Adams Under Pressure: 'We follow the law'
With the skyscrapers of Wall Street behind him, Eric Adams watched last week as an electric passenger aircraft circled Manhattan’s downtown heliport. He shared his dream that the city would be a hub of the new technology and waxed about the prospect of futuristic new jobs.
Then reality came back: a question about whether anyone else on his team had their phones seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as happened to Adams this month. “We’re talking about helicopters!” the mayor spat back, ignoring the question as he spun around and turned his eyes to the sky.
A federal investigation that burst into public view this month has compounded the challenges facing Adams, a moderate Democrat who took the reins at City Hall in 2022. His administration has clashed with the White House and the left-leaning City Council over how to handle an influx of more than 140,000 migrants, a relief effort that is leading to cuts to city services.
As I reported last week in The Wall Street Journal with Erin Ailworth, the federal probe and the migrant issue represent a political double whammy for the mayor, a former New York City policeman who campaigned on his personal story and a promise to reduce crime. The specter of corruption is fueling progressive attempts to mount a primary challenge, while the migrant crisis puts a strain on the services crucial to his core bloc of working-class voters.
To help close a looming $7 billion deficit, the mayor on Thursday announced budget cuts that would curtail summer youth programs, force library branches to close on Sundays and freeze the hiring of new police officers. The force will shrink more than 10% by 2025, officials said, which a police union leader warned would “return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s.”
Progressive lawmakers and social-service advocates denounced the plan immediately. Even before the new round of cuts, the migrant crisis was starting to eat into Adams’s base in majority-minority outer-borough neighborhoods like the area where he grew up in Jamaica, Queens. An October poll by the Siena College Research Institute found 50% of voters surveyed disapproved of Adams’s approach to handling migrants, compared with 41% who supported it.
“Mayor Adams’s unnecessary, dangerous and draconian budget cuts will only worsen New York’s affordability crisis and delay our city’s economic recovery by cutting funding for the schools, child care, food assistance and more that help New Yorkers live and raise families in this city,” City Councilman Lincoln Restler, chair of the body’s progressive caucus, told the New York Times.
Adams himself didn’t address reporters when he announced the cuts, but released a video statement in which he promised the funding cuts were crafted to “minimize disruption.” He kept up his schedule all week, including the appointment on Friday of a nightlife mayor and an appearance at a screening of “A Wu-Tang Experience: Live at Red Rocks Amphitheater.”
Meanwhile, New Yorkers are learning more about the federal probe. As my colleagues Jim Fanelli, Cory Ramey and I reported earlier last week, Adams has crisscrossed the city—and sometimes the world—over the past decade to participate in events promoting Turkish businesses, culture and causes. He has cultivated close ties to the city’s Turkish community and to people with connections to the country’s government in Ankara —relationships that have now caught the eye of federal investigators in Manhattan.
Investigators are examining donations, including those from a Brooklyn-based construction firm, to determine whether they were illegally funded by Turkish nationals and government officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The probe became public less than two weeks ago, when FBI agents searched the home of Brianna Suggs, a fundraiser for Adams’s campaign. The same day, agents also searched the home of a former Turkish Airlines employee as part of the probe, according to people familiar with that search. Adams has said he has frequently flown to Istanbul, including at least one trip in 2015 that was partly paid for by the airline and was disclosed to the city’s ethics board.
Adams on Tuesday acknowledged on Tuesday that he asked the city’s fire commissioner to “look into” the Turkish official’s request for an occupancy certificate for their new consulate building, which opened days after Adams’s outreach to the FDNY commissioner in 2021.
NBC New York reported that the FBI has spoken with fire chiefs about a pressure campaign to approve the building. Adams has said he is cooperating with the investigation. The FBI has declined to comment, and nobody has been charged with wrongdoing.
“We don’t do quid pro quo,” the mayor said last week. “We follow the law.”
THE QUESTION: What is the name of the activist group that Eric Adams co-founded while he was an NYPD officer?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: The “three I’s” in New York politics were Italy, Israel and Ireland. It referred to necessary nods to ethnic blocs for successful candidates. It’s now a bit dated!