If New York’s City Hall is indeed selling favors, as a growing pile of corruption and bribery indictments say, the prices have fallen to bargain-basement, clearance levels.
The allegations feature a boat party with a D.J. A karaoke nightclub in Queens. Crab cakes. Seafood salad. A guy calling himself “Suave Luciano” whose real name is Glenn.
The four indictments unsealed on Thursday, with their mundane details of petty criminality, target a former top adviser to the mayor, her son and several members of the business community.
They follow a slew of other corruption charges that together form a dispiriting whole. An 8.5 million-person metropolis built on muscle, willpower and can-do innovation finds itself sidetracked with investigations into grifts, gifts and side hustles with pointedly low returns.
The latest indictments center on one of Mayor Eric Adams’s top aides and his former chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who is charged with accepting more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for her influence over city agencies.
Bribery charges are, of course, nothing new in New York City. In Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a headstone marked “Tweed” stands over the resting place of the city’s notorious 19th-century political boss, William M. Tweed.
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The post From Boss Tweed to Bike Lanes: N.Y.C. Graft Ain’t What It Used to Be appeared first on New York Times.
