Humble roots helped make Eric Adams New York mayor, a love of luxury may bring him down

NEW YORK – In December 2021, just weeks after he was elected as the second black mayor in New York City’s history, Eric Adams took a surprise trip to Ghana.

He called it a “spiritual journey”, and the week-long tour built on a story that had resonated deeply with voters. Adams visited slave trade sites and meditated on the remarkable arc that allowed a man whose ancestors left in shackles to return as the next leader of America’s largest city.

But federal prosecutors asserted this past week that the trip was also at the centre of a far more troubling story: a long-running bribery scheme in which Turkey plied Adams with more than US$100,000 (S$128,000) in luxury travel perks and illegal campaign contributions in exchange for political favours.

His spokesperson insisted at the time that Adams had paid for the sojourn to Ghana. But prosecutors charged in their indictment that Turkish Airlines had secretly given Adams and his partner free business class upgrades worth US$12,000 – right after he agreed to lean on the Fire Department to prematurely approve safety permits for Turkey’s new consulate.

The five criminal counts in the indictment have made Adams, a Democrat, the first New York City mayor to face federal criminal charges. On Sept 27,

he pleaded not guilty to all of them

in US District Court in Manhattan.

But the 57-page indictment – stuffed with the Mayor’s private text messages, images of sumptuous suites at the St Regis Istanbul and details of sham fund-raisers – has forced to the fore painful questions that promise to recast the narrative of his mayoralty, if not end it altogether.

The outlines of that ascent are well known. The dyslexic child of a single mother in New York City, Adams was beaten by police before signing up for the force. He did not look or sound like mayoral candidates before him, but voters flocked to him.

He won a crowded primary in 2021 – in a city laid low by a once-in-a-century pandemic – not so much by selling policy prescriptions but rather an image of New York City embodied by himself. He was a former police captain who simultaneously projected the swagger of wealth and power and the striving of millions of black and working-class New Yorkers.

So bright was Adams’ megawatt charisma, though, that it overshadowed years of unsettling questions about his judgment, his tight circle of friends and allies with chequered legal histories and ethical issues, where he travelled and even where precisely he lived.

Rather than speak out, some of his oldest peers from Brooklyn and beyond concede they simply kept their distance.

“There was the hope and expectation that his unique journey would also animate his service,” said Mr Patrick Gaspard, an adviser to Democratic mayors and presidents who began his career as an aide to the city’s first black mayor, Mr David Dinkins.

He added: “It appears that journey, that story, has been betrayed, either because of personal hubris or reliance on others who lacked competence.”

As he digs in for a fight, Adams, 64, is again wrapping himself in his origins. On Sept 26, just as the charges against him were being unsealed, he held a rally outside Gracie Mansion with black clergy and civic leaders, some of whom helped lay the groundwork for his career.

“This case isn’t even a real case,” the Mayor’s lawyer Alex Spiro said on Sept 27. “This is the airline-upgrade corruption case.”

But even some of those close to the mayor fear that the damage might already be done, and not only to Adams. They also worry that a rare window of opportunity for black leadership and the city itself opened by his election may also slam shut. One senior administration official, who asked not to be named, characterised the past few days as a collective traumatic event.

Mr Charles Rangel, a former member of Congress and dean of black New York City politics for half a century, concurred, describing the episode as “painful”.

“I’m a New Yorker, and the Mayor’s been indicted,” he said. “Goddamn.”

‘I am you’

By the time Adams set his sights on City Hall, he had honed a pitch that would gradually lift him to the top of a field of a dozen Democratic candidates, some of whom he had successfully cast as elites.

“I didn’t go to Harvard and Yale – I went to CUNY and jail,” he told a group of union members in the spring of 2021, as he was closing in on the nomination, referring to the City University of New York. “But I worked my way through. I am you.”

The verse was a quintessentially Eric Adams way of cementing the message that had made him stand out.

The city, he told voters, should be led by one of its own.

He grew up poor, the son of a house cleaner who moved the family from an increasingly dangerous part of Brooklyn to South-east Queens, a neighbourhood of black home owners and civil servants where the Mayor’s biography has held particular resonance.

“If you look back at all the mayors we’ve had recently, even Dinkins, they did not have these roots so deeply embedded among working people in the black community,” said Mr David Jones, a long-time Democratic political adviser and the president of the Community Service Society, an anti-poverty group. “And that’s why the potential was so great, and the hope was so great.”

But Adams’ climb out of poverty and into the heights of city government has been pockmarked by half-truths and flat-out falsehoods, as well as a steady stream of questions about his ethics and conduct that eventually caught the attention of the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The experience at the centre of Adams’ career traces back to his teenage years, when he said he was arrested on a trespassing charge and later beaten by police. That anecdote has become his life’s foundational trauma – and the fuel that propelled his mission to reform the city’s police department from the inside.

Adams became a transit officer, making a name for himself by creating 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group of officers dedicated to curbing police abuses and forging better ties with communities. But he also came to be known for controversy, and he was the subject of four separate internal investigations in the department.

In the 1990s, Adams appeared with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader known for anti-Semitic remarks, and he travelled with a group of officers to Indiana to escort boxer Mike Tyson, who had been convicted of rape, from prison.

Within the police department, Adams found not only a place to seed his political ambitions but also a tight circle of allies who have advised him for decades. Some of those people were appointed to the Mayor’s Cabinet and face their own legal peril.

Mr Timothy Pearson, a senior adviser to the Mayor and a former police inspector, has been accused of sexual assault and of physically attacking security guards at a migrant shelter. Mr Philip Banks III, a long-time friend of the Mayor’s and the deputy mayor for public safety, was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in a corruption investigation. The police commissioner, Mr Edward Caban, resigned in September.

All three men have had their phones seized by federal agents in recent weeks, along with other mayoral confidants.

Questions about Adams’ judgment followed him to the state senate. He and a group of colleagues were excoriated in a 2010 report by the state’s inspector-general for attending parties and fund-raisers with lobbyists from a casino franchise bidding for approval at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens.

None of that stopped Adams from entering the 2021 mayoral primary with a host of advantages.

He had high name recognition in vote-rich Brooklyn, where he had been elected borough president, and a huge campaign war chest. New Yorkers emerging from the worst of the coronavirus pandemic and worried about crime and street homelessness were drawn to a candidate who promised to revitalise the city, and who shunned calls to defund the police.

“I think he came at the right time,” said the Reverend Al Sharpton, for whom Adams once worked as a bodyguard.

Even then, Adams’ campaign was blemished by a series of tall tales and bizarre claims about seemingly basic facts. After Adams struggled to clarify where he actually lived during the campaign, reporters routinely camped out outside his office at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, a row house he owns in Bedford-Stuyvesant and his home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to try to discern where he was sleeping.

Adams’ veganism, born from his health struggles as a diabetic, is a key part of his political biography, and the subject of his 2020 book about plant-based eating. But as reporters trailed him after Election Day, they discovered that he sometimes ordered fish when dining out.

In his first month as mayor, Adams shared a moving story about how he kept in his wallet a photo of a police officer and close friend who died in the line of duty.

“I still think about Robert,” Adams told reporters after two officers were killed. When The New York Times asked to see the photo, the Mayor provided a copy that staff had hastily printed from Google and stained with coffee to make it look worn.

Among the tangle of ethics questions that have dogged the Mayor, it is his penchant for international travel that has aroused curiosity and eventually caught the attention of federal prosecutors.

‘My way of flying’

In a 2019 graduation address delivered on Coney Island, Adams told the audience to travel the world, and not be defined by where they grew up.

“Don’t be a MetroCard graduate,” he said. “Be a passport graduate and conquer the globe. Be bigger than people think you are.”

To celebrate his victory in the Democratic primary to become New York’s 110th mayor, Adams followed his own advice. His staff announced that he would take a trip to Europe. Reporters asked where. It took his campaign weeks to reveal that he had spent his vacation in Monaco.

As a state senator, he declined to answer questions about why he and his colleagues accompanied a lobbyist on what appeared to be a 2011 junket in South Korea. And just a few months after he took office as borough president, he left Brooklyn on a week-long trip to China.

Prosecutors later said many of those trips taken while he was borough president – including trips to India, France, China, Hungary and Turkey – had come at steep discounts and often with upgrades provided by Turkish Airlines, a carrier largely owned by the Turkish government.

On a 2017 trip to Istanbul, he stayed two nights in the St Regis’ palatial “Bentley Suite”. It was a US$7,000 value, prosecutors said, and Adams paid less than US$600. Fake paper trails were sometimes concocted to make the expenses look more legitimate, according to the indictment.

The travel also helped forge connections to businesspeople who prosecutors said steered illegal donations to his 2021 and 2025 mayoral campaigns through so-called straw donors in the United States.

None of it exactly came for free. Adams traded small favours for his Turkish contacts and one bigger one: his personal intervention in September 2021 to help accelerate safety clearances from the city’s fire department for a new high-rise Turkish consulate building in Manhattan, according to the indictment.

The Mayor’s legal team has suggested that the upgrades were common and trivial, and they have found support in some allies.

Dr Hazel Dukes, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’s New York State Conference, compared the accusations against Adams to reports that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted free travel for years without reporting it or being penalised.

“If he can still govern and make decisions, I think Eric Adams should have the same opportunity,” she said.

But this past week’s indictment may not be the end of Adams’ legal woes. State and federal investigators continue to actively probe his campaign and administration, seizing phones from and searching the home of yet another top adviser, Ms Ingrid Lewis-Martin, as recently as Sept 27.

Ms Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer who ran for mayor against Adams in 2021 and has called on him to resign, said that he had violated the public’s trust.

“The behaviour we’re seeing in the indictment suggests a feeling of entitlement and no trepidation over whether he should receive fancy hotel rooms and upgraded flights,” she said.

Indeed, the indictment suggests that by the time Adams traveled to Ghana in late 2021, he had settled into a routine with Turkish Airlines, which he called “my way of flying”.

His staff booked coach airfare – initially to Pakistan, before switching to Ghana four days before departure – then asked a contact at the airline for an upgrade, prosecutors said. The Turks also provided a BMW 7 Series sedan to escort him to a dinner during a layover in Istanbul with a Turkish official.

According to the indictment, the Turkish consul-general messaged Adams’ aide to make sure the Mayor-elect understood where the gifts were coming from. “We are the state,” prosecutors quote him as saying.

Adams announced the Ghana trip at the last minute, but he never disclosed his stop in Istanbul. His team made clear that he appreciated the hospitality, but Adams apparently turned down at least one offer, for a scenic cruise on the Bosporus.

Adams, prosecutors said the aide explained, had “done the boat tour a few times”. NYTIMES