Opinion | The Most Galling Part of the Whole Eric Adams Affair

The federal charges of bribery, fraud and conspiracy that Mayor Eric Adams faces are grave. But graver still is the damage the mayor has done to the city he claims to love and will continue to inflict if he remains in City Hall. If the mayor will not resign, Gov. Kathy Hochul should begin the process of removing him from office.

Mr. Adams has exacted a high price from New York, in reputation and morale, for what seem to be petty acts of greed and disregard for democratic principles. It raises questions of how America’s largest, wealthiest city, with its reservoir of talent in everything from the arts to finance, ended up with someone accused of being an incessant petty grifter as mayor.

The 57-page indictment that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, unsealed early Thursday demolishes Mr. Adams’s defense, laid out in a video on Wednesday night, that he became a target of the federal government because he has criticized the Biden administration’s response to the migrant crisis.

The federal charges are not frivolous allegations based on legal technicalities. They are a meticulously detailed chronicle of what Mr. Williams says was a yearslong campaign on the mayor’s part to solicit political and personal benefits that he knew to be illicit.

Mr. Adams isn’t accused of lapses in judgment. Rather, he’s accused of repeatedly soliciting and accepting gifts, including from the Turkish government and Turkish-controlled business interests, in a pattern that dates back to 2016, when he was the Brooklyn borough president.

The U.S. attorney charges that Mr. Adams took more than $100,000 in bribes in free or upgraded luxury travel, much of the money from foreign citizens prohibited from participating in U.S. elections.

Mr. Adams isn’t accused of disorganization in failing to vet donors. Rather, the indictment outlines premeditated, deliberate organization, with him allegedly directing staffers to conceal his behavior with “fake paper trails.”

One such instance occurred in June 2021, when Mr. Adams was in his final year as borough president. Turkish Airlines’ New York City general manager offered to charge him just $50 for a last-minute business-class trip worth more than $15,000; an Adams staff member wrote back to the manager that Mr. Adams’s “every step is being watched right now,” so the price paid directly by him should be “$1,000 or so. Let it be somewhat real.”

That instance is a stinging betrayal of the New Yorkers who voted for Mr. Adams, since it occurred on June 22, 2021 — the day of the mayoral primary. With New York unlikely to vote for a Republican that November, the emerging primary results, made official two weeks later, made him the de facto mayor-elect, increasing his power and responsibility.

Instead of seizing on the six-month transition period to determine how best to meet the trust voters had granted him to reduce crime and revive New York’s economy after Covid-19 lockdowns, he was allegedly scheming to discard that greater public trust.

It’s all so small and tawdry, really: Mr. Adams, was scoring the extra legroom worth it, compared with becoming a well-respected mayor with a list of sturdy accomplishments?

But these allegations aren’t about Mr. Adams’s lost promise but about the harm he allegedly inflicted on the city.

Mr. Adams, the federal indictment alleges, used his power as the presumptive mayor-elect, beginning in 2021, and as mayor beginning in 2022 to erode New York City’s critical public-safety procedures.

In September 2021, Mr. Adams, at the behest of a Turkish government official, allegedly pressured the Fire Department, whose commissioner’s continued tenure he would soon control, to approve a temporary certificate of occupancy for a newly built Turkish diplomatic building in Midtown Manhattan, even though “the fire prevention chief refused, citing numerous reported fire safety defects, some of which were serious,” the indictment reads.

Mr. Adams allegedly pressured the F.D.N.Y. to reverse itself; the chief of the department told the fire prevention chief that both officials would lose their jobs if they did not submit to this pressure.

As mayor, Mr. Adams allegedly continued to engage in such casual undermining of conscientious government. In February 2023 an Adams campaign donor asked for help in getting the Department of Buildings to lift a stop-work order, an emergency order that the department issues at construction sites that are not following basic rules, in order to prevent construction injuries and deaths.

When the businessman wrote to Mr. Adams to get the Department of Buildings to lift the order, reminding the mayor that “I have always supported you,” Mr. Adams promised to “look into this,” and a week later, the businessman thanked Mr. Adams “for your help.”

This written quid pro quo — a favor for campaign support — may meet the standard that the Supreme Court set in recent years for bribery cases: It’s not enough for a donor to give contributions or gifts to an elected official and then receive favors from that official; the elected official must commit an “official act” in exchange.

The mayor is also accused of thwarting New York’s attempt to ensure honest, fair elections, helping to illegally obtain $10 million in city matching funds via straw campaign donations. He is accused of continuing to engage in such behavior even after prosecutors separately indicted his fund-raisers over similar acts.

The crass details of the indictment make it reasonable for New Yorkers to ask whether blatant abandonment of the public good in return for private gain is Mr. Adams’s governing philosophy.

New Yorkers can reasonably wonder, for example, if some of the billions of dollars the Adams administration has issued in no-bid emergency contracts for migrant shelter and migrant benefits provision since 2022 have been awarded on considerations other than merit.

More important, a mayor leads by example, good or bad. In the past few weeks, a slew of top Adams deputies and commissioners, from his just-resigned police commissioner to his soon-to-depart schools chancellor, have come under federal scrutiny. Again, it is not unreasonable for New Yorkers to wonder if other top officials observed the behavior that the mayor is accused of and determined that they, too, had latitude to act improperly.

Mr. Adams’s determination to remain in office shows the potential for him to do more harm to the city.

He cannot pretend that he can continue to govern. Yes, it’s possible that he can attract caretaker replacement commissioners with the city’s interest at heart, willing to step in on an emergency basis, possibly people from the de Blasio, Bloomberg and Giuliani administrations. But with the mayor so wounded, such commissioners would have no mandate for strong governance; they’d be tasked only with keeping the lights on. Mr. Adams has already imperiled his singular long-term growth initiative, his “city of yes” proposal to allow for the construction of more than 100,000 new homes, on which the City Council must vote soon.

The city, still weakened by Covid-19 lockdowns and by a post-2020 surge in violent crime that hasn’t fully abated, cannot stand to be injured further.

In the longer term, though, New York City cannot rely on federal prosecutors to do what voters must do: elect a competent, honest mayor who shares their needs and desires. In 2021, Democratic voters overlooked rumors of corruption and elected Mr. Adams because he was the only candidate who ran as a moderate and made crime a central issue. The city did not have enough such candidates to choose from: His close runner-up, the former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, ran on competence as her dominant issue, not public safety.

Without a more robust, ideologically diverse pool of mayoral candidates, voters can feel forced to select an imperfect candidate whose flaws, though partly revealed before election time, unveil their full capacity for damage only after it is too late. Whether it’s in a special election early next year or in next year’s June primary, New Yorkers need a wider choice of moderate candidates with strong governing experience. Choosing from a position of weakness got us a weak mayor who is accused of weak behavior and has further weakened New York City.

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