Barring an electoral miracle this November, New York City Mayor Eric Adams will soon be gone, and we will all be poorer for it. He is a crook of an order not often glimpsed by the public in the modern era, not because no one’s crooked anymore, but because they usually have the good taste to carry out their corrupt dealings on a scale and at a level of secrecy that the public has come to expect.

What’s been remarkable about Adams’s self-dealing is how low-brow and penny-ante it all is. Most recently, Adams adviser Winnie Greco, who resigned from her official post as the administration’s liaison to the city’s Asian communities after the FBI raided her two Bronx homes, literally handed a red envelope of cash to a reporter from The City concealed in a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. (Greco’s lawyer chalked it up to “Chinese culture”; one day later, the New York Times reported that reporters had spotted Adams supporters handing out red envelopes of cash at three separate campaign events in July, each of which Greco also attended.) 

But Adams’s troubles began much earlier. When he was indicted on federal bribery, conspiracy, and campaign finance charges back in September 2024—earning the dubious distinction of being the first sitting New York mayor to be criminally charged—New Yorkers were treated to the naked idiocy of the schemes the man they’d elected had allegedly spent years spinning. 

The indictment revealed that much of the alleged corruption stemmed from deeply discounted Turkish Airlines tickets and expensive flight upgrades. Selling out your city and your country for cheaper airfare feels so true-blue American—after all, have you looked at Google Flights lately?—and Adams cashed the hell out. According to the indictment, the general manager of Turkey’s national airline himself, in texts with an Adams aide, offered to charge the mayor $50 for flights to Istanbul. According to the indictment, the aide replied: “No, dear. $50? What? Quote a proper price[…] His every step is being watched right now. $1,000 or so. Let it be somewhat real. We don’t want them to say he is flying for free. At the moment, the media’s attention is on Eric.” 

The flights for Adams and his romantic partner came out to an arbitrary $2,200, but would have cost more than $15,000 without the influence-peddling discount. (Why yes, that would be the same partner who secured a handsome $50,000 pay raise and a major promotion for what was allegedly a “no-show job” in the Education Department after Adams took office. She quietly retired in 2024 after a complaint was filed.) When the aide asked where Adams and his partner should stay on their sojourn, the Turkish Airlines manager naturally suggested the Four Seasons, and when the aide demurred, he responded: “Why does [Adams] care? He is not going to pay. His name will not be on anything either.” The aide’s response? “Super.” All told, since 2016, federal prosecutors allege Adams collected and failed to disclose gifts worth more than $100,000.

Adams was also charged with wire fraud, stemming from allegations that he used straw donors to conceal illegal campaign funds, including, again, from his bosom buddy, Turkey. In exchange for their campaign contributions, Turkish officials allegedly secured Adams’ failure to publicly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, some greasing of the rails for a new Turkish consular building to open without a fire inspection, and some other hyperlocal tit-for-tat. 

During the course of the investigation, prosecutors seized enough phones and tablets from Adams' allies to open an AT&T branch in a town like Schenectady, a name I would love to hear the mayor say out loud. When the feds seized Adams’ own phone in November 2023, he claimed, incredibly, that he couldn’t remember the passcode, as he’d recently changed it to make sure no records related to the probe were deleted. The investigation and filing of charges led to the resignations or retirements of the mayor’s police commissioner, his chief counsel, the schools chancellor, and his brother (a “mayoral security adviser”), along with three former aides, casting the administration into total disarray.

But Tammany this wasn’t, largely because Adams is no Boss Tweed. Rather than ruling with an iron grip, Adams will live on in the hearts and minds of many New Yorkers for his many bizarre hijinks, malapropisms, and general oddball-ness. He is one of God’s last true weirdos, and there will never be another like him. 

I first remember spotting his freak flag flying from a mile away back in 2021, when he was the Brooklyn Borough President and first running for mayor, when a 2011 PSA resurfaced of him instructing parents on how to toss their kids’ rooms for contraband like prison guards. In the video, a visibly younger Adams, then a state senator, invites parents to join his “crusade” against illegal handguns before taking viewers on a scavenger hunt, purportedly of his own home. 

“The First Amendment does not apply to the right of parents to go through their home to remove contraband or any other unsafe item,” Adams says in the video, providing an unfortunate test case of how firm a grasp the NYPD has of such niceties as constitutional rights. 

During the search—apparently, I must emphasize, of his own home—the former New York City Police Department captain recovers a small gun concealed in a jewelry box, “something simple as a crack pipe, a used crack pipe” in the backpack of a “child,” and bullets—which the state senator says might not mean a gun is also present—lurking behind a picture frame, plus a hefty sandwich baggie of cocaine resting on a bookshelf. The place was essentially a crime scene, and it was far from the last time that Adams would make his alleged home a news item. 

But Adams has also seemed to intuitively understand the role that New Yorkers want their mayor to play, and he’s stepped into that spotlight with great enthusiasm. In a city of more than 8 million souls all living on top of one another, the project of civic decency can only persist with a shared target at which to direct our collective frustration and scorn, and the mayor is our most enduring heel. We love beating up on our mayors for being stupid, corrupt assholes—a reason I fear for Zohran Mamdani, who’s heavily favored to next assume the mantle—and Adams has delivered. As a result, he’s done more to unite this city in hating him than most.

I’ll especially miss his many, many antics: his inexplicably making smoothies with romaine lettuce, his adoration for calling New York the [insert any major international city here] “...of America,” (all real examples: “New York City is the Islamabad/Istanbul/Tel Aviv/Zagreb of America”); definitely understanding and being able to say the term “global intifada" (and, naturally, being against it); pretending that he used to be a skateboarder who “can do a few tricks”; never sleeping and claiming he loves to buy fruit from street vendors under the cover of darkness; attributing the city’s “special energy” to rare gems and stones buried under all that pavement. (Adams also regularly wears “energy” stones, some of which a crystals expert instructively identified to theGuardianas aventurine, for financial matters “when times are tough” and citrine, which apparently “dissolves negative energy.”) Another of my personal favorite snafus was Adams’s “Operation Padlock to Protect,” during which the city unconstitutionally seized merchandise and shut down more than 1,000 businesses accused of selling unlicensed cannabis, and Adams personally destroyed more than four tons of the stuff. I could do this forever.

Make no mistake: Eric Adams has been an evil mayor. He sold New Yorkers out for a highly irregular sweetheart deal with Donald Trump’s administration, giving ICE free rein to carry out its fascistic deportation sweeps in the city and operate within Riker’s Island in exchange for making those federal corruption charges go away. He’s decimated our libraries, universal pre-K, and homelessness services—going as far as declaring war on homeless people sleeping on the train—and super-charged the deployment of NYPD in our subway system to bust fare jumpers, harass ladies selling mango slices, and stare at their phones. He’s launched brutal police crackdowns against pro-Palestinian protesters. He mismanaged the city’s response to the influx of migrants he said would “destroy New York City,” first by handing out eviction notices and now by closing many of the shelters, handing a propaganda win to some of the country’s most evil and powerful people, who are foaming at the mouth to portray the city as a fallen metropolis. 

Still, he is a creature of this city, part of its collective soul. His influence will be felt for many, many years after he reluctantly leaves the public eye. In a more perfect world, we could keep him as the city’s court jester. He could continue to unite New York in daily remarks to the press, perhaps broadcast from the comfort of a private jail cell, to remind us that he’ll always be there. That wherever a new business is opening or 9/11 is happening, he’ll be there. Wherever there are haters who become waiters at your table of success, he’ll be there. And wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy (that one still works), he’ll be there too, congratulating the cop on a job well done.