Mayor Eric Adams gained his workplace 4 years in the past pledging to ship New Yorkers from chaos and calamity — a former lawman entrusted to tame a proudly unruly metropolis.
It hasn’t occurred that approach.
Over practically 100 interviews with aides, allies and adversaries spanning Adams’s life and profession, The Times Magazine found a mayor and a city unmoored, their fates entwined whether or not or not residents need them to be. Lengthy earlier than his indictment final fall on federal corruption fees, Adams grew to become the avatar of New York’s day-to-day dysfunction, a unstable chief to match (and contribute to) unstable occasions.
His chosen path out of his private disaster, many particulars of which haven’t been beforehand reported, concerned cozying as much as a brand new president whom most of Adams’s constituents oppose — and providing these constituents, federal prosecutors have mentioned, as human collateral to the Trump White Home.
Listed below are 5 takeaways from our reporting:
Adams (and Trump) have performed the lengthy sport
President Trump and Adams, two sons of Queens, appeared to grasp one another from the beginning. When Trump encountered the mayor at a charity dinner in October, weeks earlier than the presidential election, he put his arm round him in personal. Adams’s pal, former Gov. David Paterson, mentioned that Adams was quiet for the remainder of the evening. “Nearly like he’s serious about it,” Paterson mentioned. “Like: ‘Is that this doable? Boy.’”
Trump urged Adams to “cling in there” earlier than publicly suggesting that each males had been persecuted by the Biden Justice Division. Adams, a Democrat who criticized Trump’s “fool habits” throughout the president’s first time period, has not mentioned a cross phrase about him since. By January, he was flying to Florida to dine with Trump days earlier than the inauguration. And Trump had acquired a helpful new pal in his native metropolis: a mayor straining to cling to each his workplace and his freedom.
Adams is a political shape-shifter
Adams has at all times been an adaptable politician, snug flip-flopping between the 2 main events because the winds shifted. He was a Democrat, then a Republican within the Nineties, then a Democrat once more. He briefly thought-about operating in 2021 as a Republican. And he has thought-about it once more in 2025.
In an interview, Tucker Carlson urged Adams had previously been “intimidated into supporting issues he doesn’t imagine” and mentioned he and the mayor “have loads of gut-level agreements.” Adams was so open to Trump world that he even thought-about attending Trump’s October marketing campaign rally at Madison Sq. Backyard, Carlson instructed us, earlier than deciding towards the thought.
“Eric at all times was extra proper of heart,” the Rev. Al Sharpton instructed us. “He was not a fellow traveler.”
The migrant disaster was Adams’s first main take a look at as mayor
The town’s migrant inflow grew to become a defining administration disaster of Adams’s time period, decisively shaping his relationship with two presidents. “Joe Biden is making an attempt to hold me out to dry,” the mayor instructed members of Congress visiting Metropolis Corridor in 2023, based on an attendee. By 2025, the Trump administration, pushing for a dismissal of Adams’s corruption fees, mentioned the mayor wanted to be uninhibited in aiding the brand new White Home’s deportation agenda.
However Adams’s views on immigration are extra sophisticated than is broadly understood. He has greeted asylum seekers personally upon their arrival to New York and slept on a cot in a tent shelter. He additionally predicted, lengthy earlier than his indictment, that the difficulty would “destroy” the town, amplifying fears about migrants’ committing each petty and violent crimes.
Adams is usually loyal to a fault
“I’m going to ensure my persons are taken care of,” Adams mentioned privately simply after his win within the major, noting that the white mayors earlier than him did the identical.
And so reasonably than select a cupboard primarily based solely on experience, he created a Metropolis Corridor divided between technocrats and cronies.
The fallout has devastated Metropolis Corridor and rendered it rudderless. By his fourth yr in workplace, practically all of Adams’s most trusted aides had left amid investigations and scandal, together with Adams’s chief adviser, police commissioner, interim police commissioner, first deputy mayor and colleges chancellor. Invoice Bratton, a police commissioner underneath two earlier mayors, recognized the issue: “Too many mates with too many issues in too many excessive locations.”
Adams has lengthy tied his personal story to the town’s
Adams has repeatedly instructed his audiences “I’m you.” At his simplest, he has woven his biography — as a scofflaw youth who grew to become an officer who grew to become the mayor — into New York’s personal tumultuous and resilient historical past.
“The mayor should match the attribute of the town,” Adams mentioned final yr. He does, particularly now: self-regarding, sleepless, quick and free, saddled with knotty crime issues. His authorized duress has unfolded towards the backdrop of a metropolis that may really feel as whether it is shedding its collective thoughts, unsettled by a reel of semi-surreal scenes, from the subways to the streets, that New Yorkers encounter daily.
Perhaps Adams is New York. However New York won’t be his for lengthy.
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