A man with a job do to: Eric Adams is not a gift from God
My Sunday Daily News spread on NYC's intoxicating new mayor:
Purim begins Wednesday night, and the story in the Book of Esther of an orphan who becomes queen and rises to her position and the occasion to save her people from destruction feels especially timely this year as Ukraine’s democratically elected Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, tries to rally his people and the world to repel a brutal Russian invasion supposedly intended to bring about the “denazification” and “democratization” of his nation.
Closer to home, Eric Adams, who grew up the hard way in New York City and forged his own path that led him to City Hall, keeps citing the verse where Mordechai instructs his adopted daughter Esther, whose new husband the king doesn’t know that she’s Jewish and is planning to wipe out his kingdom’s Jews: “If you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will come to the Jewish people from another place, but you and your father’s family will be destroyed. Who knows, perhaps you have come to your royal position for such a time as this.”
Or, as Adams has been putting it since even before he won the Democratic primary, removing the “ifs” and “who knows” to pre-write his own divinely ordained happy ending: “Esther 4:14 in the Bible stated, ‘God made me for such a time like this.’ ”
Like almost everything Adams says as he swaggers around the city celebrating its recovery in the hopes of making it happen and keeping himself center stage in the process with an endless stream of appearances and words (most of them not being transcribed by his office), so that each new storyline pushes the last one off of the front pages, that can be taken a few different, conflicting ways.
Talking to Politico’s Ruby Cramer for an excellent profile published Friday, Adams answered a question I’d asked last month about how he can compare himself to Jesus Christ in one breath (“You can’t be a good shepherd if you’re not hanging out with the sheep”) and to Tywin Lannister in the next (“Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep”).
“Different sheep,” he said.
That’s cute, and it may well be politically sufficient.
The people triggered by the wild stuff he says are rarely the ones who voted for him in the first place. The left-wing “smart” set endlessly dismissing Adams as a dumb “cop” while amplifying his every absurd utterance and tweeting about how “we could have had Maya Wiley” may be racking up primary wins in legislative districts where youthful left-wing energy can overwhelm a moribund Democratic Party operation, but they lost the mayoral race (where Wiley, in fact, came in third).
Adams gives them plenty of ammunition as he at times badly misses the trees — talking about somehow barring drill rap music from social media platforms, blaming bail reform on crimes that have nothing to do with it, declaring that only people who’ve been cops like him can object to his bringing back solitary confinement, and on and on. But his critics often seem to miss the forest of a city that feels less safe amid people being freed after committing serious crimes then committing more serious crimes.
Rhetorically and politically, Adams — who as a candidate skated away from serious questions about where he actually lives and filing inaccurate tax returns and disclosures about that, and as mayor skated away from getting caught lying for years about being a vegan — is functioning like a point guard (and I hear the Nets could use one at Barclays, by the way), controlling the pace of play. But, of course, running the city isn’t a game.
***
Messing around with his own life story is one thing. Failing to live up to his big, vague promises to make New York City fair and safe, to have the public schools really educate the 65% of Black and Hispanic students who haven’t achieved academic proficiency, and to “get stuff done” (which is at once a big promise, and a way to avoid setting measurable baselines for himself) would be quite another.
One perverse advantage that Adams starts out with is that the disruptions of the last two years mean that the old numbers don’t really apply, or at least seem very old. Crime is way up compared to 2019, and, even with a big year-over-year leap this January, things look very different depending on whether you use 2019 or 2020 as the baseline.
Similarly, with the state Regents tests optional for the second straight year because of the pandemic, it’s that much harder to measure how much learning students lost out on over the disruptions of the past two years, and thus what the baseline for them should be going forward.
Naturally, the mayor will emphasize the numbers that reflect well on his administration as he’s betting on himself and prematurely declaring victories in the hopes that circumstances will bear him out. While it’s much too early to pass judgment on Adams, there are warning signs piling up as the rubber starts to meet the road on his watch, including a growing list of dubious dining companions and distressing appointees (mixed in with some excellent ones) including three political hacks with records of virulently homophobic rhetoric.
My concern is that — as we saw with Bill de Blasio after prosecutors scolded but didn’t indict him for his various corrupt schemes and he then coasted all but unchallenged into a second term — if this mayor isn’t politically punished, he’ll keep on with the same shenanigans that got him this far, including ones involving some of the same characters who were mixed up in the last mayor’s messes.
When it became clear that Mayor-elect Adams was determined to bring back Philip Banks, the former NYPD chief widely seen as de Blasio’s commissioner in waiting before he abruptly resigned in 2014 just after investigators started digging into his ties with two guys who’d been bribing the mayor with campaign cash and top police officials with hookers (Banks insists his resignation was unrelated to all of that), one big question was how much autonomy his police commissioner would actually have.
So far, it doesn’t look like much. While Banks has kept a very low public profile as deputy mayor for public safety, overseeing the NYPD, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has yet to hold a single press conference at One Police Plaza. Where previous commissioners met the press every month to announce the new CompStat numbers and answer questions, the (distressing) numbers from the last two months — overall crime is up 47% year-to-date, with felony assaults up 19% and robbery up 45% — have been quietly released with no sign of Sewell.
The new teams, including police officers, that Adams vowed would clear people living in the train system out of it “right away” ended up placing just 22 people in shelters in their first week of operation. And the new anti-gun unit Adams announced in January as “not just a plan for the future [but] a plan for right now” has yet to deploy; just after I filed this on Friday, Sewell announced that 168 officers in that unit would be deployed to high-crime neighborhoods with 300 more to follow “on a rolling basis” as they complete training.
On the education front, Chancellor David Banks (Philip’s brother) just announced, at the last possible minute, that he would keep for the coming schools year a redistributive new admissions lottery de Blasio created on his way out that’s intended to get more Black and Latino kids into top schools not by improving the K-8 system they’re coming out of, as Banks has pledged to do, but by changing the admissions standards for the high schools.
Banks said he stayed with the new system because he didn’t want to make an abrupt last-minute change, but he had more than six months as chancellor-in-waiting after Adams won last year’s Democratic primary to get up to speed and make a prompt call.
***
Meantime, Adams has a chief of staff whose name keeps popping up in lawsuits related to insurance fraud and unpaid bills, and whose business associates contributed to Adams’ campaign. And while Adams dropped his original Zero Bond host, Ronn Torossian, after my Daily Beast colleague Lachlan Cartwright asked “Why Is NYC Mayor Eric Adams Glued to This ‘Toxic’ PR Guru?” the mayor is still going out to meals with Zhan Petrosyants, the restaurateur who introduced him to Torrossian in the first place and who pleaded guilty along with his twin brother Robert to a money-laundering scheme in 2014.
Adams is the mayor, and he gets to dance with them that brung him. He’s right that if he gets stuff done, all this will just be background noise, and he’s right that not every person convicted of a crime in the court of law or public opinion needs to be expelled from public life forever.
But Adams owns what his friends do now, and several of them don’t seem particularly repentant. And while it’s easy to talk about a “firewall” between politics and policy, it’s nearly impossible to actually maintain one.
Katie Honan and Claudia Irizarry Aponte reported out a story at the news site The City that demonstrates how political friendships can bleed over into policy and people’s lives, following up on the families displaced by the horrific Twin Parks fire in the Bronx.
After the organization that had been providing meals to displaced families — many of them living in motels in a sort of limbo as the Mayor’s Fund has so far disbursed just 10% of the $2.5 million raised for the fire’s survivors — shifted away to focus on Ukraine relief, City Hall tapped an ally of Adams, Arelia Taveras, to step in.
Taveras, who donated to the Adams campaign, is a former lawyer who was disbarred after stealing money from clients to support a gambling addiction and then became a restaurant consultant. Earlier this year, she got the mayor to offer his support to a restaurant in Fordham trying to fight off $100,000 in state fines for multiple violations of COVID restrictions and allegedly putting false information on their liquor license.
And Taveras’ organization has been delivering food to the fire survivors with “packages…left strewn on the ground,” unrefrigerated, and that are “no longer properly labeled so it’s difficult to determine what is halal or vegetarian” or if it meets people’s dietary restrictions. One retired nurse called it “dog food.”
***
Back to the Book of Esther, it’s unique — the last of 24 books to be added to the Jewish scripture and, along with the Song of Solomon, the only one that doesn’t really mention God.
And Purim is unique, a sort of carnival that Jewish adults are supposed to mark with “days of feasting and joy,” making ourselves “fragrant” with wine until we can no longer distinguish between the cursed oppressor Haman and the blessed elder Mordechai.
Adams, who likes to boast, accurately, about how he’s not going to be boring to cover, is already an intoxicating mayor. Who knows, perhaps it will turn out that he indeed came to his high position for such a time as this.
It will help if people pay close enough attention to what he does and delivers, not just to his swagger.
-30-