Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo
New York City Mayor Eric Adams departs Manhattan federal court, September 27, 2024, in New York.
In the very long and storied annals of New York City’s municipal corruption, the entry for Eric Adams stands out for two particulars. First, how he allegedly defrauded the city’s public matching funds law to secure $10 million that enabled him to squeak out a 7,197-vote plurality in the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor, which amounted to 1 percent of the total number of votes cast. Second, how the illegal funding he allegedly received from associates of the Turkish government, which he fraudulently disguised as small-dollar contributions from American donors (and which, given the 8-to-1 ratio of public matching funds for small-dollar donations, brought him that $10 million from the public till) yielded virtually nothing for Turkey.
The indictment released last week by federal prosecutors tells a tale of cheesy material ambitions and out-of-control political ambitions on Adams’s part, and bewildering miscalculation on the part of Turkey, which was meeting all of Adams’s illegal requests even as it struggled to find something they could ask of him. Adams’s requests fell into two categories: While still Brooklyn borough president, he’d gotten into the habit of free travel on Turkish Airlines, which whisked him and his girlfriend to an array of foreign vacation spots, and having various Turkish entities comp him on the spots actually located in Turkey. Adams also allegedly solicited major campaign donations from major Turkish business interests (which I can only presume had connections to the administration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), which he then laundered into low-dollar contributions from straw donors, eligible thus for those 8-to-1 public matching funds, in his 2021 run for mayor.
The indictment released last week by federal prosecutors tells a tale of cheesy material ambitions and out-of-control political ambitions on Adams’s part.
By New York’s stratospheric standards of municipal corruption, however, Adams’s non-campaign-related asks must be seen as, well, small potatoes. Measured against the millions of dollars pulled down by old-time city bosses—Tammany’s William Marcy Tweed and Richard Croker, for instance—free trips on the Turkish government don’t really amount to much. Nor did Adams have the kind of steady sources of income that once benefited even the secondary leaders of New York’s machines. In the heyday of Tammany, the legendary ward boss Big Tim Sullivan didn’t extract protection payments from the brothels in his ward, for the simple reason that he actually owned them. The even more legendary ward boss George Washington Plunkitt famously told journalist William Riordan that his buying up property just before the city announced it would develop it was “honest graft” that he pocketed in accord with his credo, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”
That kind of self-enrichment at the apex of New York politics began to wane somewhat in the 1920s and was altogether extinguished during the 1934-1946 mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia. Since then, it has only occasionally flickered, though not at the mayoral top of the system. What has kept it burning are the remnants of machine politics, the party clubhouses and arcane electoral laws that enable a handful of people to solicit and dole out favors, some legal, some not.
The recent indictment of southern New Jersey political boss George Norcross for alleged illegal seizure of property fits into the model of the old-time Tammany tales, as does the conviction of recently resigned Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez for accepting payments from the Egyptian government. The real New Jersey scandal, though, was until very recently its electoral system, which enabled Democratic county chairpersons to structure primary ballots so that the name of their preferred candidate would top the ballot, and the names of that candidate’s opponents would be hard even to find. Manifestations of this vestigial machine politics still exist in a number of Northeastern states where the machines once were strong. The South Jersey Norcross machine and the Long Island Republican Al D’Amato machine persisted into our time, and even when such machines vanish, they leave in their wake a culture of party clubhouses where favors are routinely swapped. In was in such a culture where Adams began his political career.
The new wrinkle that Adams brought to this culture wasn’t his material asks, which by Boss Tweed standards (or even Boss Norcross standards, if he’s found guilty of the charges against him) were puny, but his political asks, which were based on defrauding a fairly new and distinctly progressive innovation: public matching funds for modest campaign contributions. That amounts to a massive case of defrauding the public and, more seriously still, election-rigging.
There’s nothing particularly mysterious about Adams’s conduct; his goals and motivations are perfectly clear. What mystery there is solely concerns Turkey’s conduct: What on earth did they think Adams could do for them?
The 57-page indictment handed down by the federal prosecutor documents just two asks that Adams’s Turkish government backers made of him. The first was to have the fire department declare that Manhattan’s new Turkish consulate building was safe for occupancy, so that President Erdoğan could see it up and running during his then-imminent New York visit. In fact, it wasn’t yet safe for occupancy, but Adams (not yet mayor, but as the winner of the Democratic primary, assured of taking office in the next few months) allegedly pressured fire department officials to declare that it was. Those officials then informed the building inspector that he could lose his job if he didn’t go along. He went along.
Since Adams officially became mayor, there’s been only one incident that the prosecutor has found in which Turkey made a request of him: In the spring of 2022, the consul general asked Adams not to release a statement commemorating the Armenian genocide on the upcoming Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Accordingly, Adams released no such statement.
Without offering anyone free air travel, or a penthouse suite at some five-star Istanbul hotel, Turkey could surely have gotten some crackpot on Tucker Carlson’s show to state that the Armenian genocide never happened.
In addition to Adams’s small-scale venality and large-scale election fraud, the biggest takeaway from the Adams scandal is the depth of the Erdoğan regime’s ignorance of American political realities—of how little Adams could do for them and how much they could accomplish if they linked up with the Goebbels wannabes on the American right.
