversee, um,

contracts that the city was sort of carrying all these emergency contracts from COVID from the pandemic that were like exorbitant and the city was spending tons of money and they needed somebody to come in and slash all these contracts and renegotiate them and the guy he picked for this job was Tim Pearson who like nobody had ever heard of

who was working as an executive at a quasi-casino out in Queens. He was working as an executive there, having retired from the NYPD. And then initially, when Adams took office, Pearson, the plan was for him to keep drawing a salary from the casino company while he was in City Hall. It was sort of completely kind of like, how did you guys not think that this was going to be a problem kind of thing?

They barely apologized for that even though Pearson did end up giving up the salary from the casino. And then Pearson has just been involved in like one thing after another. There's been lawsuits against him from city workers that he sexually harassed them. Adams' answer to that is like there's always lawsuits. Today at the press conference, he compared him to Yusuf Salam who was one of the members of the Central Park Five who is now a city council member.

You know, he's just he's up there being like, you know, it's like you can't prejudge somebody. Allegations are allegations. There's always lawsuits. That's sort of the stance that he's taking at the press conference today. The reporter was like, what's so special about Tim Pearson? You know, why was this guy the guy who you needed for the contract work?

And Adams' answer was like, well, I didn't mean to give the impression that he was the only person involved in the contract work. It was a team effort. I mean he just – he has no real way of defending –

publicly the decisions that he's making. And that, to me, that is for the city the most damaging part of these scandals and for Adams potentially the most dangerous, which is like when a politician gets into a situation where they're so obviously not telling the public everything that they know or even worse, kind of, if not lying, like putting this kind of just unavoidable gloss on it. Like, and the key is like politicians lie all the time, but it's like when you're caught, you know, when you're in a situation where it's obvious that

It's just like that's not tenable. It's not sustainable. And then that leads to the reporting drip of stories and just this stuff that just, you know, it just doesn't end well. Thank you so much for your time, Eric. Thanks for having me. Eric Latch is a staff writer at The New Yorker. You can read his coverage of New York City politics, including his latest piece, Eric Adams Stays Focused, Avoids Distractions and Grinds, at newyorker.com.

This has been The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett. This episode was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Gianna Palmer with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Enjoy your week, and we'll see you next Wednesday. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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