Opinion: The Adams administration autopsy report

The mercy killing of the Eric Adams reelection campaign finally happened in broad daylight on Sunday.

The mayor, in a video that featured him sitting in front of a photo of his late mother with a classic Frank Sinatra tune playing in the background, finally admitted what 90% of New Yorkers already knew – he had no path to victory and no hope of beating front-runner Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee.

Like any mystery movie that flashes a gun in the first scene, there was a foreshadowing of his downfall extremely early in his ascent to City Hall. That event indicated to me that a premature ending was likely to happen at some point.

The night of Adams’ primary victory party in June 2021, he and his team recklessly decided to banish two of the more respected political journalists in New York City – David Freedlander of New York magazine and Ross Barkan, who writes for many publications including Crain’s and The Nation.

Thus began a high-stakes war between Adams and the tenacious New York City press corps. It was a one-sided battle from the start – as most mayors learn the hard way. Based on yesterday’s news, it appears Adams lost that fight quite decisively.

But to attribute his one-term flameout merely to bad press would be ignoring many other factors. Eric Adams neglected the management of the city, and while he brought in some very strong people to his administration, he was taken down by the dozen or so cronies he put in positions of power who were unqualified to be there, and who took advantage of public office to commit petty acts of corruption or ethical violations. 

Three examples of his flawed early hiring spree:

1. Making Phil Banks the deputy mayor for public safety, a new and unnecessary position that was redundant with the New York City police commissioner. Banks had a checkered career – with a trail of accusations of corruption – and his presence in Adams’ inner circle was an unnecessary lightning rod. It indicated early on to the press and to the public that this was not going to be an administration that prided itself on strict adherence to ethics. Furthermore, Banks’ presence outranking the very able police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, ruined the chain of command and undermined her ability to be successful, even though she was extremely well-liked by the rank-and-file.

2. The appointment and elevation of Timothy Pearson at the NYPD, despite a long record of complaints against his behavior, further indicated that Adams, himself a former cop, might be interested in cleaning up the streets but didn’t care about the ethical cesspool he was creating at 1 Police Plaza.

3. Despite being cautioned by numerous people, Adams appointed his long-time deputy Ingrid Lewis Martin to a nebulous “senior advisor” role, which allowed her to muck around in lots of city agencies and impede the work of the first deputy mayor. In the past year, Lewis Martin has been indicted multiple times for alleged corruption related to work in the administration. Although not yet convicted, her future looks rather perilous.

These unfortunate hires often overshadowed the work of some very talented people that Adams appointed as deputy mayors and commissioners. 

On the real estate and economic development side of the administration, Adams hired an all-star team that included former Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, current City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick and Economic Development head Andrew Kimball. Their work on the “City of Yes” and other zoning and development victories will be among the shining accomplishments talked about long after Adams leaves City Hall.

There were a number of other impressive accomplishments over the last four years that were drowned out by all the coverage of the alleged corruption and merry-go-round of top administration officials coming and going.

The hiring of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch last year accelerated an already impressive decline in major crimes. The city’s economy came roaring back and commercial real estate flourished after retrenching during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There was impressive progress at NYCHA, with an innovative development at Chelsea Houses pointing the way for long-overdue improvements in public housing. But the next mayor needs to scale that public-private partnership idea to make meaningful change in the public housing authority’s dilapidated buildings.

Containerization of trash throughout the city (although still not in every neighborhood) will yield dividends in cleanliness on our streets for generations to come. And the program to compassionately remove homeless mentally ill from our streets and subways was a partial success – a gallant attempt to deal with a chronic problem for the past five decades.

In education, the decision by DOE Chancellor David Banks to reverse the decades-long mistake of “whole language” teaching to young children and switch to phonics-based reading instruction will increase reading proficiency and test scores.

Faced with an unexpected crisis of 210,000 asylum-seekers descending on our city starting in the spring of 2022, early in Adams’ term, the mayor and his team nimbly handled this humanitarian and fiscal issue despite getting little help from the federal government. There were some missteps, of course – putting tents in a flood zone and overburdening certain hotels in midtown Manhattan, to name just two. Conspiracy theorists will say that Adams’ open criticism of Biden and his administration led to the mayor’s later indictment. That’s doubtful, but it certainly didn’t help Adams’ standing in the Democratic Party when he attacked the president. 

I met Eric Adams in late 2018 when he was gearing up to run in the 2021 election. He asked me at our introductory breakfast for my help in meeting people who could help him develop a public policy agenda for his administration. As a policy wonk myself, and because I liked Adams personally and thought he had a good chance of winning, I dedicated the next two years of my life to running “mayor classes“ for him each week. We met with over 100 thought leaders in New York City to discuss ways to fix an array of urban chronic problems.

It was a successful endeavor. Adams got to meet some of the most powerful and influential New Yorkers very early in the campaign. Many of them took a shine to him and word filtered out that he was a serious candidate to watch. 

Adams benefited from these policy discussions because it allowed him to be much more well-versed on city issues when the debates started in 2021. I believe that if Andrew Yang or Ray McGuire had attended similar “mayor classes,” they might have become mayor instead of Adams.

But looking back, I wish I had scheduled more classes on management and on ethics. On the latter, it didn’t occur to me that it would be necessary; but on management, I should’ve trusted my instincts and emphasized that more so that Adams could have improved his skills there. Setting up an effective government and hiring the right people is 80% of the job of being mayor. 

Former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, one of the early “mayor class” instructors, told Adams that when he sets up his administration, he should follow a few basic rules: 

1. Every commissioner should report to a deputy mayor 

2. Have very few deputy mayors 

3. Don’t hire senior advisors, who have undefined portfolios

Alas, Adams ignored all three of these wise suggestions. I believe that if he had followed Doctoroff’s template, he would have been more successful as mayor and had much less turnover. And two of his “senior advisors” were Eric Ulrich and Ingrid Lewis Martin, both of whom ran afoul of the law. 

I was pretty close to Eric Adams from 2019 to 2021, while I was helping him in my unofficial capacity as principal of “mayor school.” After he took office, our relationship shifted and we only occasionally texted. We had dinner together only twice in the last four years. At one of those dinners, we were accompanied by Andrew Cuomo, who told me in early 2022 – six months after he was exiled from Albany – that he could help the new mayor with advice on how to deal with the state Legislature. 

When I told Adams what Cuomo had said, he asked me to set up a dinner for the three of us. Given what’s happened between them the past year, that dinner still looms large in my memory. (And not just because the “vegan” mayor ordered Branzino.) Cuomo seemed to want to get Adams’ support for a potential comeback, but the assumption then was that he’d run for governor again one day, not challenge the sitting mayor. 

Now, with Adams’ departure from the race, the anti-Mamdani coalition will intensify its efforts to rally around Cuomo and bolster his chances. But unless they can figure out how to get Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa to step aside, it’ll likely be a futile effort. 

Cuomo needs all of Sliwa’s potential voters to mount a competitive race against Mamdani, but even one-on-one, he faces an uphill battle as an independent candidate. The last victorious mayoral candidate who was not on either the Republican or Democratic line was John Lindsay (who ran on the Liberal line) in 1969, 56 years ago. 

But today the spotlight is on Eric Adams, the first one-term mayor since David Dinkins in 1993, 32 years ago. Even a relatively unpopular mayor like Bill de Blasio won reelection easily in 2017.

Adams is now in the final stretch of a four-decade career in public service – from gadfly cop who railed against police brutality to swaggering mayor who brought joy and enthusiasm to City Hall. 

But ultimately, it wasn’t enough because the last four years have felt like Ed Koch’s corruption-tainted last term, which was memorably encapsulated in a book titled “City For Sale.” 

I used to say that if Adams were a professional basketball player, he’d likely score 20 points a game, but he’d undermine that by committing 15 turnovers. 

It was the unforced errors that cut the Eric Adams Era short. But like Dinkins, I think history will be kinder to his mayoralty than the press was.