At first, none of the reporters gathered in City Hall one afternoon last August for Mayor Eric Adams’s news conference understood why colorful plastic whistles had been placed on their chairs.
Mr. Adams was defending his decision to continue to seek re-election after the indictment of several close associates, including Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his chief adviser. Asked about the whistles, Mr. Adams made a sardonic comment about his then-opponent in the general election for mayor, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had resigned four years earlier after the state attorney general’s office substantiated several allegations of sexual harassment against him. Mr. Cuomo denies the accusations.
Referring to several female journalists at the news conference, Mr. Adams said, “Many of these women here are interviewing Andrew Cuomo, and they feel unsafe.” He added, “They’re going to have a whistle to help them through it, OK?”
It turned out to be an expensive jab.
On Monday, the Conflicts of Interest Board, the agency charged with enforcing the city’s ethics laws, said that Mr. Adams had agreed to pay a $4,000 fine for violating the City Charter by conducting campaign activities during the course of his official duties.
In a statement to the board, the former mayor acknowledged that he had violated the Charter “by having City Hall staffers distribute whistles for attendees of an official City Hall press conference for the purpose of drawing negative attention to an opponent in my re-election campaign during that press conference and when they were required to be performing work for the city.”
Mr. Adams and his lawyer signed the settlement in December, and it was approved by the board chairman at the end of January. Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, said the former mayor had “cooperated fully” and “resolved this matter promptly.”
In spite of Mr. Adams’s written acknowledgment of the violation, Mr. Shapiro defended the former mayor, saying “the issue involved routine event preparation by staff and was never intended to support any political activity” and that there had been no “misuse” of public funds for political purposes.
“Mayor Adams takes ethics and compliance seriously,” Mr. Shapiro said, “and has always held his administration to a high standard.”
Federal prosecutors did not agree when they accused Mr. Adams of bribery and soliciting illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals, making him the city’s first sitting mayor in modern history to face indictment.
The Trump Justice Department successfully sought to drop the case, a decision a federal judge said “smacks of a bargain” in which Mr. Adams agreed to cooperate with the president’s mass deportation agenda in exchange for being freed from the charges. Mr. Adams decided not to run in the Democratic primary for mayor against Zohran Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo, and instead ran as an independent in the general election.
After Mr. Mamdani beat Mr. Cuomo in the primary, Mr. Adams — facing dismal approval ratings and almost no chance of victory — not only dropped out but sat courtside at a New York Knicks game with Mr. Cuomo before later endorsing and campaigning with him.
Complaints to the Conflicts of Interest Board are confidential, said Carolyn Lisa Miller, the board’s executive director, so it is unclear who filed the objection.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said that to his knowledge, neither the former governor nor any of his campaign staff had filed the complaint.
Given Mr. Adams’s long history of ethics violations around campaign finance rules, Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said he had gotten off easy.
“It’s corruption, and it is very much a snowball effect,” Ms. Lerner said in an interview. “Whether you get away with the large stuff or the small stuff, we have to consider our ethics laws and people’s expectations that their elected officials will be honest, will not be corrupt and will not misuse city assets, large or small.”
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
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