Feds charge NYC Mayor Adams with taking bribes and foreign funds

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, left, exits Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, in New York. | Yuki Iwamura/AP

NEW YORK—After months of mounting pressure, and multiple scandals in his administration, the federal indictment roof fell in on Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

And with a grand jury stating Adams took bribes and illegal campaign contributions from foreign interests—and thus was an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey—next year’s New York City mayoral race is now wide open.

The race is so open that several progressive hopefuls, including State Senate Labor Committee Chair Jessica Ramos, D-Queens, have already jumped in. She was leaning towards running even before unionists kept approaching her during the city’s Labor Day parade urging her to go for the top city job.

“I’m a Queens labor Democrat. That probably describes me best,” Ramos, the daughter of Colombian migrants, told one local publication. She sees her base as all working class New Yorkers, she says.

Unions have made no decision yet on the New York mayoral contest. They’re tied up with national and state politics. That includes the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a UFCW semi-independent sector which worked closely with Ramos on enacting state pro-worker measures.

But Ramos is not the sole progressive interested in ousting Adams. And that gives the scandal-scarred mayor an opening for a renewed mandate next year.

Others include current city Comptroller Eric Lander, who’s used his post to oppose investing workers’ pension fund money in securities from anti-worker firms. His predecessor, Scott Stringer, who’s also a former Manhattan Borough President, is running, too.

Such divisions mean progressive voters in the Big Apple could split their support and allow a right-winger to sneak through via its ranked-choice voting system. That’s how Adams, a police officer for 22 years, and a Republican for four of them, won the mayor’s chair almost four years ago.

As a Democrat, Adams became a state senator, then Brooklyn Borough President, then Mayor. He’s New York’s second African-American mayor.

Both Lander and Stringer want Adams to resign now, for the good of the city. So does progressive leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. “Nonstop investigations will make it impossible to recruit and retain a qualified administration,” she tweeted. “For the good of the city, he should resign.”

The grand jury reported Adams engaged in a decade-long string of corrupt practices. He sought “straw donations” to abuse a public campaign donation matching program, accepted improper gifts and luxury travel from Turkish businesses and officials, and acted on behalf of a Turkish official. Those last two counts led to his indictment on violating the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Says he accepted $100,000 in foreign travel “gifts”

The indictment disclosed Adams accepted more than $100,000 in foreign travel and luxury hotel “gifts” from foreign governments or government-controlled entities, including Israel, France, Hungary, Turkey, and China.

The Turks were in the forefront, in exchange for Adams pressuring city fire officials to waive the fire code and let them open a 36-story skyscraper for their consular offices in September 2021 without an inspection—but in time for “a high-profile visit” by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“The fire official was told he’d lose his job if he failed to acquiesce” to Adams’s demand, the indictment says. It adds that had the inspection occurred, the skyscraper would have flunked.

Adams isn’t the sole top member of his administration in legal hot water, forced out, or who resigned in disgust. Two of his Police Commissioners, including the latest, Edward Caban, had to resign under fire due to financial finagling.

Adams’s handpicked Education Commissioner David Banks—who favored Adams’s money cuts for K-3 kids which the United Federation of Teachers opposed—will quit at the end of this school year. Health Commissioner Ashwan Vasan will leave in January, The Gothamist reported.

Corporation Counsel Lisa Zornberg resigned in protest when he ignored her advice to cut ties with a corrupt Turkish fund-raising operative. His new Corporation Counsel is a pro-corporate right-winger.

And Adams himself has already been accused of sexually assaulting a female police officer decades ago, before he rose to a captain’s post.

Adams, who seeks re-election, protests his innocence and charges he’s indicted in a political vendetta orchestrated by a fellow Democrat, President Joe Biden, through the Justice Department.

His alleged reason? Adams criticized Biden’s migration policies as “bankrupting” New York. Adams charges Biden’s done nothing to prevent migrants from Latin America from being flown by rightist Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas to New York and dumped there and in other “sanctuary cities.” Other cities receiving migrants include Chicago and D.C.

“Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics,” Adams said in a video statement.

Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, asked to respond, said the mayor is wrong. “The president made clear when he was running in 2020 that the DOJ is independent, and the DOJ is handling this case independently. I’m not going to go beyond that,” Jean-Pierre said on September 26.

Adams, however, might not be in the mayor’s chair by the time of next year’s race. State law lets the governor—in this case Democrat Kathy Hochul of Buffalo—remove allegedly corrupt mayors, and Adams is the first-ever New York City mayor indicted while still in office.  Also a “cabinet” of five top officials can vote a mayor out, but the city council must then approve their decision.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.