Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at takeaways from the Democratic primary on Tuesday. We’ll also get details on developments in separate corruption investigations involving former officials with ties to Mayor Eric Adams.
At his inauguration in 1961, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation.” He was 43. He succeeded President Dwight Eisenhower, who was 70.
That kind of generational turnover was one theme in Tuesday’s primary. Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent who is 71, lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenger seeking his seat in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Another progressive, Claire Valdez, who is 36, won the race in Queens and Brooklyn to succeed Representative Nydia Velázquez, who is 73 and is retiring from Congress.
“What we saw is a generational shift that I think is in many ways a political shift,” said Basil Smikle, 54, a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party who is now a professor at Columbia University. “My generation and older viewed the institutions as flawed but fixable if you had the right person in charge.”
But younger candidates — and younger voters — believe that government institutions “are inherently flawed and cannot be fixed from within, so we need to find a way to start from scratch,” he said.
That was another takeaway from the primary, about insurgents and established politicians. Democrats backed by labor unions and the party’s longstanding Black and Latino contingents — which have dominated local politics for years — were pummeled by left-leaning insurgents tied to Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was less than half former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s age when he defeated him in last year’s Democratic primary).
So it wasn’t a good day for candidates like Antonio Reynoso, who lost to Valdez and who has extensive experience in government.
It also wasn’t a good day for Kennedy’s 33-year-old grandson, Jack Schlossberg. He finished a distant third to Assemblyman Micah Lasher, who at 44 was the designated heir to Representative Jerrold Nadler, 79. With 87 percent of the votes counted, Lasher stood at 39 percent; Alex Bores, a former tech executive who is now a state assemblyman, had 35 percent; and Schlossberg had less than 11 percent.
Mamdani had not endorsed any candidate in that race. But he described the victories in the other contests as evidence that his progressivism was not an anomaly. He also argued that it offered a way forward in the face of the affordability challenges that he put at the center of his campaign last year.
“The old politics that got us into this crisis is not the politics that’s going to get us out of this crisis,” Mamdani told the crowd at a primary-night party.
On Tuesday, the mayor backed relatively untested contenders, and the results pointed to voters’ apparent tolerance for far-left views. Avila Chevalier won despite scrutiny of her past provocative social media posts, in which she criticized Kamala Harris, Joseph Biden Jr., interracial relationships and the American flag.
Mamdani’s success in picking winners did not go unnoticed. Even President Trump sounded envious of the mayor, though he called the winners “Communists.”
Trump also reveled in the defeat of a longstanding nemesis, Representative Dan Goldman, who was the lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment case. “This jerk is finally GONE,” Trump wrote on social media.
Goldman lost to Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, who had blasted Goldman for accepting support from pro-Israel donors and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC. Goldman supports Israel’s right to exist but has criticized its current leadership and does not refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide, as Lander does.
Avila Chevalier also called out her opponent for accepting campaign contributions from AIPAC and for not using the term genocide. Like Goldman, Espaillat has criticized Israel while defending its right to exist. Valdez said that Reynoso had taken money from pro-Israel donors, but AIPAC said it had sat out that race. And Reynoso had long criticized Israel.
Weather
Today will be sunny with a high around 81. Expect cloudy conditions and a chance of showers and thunderstorms tonight as temperatures drop near 68.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until July 3 (Independence Day observed)
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It’s not as if Broadway has ever been an easy place to crack, but the usual mismatch between expenses and income has never been greater,” said John Breglio, a longtime entertainment lawyer and sometime-producer, on why new musicals have all but vanished.
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Judge stops gender transition investigation: A Manhattan federal judge ordered the Justice Department to stop seeking sensitive medical information about transgender youth who had received transition-related medical care at New York City hospitals.
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A legal face-off: Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who is running for re-election, faces up to 17 years in prison after an altercation with immigration agents outside Delaney Hall, a troubled detention center in Newark that resulted in no injuries.
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A traumatic compensation process: Exonerated New Yorkers can receive millions of dollars from cities and the state for wrongful convictions. But sometimes, they must first go on trial again — a process they say can be harrowing and tortuous.
A former City Hall official is arrested on corruption charges
Wednesday began with developments in unrelated corruption investigations. One was the arrest of a chief of staff to former Mayor Eric Adams. The other was a search of police officials’ homes by Police Department investigators and F.B.I. agents.
Adams’s former chief of staff, Frank Carone, faces federal bribery and money laundering charges. His brother and a developer from Queens were also indicted. Carone was accused of using his influence to steer an emergency shelter contract to the developer, Yan Po Zhu, in exchange for $120,000 in bribes.
Prosecutors said that city officials had repeatedly rejected Zhu’s efforts to arrange a contract to house migrants at his hotel in Long Island City — until Carone intervened. The indictment said that the bribe money went through a law firm bank account controlled by Carone’s brother, Anthony.
Two of Frank Carone’s lawyers called the prosecution “utterly misguided.” A lawyer for Zhu said that his client would plead not guilty and that he “is anxious to get to court and disprove these allegations.”
The searches of current and former police officials’ homes involved inquiries related to Jeffrey Maddrey, who was the chief of the department under Adams. One of the inquiries focused at least in part on bribery accusations and stemmed from earlier scrutiny of Maddrey.
One of the officials targeted in that investigation was Assistant Chief James McCarthy. He was removed as commanding officer of the department’s Manhattan South patrol district and placed on modified duty on Tuesday.
METROPOLITAN diary
Vamping
Dear Diary:
When I was a student at N.Y.U. in the late 1970s, I worked part-time as a CBS page at the network’s broadcast center on West 57th Street. On one memorable spring day, I was assigned to play Dracula for a blood drive at Black Rock, the CBS headquarters.
My supervisors asked me to go to the makeup room where the soap operas were filmed. I was outfitted with a black wig, darkened eyebrows and enough makeup to make my face look as pale as a corpse. I was given formal tails and proceeded to wear them with the passion of a Transylvanian vampire.
There was only one thing they forgot — how to get crosstown to Black Rock on Sixth Avenue?
I decided to take a cab.
Mind you, these were the days when you had to pay in cash and talk to the driver.
I walked out of the broadcast center onto 57th and 10th Avenue to hail the cab. It didn’t take long, and the driver was your classic New York cabby.
I hopped in. We completed the trip across Midtown. And the driver did not ask one word about why a random guy dressed as Dracula was in his cab, in the middle of the day, several months before Halloween.
I got out at 52nd Street, on one of the busiest sections of Sixth Avenue. Again, I went without being noticed. No side eyes. No stares. Nothing.
When I got to Black Rock, I did get a reaction at the actual blood drive. But the donors seemed more excited about choosing the free CBS Records album they received for giving blood.
It was then that I learned why celebrities love to live in New York.
You can be Dracula and not attract a crowd.
— Michael Gargiulo
Michael Gargiulo is a co-anchor of “Today in New York” on WNBC-TV.
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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