Eric Adams stays focused, avoids distractions and grinds

“No rest for the weary,” Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday when asked how he was feeling. “A little tickle in my throat, you know, a little runny nose.” He had tested positive for the virus a day earlier. COVID-19. Five days earlier, the FBI had issued subpoenas to several of his closest aides and seized their phones. He was in quarantine and recovering at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s Upper East Side residence, and his weekly “off-topic” news conference had been moved online. He appeared in a Webex window dressed in a blue suit. His voice was hoarse, and he looked tired and pixelated. “Thanks for asking,” he said.

For a week now, the mayor has struggled to find something compelling to say about the entangled scandals that have engulfed him and top officials in his administration. “Stay focused, don’t get distracted and get on with it,” he told a reporter from Politico New York last Thursday. Living up to that mantra has proven impossible. Tuesday was Adams’ first extended media availability since news of the federal investigation broke, and nearly every question focused on that issue. Was he planning to fire the police chief? Why had he appointed old friends with past or present ethical issues to positions of public trust? Would he promise to resign if accused of a crime? Adams offered vague answers. “Look, I realize these investigations raise a lot of questions and concerns,” he was about as direct as he could be. “These are serious issues that need to be addressed.”

But on the advice of his lawyers, the mayor has not told reporters everything he knows. Last weekend, The city reported that Terence Banks, brother of Phil Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety, and David Banks, the schools chancellor, had lobbied the city on behalf of a company that was trying to sell “panic button” apps to the city’s public school system. (The Banks brothers go way back with Adams — he served in the NYPD under their father, Phil Banks, Jr.) After also reported that James Caban, the twin brother of NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, runs a consulting firm that helps bars and nightclubs with police cases. (Adams, while on the force, was also close to the Cabans’ father.) “It wasn’t old-fashioned Mafia, ‘If you don’t pay up, we’ll break your windows,'” an anonymous source told the tabloid. “But (it was), ‘My brother’s a big boy, and he can make your tickets and underage drinking disappear.'”

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Some thought Adams was cooked a decade ago, when FBI agents pulled him over on the street and confiscated his phones and an iPad, reportedly as part of an investigation into possible illegal campaign contributions Adams had received from the Turkish government. “I think they’re already pushing the ‘we’re gonna charge’ button,” a former federal prosecutor for political corruption texted me last November. Months passed without any further public action from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In February, the FBI raided two homes of Winnie Greco, a fundraiser for Adams and a liaison to the Chinese American community, as part of a separate investigation overseen by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. (Greco initially went on leave after the FBI raided two of her homes in February, but later returned to her job at City Hall.) Lately, Adams has made a point of saying that no one close to him has yet been formally charged with wrongdoing.

After the latest raids, the district attorney texted me again: “Absolutely unprecedented aggression…in the past, issuing a subpoena to the commissioner would have been almost a declaration of war.” On Tuesday, Adams suggested, not for the first time, that he was being treated unfairly. Asked by Bloomberg News’ Laura Nahmias whether he thought the federal government was “fishing” a little bit, given the breadth of these simultaneous investigations, Adams said, “That’s a fair question.”

In recent months, Adams and his allies have compared him to former Mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, who lost reelection in 1993 after one term amid a wave of racist backlash fueled in part by Rudy Giuliani. This week, Adams ramped up the comparisons. “I’m just in my Job moment,” he said Sunday, speaking to a Brooklyn church congregation. He has supported the Banks brothers and refused to publicly criticize the police chief, even as rumors swirled that Caban was under pressure to resign. That his loyalty to his people seems more suspect than noble is a situation entirely of Adams’ own making: He has a tendency to double down when people in his inner circle get into trouble. “I’ve known the Banks family for years,” Adams said at the news conference. “I hold them to the same standard that I hold myself.”

A decade ago, Phil Banks was identified as an unindicted accomplice in a police corruption scandal that engulfed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. In 2022, Adams appointed Banks deputy mayor for public safety anyway, despite protests from good-government advocates. Now that Banks could be troubling a second mayor, Adams acknowledged no irony. “I have the utmost confidence in the New York City Police Department,” he said Tuesday, despite the fact that subpoenas have been issued not just to Caban but to officers all the way up to the police department. One of Adams’ aides who got the early-morning knock on his door last week, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, was actually on the conference call with him, filming from her office at City Hall. Wright lives with her fiancé, David Banks. When asked if she could explain what the officers at her home were looking for and what she or Banks gave them, Wright said only, “I am fully cooperating with any investigation. I am confident I have done nothing wrong.” It was a stronger statement than Adams made all day.

“It’s paralyzing for government,” said one former City Hall official. “How can they get anything done when nobody knows whose phones are being seized?” The mayor’s relationship with the City Council was already deteriorating before these latest developments. “Everything was dysfunctional,” said one City Council official. “This has made it significantly worse, that’s for sure. But it’s not like we’ve gone from a mediocre government operation to a bad one — we’ve gone from bad to worse.” Adams is up for re-election in 2025, and news of the investigations will only embolden politicians planning to challenge him in the Democratic primary in June. That his approval rating currently sits below 30 percent is partly due to the perception that something is amiss with the current City Hall staff. Manhattan District Attorney Damien Williams has now dramatically questioned the mayor’s integrity on multiple occasions. He better have the goods. ♦