Before Eric Adams can start explaining the conspiracy that took him down, the soon-to-be-former mayor of New York City must make his morning smoothie. On a chilly recent Friday, he is standing in the stainless-steel kitchen of Gracie Mansion, the stately official residence on the Upper East Side, layering blueberries and ginger and flaxseed and greens into a Nutribullet blender.
“People think that our stomachs are like a washing machine—that when you eat, everything mixes up together—and it is not,” he says, whirring the mixture into a greenish-brown sludge. “Our stomachs are like a sink, where what you put in it first goes down the drain first.” He pours me a sample. It tastes like ginger-flavored grass.
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We are speaking a week and change since Adams bowed to the inevitable and dropped his bid for re-election. There is a lot he wants to get off his chest. When he was elected four years ago, Adams seemed poised to be a transformational figure. Amid rising crime and racial tensions, the former police captain promised there need be no compromise between safety and justice. Like Joe Biden’s election a year earlier, his win was a triumph of the Democratic Party’s moderate Black base over the radical-chic faculty liberals and their alienating ideas. “I’m the Biden of Brooklyn,” Adams boasted. “Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic Party.” Aides whispered that he could run for President.
Four years later, the Democrats’ future looks murkier than ever, and Adams’ lofty ambitions lie in ruins. His approval rating sank as low as 20% in the wake of his federal indictment on bribery and corruption charges and its subsequent dismissal by President Trump’s Justice Department. In the mayoral race between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, Adams was relegated to an afterthought, an object of ridicule and scorn. The cloud of scandal has obscured the message he wants to leave on his way out.
“I could have made better choices,” he says, reflecting on all the appointees who broke the rules and betrayed him. “But I had a city to run. And when you look at it, even with the crew that I assembled, there was not one year that we were not moving the city forward.” He’s been punished, as he sees it, for telling unpopular truths, harassed by an unfair justice system, hammered by a biased press, his achievements diminished by a system he threatened.
It’s hard not to think about what might have been. “It strikes me as Shakespearean in its tragic outcome, because there was so much there to admire,” says Juan Williams, the Fox News analyst who has known Adams since the 1990s, when Playboy assigned him to write a profile of the young lieutenant who’d risked his career to testify about racism in the NYPD. “There was so much energy and determination,” Williams recalls, ”a sense that this guy was going somewhere and he was going to take other people with him, especially Black people. But I don’t think there’s any question it’s his fault. He was selfish, and it clouded his thinking—his sense of right and wrong.”
Adams proceeds to a peach-colored parlor, the smoothie in one hand and a container of carrot slices in the other. All he is asking, he says, is for people to look at his record. To put the good alongside the bad and see how it all adds up. The crime and homelessness he reduced, the jobs numbers and test scores he improved, the nightlife he brought back from its COVID-era slumber.
Settling onto an orange couch, a carrot stick in each hand, he turns the conversation to his late mother, whom he says left school after third grade, worked three jobs, and raised six kids on her own. A black-and-white photograph of her adorns the cufflinks he’s wearing. “There was one point during this whole thing that it took everything to get out of bed,” Adams says. “And it was only thinking about Mommy—how she always got up, no matter what she had to go through—that I said, listen, Eric, you just can’t surrender.”
He came so far, only to end up isolated and diminished. “They didn’t think I could do it,” he says. “You’re a darn former cop, how are you going to run a city this complex? And there was a body of people that was not even willing to give me a chance.”
Adams grabs the smoothie and his suit jacket and climbs into the back of the black Suburban that is his de facto office. There is a packed day ahead. The next 12 hours will take us to 10 stops across three of the city’s five boroughs, from a rundown police precinct to a glitzy nightclub, from a subway platform to a taxi-drivers’ gala.
The indictment is on Adams’ mind as we make our way to City Hall. “No gold bars, no bags of cash, nothing—the case was about upgrades,” he says of the bribery charges. “Over years of investigating me, they could never find anything. So they had to concoct this.”
Adams was born in Brooklyn and moved to Queens in elementary school. By his teens he was a street hustler affiliated with a local crew. At 15, he was arrested with his brother after being caught stealing. In police custody, officers repeatedly kicked the brothers in the groin, according to Adams, leaving him urinating blood. The encounter left Adams’ brother with a hatred of cops—but it motivated Eric to become one. In 22 years on the force, he became known as an outspoken internal critic.
Adams left the NYPD and ran for state Senate in 2006, where one of his first causes was pay raises for lawmakers. (“Show me the money!” he said in a floor speech.) He served four terms before being elected the first Black Brooklyn borough president in 2013. In 2020, he joined a crowded Democratic mayoral primary that included tech executive Andrew Yang and several liberal technocrats. Adams’ focus on public safety stood out. His upset victory, powered by outer-borough Black voters, signaled that the party’s working-class silent majority wanted more and better policing, not the “defund the police” of the fashionable activist slogan.
Under Adams, the city has seen a decline in both violent and property crimes. This year, shootings are down 54% and murders are down 36% compared to the same period four years ago, according to the NYPD. Subway crime in the third quarter of 2025 was the lowest in recorded history excluding the pandemic. And crime isn’t the only area where Adams’ accomplishments have been “substantial,” says Kathryn Wylde, president of the powerful Partnership for New York City, who has worked with mayors since the 1970s. The city’s economy has grown at a faster pace than the rest of the country, hitting records for gross output and jobs last year. Adams’ zoning reform, the biggest in decades, is projected to spur the construction of 80,000 new homes over 15 years, and his “Trash Revolution” has begun to move the city’s notorious garbage piles off the sidewalk and mitigate the rat problem. As one X user argued: “Eric Adams is legitimately insane and literally committed treason in exchange for airline miles. He’s also the only NYC mayor in ~50 years to make progress on two of the biggest issues the city has: trash & housing.”
Adams cut billions from the budget and took on entrenched urban nonprofits, weathering criticism from homelessness advocates when he ramped up the city’s use of involuntary commitment for those with severe mental illness—a policy Mamdani has vowed to roll back. His chief of staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, tells me Adams has a skepticism of government grounded in his upbringing. “He feels the city failed his family, and that drives him in a way I don’t know if he even understands,” she says. “I tell him, ‘I always think of you as Batman, and not just because you like to go out at night.’”
New Yorkers are not convinced. In a recent CBS News poll, 61% of respondents said that things in the city are “going badly.” Just 22% said crime had decreased over the last four years, while 46% said it had increased. Ana María Archila, co-director of the left-wing Working Families Party, says Adams doesn’t deserve credit for declines in crime when rates have been falling nationally. Adams, she says, has been too willing to see police as the answer, and has governed the city for the benefit of his wealthy patrons rather than his working-class constituents. “He spent so much time fear-mongering about crime,” she says, “and at the same time he put police officers on the front lines of the approach to mental health and homelessness in ways people perceived as highly ineffective and not very humane.”
But political leaders are often defined not by the plans they make but by the crises forced upon them. For Adams, it was the migrant surge. When he came into office, the Biden Administration was insisting there was no crisis at the border. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott then began sending buses of asylum seekers to Washington in protest. In July 2022, Adams called Abbott’s action “shameful” and urged him to “let them come to New York City, where we can take care of them.” Abbott was happy to oblige, and the first buses were soon on their way to Manhattan.
A year later, Adams’ tone changed. New York was spending billions housing the migrants, whose numbers had reached six figures, in shelters, encampments, leased hotels and a cruise terminal. Adams began criticizing the Administration, saying Biden had “failed New York City.” In private meetings, Adams says, he urged Biden and his team to secure the border. He says Administration officials urged him to be quiet and compared the crisis to gallstones—it would be painful, but it would pass, and the best thing to do was tough it out.
For Adams, who was cutting back library hours to pay for the shelters and taking political heat for giving handouts to migrants, that was not a satisfying answer. Adams wondered who was really in charge at the White House: in his later meetings with Biden, he says he noticed a marked decline, and suspected the president wasn’t well-served by his staff. He found himself frozen out by the White House, dropped from the advisory council of Biden’s reelection campaign. (A Biden spokesperson did not return a request for comment.)
On Nov. 2, 2023, Adams was headed to Washington to confront federal officials about the migrant crisis when the FBI raided the home of his chief campaign fundraiser. The mayor turned his car around on the way to LaGuardia and canceled the trip. Four days later, the feds stopped Adams on the street and seized his phones and iPad. To Adams, the connection seems obvious: He called out Biden, and then Biden’s Department of Justice went after him.
A few months later, Trump went on trial in Manhattan, and Adams began to sympathize with the former president’s claims of political targeting. Adams read the book Government Gangsters, by Kash Patel, the erstwhile MAGA influencer who is now Trump’s FBI director, which painted a sinister picture of the “deep state” that would stop at nothing to destroy Biden’s enemies. He watched Biden decry Trump’s subversions of justice and then pardon his son on his way out of office. “Take Trump’s name off it,” Adams says. “They basically had a hit list.”
Back in the car after taping a TV interview about subway surfing, the mayor takes a sip of his smoothie, which has been sitting untouched for hours. “My spinach,” he says, “like Popeye.”
We pass the flashing screens of Times Square and descend the steps to its subway station, where a dozen reporters and a row of television cameras await. Adams, as is his custom for even the most banal announcement, enters to the strains of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”
The press conference begins normally enough. Adams and his well-respected police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, tout the program they’ve instituted to reduce crime and homelessness on the subway, which they say has removed 2,100 people for quality-of-life violations and connected thousands with shelter beds and permanent housing. It’s when the reporters start asking questions that things start to go off the rails.
One asks about the latest gruesome subway crime, a 64-year-old man beaten to death at a Brooklyn station. Another asks if Adams’ campaign failed because his claims of progress weren’t convincing. Adams blames the media. “My campaign didn’t struggle because we failed,” he says. “My campaign struggled because the story has not been told by the same people that are not telling the story right now.”
Perhaps, another reporter suggests, there are shootings not being recorded in official statistics. Tisch takes this one. “If the suggestion is that we are in some way hiding people with bullet holes in them, I think that’s absurd,” she says.
Adams seizes the lectern. “Let’s be honest,” he says. “You didn’t think I could turn this city around. Many of you thought, He’s just a cop. What does he know about running a city this complicated?You don’t want to deal with the fact of more housing than ever in the history of the city, lowest crime in the history of the city, more jobs—we broke the record 11 times. Outpacing the state in reading and math. We have dropped unemployment all across the city, but particularly in the Black and brown community. All of these indicators. You didn’t think I could do it in four years.” The same statistics the press uses to judge other mayors demonstrate his success, Adams argues, yet “you’re still talking about how we’re fudging numbers.”
He’s getting heated now, lapsing into the third person: “Eric has turned around the economy. Broadway had the best 12 months in recorded history. Crime is at record levels. Just report the facts. Stop coming up with all of these creative ways of saying Eric failed. Eric didn’t fail. Eric did the job of a working-class mayor.”
Now Adams points a finger at his least favorite reporter, Chris Sommerfeldt of the Daily News, whom he banned from City Hall press conferences earlier this year. In today’s paper, Sommerfeldt has a story about Political Humanity, a new memoir self-published by Adams’ former girlfriend Jasmine Ray, who later worked in his administration. Their relationship first turned romantic, according to the book, in a 2014 encounter at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Adams takes issue with Sommerfeldt’s description of this as “the first time she slept with Adams.” (The book strongly implies it, but Ray tells me they merely kissed.)
“You’re a dark, sick person, man,” Adams says, glaring at Sommerfeldt. Tisch and some of the other officials are starting to look uncomfortable. He dismisses them: “Y’all can depart. Let me do this.” A prolonged diatribe at Sommerfeldt ensues.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has just been indicted by Trump’s Justice Department, but her indictment, Adams notes, is being widely portrayed as politically motivated payback, unlike his own. “People attacked me. They called me names. They destroyed an impeccable record in the city,” he rants. “Folks, I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I have 40 years of delivering for the people of the City of New York. And within months, because of a lawfare, you all of a sudden turned me into a criminal.”
Adams goes on in this vein for some time. “So don’t start asking me about what’s going on now,” he finally concludes. “I want to know what did y’all think about when my life was destroyed in this city. And I wish I had a mic so I can drop it right now.”
He turns on his heel, exuding the calm of a man whose anger has escaped his body. The small crowd that has gathered on the other side of the turnstiles breaks into a mix of heckling and applause. As Adams strides back up the subway steps to his waiting car, a voice calls out behind him: “Would you take the upgrades again, Mr. Mayor?”
Adams settles into the back seat, turns to me, and grins. “For the next three months,” he says, “I’m going to have so much fun.”
The federal indictment of Eric Adams, unsealed in September 2024, alleges that before he became mayor, Adams accepted valuable gifts from the Turkish government in exchange for official favors, and that his mayoral campaign accepted illegal donations by laundering them through straw donors. Among the alleged gifts in question were airline upgrades on Turkish Air between the years of 2016 and 2021; the official favor is that he called the FDNY in 2021 to see what was holding up the inspection of the new Turkish consulate building.
As we make our way through traffic to a police precinct in the Bronx, Adams lays out his defense. “When you get an upgrade, if you’re in your official capacity, there’s no problem—you’re allowed to do it,” he says, with the confidence of a man who has carefully scrutinized what the ethics laws permit. As for calling the fire department, he says, he was just trying to make sure the city’s bureaucracy was working to meet the needs of an important resident. “I was indicted for calling the fire department and saying to them, ‘Hey, the president of Turkey is coming in and they have a new building. Can you go do a building inspection?’ I didn’t say pass them. I said, if you can’t do it, let me know and I’ll manage their expectations.” (In fact, the indictment describes a lengthy back and forth between Adams, the fire commissioner, and a Turkish representative as he sought to facilitate the building’s opening without an inspection. In the course of urging the commissioner to get it done “today if possible,” Adams says that if it can’t be done, he will “manage their expectation.”)
Adams is not the only one to find both the quid and the quo alleged in the case underwhelming. The CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, opined that it was “not a slam dunk.” Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose campaign was also investigated for alleged campaign finance violations, says there ought to have been a higher bar to bring the first-ever indictment of a sitting mayor. “I did not see how on earth he would ever be convicted on those charges,” de Blasio tells me. “Something involving airline upgrades? An allegation of foreign money, but nothing linking him to it directly? It seemed very thin.” Adams’ staff refers to it as “an indictment over legroom.”
More vexing to many New Yorkers than whatever he did or didn’t take from the Turks were Adams’ dealings with Trump in the aftermath. The two men met for the first time, according to Adams, in October 2024, three weeks after Adams was indicted and three weeks before the presidential election, when they both appeared at the Al Smith Dinner, an annual white-tie charity roast. At the time, top Democratic politicians had disowned Adams, and Gov. Kathy Hochul was considering using an obscure state law to force him from office.
Trump saw a fellow victim. “I’ve never met a person who’s a vegan who liked Turkey so much,” Trump razzed, before adding: “I was persecuted, and so are you.” He continued to champion Adams’ case on the campaign trail. In January, as Trump prepared to move back into the White House, Adams traveled to Florida to meet with him. He skipped Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations in New York to attend Trump’s inauguration; I found him in the Capitol before the program began, sitting with his eyes closed. After I interrupted Adams’ meditation to ask if he was angling for a pardon, he insisted he only wanted to talk to Trump about their shared policy priorities.
Trump’s Justice Department filed to dismiss Adams’ case in February. At least 10 prosecutors resigned in protest. In her resignation letter, then acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon wrote that the case was being dismissed in exchange for Adams’ cooperation with the Administration’s deportation efforts. “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” she wrote. Two days later, Adams went on Fox and Friends alongside Tom Homan, Trump’s immigration czar. “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City,” Homan grinned, “up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is that agreement we came to?’”
A judge, while observing that “everything here smacks of a bargain,” dismissed Adams’ case in April, saying he could not force the Justice Department to prosecute. The next day, Adams dropped out of the Democratic primary, staying in the race as an independent candidate. His re-election bid was hobbled by the city’s Campaign Finance Board, which denied him more than $4 million in matching funds, citing the corruption charges. Cuomo, the former governor who’d once vowed not to run if Adams was in the race, had already reversed himself and entered the field.
Rumors swirled that Trump’s allies were working to lure Adams out of the race. He was offered the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia, or a position at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, per various reports. Adams says none of it was ever true: “There was never a deal with Trump.” The proof, he says, is that he was consistent when it came to the migrant crisis. “I said pre-election that if you break the law you need to get the hell out of this country,” he says. “I said that after the election.” He has urged Trump not to send the National Guard to New York City—successfully, thus far—and criticized the Administration for a recent ICE raid.
“The visceral hate for Donald Trump, and the feeling that he did something for me—the city turned on me,” Adams says. “It was like I became the symbol of their hate.” New Yorkers were convinced Adams couldn’t be trusted, and he, in turn, was radicalized—disillusioned about the justice system, the law-and-order apparatus he’d held dear.
To hear Adams’ critics tell it, the mayor was not a victim but a serial offender, a machine pol on the make who was never really vetted before he won the keys to the city in a stroke of lucky timing. Adams was repeatedly investigated for alleged ethical lapses prior to his mayoral election. Once in office, he surrounded himself with cronies, many of whom were quickly enmeshed in scandal.
“In 2021, I warned people that he would be corrupt and there would be chaos, and unfortunately I was right,” says Curtis Sliwa, the Republican who ran against Adams four years ago and is once again the GOP nominee. “He is the most corrupt mayor in the history of New York City, and that’s saying a lot. He created his own destruction, but like every politician, he can never acknowledge it, can never apologize. It’s always a conspiracy.”
By the time Adams was indicted, dozens of city officials had resigned or been fired, and many had themselves been indicted for allegedly selling contracts and trading favors. An October 2024 New York magazine cover blared, “Last one out of City Hall, turn out the lights.” It is a testament to either Adams’ governance or to New York’s vast and competent bureaucracy that the city continued to function smoothly as members of the mayor’s cabinet fell like dominoes.
Adams’ car pulls up to the NYPD Academy in Flushing, Queens, where this year’s class of more than 1,000 cadets has assembled in a massive auditorium. He stands at the front beside a pair of flags, a tiny figure against a big gray wall. “It takes a special person to complete their career and not be bitter, because you’re going to watch the worst things that man can do to man,” he says, speaking with feeling and without notes. “And you can either leave your career being engulfed by the pain and devastation of that, or you can embrace it.”
He urges the young officers to take care of their families and relationships, and to learn from one another about their diverse communities. “Wearing that shield and that gun and that vest is a commitment. It’s a dedication. And you cannot do anything to tarnish that.”
Adams is vague about what he’s going to do next. Back at Gracie, as he microwaves a vegan dinner for one—a lentil-based pasta and medley of vegetables smothered with nutritional yeast—he tells me he’d like to travel the world and work in the private sector. In recent days he has regaled the city press corps with talk of a book, a documentary, a Ph.D. he wants to pursue.
Our conversation turns to the election. Adams considers Mamdani’s promises unrealistic; he predicts buyer’s remorse when the frontrunner’s supporters realize he can’t actually freeze most people’s rent, make buses free, or bring down the cost of living. Adams is also concerned about the threat of Islamic extremism, with which he thinks Mamdani is too comfortable, and perplexed by polls that show Mamdani getting a large proportion of the Jewish vote. (In public comments, Mamdani has cast such criticism as Islamophobic.)
In 2023, Adams hosted Mamdani and his father, a scholar of post-colonialism at Columbia University, for dinner. “The frightening thing is, he really believes this stuff!” Adams tells me as he mixes the veggies. “Globalize the intifada, there’s nothing wrong with that! He believes, you know, I don’t have anything against Jews, I just don’t like Israel. Well, who’s in Israel, bro?” At the dinner’s end, Adams says he told the Mamdanis, “Listen, I just don’t believe what you do.” (Mamdani has decried antisemitism and recently, after a prolonged controversy, said he will discourage use of the loaded intifada phrase.)
On Oct. 23, Adams endorsed Cuomo, calling him the better candidate to keep the city safe. Mamdani’s candidacy, Adams tells me, is “the number one threat to our city, and to be honest with you, I think the entire country, because you’re going to watch cities fall like dominoes if his philosophy takes root in New York City.” But he is still no fan of Cuomo, whom he sees as too inclined to capitulate to the left. “Andrew sabotaged this race,” Adams tells me. “He’s better than Zohran, yes, but that’s not a hard choice, because to me everybody’s better than Zohran.”
Later in the evening, Adams will take me to a taxi-drivers’ gala in Queens, where numerous young Black and brown men tell me they think he got a raw deal. Then it’s on to a club opening in downtown Manhattan, where he’ll pose with a pair of puffy-vested DJs at an outdoor roller rink while a deafening beat thumps, and crypto billionaire Brock Pierce will urge him to reenter the race. He’ll swap his suit coat for a maroon dinner jacket and head back uptown, where a celebrity chef, an ambassador, and a selection of imported wines await in a private room.
But for now, as he eats his plant-based meal standing up in his taxpayer-funded kitchen, he seems like a man who is very much alone. “There won’t be anybody like him again,” the veteran New York Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf tells me. The city’s demographics are changing, becoming more Chinese and Muslim, less Black and Jewish and white-ethnic, and its politics have been taken over by an educated, professionalized cohort. “The political-industrial complex is now in control, and they don’t need the Eric Adamses of the world. He wasn’t from Harvard, wasn’t from Yale; he was from the streets. He was held to a different standard in many ways. He never had a shot.”
The Democratic strategists who have chewed over their party’s unpopularity in memo after memo since last November pine for an authentic tribune of the working class. A candidate who plays to the middle. Someone who can sound tough on crime and immigration without being a malicious racist. Someone who understands the aspirations of regular people. Who can embody masculinity without disrespecting women or gay people, who can speak to the men—particularly young men of color—leaving the party in droves. Someone who can work the system and deliver for the people.
“You had a mayor that was probably one of the finest mayors for working-class people, and the city turned against him,” Adams says. “But no one said it’s supposed to be fair.”—With reporting by Leslie Dickstein