Why Eric Adams still won't quit: An American story of faith and delusion

Just days after New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on federal charges that could cost him decades in jail, prosecutors told a federal judge it was "quite likely" there would be a second superseding indictment outlining more alleged crimes. All around him, Adams saw his top lieutenants' phones seized and homes searched, yet the former NYPD captain was resolute at his first weekly press conference after the indictment: He wasn’t going anywhere.

In the 57-page indictment filed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, prosecutors alleged that, going back to his time as Brooklyn borough president in the 2010s, Adams pulled in more than $100,000 in illicit benefits that included international flight upgrades and luxury accommodations from Turkish officials, while organizing a network of illegal "straw donors" that enabled him to defraud the taxpayers of more than $10 million in public campaign financing.

Although phrased in carefully crafted legal language, the alleged quid pro quo demanded of Adams is made clear enough:

In September 2021, the Turkish Official told Adams that it was his turn to repay the Turkish Official, by pressuring the New York City Fire Department (“FDNY”) to facilitate the opening of a new Turkish consular building — a 36-story skyscraper — without a fire inspection, in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey’s president. At the time, the building would have failed an FDNY inspection. In exchange for free travel and other travel-related bribes in 2021 and 2022 arranged by the Turkish Official, Adams did as instructed.  Because of Adams’ pressure on the FDNY, the FDNY official responsible for the FDNY’s assessment of the skyscraper’s fire safety was told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce, and, after ADAMS intervened, the skyscraper opened as requested by the Turkish Official.

The night before the unsealing of the indictment, in a short video address given in front of a fireplace mantel in Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Adams insisted the charges were “based on lies.” He intimated that he had been “targeted” for his criticism of the Biden administration over its “broken immigration policies,” which led Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida to transport more than 200,000 sanctuary-seeking immigrants to the Big Apple.

This defiant tone seemed  to annoy several members of the City Hall press corps, who had been informed by supposedly reliable sources that the end was near for Adams. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow centrist Democrat generally allied with Adams, had the power to remove the city's mayor. Surely she would act, or so many assumed. 

But Hochul held fire, issuing a statement that described the indictment as part of “a disturbing pattern of events that has, understandably, contributed to a sense of unease among many New Yorkers” while taking a wait-and-see attitude toward her political ally's precarious circumstance.   

A few days later Adams was in full and unapologetic battle mode, pushing back vigorously against the generally false narrative that New York is experiencing a crime wave. When he took office in 2022, the mayor said, “I inherited a city where we were witnessing a 40 percent increase in crime," but now "we're moving in the right direction," with murder down by more than 11 percent in 2024 and shootings down by 8.7 percent. And that was “on top of the double-digit decreases in shootings and homicides last year and year before as well,” Adams added. 

 "These achievements are on top of the fact that we have removed 18,500 guns off our streets to make our city safer than ever," Adams said, proclaiming — not without justification — that New York is now the "safest big city in America." 

This gesture of defiance comes in the face of a scandal that has mushroomed into at least five separate or overlapping criminal probes that have led to the resignations or forced departures of numerous aides and city officials, including a first deputy mayor, the police commissioner (and then his acting replacement), the health commissioner and the city’s chancellor of public schools. At least 46 elected officials have called for Adams to resign, including four members of Congress representing New York City, 20 state legislators and 18 City Council members. Several of the mayor's detractors stipulated that while he has the right to the presumption of innocence in court, he has no right to remain as the chief executive of America's largest city under these circumstances.

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Eric Adams' personal narrative is a remarkable American story, by any standard. His father, by Adams' account, struggled with alcohol abuse. His mother was a housecleaner with little formal education. He was one of six children in a household so poor that the kids adopted a rat — a Norway rat from the streets, not a white rat from a pet store — and named him Mickey Mouse.

“We put him in a box and he became our pet," Adams told the New York Post when he was running for mayor in 2021, after having previously been elected as a state senator and then Brooklyn borough president. “We didn’t even realize the diseases that could come from it. As with any child, you normalize your environment. We didn’t know we were poor because that’s how everyone around us lived.”

As a teenager in Jamaica, Queens — not far from where Donald Trump grew up, but several rungs lower on the socioeconomic ladder — Adams was badly beaten by police on at least one occasion, according to his story.

“They handcuffed us backwards and repeatedly kicked us in the groin,” Adams told the Post in that same campaign interview. “When you are abusive, you are smart in your abuse. They didn’t hit us anywhere else because they didn’t want to leave marks. When I urinated, I saw blood in the toilet. It was an emasculation that took place, and I had a lot of rage. The rage really engulfed me for years. I could not hear a siren without thinking about that. That’s what PTSD is all about: Reliving it over and over again.”

In multiple interviews over the years, Adams has recounted that his decision to join the NYPD was informed by an altruistic sense of mission: He wanted to change policing “from within,” as suggested by the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, then the pastor of Brooklyn’s House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn. Daughtry, one of the founders of the Black United Front, has had a storied career as a civil rights leader. With other prominent Black clergymen, he helped to win the release of Nelson Mandela and end apartheid in South Africa.

As an NYPD officer, Adams organized the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, aimed at countering racist police tactics, including the use of "stop-and-frisk" under previous mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, which overwhelmingly targeted Black and Latino young men and worsened community tension, but rarely resulted in arrests for serious offenses.  

Yet one of the great paradoxes of Adams' career is that as a mayoral candidate and in nearly three years in office, he has struck a strongly pro-police stance, much to the consternation of civil rights and police accountability advocates. In addition to moving to encrypt police radio traffic (and thereby shield it from citizen oversight), Adams has consistently backed police officers after high-profile violent incidents. Just last month, NYPD efforts to arrest a subway fare evader armed with a knife led to a police shooting that wounded two bystanders and a police officer, as well as the suspect.

Adams strongly defended the cops involved, drawing eloquently on his own history. "I was in the subway system as a transit cop," he said at a press briefing a few days later, "and I know what it takes to try to de-escalate a situation. I remember one situation when I had to wrestle with someone that had a knife, was trying to stab a passenger." It was too easy, the mayor said, to "look at the video" of an incident, "where you can hit pause, you can hit stop ... you can go and get something out of the kitchen and come back and look at it again. That's not real life.”

The officers in the subway shooting repeatedly told the suspect to drop the knife, Adams continued. "Those officers did what they were trained to do." The suspect involved was "a person that has been arrested over 20 times. ... He had a clear mission to carry out a violent act, and I thank God that those officers took the necessary precaution.”

Adams' administration “continues to prioritize the NYPD’s impunity over building trust between the Department and the New Yorkers that they are sworn to serve,” the Legal Aid Society said in a statement earlier this year. “A city devoid of the necessary safeguards to check police misconduct weakens public safety and reinforces a sentiment that officers are above the law and that the rest of us are all de-facto second class citizens.” 

Adams has long described himself as a man of deep religious conviction who is in regular contact with God, a somewhat unusual profession for a big-city Democratic mayor. Last May, as reported by Dana Rubinstein in the New York Times, he told a crowd at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn that, decades earlier, he had heard a divine voice that “prophesied that he would become mayor on Jan. 1, 2022."

"The same voice I heard 32 years ago spoke to me a few months ago and said, 'Talk about God, Eric,'" Adams concluded. "'Talk about God.'"

Last October, Adams appeared on Radio Visión Cristiana, a Spanish-language Christian broadcast, just a few weeks before his cell phones were seized by the FBI the first time. Dr. José Martínez, the host, began by observing that “the Bible says that every authority is established by God, and it calls on to be submissive to that authority and recognize and respect all authority.” He added that when Adams was first running for mayor “he partook with us" and was returning this time “with the authority given by God.”

“I believe you opened us with the right thought," Adams responded. "I am mayor because God gave me the authority to be mayor, and he placed in the hearts of the voters to give me that authority. Sometimes we miss how God operates, but I am clear when I receive my blessings from God." Returning to Martínez's program, he said, felt "like Joseph returning home."

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Last month, clearly beset by deepening scandal, Adams told congregants at the Power and Authority Evangelical Ministry and the Changing Lives Christian Center in Brooklyn that the Book of Job was his “favorite” Bible story. He did not mention his legal troubles, but likened his past struggles with dyslexia and diabetes with the tribulations of Job, a “blameless and upright” family man whose faith in God was tested by the loss of all his property and the deaths of his children and servants, along with all manner of painful physical afflictions.

As Adams' listeners surely knew, Job’s faith endures and he is rewarded with a long life, several new sons and the restoration of his fortunes beyond what he had originally possessed.

Whether or not he meant the parable to be explicit, Adams has cast himself as an honest servant of the people targeted by unseen political actors. “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,” the mayor insisted on the eve of his federal indictment.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime friend and ally of Adams, was quick to insist that he should not be forced to resign, observing that Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey remained in office for months after his indictment on corruption charges, resigning only after his conviction. “What we’re saying is there must be one set of rules,” Sharpton said on MSNBC.

Earlier this month, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a fellow Brooklyn Democrat, declined to demand Adams' resignation, while appearing to hedge his bets. Adams should stay in office and let the legal process proceed, Jeffries said, as long as he could “articulate to New Yorkers, in a compelling way, a plan and a path forward.”

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As the days after the initial indictment have stretched into weeks, Adams seems to have weathered the storm, at least for the moment. He used his Tuesday press conference last week to announce the promotion of Maria Torres-Springer as first deputy mayor. She is replacing Sheena Wright, who resigned shortly after her phone had been taken and her home was searched — the home she shares with her husband, outgoing Schools Chancellor David Banks, whose phone has also been seized. 

Adams says he is willing to trust a jury of his peers. A recent Marist Poll suggests that 69 percent of New York City residents sampled think he should resign. The mayor dismissed those results when asked about them by reporters, saying that polls during the 2021 mayoral race showed him 13 points behind former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who had recently entered the race. 

Yang "was riding a skateboard and he was all happy. He was measuring the drapes here," Adams said. "I was 13 points behind, and I would see some of you on the campaign trail, like, 'You're 13 points behind, Eric. No one can come back from that.' And what did I say? Stay focused, no distractions, and grind."

One reporter asked the mayor what sustains him in a time of crisis. He invoked his mother, who died during the mayoral primary campaign three years ago.

"When you're going through stuff, you need to make sure you're prepared for the journey. And my source of my strength is, as many of you know, my spiritual base," Adams said. "But also, I think — absent from the body, presence in the spirit — I keep hearing Mommy's voice: 'Baby, you're all right. And baby, you got this.' And that's the source of my strength. She's been here with me — just because she transitioned physically, I still feel Mommy's here spiritually. She has guided me through all sorts of things, and, you know, she didn't bring me here to be the mayor, to abandon me."

But the people of Eric Adams' city may have already done so.