ADAMS and LEAVE!

Eric Adams is over.

No New York mayor has ever been indicted while still on the job though there have been many scoundrels over time. Two stand out: Paul O’Dwyer and Jimmy Walker, both ex-cops, fled the office before they could be indicted on corruption charges. That distinction falls to Eric Adams, the incumbent.

Adams grew up poor. As a Black kid in Brooklyn, he was batted around by the cops but ultimately became a police captain. He founded 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care and was elected Brooklyn Borough President. As mayor he immediately installed political cronies in top jobs. Those cronies begot cronies and unto them came more cronies. The result is entrenched mediocrity, not uncommon in City Hall. Adams succeeded a progressive mayor, Bill DeBlasio, who termed out. Good politics notwithstanding, he was a disappointment; most of us were delighted to see his back. He seemed sorta’ lazy, commuting frequently from Brooklyn so he could be near his townhouse and his gym. New Yorkers were eager for change. What we got was Adams and a Rat Czar to eliminate rats. What we needed was a Crony Czar to eliminate cronies.

Adams brought in some good people who tended not to stay long because their authority was undermined by Adams or his inner circle. For example, Keechant Sewell served as the 45th New York City Police Commissioner, the first woman and third black person to serve in the position. Her appointment was announced in December 2021 shortly after the election; she left in June, 2023, She gave no reason for her departure. Nor did the mayor. It soon became known that she was unable to exercise her decision-making authority because of upstaging and second-guessing by Adams top insiders.

From the early days of his administration it became clear that the bespoke suits, the lapel hankies and the carefully curated late-night-Bond/Zero-Club-man-about-town image was all there was. Image and suit. ... Elephants filling rooms is a tiresome cliche. Still, the elephant in this room was, and is, race. It wasn’t that Adams was a DEI hire. Or the first. He was neither. We elected him as a good, maybe not the best, person for the job. We wanted him to succeed because the intersection of race and policing is, in New York, fraught. Stop-and-frisk, the tool of Giuliani, Bloomberg and other mayors before them was mostly a take-down of young Black males, mirroring Adams’s own experience. Obviously not everyone smacked against the wall or splayed on the hood of a car is an angel. But stop-and-frisk for the crime of walking on the street or hanging out while Black?

100 Black Men was Adams’s springboard into Kings County politics propelling him to Borough President, a truly needless office in every borough but in each a cloak room for hangers-on: the crony types, the goo-goos*, lobbyists and anybody with or hoping for business with the city. In the mayoral primary, Kings County (Brooklyn) was the main road to victory. He squeaked by Kathryn Garcia, a brainy experienced public servant who was then sanitation commissioner. Manhattanites favored her. Better Garcia if she runs again, or anyone breathing, just not ousted governor Mario Cuomo, who is reportedly eyeing a comeback.

Adams ran in the 2021 general election against Republican Curtis Sliwa, beret-wearing crusader-founder and self-appointed head of the wannabe vigilantes, Guardian Angels. JD Vance may be after childless cat ladies; yo! Sliwa ran as a childless cat man living with 16 rescues and a spouse in a studio apartment on the upper West Side. Because of the cats he earned a second look. Alas, he was still many notches below Bloomberg and even several below Giuliani — a really low bar over which Adams vaulted handily.

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New York City is the global center of the visual and performing arts, of philanthropy, commerce, capital, health care, the best! Nothing else matches New York. Except for our city’s political leadership, long wanting in character, competence, ethics and accomplishment.

Adams’s political obituary brings to mind NYC political boss George Washington Plunkett. He put it best. "I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

*Goo-goos: good government types