Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
New York has inaugurated a brand-new mayor, but investigators and prosecutors will be processing the wreckage of Eric Adams’s scandal-plagued administration for years to come. The mountain of corruption seems to be far taller and stinkier than was generally known, and the ex-mayor has been busy adding new offal to the heap.
Just last week, Adams called reporters to Times Square, where he began hyping a digital asset called the NYC Token. It was part of what seems to be a grifty, multimillion-dollar memecoin hustle, known as a “rug pull,” in which investors are encouraged to buy a cryptocurrency asset by operators who quietly siphon off the invested money, leaving buyers with little or nothing. Adams and/or his unnamed partners in NYC Token may have netted a million dollars in the space of a few hours.
“The former mayor launches a memecoin, does a rug pull, and makes off like a bandit,” an exasperated former aide to Adams, Jonah Allon, posted on X. “Maybe it doesn’t meet the threshold for illegality, it’s just tawdry and unethical like much of his tenure in public life.”
New Yorkers can be forgiven for concluding that the string of City Hall scandals over the last four years feel like one rug pull after another.
The day after the NYC Token crashed, Adams’s longtime ally Tony Herbert, who held a high-ranking community outreach position at City Hall under Adams, was indicted on fraud and bribery charges. According to federal prosecutors, Herbert took kickbacks from a company providing security in public-housing developments. The indictment claims he took additional kickbacks from a funeral home that was sniffing around for city funds intended to pay for the burial of low-income victims of crime.
That’s not all. On the same day that Herbert was in federal court listening to the charges against him, news broke that Adams’s former police commissioner, Thomas Donlon, filed a defamation suit against the ex-mayor, charging that Adams and an NYPD deputy commissioner, Tarik Sheppard, tried to “publicly destroy the credibility of a senior law-enforcement whistleblower by falsely portraying him as cognitively impaired, mentally unstable, and professionally unfit.” The defamation claim is connected to a larger lawsuit by Donlon alleging that the department under Adams was run as a criminal enterprise. A similar lawsuit by the former chief of detectives alleges that NYPD promotions could be purchased for $15,000 and sexual harassment was rampant at One Police Plaza.
And there’s more: The new Speaker of the City Council, Julie Menin, says the Council will be looking into possible malfeasance by the Adams administration. “We need to retrospectively take a look back at what happened the last couple years,” Menin told me, with a special focus on the hundreds of millions in city funds handed out to hotel operators and other corporations, often without a competitive bidding process, as a surge of migrants and asylum seekers flooded the city. The Council, says Menin, will hold hearings on “the no-bid contracts that were constantly given out to various entities with little to no scrutiny oftentimes. We are going to have fulsome oversight.”
That means we’ll hear more about the kind of scandalous waste documented by former comptroller Brad Lander, such as a $432 million contract given to DocGo, a lab-testing company that somehow landed a no-bid contract to handle housing and social services for migrants. “Our detailed investigation into DocGo invoices and properties found a wide range of fiscal mismanagement and shoddy oversight — from DocGo overpaying security subcontractors by $2 million, skimming off over $400,000 in overhead for almost 10,000 unused hotels rooms, and failing to ensure promised social and casework services,” Lander’s audit found.
As early as October 2022, less than a year into the Adams administration, Timothy Pearson, a top aide who advised the mayor on city contracts, allegedly mused to members of his staff, “Do you know how these contracts work? People are doing very well on these contracts. I have to get mine. Where are my crumbs?” Pearson, a former cop who later resigned after federal authorities seized his phones, has not been charged with a crime, but some other Adams aides are still in deep legal trouble. (Adams himself, of course, got off scot-free thanks to his corrupt bargain with the Trump administration.)
Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who was chief adviser to Adams, is being prosecuted by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for allegedly manipulating city policy in exchange for cash and gifts. Her co-defendants, accused of steering contracts and taking bribes, include her adult son and Jesse Hamilton, an Adams crony who held a high-ranking position managing the city’s real-estate portfolio.
Expect more of the fiscal and legal shenanigans of the Adams era to come to light. “We inherited a budget that mismanaged finances at every turn,” Mayor Mamdani told reporters at a press conference in Albany following the governor’s State of the State address. A top aide to Mamdani, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, is himself a former city-budget director who is sure to discover any leftover waste and fraud and place blame where it belongs.
The strangest thing of all will be the sight of Adams continuing to thrust himself into public forums, in a manner that calls to mind a wry country-music ditty called “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” The ex-mayor, for reasons best known to himself, seems to believe he had nothing to do with the shame, stigma, and scandal that brought his administration to an ignominious end.
Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice