Why Eric Adams Refuses to Clean House in the Mayor’s Office

The New York Democratic strategist wasn’t being funny or facetious. “I’ve been offline for a couple of hours,” he said. “Is anyone else being investigated or arrested?” Indeed, the wave of bad news crashing down on New York mayor Eric Adams for the past two weeks seemed to grow in size and dimension almost daily, if not hourly. First came FBI raids on the homes of three high-ranking Adams administration officials. Then came subpoenas for the cell phones of four top New York Police Department officials, including the NYPD commissioner, and a subpoena for a fourth adviser to Adams. A week later, the NYPD commissioner quit. Then Adams’s top lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, also quit. Then, two retired New York Fire Department chiefs were arrested and charged with soliciting bribes in exchange for expediting building inspections.

That’s a long and disturbing list. Yet it is merely the latest addition to a series of corruption investigations stretching back to November 2023 and involving a cast of characters both baroque (a Turkish philanthropist who founded an obscure Washington, DC college) and incestuous (brothers David and Phil Banks, who hold high-ranking jobs in city government; their other brother Terence Banks, a governmental business consultant; Sheena Wright, a deputy mayor who lives with David Banks; Edward Caban, the now ex-police commissioner, and his twin brother James). The investigations are ongoing.

The connecting point in all of it is Adams—who last fall was suddenly confronted by FBI agents when they climbed into the mayor’s SUV and seized at least two of his cellphones and an iPad. The feds were apparently looking for evidence in a probe of Adams’s 2021 campaign, trying to determine whether it received illegal foreign donations from Turkey that were funneled through a Brooklyn construction company. The mayor and everyone else have consistently denied wrongdoing, and none have been charged with crimes, other than the two former FDNY officials, who have both pleaded not guilty.

On Tuesday, at the beginning of his weekly City Hall press conference, Adams peremptorily and wearily announced, “We’re not going to be distracted, and one of the distractions is answering the same question over and over and over again. Like you’re going to get a different answer. I’m just not going to do that. I got a city to run.” Which was fine because the recent spate of scandals provided plenty of fresh material for the standing-room-only crowd of reporters.

One subject that surfaced, though, was recurring and emblematic of the mess Adams finds himself in. Timothy Pearson has seemed to be on a mission to provide calamitous headlines ever since Adams hired him as a senior adviser two years ago—while allowing Pearson to retain a job as a security official at a Queens casino seeking state approval to expand. Pearson has since been sued for sexual harassment by four different former subordinates (allegations he’s denied); he has also gotten into a scuffle with security guards at a migrant facility in midtown. Plus, Pearson was one of the Adams aides whose cell phone was seized by federal agents in the most recent batch of investigations.

Yet the mayor has steadfastly refused to cut Pearson loose and save himself some headaches, even though five other advisers have reportedly pushed Adams to fire Pearson. Some of his reasons are personal. Pearson, a former inspector in the NYPD, was at one point Adams’s commanding officer in the department. Adams was an outspoken, sometimes isolated cop, and Pearson was one of his few allies. On Tuesday, the mayor claimed that Pearson had saved the city “hundreds of millions of dollars” by analyzing contracts related to the pandemic, but then several minutes later, walked back Pearson’s importance, saying that “it was a team effort…I don’t want to give the impression that Tim was the only one doing it.”

Loyalty is a good thing, generally. In government, however, loyalty becomes problematic when it shades into cronyism. But there’s something else at work in Adams not cleaning house and getting rid of Pearson or other aides who are operating under the investigation cloud. The mayor is also clearly making a political calculation. He is up for reelection in 2025 and believes voters—or enough of them, anyway—care more about schools and crime and jobs than they do about ethics probes that may not ultimately lead anywhere, or that may fall short of implicating Adams directly. There is also the risk that firing someone turns them into a hostile witness.

Adams currently enjoys a significant lead in fundraising and name recognition over the candidates who have so far declared or acted as if they’re running against him, including Brad Lander, the current city comptroller; Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller; and state senators Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos. Other numbers, though, suggest Adams is vulnerable. “His polling is terrible,” says Chris Coffey, a strategist who worked with Andrew Yang’s campaign in 2021. “And it was terrible before all of this.” The most recent public survey, by Quinnipiac University in December, saw Adams with a 28% job approval rating, the lowest for a New York mayor since 1996 when Quinnipiac began its poll. “The flip side,” Coffey says, “is that getting Black votes against Eric Adams is hard. Impossible.”

Adams retains substantial support in two key Democratic primary demographics: Orthodox Jewish and Black voters. Because New York holds its primary in the sleepy electoral month of June, turnout is reliably terrible, which makes Adams’s base particularly valuable. The mayor, leaning into that bond, hasn’t been shy about inferring that criticism of him is racially motivated, comparing his plight to that of New York’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who was also the city’s last one-term mayor. Adams, never one for understatement, also referred to a member of the Exonerated Five, Yusef Salaam, when asked about Pearson on Tuesday. “Voters of color, particularly African American voters, are understandably and historically very skeptical of media and law enforcement,” says Basil Smikle, a veteran New York Democratic strategist. “And voters in general right now are more focused on the presidential than what’s happening with the mayor.”

Perhaps all the investigation news has arrived at a relatively good time for Adams. But that won’t matter if it contributes to a perception that the mayor is leading a dysfunctional city government. One example: restaurant inspections have plummeted because the city’s Health Department is short-staffed. And voters of every color and religion care about shootings on the subways, the closing of public libraries, and the shortage of affordable housing. Adams can point to some encouraging crime and economic statistics. Yet the mayor could still be sunk by stubbornness and insularity as much as by scandal. “I’ve tried to help him,” an experienced city politics operative tells me. “But he doesn’t think he needs help.”