The Historic Indictment of a Sitting New York City Mayor
Last Thursday's unsealing of the indictment of Eric Adams revealed allegations of bribery and fraud tracing all the way back to 2014
Eric Adams is the first sitting New York City mayor to be charged with criminal offenses.
The indictment, unsealed last week, consisted of five charges related to wire fraud, bribery, and soliciting foreign contributors. The charges arose from accusations that Adams had illegally accepted travel and gifts from the Turkish government, arranged for illegal foreign campaign contributions, fraudulently accepted public matching funds by improperly certifying contributions, and improperly influenced the approval of the Turkish Consulate in New York City.
This Substack is about civic education. Keeping it going depends 100% on reader support. Please consider upgrading to paid—and thank you!
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has loudly called for Adams to step down, stating, “Nonstop investigations will make it impossible to recruit and retrain a qualified administration.” The New York Times added that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said “she could ‘not see how Mayor Adams can continue governing New York City.’”
Who is Eric Adams?
Adams is the 110th mayor of New York City after serving as a New York Police Officer for twenty-two years, a New York State Senator from 2007 until 2013, and the Brooklyn Borough President.
Adams has lived in New York his entire life and received a master’s degree in public administration from Marist College. He also graduated from New York City Technical College and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
During his campaign for mayor of New York City, Adams ran on a platform focused on crime and public safety. Adams reportedly “trumpeted his credentials as a former police officer and said they gave him the experience needed to address a rise in violent crime.” Adams also “billed himself as a reformer who had taken on police misconduct.”
Adams made history as the second Black person to be elected mayor of New York City. He came into this position as the city was still trying to return to its “new normal” in a post-COVID-19 world.
When Adams ran for New York state senate in 2006, he faced allegations of “accepting campaign contributions from a politically connected group bidding to bring a casino to a racetrack in Queens.”
Over the years that Adams has been in the political and governmental spotlight, he has faced a lot of questions and critiques. Some were a lot more insignificant things, such as whether or not he was genuinely vegan or about the video he made in 2011 as a senator in which he described how to search for things like “guns, drugs, and other illicit paraphernalia – that children may have hidden around the house.”
However, other eyebrows were raised at whether he was actually a resident of New York and whether he pulled strings to enable the building of the Turkish consulate without proper approvals. There were other mumblings about Adams’s frequenting an Italian restaurant owned by two brothers who were convicted felons; it was reported that Adams visited the restaurant up to fourteen times a month and “made it his unofficial meeting place.”
What was Adams charged with?
The indictment against New York City’s mayor includes five different charges:
One count for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, solicit foreign contributions, and accept bribes
One count for wire fraud
Two counts for the solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national
One count of bribery
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Simple Politics with Kim Wehle to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.