Interviews & Profiles

Eric Adams: the flawed, unforgettable, one-term mayor

“There was something really compelling and inspiring about what he was trying to do,” one former Adams administration official said. “A lot of that was realized … and then a lot of it was squandered.”

Mayor Eric Adams hosts a mid-autumn moon festival at Gracie Mansion.

Mayor Eric Adams hosts a mid-autumn moon festival at Gracie Mansion. Benny Polatseck

Act one, scene one of Eric Adams’ mayoralty was an effective piece of theater. The first minutes he spent as mayor just after midnight Jan. 1, 2022 were on a stage in the middle of Times Square, then a symbol of a pandemic-depressed New York, with a promise to usher in a safer, more prosperous city.

Huddled next to him were trusted advisers turned powerful administration officials including Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Tim Pearson and Winnie Greco. Each of them, like one of Chekov’s guns, would later fire one scandal or another into Adams’ one and only term.

As foreshadowing goes, the scene could not have been better directed by God himself, whom Adams believed to be the architect of his political success.

The legacy of the city’s second Black mayor, whose stubborn loyalty is widely seen as his fatal flaw, will forever be tied to the people he trusted and empowered at City Hall, including those who contributed to a steady drumbeat of corruption investigations and charges.  

Some day, the legacy of Eric Adams may include credit for the fact that the city is in some ways safer and more prosperous than it was when he took office. It may include policy wins like the City of Yes for housing rezoning, a reduction in most major crimes and a revolution in how the city manages its garbage – the work of high-ranking officials like Maria Torres-Springer and Jessica Tisch, who Adams elevated. “I think a lot of people look at the accomplishments of the last four years and don’t necessarily associate them with the mayor, which obviously is frustrating to him, and quite honestly unfair,” said Diane Savino, a former colleague of Adams’ in the state Senate and a senior adviser in City Hall. Eventually, she thinks, that will change.

But as it stands now, the legacy of Eric Adams will read like a tragedy, according to more than a dozen of his sympathetic allies, harshest critics and those in between. And like any tragic figure, Adams will be known as the victim of self-inflicted wounds.

“Any Black elected official, especially Black men … it just hurts to see somebody that we know has the ability and the talent, and who squandered it,” said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards.

Adams’ trusted advisers were engulfed in corruption scandals, but so was Adams himself. His federal indictment on corruption charges last year led to a choice that many see as the death knell for his administration. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and upon President Donald Trump’s reelection, Adams began cozying up to Trump and his administration, committing to working together on shared priorities including immigration enforcement. Trump’s Department of Justice moved to have Adams’ federal charges dismissed.

The judge who eventually agreed to dismiss the charges said the situation “smacks of a bargain.” Adams and the Trump administration denied a quid pro quo.

“I think what happened with the mayor was he gave up his identity,” former Gov. David Paterson said. “The problem that the mayor had was he owed them,” Paterson said of Adams’ resulting ties to the Trump administration. “Whether they told him he owed them or not.”

However nuanced Adams’ legacy eventually becomes, there’s little disagreement now about what will be written on the first page. “It’s going to start with ‘one-term mayor who is the first sitting mayor indicted in the city’s history,’” said Ben Max, a longtime journalist and now program director at New York Law School’s Center for New York City and State Law. “This is not David Dinkins (who) barely wins a term and then barely loses reelection. This is a guy who wins in a landslide general election and then can't even complete a campaign for attempting reelection. That’s torpedoing your political career in a big way.”

‘A real opportunity’

Several weeks before taking office, a jubilant Adams announced that he was appointing five women as his deputy mayors. A symbolic passing of the torch, trailblazers like Christine Quinn, the city’s first woman City Council speaker and former state Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, who led the charge for a generation of women and people of color in Albany, looked on at Brooklyn Borough Hall as Adams welcomed Lorraine Grillo, Anne Williams-Isom, Meera Joshi, Torres-Springer and Sheena Wright into the upper echelons of his administration. “Anyone that knows me, you know I’m a mama’s boy and I was raised by women,” Adams said, emphasizing what would become a common theme throughout the first year of his administration: that his team would be a direct reflection of the city it serves.

“His leadership looked like the community,” Richards said. “This was like ‘wow’ you know. Like ‘finally.’”

In many ways, the Adams that took office in 2022 was the embodiment of opportunity. He was quintessentially New York, raw and unfiltered with a powerful bootstraps biography. He seemed to revel in the city’s diversity, celebrating it with myriad flag raisings where he declared New York the “Mexico City,” “Istanbul” and “Athens” of America. Proud of his working-class roots, proud to be the city’s second Black mayor, proud of his unconventional path to power, he vowed to bring real change to the city. Many believed he could.

He had a real opportunity to come in and have some important and hard conversations about race, about policing, about politics and respectability.
Fordham professor Christina Greer

“He had a real opportunity to come in and have some important and hard conversations about race, about policing, about politics and respectability … public safety, public health, what it means to be a Democrat in the 21st century, you name it,” said Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University.

But Adams’ successes and failures often sat in close company, undermining what worked. A former cop, Adams ran on a platform of being a public safety mayor, and will exit office with a decline in crime in most major categories. Yet public safety was a constant battlefield for the mayor, where some of his most bitter fights with the City Council emerged and where his chosen leaders reflected disorder. As much as anywhere else, the New York City Police Department seemed to be a magnet for scandal, cycling through four commissioners in as many years, where top officials whom Adams stood by were accused of sexual misconduct and the subject of federal raids. 

On the more personal, granular level, it’s difficult to discern the truth of Adams. Some who know him well described him as kind, respectful and capable of true acts of compassion – but also as someone ultimately compromised by self-preservation. The same man whose aides kept the lights off and removed chairs from a City Council press conference during a veto fight, also made a spur of the moment decision to spend a frigid February night sleeping on a cot at the temporary emergency center at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal during the height of the migrant crisis. “When he’s exposed to that type of thing and he immerses himself he feels it in a way that I don’t think people understand,” said Shams DaBaron, a housing advocate who spent that night with him at the migrant shelter. DaBaron grew close with Adams, offering insight on homelessness as someone who once experienced it. “That’s his thing, he’s not stopping by to do a drop by, he wants to learn and really feel what you’re going through.”

The influx of more than 200,000 migrants to New York City beginning in 2022 was not a challenge of Adams’ own making, but it became indicative of how Adams could undermine the work of his own administration. Figuring out how to provide care and shelter for those migrants became a daily emergency for the administration, resulting in the standing up of hundreds of emergency shelters, with new systems of intake and legal services. For Adams, the issue resulted in “a mixed record with some impressive logistical and humanitarian response,” Max said, “and some immense cracks in the leadership that he showed.” While repeatedly appealing to the federal government – at that time President Joe Biden’s administration – for assistance and money to handle the influx, Adams said the issue “will destroy New York City.” The statement, and later his focus on migrants as perpetrators of crimes, was the beginning of Adams alienating Democrats on immigration, even as his administration sheltered and cared for tens of thousands of migrants every day.

“Burned his own house down”

Less than four years after that confetti-covered first day in Times Square, Adams, solemn and alone, accepted his fate as a one-term mayor. So much had changed, his reputation in tatters, the majority of his inner circle exiled. "My story is your story. I lived the struggle, but I never stopped loving this city,” he said, staring into the camera as he ended his tumultuous campaign from the stairs of Gracie Mansion. A portrait of his mother – similar to the one he’d hoisted triumphantly into the air his first day as mayor – rested at his side. 

Squaring the promise of what Adams could have been with what he ultimately became, has been challenging for many of his early believers. “There was something really compelling and inspiring about what he was trying to do, given who he was,” one former high-ranking Adams administration official said. “A lot of that was realized … and then a lot of it was squandered.”

The mix of emotions is perhaps especially complex for Black New Yorkers – not helped by the fact that out of the city’s 110 mayors, the two Black men each only got to serve one term. At the same time, the city’s Black population has declined rapidly over the past 20 years, forced to move due to the high cost of living. “Black community has been eroding in New York,” Democratic political strategist Yvette Buckner said. “There was a lot of faith put into Eric Adams as the Black mayor.”

Ultimately though, most see his demise as of his own making. Adams, a man who colleagues describe as thoughtful, patient and respectful behind closed doors, grew, in public, increasingly combative with the press, disdainful of his critics and inelegantly dismissive of the Democratic Party – a party he once envisioned himself as a leader of, and which he would later describe as “leaving him.” 

“I felt like he burned his own house down,” Richards said. But the mayor is worried about someone else setting a torch to his accomplishments. “This city is in good shape, and we need to make sure we don't go backwards,” Adams recently said, alluding to a nameless successor. “And let me say in the words of Bloomberg when I became mayor, 'Don't fuck it up.'”