Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll get details on the bribery and fraud charges that Mayor Eric Adams is facing.
On Thursday — Mayor Eric Adams’s 1,000th day in office — federal prosecutors made public a criminal indictment that accuses him of bribery and fraud beginning long before he became mayor.
The charges capped 10 months of apprehension and anxiety that had swirled around the mayor ever since the day the F.B.I. told his security detail to step aside, climbed into his S.U.V. with him as he was leaving an event and seized his phones and iPad.
Now, in 57 pages, prosecutors outlined what they called a scheme to solicit illegal foreign campaign donations. The indictment said that Adams had accepted more than $100,000 in graft and had used his power to help Turkey.
The mayor defiantly insisted that he was innocent.
Adams is set to appear before a federal magistrate judge on Friday, though a lawyer for the mayor has asked the judge to move the hearing to early next week. When his arraignment takes place, Adams will enter a plea, presumably of not guilty.
The arraignment, like the indictment itself, will be unprecedented: Adams is the first New York mayor in modern history to be charged while in office. And the next few days could determine whether he can remain at City Hall.
“The mayor owns this scandal, and that makes it very hard for him to disassociate himself from it,” said Chris McNickle, who has written books about two former mayors, Michael Bloomberg and David Dinkins.
“He’s going to have to focus his attention on dealing with legal matters,” McNickle said. “He may be forced to resign, so he becomes in a certain sense a quasi-lame duck mayor. And it’s going to be hard for someone who may not be in office for very long to govern with the authority that a mayor normally has.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove the mayor from office, indicated that she was keeping her options open. In a statement on Thursday, she called the indictment “the latest in a disturbing pattern of events” and said that she would be assessing what to do next and expected the mayor to do the same. She stopped short of calling on Adams to resign.
A political alarm, though, came from the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the mayor’s closest supporters, who declined to defend Adams. Some Black power brokers have been alarmed by Adams’s attacks on the Justice Department, including a claim that he has been targeted for challenging the Biden-Harris administration over immigration.
“Does that hurt Vice President Kamala Harris?” Sharpton said, referring to the Democratic presidential nominee, before noting that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, whose office brought the charges, “is a Black man that we work with.”
“There’s complexities in this,” Sharpton said, adding that he had called a meeting for the weekend with a dozen Black leaders, including Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, called the charges “serious,” as did the state’s attorney general, Letitia James. “No one is above the law, including the mayor of New York City,” Schumer said. “The legal process should now play out speedily and fairly.”
James also called the allegations “troubling.”
Prosecutors said that the scheme outlined in the indictment began in 2016, when Adams was a top elected official in Brooklyn, and continued after he became mayor on New Year’s Day 2022. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that Adams had been “showered” with gifts that he knew were illegal.
The mayor had crossed “bright red lines,” Williams said, adding that “this investigation continues” and that other people would also be held accountable.
Adams said he had been demonized. “We are not surprised — we expected this,” Mr. Adams said. “The actions that have unfolded over the last 10 months, the leaks, the commentary, the demonizing. This did not surprise us that we reached this day.”
It was a day that began with an early-morning raid at Gracie Mansion, where federal agents spent more than an hour. Adams said later that “today was about my phones.”
He insisted that he would not resign despite calls to do so by some elected officials — and by hecklers who repeatedly interrupted a news conference that Adams held outside Gracie Mansion. “I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense,” Adams said.
Shortly afterward, Williams appeared at his own news conference in Lower Manhattan.
The indictment listed trips and business-class airline upgrades that prosecutors said Adams had accepted, including one trip that was arranged on the day he won the Democratic primary in 2021. Someone from Adams’s office, prosecutors said, booked a trip to Turkey with an airline manager who described the fare as “very expensive” because the arrangements were being made at the last minute. The airline manager, according to the indictment, suggested that Adams pay only $50.
When it came to where Adams would stay, the airline manager mentioned the Four Seasons. But the staffer called that “too expensive,” the indictment said.
“Why does he care?” the airline manager said. “He is not going to pay. His name will not be on anything, either.”
“Super,” the staffer said. (The trip was ultimately canceled.)
Weather
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ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).
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METROPOLITAN diary
Princess Leia for sale
Dear Diary:
On some Saturdays in the 1990s, during the blissful summer months I had off from school, my father used to take me to the Chelsea Flea Market.
It was just me and him, taking the long trip on the 1 train down from the Bronx, me looking out the window for those few stops that are aboveground, and my father keeping an eye on me. He bought me some weird, random stuff in those years: a small (blunt) kukri knife with an ornate sheath on one occasion and a couple of ridiculously smooth orbs of white stone on another.
Then there was the rare Princess Leia Organa action figure.
I had been collecting “Star Wars” figures for some time. I would hang them on my wall, each one still in its packaging.
My friends were confused: Why didn’t I open them? But I knew that keeping them in mint condition, in their original packaging, would maintain their value.
That Princess Leia action figure at the flea market was still in its packaging. I had never owned a rare action figure, and I desperately wanted to.
We asked the vendor the price.
“For you?” he said. “Sixty bucks.”
Then he turned to another potential customer and repeated the same stupid joke. Then he did it again. And again.
I loved this routine. Forget the action figure. I was taken by the vendor’s quirky patter. To me, it captured the wink-wink, wiseguy attitude of so many New Yorkers.
My father wound up buying the action figure for me, and I still sometimes say, “For you … ” when asked to name a price for something, although no one knows why.
— Ian Park
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters, Ash Wu, Dana Rubinstein and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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