Former Mayor Eric Adams was fined $4,000 for an August 2025 press conference where he ordered City Hall staff to buy whistles to make a political opponent look bad.
The Aug. 22 press conference was held inside City Hall’s rotunda hours after his former aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin and other staffers were indicted on corruption charges — the second set of charges for Lewis-Martin, one of Adams’s closest advisors. When reporters arrived, there were whistles on each chair.
When Adams was asked about the whistles by a reporter, he confirmed his staff had placed them there.
“Many of these women here are interviewing Andrew Cuomo, and they feel unsafe,” he said, likely referring to the sexual harassment findings that led to the former governor’s resignation in 2021. “They’re going to have a whistle to help them through it, okay?”
Most of that day’s press conference, which Adams held with his first deputy mayor at the time, Randy Mastro, was about trust in the administration and his own re-election campaign. The former mayor denied he was dropping out, although he did so a month later.
“I’m never going to quit on the City of New York. We’ve worked too hard to get here, and to those thousands of men and women who serve this city every day, I want to tell them thank you,” he said.
Almost two months after he reversed himself and exited the race, and a month after calling Cuomo “a snake and a liar,” Adams endorsed him. Weeks later, Cuomo nonetheless lost the general election to Zohran Mamdani.
In the Conflicts of Interest Board ruling released Monday, Adams acknowledged that he violated a portion of the City Charter restricting outside work on city time by asking a staffer to buy and distribute the whistles at a press conference “for the purpose of drawing negative attention to an opponent in my reelection campaign.”
It’s unclear which staffers purchased the whistles, or how much they cost.
“The issue involved routine event preparation by staff and was never intended to support any political activity. There was no misuse of public funds for campaign purposes,” Todd Shapiro, a statement for Adams, said in a statement.
“Mayor Adams takes ethics and compliance seriously, has always held his administration to a high standard.”
A spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, declined to comment.
COIB released two other rulings Monday indirectly related to the 2025 election, including one against Queens City Councilwoman Joann Ariola who was fined $2,000 for sharing a post about mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa with an official City Council seal.
“Considering the low cost of the fine, it was decided that it was best to simply pay it rather than allow the argument to drag on unnecessarily,” she said in a statement.
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