Mayor Adams slams ‘silly’ concerns about his nightlife habits, but balks at requests for transparency

The nightlife mayor does not want sunlight on his nocturnal activities.

Mayor Adams took aim Monday at a report that raised ethical questions about his frequent club and restaurant outings, rejecting the notion he should produce receipts or other information to quell concern about the matter.

Speaking at a press conference in Brooklyn, Adams ridiculed the report from the New York Times for suggesting he may be flouting city ethics law by frequently dining at Osteria La Baia, an Italian eatery in Midtown run by two of his scandal-scarred friends, twin brothers Zhan and Robert Petrosyants.

“What’s going on with the New York Times? Front page of the New York Times, breaking news: Eric likes going to restaurants — c’mon!” the mayor told reporters.

After referencing COVID-19, monkeypox and crime as some issues he said the media should focus on instead, Adams added: “That was a silly story. You all know it was a silly, silly story.”

The Times observed Adams dining at the Petrosyants brothers’ spot 14 nights in June without ever appearing to pay his tab. The city Conflicts of Interest Board holds that elected officials should not accept any gifts worth more than $50 that are given to them because of their positions, as it could prompt corruption concerns.

At Monday’s press conference, Adams insisted he personally pays “every bill” he racks up for food and drinks. But he refused to commit to releasing receipts that would corroborate the claim.

“What mayor have you ever asked to give receipts for his private dinners? You can’t have a rule for Eric, and a rule for everyone else,” he said. “I owe no one a receipt of a private dinner that I have with people in the city.”

Johnny Petrosyants, left, and his twin brother Robert. (Monica Schipper/FilmMagic)

The Daily News and other outlets reported earlier this year on the longstanding ties between Adams, members of his inner circle and the Petrosyants twins, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to federal criminal charges over their role in a medical insurance scheme. The twins are the subject of several active lawsuits accusing them of shady financial practices, and some businesses they hold stakes in owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, including a Brooklyn pizzeria that was seized by the state this spring, as first reported by The News.

Despite their checkered past, Adams has repeatedly defended the Petrosyants, saying in February that his friendship with them is indicative of his ability to “mentor people.” On Monday, he used his bully pulpit to offer some free advertising for the brothers’ restaurant.

“I have a favorite restaurant called La Baia,” he said.

Eric Adams and Robert Petrosyants (far right) attend the Mayor-elect Eric Adams Celebration Party at Zero Bond on Nov. 2, 2021, in New York City. (Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Haute Living)

La Baia is not the only Big Apple hotspot where Adams’ patronage is drawing scrutiny.

A self-professed nightlife aficionado who proudly operates on little sleep, Adams often hangs out at Zero Bond, an exclusive members-only club in NoHo where celebrities, business tycoons and other power players are known to congregate.

To become a member of Zero Bond, one must cough up a $5,000 initiation fee and a $4,000 annual payment, which does not include food and drinks.

Adams, however, frequents the establishment without being a member — and admitted Monday that he’s able to do so because he goes as a “guest.” He refused to reveal who usually invites him, though, and also would not explain how or if he pays for his Zero Bond outings.

“If I tell you who I go with, there will be full-page stories on them, and no one’s going to want to hang out with me anymore,” he said. “You know, I’m just blown away how people are so attracted to my life. I mean, people just enjoy everything that I do.”

Eric Adams, the Mayor Who Never Sleeps

By Maureen Dowd


Suddenly, we were staring down at a sidewalk full of blood. A young woman had been shot in the head an hour earlier as she pushed her 3-month-old daughter in a stroller on 95th Street.

Standing next to a school playground, John Miller, the storied deputy police commissioner, briefed the mayor sotto voce about the 40-caliber bullet casing, powder burns and a young man in a black hoodie shooting at point-blank range, execution-style. The woman was 20 and her name was Azsia Johnson. It was probably the baby’s father who was the shooter, he said. She had filed a domestic violence report against him.

In a couple of days, the police would say that this beautiful young woman, a doting mother of two, had been lured to the playground by her abusive ex, who told her he had some things for their baby daughter. He shot her and ran, leaving the baby on the street, and was arrested two days later.

After a steady rise since the start of the pandemic, murders and shootings in the first sixth months of the year were down 10 percent and 12 percent in New York City compared with last year, according to police figures. The Police Department even announced on Thursday that it had made more gun arrests this past quarter than in any since 1995. But other crimes have risen — overall crime is up nearly 38 percent — and shocking crimes like the shooting of the young mom and attacks on the subway have left New Yorkers fearful.


Adams has worked to increase patrols on subways and has restarted a special anti-gun unit to combat gun crimes, specifically going after people who are most frequently the perpetrators of violence.

“It’s ‘High Noon’ in America,” Adams warned in testimony before Congress in favor of stronger gun laws. “The clock is ticking, every day, every minute towards another hour of death.”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the quarterback for the compromise gun bill that just became law, told me that Mayor Adams had given “energy and new life” to a stalled anti-gun violence movement.

But it is tough going for Adams. He is pinioned from the left by the State Legislature, whose bail reform laws made it harder to keep criminals prone to violence in jail, and by district attorneys like Alvin Bragg of Manhattan, who deprioritized jail time even for certain low-level violent crimes, and by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who are demonizing the police, deepening morale problems. He is pinioned from the right by Clarence Thomas and the other radical justices who issued the opinion overturning a century-old New York statute that limited the number of guns on the streets and by a Republican Party hellbent on arming Americans to the teeth.

The mayor had started that Wednesday with Commissioner Sewell and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. The commissioner noted that they had taken 3,300 guns off the street so far this year (now it’s 3,700), and the trio talked about lawsuits that Ms. James and the city had filed to crack down on ghost guns, untraceable weapons made from a kit that are being illegally sold in New York State.

That afternoon, the mayor and the commissioner had had a news conference with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand about legislation recently passed that would allow the federal government to crack down on gun trafficking across state lines.

By 9:30 p.m., we came full circle: The esoteric discussion went on by day and the bloody reality reared its head at night. The shooting illustrated Adams’s Sisyphean battle.

That Thursday night, he went back to the Upper East Side to a candlelight vigil for Azsia Johnson and hugged her distraught mother, Lisa Desort, saying the death “hit so close to home” because he had worked with Desort when she was an emergency medical technician and he was a police officer.
Image
The mayor with Lisa Desort, left, at a vigil for her daughter.Credit...Paul Martinka

At the police academy graduation at Madison Square Garden the day after that, on Friday, the mayor spoke of how shockingly high crime was when he started on the beat 38 years ago. “People no longer believed in the city,” he said.

But, the mayor continued, “every entity in the city was on our side,” as the police tried to take the city back. “That’s not the climate you’re policing in,” he told the white-gloved graduates. “You’re policing in a climate where everyone is against us. Every story seems to be negative about our actions and not see what we do every day. Laws are being passed that protect guilty people.”

Promising to be their general, telling them to ignore heckling, name-calling and Twitter insults, he said they are now dealing with a situation where almost anyone can carry a gun and where they can no longer count on criminals they arrest staying in jail. “No, they’re going to come out probably the next day,” he said, “because of a court system that just does not seem to understand the reality on the streets.”

Then Adams, who first drew public attention early in his career as a police officer who criticized police brutality, advised them: “You must be your brother’s keeper. You must ensure that he or she never reaches the point where they tarnish the shield, because one officer could destroy all the work that we are attempting to do.”

His younger brother, Bernard, a former police officer who is the director of mayoral security with a salary of $1 a year, told me that their mom drilled into them that “you have to be your brother’s keeper” and watch out for the little guy who wasn’t getting a fair shake.

Six months into the job, Eric Adams, 61, is at a crucial juncture. The honeymoon, filled with hope for a dynamic new mayor, is over. Adams’s poll numbers have dived, which the optimistic politician took with aplomb. “A C is not an A, but a C is not an F,” he told reporters, adding that he interpreted the numbers from tough New York graders to mean “We’re going to give Eric a shot.”

The New York Post, which endorsed his candidacy, has now given Adams the Homeric epithet “club-hopping.” The Times’s Emma G. Fitzsimmons wrote that his efforts in Albany, where he once served as a state senator from Brooklyn, fell short of achieving long-term mayoral control of public schools and other measures. David Freedlander of New York magazine, asserting that Adams can boast of few accomplishments, wrote recently, “It’s become hard to escape the impression that New York City is being led by a mayor who is, frankly, winging it.”

What Adams has brought to the job is a flair that’s refreshing after eight years of the dyspeptic Bill de Blasio. Over the July 4 weekend, he tweeted a video of himself taking a spin on a jet ski and “looking like a pro” in Mill Basin between Brooklyn events. But the questions echo: Is he all hat and no cattle? Is he skewing too much to swagger at the expense of substance?

“It’s like the second coming of ‘Beau James,’ Jimmy Walker,’’ one top Democratic politico said, referring to the vivacious Roaring Twenties mayor (who left office in a cloud of scandal). “But the most important thing is what you do between 9 and 5, not 5 and 9.”

A top Democratic strategist agreed: “On paper, Eric is kind of a Democratic superhero. But he needs real-world results, not just great swagger.”

In winning City Hall, Adams told a powerful, unique story about becoming a policeman after being beaten by the police as a teenager. He presented himself as someone who could soothe a jangly city and push back on defund-the-police and coddle-the-criminal rhetoric on the far left, restoring a little perspective and sanity as a moderate new face of the Democratic Party. He promised that he could address injustices to Black victims, build a police force that treated people with respect and deliver safe streets.

As the daughter of a police detective, I want to believe in that message. I want to believe we can hold bad police accountable and root out the Derek Chauvins, without straitjacketing officers to the point that forces suffer chronic blue flu and quit in droves.

I also want to believe that moderate Democrats are not becoming pariahs in their own party and heading toward extinction. I want to believe that you can work hard and achieve serious goals while showing flair. Politics is so tepid on the Democratic side and anti-democratic on the Republican side. The mayor’s magnetic smile is a promise. His noir expeditions — turns on red carpets, drop-bys at clubs, and theater and fashion events — reflect his belief that New York is back and open for business, tourists, fun and, yes, swagger.


Image
A ribbon cutting at the Brooklyn Chop House.Credit...Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

Image
The mayor and Tracey Collins on the red carpet at the Met Gala.Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

Image
The mayor at the New York City Ballet spring gala.Credit...Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Image
Performing at the Inner Circle Show, a charity event hosted by New York City journalists.Credit...Todd Maisel/The Inner Circle Show, via Associated Press

I also want to believe that New York doesn’t have to be, as the former police commissioner Bill Bratton said, “the Wild West.” (Even as I was writing this story, there was a cascade of news bulletins: A member of the mayor’s advance staff was mugged in Brooklyn at knifepoint; a teenager on a scooter in the Bronx was fatally shot; a man sleeping on a bench in Hudson River Park was stabbed to death, and three people were shot, two fatally, by a man outside a Brooklyn deli.)

I had run into the mayor in February at the dinner after the opening of “The Music Man” on Broadway and asked him if I could follow him around for a story, the days and nights of Eric Adams.

“Zero Bond?” the enigmatic mayor murmured with a smile, referring to the private club in NoHo he frequently visits. (I never did get there.)

I began trailing him last month as he bounced around the city, wearing his navy blue “NYC MAYOR” jacket, meeting with religious leaders about retrofitting hotels for the homeless; climbing into a sanitation truck to help recruit workers; announcing plans for major renovations at a park in the Bronx; delivering a robot’s baby, complete with simulated blood, in a virtual reality program at Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx to help with the maternal morbidity crisis among Black mothers. He gave a Juneteenth speech in Central Park at the site of Seneca Village, where he compared gentrification to slavery. On Father’s Day, he went to a Mets game with his son, Jordan Coleman, 26, and threw out the first pitch. (He ran into the former Trump flack Anthony Scaramucci, calling out, “I love this guy!”) Then he stopped by a music festival in Jamaica, Queens, where he grew up, and presented a proclamation to the New York City Football Club at Yankee Stadium. At Gracie Mansion he gave a news conference about improving nutrition at schools, boosting “vegan Fridays.” A reporter told the mayor that she had talked to some kids who found the fare “squishy.”


Image
The Central Park Conservancy held a Juneteenth event at Seneca Village.Credit...Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York Times

Image
A ribbon-cutting ceremony at Independence Towers in Brooklyn.Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times


“In his heart, he’s still a police officer — he’s always patrolling,” said Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, noting that the mayor set up a weekly Zoom call on homelessness at 5 p.m. on Sundays. Several staffers told me that when they do 8:30 a.m. Zoom meetings with the mayor, he’s in his suit and tie on his stationary bike.

He was not always so fit. In his book, “Healthy at Last,” Adams writes that after Sept. 11, he relied on comfort food. If he had a hard day, he craved a Quarter Pounder or a bucket of KFC. He told me that when Tracey Collins, his longtime partner who has been a high-ranking official at the city’s department of education for over a decade, told him to eat a little better, he would pick up a handful of cookies and stuff them in his mouth as though to say, “Leave me alone.”

Then came the “horrific experience,” as he called it: One day in 2016, he woke up blind in his left eye and suffering nerve damage in his feet, which could have led to amputation. His diabetes was killing him. He switched to a plant-based diet, lost 35 pounds and reversed the damage from the disease. He also cooked for his mother, who died last year, to help her get healthier, and wrote a book on the experience.
Image
Adams switched to a plant-based diet after a health scare in 2016.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Every morning, he does transcendental meditation and then has his green smoothie — blueberries, kale and spinach sprinkled with chia, cacao, acai, maca and moringa. His bling: a stone bracelet Collins gave him for energy, a crystal bracelet he was given by an elderly woman on the campaign trail and a stud in his left ear, which was the result of a humorous promise on the campaign trail. To relax, he said, he’s learning to play the guitar, at the moment, the song “Lean on Me.”

The mayor can stop a staffwide Zoom if he thinks people are tired or nervous to lead the group in deep breathing. But he doesn’t want to be a nanny, like Mike Bloomberg.

“People want to have their steak, their cigarettes,” he said. “It’s all right with me.”

Lorraine Grillo, the first deputy mayor who keeps a pack of Marlboros on her desk, said she warned Adams: “I said, ‘Eric, I’m probably going to have a cigarette once in a while, I’m going to eat a steak, I’m never, ever riding a bike.’”

The mayor is a “low-drama person,” as one aide puts it. He stays pragmatic and Zen, listening more than he speaks. He organizes everything on eight Excel spreadsheets and challenges his staff if they are not prepared.

Being mayor has opened up a whole new exciting world to Adams. He told me that he had always wanted to go to the Met Gala and loved attending. “I guess after eight years of not having someone that was fun just really set the tone,’’ he said. “New York is supposed to be fun. We should laugh. We should go to these balls.”

Adams is so ubiquitous that he has earned the title “The Nightlife Mayor,” which is derisive or complimentary, depending on who’s saying it.

“He has a lot of energy and is so determined to make New York a vital cultural center,” Anna Wintour told me. “He seems to need no sleep.”

Coleman, a filmmaker who works at Roc Nation, thinks that criticism of his father’s nocturnal wanderings is unfair.

“People need to cut him some slack,” he said, because “he’s devoted his whole life to fixing this city” and “he gives 110 percent every time he wakes up.”

After an hour and a half at the crime scene that Wednesday night, I assumed the mayor would want to postpone the interview scheduled at Zona De Cuba (which is owned by the former Republican mayoral candidate Fernando Mateo). But we ended up going at 11 p.m. to Osteria La Baia, the site of “fishgate,” the report that he ate fish at the restaurant.

We sat down. The waitress asked, “Would you like your branzino?” The mayor quickly shook his head no. He munched on a Caesar salad, carefully picking out the croutons and anchovies, while he waited for his staff to deliver hummus, eggplant and mushrooms from another restaurant.

We talked about recent stories in the press about the left eating itself alive with infighting and cancel culture. “They are trying to out-perfect themselves,” Adams said. “All the things we fought for, we’re losing because we were fighting each other. We allowed Donald to stack the Supreme Court because Hillary wasn’t pure enough for folks.”

And now Clarence Thomas is on a tear, he said, adding: “He’s still holding on to what happened to him during his whole confirmation process, and he’s been harboring that for a long time. This is the type of guy that sits in the basement every day and plots.”

I wonder if he had watched the testimony of the Jan. 6 hearing suggesting that his predecessor, America’s Mayor, Mr. Law and Order, Rudy Giuliani, cooked up a coup while he was drunk.

“Talk about imploding,” Adams said. (A week later, Adams went to bat for the supermarket worker charged with assaulting Giuliani, asking the Staten Island D.A. to go easy on him.)

I asked about his night rambles.

“Remember, what is our title, the City That Never Sleeps,” he said, ordering a Tito’s vodka and soda. “When I was a cop, I did the midnight shift for 11, 12 years. There’s another city that comes alive during the nights. I want them to know, ‘Listen, I’m the mayor of you, too.’

“My mother used to tell me she would go to work, clean office spaces. She said no one would even talk to her. It’s like she doesn’t even exist. They would just ignore her being there. I said, ‘I’m not going to do that to people.’”
Image
Adams took the oath of office in Times Square holding a photograph of his mother. His son, Jordan Coleman, held the family Bible.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

I noted that he doesn’t talk much about his father, a butcher. His mother, who raised the six kids with money from cleaning work, is sometimes referred to as a single mother. Their financial situation was so precarious that Adams had to bring a bag of clothes to school in case they were evicted by the time he got out. His pet was a rat named Mickey.

“Dad was in and out, in and out, in and out,” he said. “He’d come. He would stay for three months, disappear for nine, come back. That was her love. I remember her sharing with me one day, ‘You know, I hope I didn’t love your father too much that I was just blind.’”

I told the mayor that people I’ve talked to are still hopeful about him but seem to be getting impatient. One of my colleagues had told me the day before that she was taking the 2 train and saw a man punch his girlfriend in the face during an argument.

“If you place the accent on the wrong letter, you’re going to mispronounce the word,” Adams said. “If you place the accent on the wrong moment in your life, you’re going to mispronounce your life. Place it on how many times you got on the train and nothing happened to you. Nothing eventful. That’s where the accent should go, not ‘Hey, this is my 900th ride and you know what, I saw a homeless person today. Oh my God, things are out of control.’ They’re not.”

I noted that he has received scrutiny for hanging out with some shady customers. Some friends, like Al Sharpton, warned him before he took office that appearances matter. Others were afraid he might be used by opportunists.

His night crawls, which make some City Hall staffers uneasy, include Zero Bond and Osteria La Baia; the restaurant is owned by his close pal Zhan Petrosyants, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to an illegal check-cashing scheme designed to evade anti-money-laundering rules.

When a member of the New York State Senate was convicted of misdemeanor assault for roughing up his girlfriend, Adams was one of the few who voted against expelling him from office. He named Philip Banks deputy mayor of public safety even though he was an unindicted co-conspirator in a corruption scandal involving the Police Department and de Blasio donors in 2018. And he appointed Frank Carone as his chief of staff despite scrutiny of his past business dealings, raising “money for access” questions.

“The worst day of your life should not define your life,” the mayor insisted. “I just believe that because I’ve had some worst days.”

He continued: “Phil is one of the best law enforcement officers in this country. Imagine me saying, ‘I need to deal with crime. You did some dumb things; now I’m going to leave you on the bench when my team is losing.’ No, I’m not doing that.”

I wanted to know about his sparring with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York Post summed it up with a witty headline: “Is this AOC’s or Adams’ Apple?” The mayor, who spent a few years as a Republican, has critiqued the congresswoman’s socialist agenda and the “Tax the Rich” gown she wore to the Met Gala. He chided it as the wrong message, arguing that the wealthiest New Yorkers paid most of the city’s income taxes (although the top 1 percent make as much as the bottom 90 percent). When he found himself on Anna Wintour’s A list for the next gala, he trolled A.O.C. by sporting his own message on the back of his jacket: “End Gun Violence.”

Adams said he had read a book on “the importance of our children disagreeing with us. That is so natural. I’m almost twice her age. Our experiences are different. She may find it hard to believe that there’s going to come a time that, to her children’s generation, they’re going to say she’s out of touch.”

“I believe that it’s all right to disagree,” he said. “It’s not all right to be disagreeable.”

He can get testy, though, when confronted. At a news conference in February, after the media had questioned his failures at legislative changes in Albany, he threatened to stop answering questions and suggested that the City Hall press corps needed more diversity.

“Listen, it hits a sore spot, but we have to be honest,” he told me. He is only the second Black mayor “and I sit in a room sometimes and I look around the room and I say, ‘Where are the black reporters?’” He added: “My white counterparts, they do one-two-three, one-two-three; that’s their dance. I do the boogaloo.”

Being a Black man in New York was challenging from the time he was young. I asked about the night when he was 15 and was brutally beaten by the police after he and his oldest brother got arrested for trying to cash a stolen money order.

Image
Eric Adams, far right, in a 1974 family photo.Credit...via Office of the New York City Mayor


“The craziest thing about it was that the cops were not angry at us,” he said. “It’s one thing if you chase someone or they fought you back, tempers rage.” But things were calm. “They were doing the paperwork. And the guy said, ‘You just feel like a beatdown?’ The other guy said, ‘Yes.’ We didn’t know what the hell they were talking about and they took us downstairs to the basement of the 103rd Precinct and just started kicking us in our groin. They weren’t angry. It was just some form of sadistic

ecreation.”

This assault inspired him to be a police officer, to fix the force from the inside. It provided no such inspiration for his brother. “I don’t think my brother has ever been right since that incident,” he said, sadly.

Despite his club-hopping, he said, he would stay home in his pajamas, watching “The Twilight Zone,” if he had a day to himself. “I am socially awkward. I’m extremely shy. I can spend the whole day binging on documentaries. When I was a child, I would sit down and I would get excited about going home and watching ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.’ Animal behavior is the unfiltered human behavior. We cover up what we feel. At our heart, we are all vulnerable.”

He continued that when he’s in a room with billionaires and celebrities, he can see the “scared children” in them. “I look across the table from you, I see exactly who you are. You have your own insecurities, you have your own concerns. ‘Does my wife still love me?’ ‘Am I still appealing?’ I may be mayor but I’m still this child that just wants to do right.”

So which animal in the jungle are you?

He laughed. “Clearly, I am a lion. I am meant to rule the jungle.”

Underneath the swagger, beyond the swank parties, the serious parts of the job are never far from his mind.

“Listen, I got to live up to the job,” he said. “I got to turn around the economy. I have to make the city safe. I have to educate children and there’s no excuses. It shouldn’t be, ‘Oh, you are a Black man. We’re going to give you a pass.’ No, I don’t want a pass. I’m responsible for that woman being shot today. My job is to make sure she could walk down a block pushing a carriage without being assassinated. I’m going to live up to my responsibility, but don’t stack the deck. Highlight where we are successful. We got some real W’s.” The press and critics, he complained, laughing, “only talk about, ‘Hey, did you eat a piece of fish?’”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

 

New Yorkers Really Don’t Like Adams, Hochul Because of Crime

By Nia Prater

Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul attend the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum’s annual Memorial Day commemoration ceremony on May 30 in New York. Photo: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock

More than three-quarters of New Yorkers say they personally worry about becoming a victim of violent crime, and they’re taking those fears out on the mayor and the governor, according to a survey of city residents released Tuesday.

Spectrum News NY1 and Siena College reported in their new poll that 76 percent of the city’s residents say they were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about being a victim of violent crime. Fifty-six percent say the city is headed in the wrong direction, and they give poor marks to the man who ran on cleaning it up. Just 29 percent approve of how Eric Adams is doing his job with 64 percent saying they disapprove. Only 16 percent of residents say he’s doing a “good” job handling crime. His approval rating has been cut in half since a similar Siena poll in January pegged him at 63 percent favorability.

Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul stands at 35 percent approval in the city and 54 percent disapproval compared to 45 percent approval among state voters in March, according to a Siena poll. Today, 46 percent of respondents say the state is headed in the wrong direction under her watch, a potentially forbidding figure as she faces a test in the Democratic primary in three weeks against Representative Tom Suozzi, who’s been assailing her over crime from the right, and the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, who has criticized her from the left.

Sign up for Dinner Party

A lively evening newsletter about everything that just happened.

There has been some criticism of how Siena conducted the poll, which asked respondents to grade the job officials are doing as excellent, good, fair, or poor. “Fair” qualified as disapproval, which Adams’s press secretary pushed back against on Twitter, saying the poll “actually says almost 2/3 of New Yorkers stand with” Adams.

Residents were surveyed at the end of May, which saw a 27.8 percent uptick in crime over the same period last year, according to the NYPD. While police reported shootings were down year over year, May saw another string of high-profile killings that have unnerved city residents, including the death of an 11-year-old girl who was shot by a 15-year-old in the Bronx and the killing of a Goldman Sachs executive on a subway train.

One area of good news for Adams is residents expressed support for several of his proposals to fight crime, with 63 percent saying they favor his idea of installing machines at subway entrances that could detect weapons and 85 percent approving of his proposal to put more police on patrol in the subway system.

Eric Adams Will Become NYC's Next Mayor

"I am you," Eric Adams told New Yorkers in his victory speech. He handily beat Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Matt Troutman,Patch Staff    NYC PATCH

Posted Tue, Nov 2, 2021 at 9:02 pm ET|

Check out results here for the mayoral between Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa. ((Michael M. Santiago) (Spencer Platt/Getty Images))

This story will be updated as preliminary results stream in.

NEW YORK CITY — Eric Adams will overwhelmingly defeat Republican Curtis Sliwa to become New York City's next mayor, according to an Associated Press projection.

Adams, a Democrat, will become the city's second Black mayor and replace Bill de Blasio, who held the office for eight tumultuous years of progressive triumphs and disappointments.

With half the city's precincts counted by 10:30 p.m., Adams had 67 percent of votes to Sliwa's 29 percent.

He took the stage Tuesday night to bask in his victory, quote Drake and send a message of unity.

I'm the mayor," he told a cheering crowd.

"Today, we take off the intramural jersey and we put on one jersey: Team New York," he said.

For election results and other New York City news, sign up for Patch's newsletters and breaking news alerts.

The race between Adams and Sliwa was lopsided from the beginning— Adams carried an inherent advantage as a Democrat even as Sliwa consistently argued his appeal goes beyond party lines.

Still, early results were so strongly in Adams' favor that the Associated Press called the race about 20 minutes after polls closed Tuesday.

Sliwa conceded the race shortly before 10 p.m. — not even an hour after polls closed.

He pledged his support to Adams and, invoking former President Richard Nixon, promised that New Yorkers haven't seen the last of him.

"You will have Curtis Sliwa to kick around," he said.

But if the race between Adams and Sliwa seemed a foregone conclusion, Adams' path to become the Democratic nominee was considerably more rocky — and could presage fights with his own party going forward.

The crowded Democratic primary field had candidates such as Maya Wiley and Scott Stringer advance strongly progressive platforms, while Kathryn Garcia grew support by stressing her technocratic competence.

Adams jockeyed for the top spot with Andrew Yang, who advanced a similar broadly appealing moderate agenda, but eventually pulled far ahead by the primary.

In the end, Adams eked out a narrow victory over Garcia after successive rounds of ranked-choice voting — and one major error by the city's Board of Elections.

But once Adams clinched the nomination he garnered support from a wide swath of New Yorkers, from community advocates to prominent billionaires.

He also had the wholehearted support of de Blasio.

After the primary, de Blasio noted a similar coalition of working-class voters to those who thrust him into office clinched Adams' victory.

The support wasn't always reciprocated — Adams tried to distance himself from de Blasio at several points during the campaign.

But when pressed at a debate, Adams gave de Blasio a "B+" grade for his time in office.

De Blasio quickly took to Twitter to congratulate Adams.

"@EricAdamsForNYC embodies the greatness of our city," de Blasio tweeted. "He will be an outstanding mayor. Congratulations, my friend!"

Adams, during his victory speech, cast himself as a mayor who can speak for all New Yorkers.

"I am you," he said.

 

Former police officer Eric Adams close to winning NYC mayoral race as ranked-choice votes are tallied

YAHOO

Jon Ward

·Chief National Correspondent

Wed, June 23, 2021, 4:29 PM·5 min read

The result of the New York City mayoral primary will not be known for another week or two, but as expected, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is currently in the lead.

Adams, a former NYPD captain, emerged in April as the frontrunner in public polling by emphasizing his crime-fighting credentials. His rise coincided with survey results showing that violent crime was the top concern of voters in the nation’s largest city, replacing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given the city’s strong Democratic tilt, Adams will be the overwhelming favorite to win the general election later this year, should he emerge victorious from the primary. Republicans on Tuesday nominated talk show host Curtis Sliwa — a longtime city fixture known for his trademark red beret and his leadership of the volunteer anti-crime group the Guardian Angels — as their candidate for the November election.

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams at his election night party on Tuesday. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

For Tuesday’s primaries, the city adopted ranked-choice voting for the first time in its history, a reform that is gaining support around the country among those who want to encourage moderation and bipartisanship in politics. Under this system, voters were able to rank their top five choices for mayor — and as candidates who receive the least votes are eliminated, their supporters are reallocated based on their second, third, fourth and fifth choices.

The New York City Board of Elections, however, won’t announce the results of the reallocation until next week, and even then won’t announce the results of absentee ballots. That means it could be two weeks until the winner is declared.

Adams led the first round of voting with 31.7 percent support, followed by the civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley, with 22.3 percent. The city’s former sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, was a close third, with 19.5 percent. The entrepreneur Andrew Yang — who conceded the race Tuesday night — came in at a more distant fourth, with 11.7 percent.

In the past, the race would have gone to a runoff between Adams and Wiley because no candidate won more than 40 percent, the city’s threshold for winning outright. The last New York City runoff for mayor was held in the 2001 Democratic primary.

“We’re in a holding pattern … while the votes are counted and while we wait to see how the ranked-choice tabulations work out,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, who is leading the race for city comptroller, in a TV interview.

Voters scan completed ballots at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua polling site for the New York City mayoral primary on Tuesday. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Of course, if there were to have been a runoff, as there would have been in the past, it would have taken even longer to determine a winner.

The consensus among observers is that it will be hard for Wiley or Garcia to catch Adams, who dominated working-class neighborhoods in Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Wiley performed best in upscale portions of Brooklyn, while Garcia was most popular in Manhattan and parts of Staten Island.

Adams, Garcia and Yang were all seen as the more moderate candidates in the crowded Democratic field, with progressives rallying in recent weeks behind Wiley.

“Based on his considerable lead over the next two candidates, it would seem very unlikely he loses,” an adviser to one of the eliminated candidates told Yahoo News. “If it was 30 to 27, [it] would be very different and, yes, more fluid, but 10 points is a lot, especially when you consider how many Yang voters likely ranked Adams as a two.”

One recent poll, the Marist survey, backs that up, showing that the most common second choice of Yang voters was Adams. But it also showed that the most common second choice of Wiley voters was Garcia, and the most frequent second choice of Garcia voters was Wiley.

“Are you saying it’s girls against boys?” Garcia joked when asked about that survey result last week. But the serious point is that if enough voters listed Wiley and Garcia as their first and second choices, one of them could approach 50 percent. 

Mayoral candidates Kathryn Garcia, left, and Maya Wiley greet each other at the unveiling of a mural in New York City's Chinatown on Sunday. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images)

“Maya may have a path. It’s just really narrow,” the adviser to a defeated candidate said, adding that if enough voters for other candidates listed Wiley second, “she could make it really tight in the final round.”

Fair Vote, an election reform organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, noted that the vast majority of candidates who have led in the first round of voting in ranked-choice elections over the past 15 years have ultimately won.

The biggest surprise may have been the high turnout. There were 798,000 votes already counted as of Tuesday night, with another 90,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, and another 130,000 absentee ballots not yet returned. Ballots that were postmarked by June 22 must be received by next Tuesday, the city Board of Elections told Yahoo News.

That means the final turnout for the Democratic primary will be close to 1 million votes, compared with only 691,000 in 2013, the last time there was an open race for mayor.

Eric Adams Struggles to Energize Younger Voters. Can He Make It to City Hall Without Them?

 BY GWYNNE HOGAN, WNYC

GOTHAMIST

Eric Adams GWYNNE HOGAN / GOTHAMIST

Outside City Hall on a recent afternoon, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams stood in a pinstripe suit and tie beside Abner Louima, who’d been badly beaten and sexually assaulted by NYPD officers in 1997. Louima spent two months in the hospital after the attack. His beating set off a wave of protests against police brutality.

“This incident happened over 20 years ago. The average young person now, some were not born,” Adams said. “Police reform is not a 2021 issue. This has been a fight that we’ve been having for a long time.”

In recent weeks, Adams has tried to craft a message that draws in younger voters, recalling his activism against police brutality over many years. But for younger New Yorkers, some of whom were galvanized by the murder of George Floyd last summer and who are pushing for more radical change, that message has mostly fallen flat.

“Young Black progressive are like ‘defund the police, abolish the police,’” said Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “Older Black homeowners are like ‘where are the police? I don’t want these people on my yard. What is happening? I own a house.’”

Greer said with the clock ticking on the mayor’s race (early voting begins on June 12th) Adams may be better off broadening his base of older voters rather than trying to attract a younger crowd and risk sounding hypocritical.

“There’s something to be said about going to the dance with the person who brought you,” she said. “And the person who brought you are moderates who care about crime and safety.”

Eric Adams with Abner Louima GWYNNE HOGAN / GOTHAMIST

Among those voters likely to turn out for Adams this June is Alaire Chappell, a 61-year-old resident of the Van Dyke Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn. After a vigil last month for a mother and her two daughters who were gunned down by the woman’s boyfriend, Chappell said she felt neighborhoods like Brownsville were set up “to explode,” citing high rates of unemployment and a lack of job prospects.

“So you are left to participate in criminal behavior. These young people often want what everybody else wants,” she said. When asked which mayoral candidate might be best suited to tackle those issues, she smiled. “You know I kind of like my borough president. I think he has demonstrated that his heart is for the people. He brings the real person to the floor.”

Adams has been hustling to broaden his base beyond central Brooklyn, recently scooping up the support of his counterparts Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. For the first time, Adams surged ahead of Yang in citywide polls this week. Adams has amassed the biggest war chest of any candidate in the race, with $7.8 million hand as of the most recent filing.

READ MORE: The "Shocking" And Unpredictable Political Journey Of Eric Adams

His rise through the ranks of New York City political life has been anything but traditional, as Gothamist chronicled last year. As a 15-year-old growing up in South Jamaica Queens, he was beaten so badly by police inside a precinct house that he urinated blood for a week after, he later told the New York Times in 1999. He joined the police department after being recruited by civil rights leaders, rising through the ranks in his 20 years on the force, and co-founding 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an organization that often openly criticized the NYPD and advocated for Black officers. Later, State Senator Adams was an outspoken critic of stop-and-frisk policy, even testifying against Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Adams presenting rat control technology, September 2019. DAVID 'DEE' DELGADO

Over the years in his role as Brooklyn borough president, he has grabbed the spotlight for off-color stunts whether he was shouting “show me the money” on the senate floor when demanding a raise for lawmakers, revolting the press corps with a bucket of drowned rats, telling transplants to “go back to Ohio,” or insisting he’d carry a gun in a house of worship following the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, a statement he’s since walked back.

On the campaign trail, Adams has made tackling the uptick in gun violence his cornerstone issue, rallying at the scene of recent shootings. He supports increasing funding for the NYPD’s Gun Violence Suppression Division, more spot checks at train and bus stations to stem the flow of illegal guns, creating a citywide special prosecutor specifically for gun crimes, and reviving the controversial anti-crime unit that was dismantled last year. Adams does not want to decrease the NYPD budget, one of the central demands of younger activists, but rather redirect $500 million towards gun-violence prevention efforts.

Many of those proposals make younger reformers bristle.

“He has old ways of thinking about what he considers reform,” said Antonio Reynoso, a city council member currently running to succeed Adams as borough president. “The issue is the right issue, the solution is more of the same.

Adams has ceded many younger supporters to candidates like Dianne Morales and Andrew Yang, who have beefy social-media followings, and ways of talking about issues that resonate with younger voters.

“I think a lot of friends of mine are very passionate about racial justice and transformative change,” said Jada Shannon, a 19-year-old media studies major at Hunter College, who said she was most excited about Morales for her positions on police reform, school desegregation and free college tuition. She was considering other more left-leaning candidates in the race such as Maya Wiley, Shaun Donovan, and Paperboy Prince.

She said she felt Adams was “very dismissive of young people's voices.”

Other baby boomers in the race, peers of 60-year-old Adams, have made strides to recruit younger blood into their campaigns. Scott Stringer, 61, before he hemorrhaged progressive support in the fallout of an allegation of sexual harassment, had recruited a cadre of young left-leaning legislators. Ray McGuire, 64, who is most directly vying for would-be Adams supporters, has recruited athletes, filmmakers, and rappers with younger followings.

In his time in Borough Hall, Adams has used the office to connect with young people across the borough. 18-year-old Jeff Santus, a senior at Midwood High School, first got to know Adams when he was trying to fundraise money for his basketball team as a freshman.

“I was reaching out to community leaders. Nobody responded to me except Eric,” Santus said. “He doesn’t just listen to listen he listens to understand and try to comprehend.”

Santus turned to Adams when he was looking for information on how to become an Emergency Medical Technician. He direct messaged Adams on Instagram who sent him links and a number shortly after. Now he’s working full time as an EMT. “I’m 100 percent for him, many of my youth friends are sold on him. Me and my work partners are sold on him,” Santus said.

Still the generational rift keeps bucking its head on the campaign trail. Two weeks ago Adams told Business Insider he believed the Black Lives Matter movement of last summer was propelled mainly by, “young, white, affluent people who are coming in and setting the conversation,” a comment that sparked immediate backlash from local organizers of color.

And while Adams doesn’t boast much of a social media following, that hasn’t stopped him from going viral. Last month, a video he made as a State Senator in 2011 was recirculated on social media. In it, he encouraged parents to search their children’s rooms for guns, bullets, and drug paraphernalia, and showed him probing the insides of a teddy bear. It was reminiscent of another campaign in 2010 that didn’t age well, where he’d encouraged young men to pull up their pants, with a slogan “Stop the Sag.”

It did not take long for another mayoral hopeful, Paperboy Love Prince, a 28-year-old rapper and artist, to remix the video for a song “Eric Adams Please Get Out of My Room.” The video was viewed more than 20,000 times, getting much more attention than any recent Adams campaign videos.

“He was just doing what he thinks was best. You don’t know what’s going on, you’re so disconnected you're just doing what you think is best,” Paperboy Prince said about Adams, adding he still had a lot of respect for him.