Opinion | No Turkish Delight for New York’s Mayor

It was one of the most anthropologically fascinating dinner parties I ever attended. Cindy Adams, The New York Post gossip G.O.A.T., feted her 94th birthday at her rococo Park Avenue apartment in April.

We joked about her party motto: “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.” (She inherited the line from her late husband, the comic Joey Adams, who coined it to describe Roy Cohn’s louche soirees in the disco days.)

I was mesmerized looking around at an amazing web of scheming New York power brokers. A penthouse full of pulped egos, famous people who had had crazy downfalls. A spidery crop of tabloid Gotham villains uneasily circling one another and eating animal crackers and ice cream in the red-lacquered, Ming dynasty’d-out lair of the tabloid queen.

Woody and Soon-Yi were standing quietly in the middle of the room.

Bill O’Reilly was there with an assistant who was handing out cards awarding a free subscription to his substack. Nearby was Robert Thomson, the top lieutenant and best friend of Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who fired O’Reilly for sexual misconduct at Fox News. (Remember the loofah?!)

Kellyanne Conway was prowling, as was Don Lemon, who lost his CNN perch after saying Nikki Haley was no longer in her prime.

The smiling governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, was standing a few feet from the man she replaced and disavowed after he was accused of sexual transgressions. Andrew Cuomo was also in good spirits, with his lovely 93-year-old mother, Matilda, on his arm. He was out of a job, but New York media and political circles were buzzing that he was eyeing Gracie Mansion.

And there, walking right past Cuomo to the bar, was Mayor Eric Adams. He reversed Cindy’s mantra: He was invited, and now he’s been indicted.

I did a feature on the mayor in the summer of 2022, when he was six months into the job.

He had started with such flair and swagger, but by the time I was trailing around the city after him, his poll numbers were dropping. Some of the mayor’s aides at City Hall were getting very uneasy about his cronies and clubbing at the private Zero Bond. And later, some of his best aides began leaving his increasingly murky orbit.

“It’s like the second coming of ‘Beau James,’ Jimmy Walker,” one top Democratic politico told me, prophetically. Another Democratic mayor with flair, a star of the Roaring Twenties’ Tammany Hall machine, Walker was forced to resign after an investigation showed he had accepted a windfall from businessmen trying to secure municipal contracts. He argued that he took “beneficences,” not bribes, and avoided potential criminal prosecution by disappearing to Europe with his mistress, a Ziegfeld girl.

When I interviewed Adams, he was buoyant. He talked about his favorite show growing up, “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” and I asked him which animal he related to. “Clearly, I am a lion,” he said, laughing. “I am meant to rule the jungle.”

As the daughter of a police detective, I was hoping that the former New York police captain would shine, not tarnish his office.

His story was powerful: The Brooklyn native joined the force after being beaten by the police as a teenager. His mother scraped to support six kids with cleaning work; as a child, Adams would sometimes have to take a bag full of clothes to school in case they were evicted by the end of the day.

I wanted to believe that this moderate Democrat could root out bad cops and bring justice to Black victims while quelling crime and pushing back on defund-the-police and coddle-the-criminal rhetoric on the far left.

But warning signs kept bubbling up.

Our interview — conducted after we rushed to the scene of a murder — was over dinner at Osteria la Baia, a restaurant owned by his friends the brothers Petrosyants, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to an illegal check-cashing scheme designed to evade anti-money-laundering rules.

Mayor Adams had chosen Philip Banks as deputy mayor of public safety, even though he was an unindicted co-conspirator in a corruption scandal involving Bill de Blasio donors in 2014. He had made Frank Carone his chief of staff, despite questions about his past business dealings.

I asked the mayor about all this, and he replied that he wanted to see the best in his friends, to give them second chances.

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

And some more worst days are to come. His sketchy associates weren’t the only graspy problem. Adams himself was, according to law enforcement officials.

In a stunning tableau on Friday, Adams was arraigned downtown. He is the first sitting mayor of New York to be charged with a federal crime — a reflection of just how sloppy Adams must have been.

He pleaded not guilty and claims, Trump-style, to be a target of a rigged system out to get him — while Hochul mulled whether to remove him and Cuomo still circled.

It’s hard to believe that a New York mayor could be had for a bunch of luxury hotel suites and business-class seats on Turkish Airlines — taking circuitous routes to Europe, Asia and Africa.

The indictment charges Adams with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, alleging he got emoluments for clearing away obstacles for Turkish officials, most frighteningly, pressuring the fire department to open a new high-rise Turkish diplomatic building, despite its having a faulty fire safety system.

When I wrote about Adams, his biggest scandal — which I learned at our dinner — was that he still ate fish even though he claimed to be a vegan.

But it seems that wasn’t the only fishy thing about him.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.