The mayoralty of New York City is well known for being a dead-end job. No mayor has ever gone on to higher office, though many of them have tried, in over 100 years. The last one, Ardolph Loges Kline, was briefly acting mayor in 1913, after the death of Mayor William Jay Gaynor, and went on to become a congressman, although it’s unclear whether that’s actually a step up. Before that, Mayor John T. Hoffman became governor of New York in 1869.
It’s not a curse or a jinx, exactly. Being mayor of the largest city in America is for big personalities, and those personalities are not usually as appreciated outside the city. They have to be able to talk to the Russians of Brighton Beach and the Dominicans of the Bronx without pissing off the bankers’ wives of the Upper East Side or the hipsters of Bushwick. It’s a delicate dance and one that largely doesn’t translate outside New York. The last three mayors, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio, all flamed out in their attempts to secure an elected office beyond New York City, with three failed presidential campaigns among them. They had run a fiefdom in New York, with power any other mayor can only dream of, and found that their skills were largely not transferable outside this one job.
These are problems current New York City Mayor Eric Adams might wish he had. Dreaming of higher office is an activity for a mayor whose term is going well. Adams’s term is not.
Adams is embroiled in a very New York scandal. His top people keep falling like dominoes. New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban resigned on Sept. 12, and the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, abruptly quit a few days later. The Wall Street Journal calls it “a full-blown political meltdown.”
The trouble began in November 2023 when the FBI searched the homes of two Adams associates: Brianna Suggs, a consultant and fundraiser, and Rana Abbasova, an aide. A few days later, the FBI seized the mayor’s phone and iPad as part of its investigation. Adams brushed off the raids, saying, “Where there’s smoke, there’s not always fire.”
It was an interesting choice of words, given what would come out about the investigation.
The corruption allegations center on Turkey influencing Adams, with a Brooklyn-based construction company, KSK Construction Group, acting as a conduit when he was Brooklyn borough president to help him solve a bureaucratic problem. The accusation is that his campaign sought illegal donations from Turkey and, in return, would help expedite a New York City Fire Department inspection for the Turkish Consulate in Manhattan at a time when such inspections were backlogged. Smoke and fire were the whole problem.
Three months later, in February 2024, the FBI searched the home of Winnie Greco, the director of Asian affairs, in connection with the same investigation.
In July, the FBI served Adams with grand jury subpoenas.
Part of the investigation included whether the scandal went beyond Turkish influence and looked into whether the mayor’s office kept a list, called the “Deputy Mayor of Operations List,” of favored real estate developers who could move to the front of the inspection line. That list allegedly predates Adams and was held by the de Blasio administration as well.
It wasn’t just a signature on a piece of paper, either. Joseph Jardin, who was previously the FDNY’s chief of fire prevention, is suing after he and six other department chiefs were demoted for protesting the use of the DMO List. But Jardin’s suit alleges not just favoritism but also looking the other way about actual danger. As the website The City reported in November 2023, “Last spring Jardin told the FBI about an interaction in 2021, when Adams was still Brooklyn Borough President but soon to be mayor, and allegedly pressured the FDNY to reinspect a newly constructed 35-story Midtown building housing the Turkish consulate where the fire safety system had failed an inspection.”
A 35-story building in Manhattan already failing a fire department inspection and being fast-tracked for approval is more than just a political scandal.
For a long time, despite the innuendos and the gossip, the house searches and the subpoenas, no one had been arrested. That changed last Monday, Sept. 16.
Anthony Saccavino and Brian Cordasco, two high-ranking fire department officials who had resigned their posts after their own FBI home raids earlier this year, were arrested in connection with the investigation.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams held a press conference on Monday outlining the scheme. “They allegedly created a VIP lane for faster service that could only be accessed with bribes,” he said at a press conference. “That’s classic pay-to-play corruption.”
Suddenly, New York City Hall’s attempts to brush off the corruption allegations looked unlikely to succeed. In the last year, many had come to the mayor’s defense. Former New York Gov. David Paterson called the federal investigation “Orwellian” and suggested the Biden administration was coming after Adams because he had criticized the president for sending migrants to New York. The conversation about whether Adams would survive his term was no longer theoretical. If the FDNY officials were facing jail for their role in expediting the inspections, it stood to reason that someone in the mayor’s office had motivated them to do so.
What’s interesting is, according to the New York Post, “Adams’ campaign accepted a $6,000 donation from three donors who served on the board of a foundation backed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son Bilal.” A $6,000 donation hardly seems like the kind of thing to blow up your mayoralty over. And the existence of the DMO List during the de Blasio administration tells the story that this kind of, yes, corruption was often accepted and overlooked.
Back in November 2023, Adams said helping constituents in this manner was standard practice: “This is what we do every day. When the constituency reaches out to us for assistance to another agency, you reach out to an agency and ask them to look into a matter.”
It’s unclear whether the resignation of Caban, a close Adams ally, was related to the Turkish donation mess. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that “an Adams administration staffer was fired after a Brooklyn bar owner told a local NBC News station that he was informed his problems would go away if he made a payment to the police commissioner’s twin brother.”
“At least four agencies — the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service and the city Department of Investigation — now have probes going. It isn’t clear exactly which potential crimes they are focused on,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Zornberg resigned after Adams allegedly refused to take her advice about cutting off some toxic people in his orbit. NY1 reported Zornberg “left after she recommended Adams to fire a handful of officials involved in the federal investigations, potentially including senior adviser Tim Pearson and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks.” Pearson heads the NYC Economic Development Corporation and, in addition to being involved in a number of sexual harassment lawsuits, is being investigated for his involvement with Caban. Banks, the brother of New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks and brother-in-law of First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, is being investigated for steering city contracts to his other brother, Terence Banks.
The problem for Adams is that despite not being directly accused of a crime, all of it seems rather close to the mayor and the sharks are circling in the water. Candidates who have announced that they will primary Adams include a handful of state senators, former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who was in pole position to win the nomination last time around but was embroiled in a #MeToo scandal for which he is now suing the woman for defamation, and leftist New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.
Adams had previously accused unnamed forces of a “coordinated” effort to get rid of him. It’s not entirely far-fetched. New York’s political Left, including the Democratic Socialists of America, hate him, and he returns the favor. He was likely going to be primaried either way, but the open investigations provide cover for naked ambition like Lander’s, where instead of stepping on a fellow Democrat, he’s hoping to give the impression that he’s just helping New York in a time of trouble.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Adams ran in 2021 to help rebuild a struggling city. His fairly centrist campaign was appealing after eight years of leftist leadership by de Blasio. But Adams quickly established a reputation for partying at nightclubs and being a detached mayor. Despite appearances to the contrary, the mayoralty of New York is not a very glamorous position. Doing Saturday Night Live appearances occasionally or scoring the odd invitation to the Met Gala is secondary to making sure the subways are clean and orderly and the garbage gets picked up. One of Adams’s most applauded policies involves the city’s “war on rats.” Being hands-on is important, and the scandals have absolutely distracted the mayor from his job.
A frequent criticism of Adams is that he filled many of the top positions with his friends. As his close allies resign and his fellow Democrats line up to run against him, Adams is increasingly isolated and could use some friends. “I’m dyslexic. I was arrested. I was rejected. Now I’m elected,” Adams likes to say. Yes, but can he stay that way?
Karol Markowicz is a regular columnist at the New York Post and Fox News and co-author of the bestselling book Stolen Youth. She is host of the Karol Markowicz Show, a podcast on iHeartRadio. She was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Brooklyn. She now lives in South Florida with her husband and three children.