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Mayor Eric Adams flashed a jaunty thumbs-up as he strode into the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street to be arrested. Hours later, the signature cocky smile was gone as the mayor, booked and fingerprinted, stood quietly in the well of a courtroom listening to a public reading of the felony charges against him.
“I am not guilty, your honor,” the defendant said to Judge Katharine Parker. The grim moment was a departure from Adams’s attempt to project an air of breezy confidence about his mountain of legal and political problems. The mayor has been trying, with little success, to convince the world that his administration is not in a state of collapse.
“We are not surprised. We expected this,” Adams said at a noisy, chaotic press conference in front of Gracie Mansion on the day the indictment was unsealed. “I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense before they make any judgments.”
He said it with a broad smile on his face and deep denial in his heart. You’d never know that a team of federal agents had arrived at Gracie Mansion earlier that morning to seize the mayor’s phones. Or that Adams is the first New York City mayor in 150 years to be arrested on criminal charges. At least five probes of the administration are now underway, including investigations of possible procurement irregularities and allegations of bribery and extortion, along with evidence of a host of campaign finance violations.
Adams, a desperately wounded politician, is turning to his Black working-class base for emotional and political support. Hours after his arraignment, he was laughing and dancing with seniors at a Harlem community center, and his weekend included trips to Black churches in Queens and the Bronx.
“You will hear the small number of loud people saying when he should step down. No, I’m going to step up,” he told worshippers at Emmanuel Presbyterian Reformed Church with a touch of the old bombastic flair. “I’m not gonna resign, I’m gonna reign!”
But maybe not for long. Behind closed doors, many of the city’s Black political leaders are quietly laying the groundwork for life after Adams.
The underlying logic of these blunt, private conversations goes like this: It took generations of voter registration, street protests, civil-rights lawsuits, patient institution-building, and countless hard-fought local campaigns to grow the community’s political power to its current apex. New York currently has Black officials as mayor, public advocate, Assembly Speaker, Senate majority leader, City Council Speaker, State attorney general, lieutenant governor, chief judge of the state, and the chairs of four of the city’s five Democratic county organizations, along with a congressman on track to become the next Speaker of the House.
These men and women — and the army of big-money donors, campaign strategists, party loyalists, and union leaders who support them — are not inclined to risk the city’s future and their hard-won seats at the table of power for Adams, whose self-inflicted legal and political problems may have placed him beyond the hope of rescue in any event. A close reading of their public statements shows that New York’s Black power players are preparing to see Adams step down.
“The ability to govern must be the top concern of city officials,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said at a press conference. “I ask the mayor to seriously and honestly consider whether full attention can be given to our deserving New Yorkers who need our government to be sound and stable.”
The Reverend Al Sharpton, who has been an ally of the mayor’s for decades — Adams was one of the original incorporators of Sharpton’s National Action Network — pointedly has not leapt to the mayor’s defense but instead called for Black leaders to meet privately and hold discussions. “The governor should not be pressured into removing Eric Adams from being the mayor,” Sharpton said at his weekly rally. The unspoken corollary was We’ll handle that ourselves, if necessary.
“I think the mayor has a duty to try to say that I have a plan, not just in a personal capacity, but in a way to regain trust,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told me. “I think that window is closing really rapidly.” If Adams should resign, Williams would become mayor temporarily; a special election to fill the vacancy would be held within 80 to 90 days.
Multiple sources tell me that labor leaders have been reaching out to Attorney General Letitia James, promising support if she should run in a special election. And we have yet to hear from Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie or Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, though neither has stopped a growing number of individual legislators from calling on Adams to quit.
Black leaders are also publicly pushing back against Adams’s accusation — for which he has supplied no evidence — that his arrest and prosecution are political payback for criticizing President Biden over migrant policy.
“Man, listen,” Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the State Democratic Party said on MSNBC. “When he goes and says, ‘The migrant crisis is what’s concerning everybody right now. It’s retribution,’ he sounds like Donald Trump.” Smikle and other strategists point out that attacking the Biden White House supplies talking points that can be used against Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates — a big no-no in the closing weeks of the national campaign.
Back in February, I asked Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, about the accusations of prosecutorial bias. “When I hear that, it always puzzles me, because I’ve never communicated with anyone from the White House about cases that we do,” he told me. “It’s just not appropriate. There are clear lines about who we can communicate with and about what. We don’t take orders from the White House or Washington about cases that we charge or don’t charge. That is the core of our discretion right here in the Southern District of New York.”
Williams’s résumé includes supervising the convictions of Christopher Collins, an upstate Republican congressman; Sheldon Silver, the former Speaker of the state assembly, and New Jersey senator Robert Menendez. Irish, Jewish, Latino: It seems safe to say that Williams, the first and only Black U.S. Attorney in the 235-year-old history of the Southern District, applies the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion when it comes to prosecuting public corruption.
“This goes back for generations. It’s not about Democrat or Republican,” Williams told me. “There is a long, unbroken history of this office being allowed to do the work that we want to do, regardless of who is in the White House.”
Williams’s work is clearly far from done: His office has conducted searches and seizures of Adams officials who had nothing to do with the mayor’s bribery case, which makes it all but certain that additional charges will be coming.
Governor Kathy Hochul — who legally possesses the seldom-used power to remove Adams from office if push comes to shove — issued a statement that sounded unmistakably ominous. “New Yorkers deserve to know that their municipal government is working effectively, ethically and in the best interests of the people,” she said. “While I review my options and obligations as the Governor of New York, I expect the Mayor to take the next few days to review the situation and find an appropriate path forward to ensure the people of New York City are being well-served by their leaders.”
Anybody who’s ever been downsized from a job understands exactly what it means when the person who can give you the boot starts using phrases like “take the next few days” and “find an appropriate path forward.” Eric Adams, ignoring the hint, is instead appealing to his Black base.
The problem with that strategy is that the Black allies he’s beseeching for help know the chessboard of power requires thinking ahead a few moves — and occasionally sacrificing a piece along the way.
