Four years ago, Eric Adams, fresh off what would become a razor-thin victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, held forth with characteristic bombast. He was the “face of the new Democratic Party,” he said.
He suggested that with his working-class roots and police background, he was the model of new leadership for a party held hostage by the gentrifying elite. He would orient City Hall toward the dispossessed and the underserved. And as the city’s second Black mayor, he would continue the legacy of the first, David N. Dinkins.
“I am you,” he told his supporters that November, after he won the general election. “The campaign was never, never, never about me.”
But as he began to lead New York City, Mr. Adams allowed his focus to become uncommonly inward-looking, oriented around the very few allies he considered sufficiently loyal.
Questions arose early on about his character, job performance and decision-making. He was caught lying about what he ate and with whom he owned real estate. And investigations plagued his administration, finally landing at the mayor’s door.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Adams with bribery and fraud, saying he accepted free and heavily discounted travel on Turkish Airlines in exchange for help opening a new Turkish consulate in Manhattan that the Fire Department had deemed unsafe. Prosecutors accused him of knowingly soliciting illegal foreign donations that were routed through straw donors.
The high hopes that many New Yorkers had for Mr. Adams have long since been dashed, and on Sunday, the mayor’s own ambitions ground to a halt. Acknowledging the political reality that the city he runs does not want him to remain in City Hall, Mr. Adams said he would stop campaigning for re-election.
In his first State of the City address, Mayor Adams vowed to be a “servant leader,” who would change the life “of the Eric Adams of today, who was dyslexic and was arrested,” and “lived on the verge of homelessness.” He would follow the example of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, like him, understood the need for “bold plans” to solve entrenched problems. He promised to abide by an acronym of a mantra that he promptly had printed on ball caps, “G.S.D.”: “This is an administration that is going to get stuff done.”
He faced challenges from the start. He was being asked to lead New York out of the Covid pandemic, tame the accompanying rise in crime and ease the turmoil that followed the police killing of George Floyd.
His administration was not without accomplishments. Crime began to fall, and New York City emerged from the economic doldrums of the pandemic, gaining jobs and regaining its stride. He helped pass major changes to the city’s zoning rules to allow for the future construction of more housing, and his education department changed how reading was taught, with promising early results.
But his bravado, and his seeming indifference to the checkered pasts and questionable qualifications of his closest aides, worked to outpace his achievements.
“Sadly, his tenure has been marked by an inability to self-reflect or course-correct after sustained and continued bad decisions, squandering potential and ensuring that the second Black mayor in our city’s history will, once again, not have a second term — overshadowing any real achievements along the way,” Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said in a statement.
Of the close friends who joined Mr. Adams on a Times Square stage on Jan. 1, 2022, as he was sworn in as mayor, one would be sued four times for sexual harassment and become the subject of a federal corruption investigation; another would see her two homes searched by the F.B.I. in a separate corruption inquiry and nonetheless later would give a reporter a potato chip bag filled with cash; a third would be indicted several times on state bribery charges.
Hours before taking office, Mr. Adams named his brother, Bernard Adams, a Virginia parking administrator and retired police sergeant, to a top position at the Police Department.
Seven days into his mayoralty, he appointed Philip Banks III, an unindicted co-conspirator in a sprawling corruption investigation that resulted in several convictions, as deputy mayor for public safety. Mr. Banks was allowed to announce his own appointment in an opinion piece in The Daily News.
Five months in, he named Timothy Pearson, a confidant and retired Police Department inspector, to a senior adviser position, allowing Mr. Pearson to also keep his job overseeing security at a Queens racetrack and slot machine parlor, even as the owners of that parlor were seeking city support to expand their operations.
“His mayoralty will likely be remembered as something that was rather tortured,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic political strategist. “It’s sad. I use the word disappointing.”
The ensuing three years would see the early scandals of the Adams administration fade into the background as newer, more explosive allegations took their place. Mr. Pearson would face four sexual harassment lawsuits and resign after federal agents seized his phones and he instigated a brawl at a migrant shelter.
U.S. agents would search the home of Mr. Adams’s uncommonly young and inexperienced chief campaign fund-raiser, and after an event at New York University, seize the mayor’s electronic devices.
Both he and Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his closest aide and a decades-long friend he referred to as his “sister,” would be indicted, he in federal court, she by state prosecutors, on allegations of corruption.
He then adopted an unusual strategy for a Democratic mayor, embarking on a successful public and private courtship of the incoming Republican president, Donald J. Trump. Ultimately, the Justice Department would ask a federal judge to abandon the charges against Mr. Adams, a request the judge said he had no power to deny, even as he decried what looked to him like a bargain: the president’s help in exchange for the city’s help with his deportation agenda.
In the interim, politicians would call for Gov. Kathy Hochul to remove the mayor from power, and half of the city’s deputy mayors would resign over concerns that the mayor was prioritizing his own interests over the city’s.
His poll numbers were already at historic lows before the indictment. The courtship of Mr. Trump only caused them to fall further.
In the end, the Trump connection saved the mayor from the public spectacle of a federal trial and the possibility of significant prison time, but dealt a death blow to his political career in New York City.
“The thing that hurt him more than anything was the perception that he had become compromised by Donald Trump,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, an MSNBC host.
After opting out of the June Democratic primary, in apparent recognition of his dim chances of winning, he mounted an independent run for mayor that never gained traction.
He lagged in the polls and in fund-raising. The city’s Campaign Finance Board denied him public matching funds, citing the seemingly endless irregularities surrounding his fund-raising.
He told friends that he was open to other jobs. His allies crafted a now defunct plan with Steve Witkoff, an adviser to Mr. Trump, to make Mr. Adams ambassador to Saudi Arabia. As word of his deliberations leaked out, he said the media was intentionally undermining his campaign.
All the while, he continued to poll in fourth place, behind Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate and democratic socialist; Andrew M. Cuomo, the former governor running on a third-party line, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate and red-bereted founder of the Guardian Angels.
In the end, following a prolonged period of equivocation, the mayor acknowledged political reality. He could not be re-elected in New York City.
In a video announcing his decision on Sunday afternoon, he repeated an assertion from his election night victory party.
“I am one of you, my story is your story,” Mr. Adams said.
But in an interview, Mr. Sharpton questioned the mayor’s assertion. “Where does ‘you’ end?” Mr. Sharpton said.
“Eric and I both come out of single-parent homes, out of the hood,” he added. “But did we come out of there to become like the forces we were fighting?”
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
The post The Rise and Fall of Eric Adams appeared first on New York Times.
