One surprising detail emerged in the trove of documents released about Mayor Eric Adams’s federal corruption case: The mayor used at least seven different cellphone numbers during the yearslong period in which he was under investigation.
Mr. Adams had a ready explanation for why he had so many phones.
“You have your office phone, you have your personal phone — you can’t mix the two,” Mr. Adams told reporters over the weekend, adding: “Many New Yorkers have several phones. I had also my campaign phone. So there’s a series of phones that you have.”
The mayor said that he had to get additional phones after federal authorities stopped him on the street in November 2023 and took his electronic devices as part of the investigation.
It was a glimpse into the personal life of a man whose habits have often been shrouded in uncertainty — his place of residence has at times been hard to pin down, and he has rarely been seen in public with his longtime partner — and have long been the subject of public curiosity.
The mayor’s many devices were a prominent part of the federal investigation that led to his indictment in September on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud and solicitation of illegal foreign donations. Mr. Adams has maintained his innocence.
The F.B.I. obtained warrants to track Mr. Adams’s location using cellphone data and found that he had used seven different phone numbers since the investigation began in August 2021, according to the roughly 1,700 pages of documents from his case that were released on Friday.
The charges against Mr. Adams were ultimately dismissed after the Trump administration asked to drop the case, a request that prompted the interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, to resign rather than carry out an order that she called an apparent “quid pro quo” in exchange for help with Mr. Trump’s immigration efforts.
During the investigation, Mr. Adams’s use of so many phones prompted the F.B.I. to seek permission to use a “cell site simulator” to discover other devices in the vicinity of ones Mr. Adams was known to be using, in an attempt to identify any new numbers Mr. Adams might have been using.
The F.B.I. approached Mr. Adams in November 2023 and seized two or three iPhones and an iPad from him, but the mayor was not carrying his personal phone, which the F.B.I. called “the target cellphone,” according to the warrant files. The next day, Mr. Adams’s lawyers turned over that phone, a gray Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max that Mr. Adams said he had locked himself out of and could not remember the password for, and another phone.
When agents searched Gracie Mansion in September 2024, more electronic devices were seized: two more iPhones, an iPad with a “NYC Mayor’s Office” sticker and an Iridium satellite phone that was in a protective case on the night stand next to Mr. Adams’s bed.
At City Hall on Tuesday, Mr. Adams bristled at the tactics used by federal authorities. He said that it was his dyslexia that prevented him from remembering the password on his primary phone and that their deliberations over seizing his devices at the finish line of the 2023 New York City Marathon were intended to humiliate him.
“They wanted to take my phones at the goddamn marathon,” he said.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
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