Where Eric Adams stands in the pantheon of New York City mayors will be for historians to decide, but in a single respect he joins only one other mayor, long forgotten: A. Oakey Hall.
Hall was the last New York City mayor indicted while in office , charged in 1871 with neglect of his official duties. He was supposedly on watch when Boss Tweed and his nefarious Tammany Hall cabal looted and pillaged what today would be untold millions of dollars through inflated city contracts and a remarkable variety of shakedown schemes.
The scope of perfidy was breathtaking. Tweed himself was found to hold a secret interest in the quarry that supplied the marble that built the Tweed Courthouse — a wildly inflated boondoggle that sits behind City Hall as an unrivaled monument to political corruption.
Ward boss George Washington Plunkitt explained the Tammany mindset in his book titled “Plunkitt of Tammany” by insisting there was such a thing as “honest graft.” Or, as he put it,
“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”
The Boss died in prison. Hall, however, never did a day in jail. He went on trial three times: the first ended in a mistrial, the second in a hung jury and the third in an acquittal.
New Yorkers never got to see whether Adams could have been the first convicted New York City mayor, because the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump forced the dismissal of his case in exchange for his cooperation in the administration’s immigration crackdown.
In some ways, notes Terry Golway, author of “Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics,” the potential for scandal in any mayoral administration exists simply due to the enormous size of New York City government, which now tops 300,000 employees and requires a $116 billion budget.
“Some sort of scandal would seem to be inevitable. The question really is about culpability: To what extent was the mayor implicated in his administration’s scandals?” Golway said. “Adams would seem to be as culpable as you can get, barring an outright conviction.” (Adams pleaded not guilty to all charges before the Trump Justice Department moved to dismiss his case.)
Adams was charged with bribery and campaign finance fraud for allegedly soliciting and accepting illegal straw donations in his pursuit of $10 million in public matching funds, but escaped thanks to Trump. Two other mayors were accused of perfidy, but escaped without charges.
Jimmy Walker, the impeccably dressed Tammany Hall mayor of the Roaring ’20s who frequented speakeasies and courted chorus girls, was accused in an anti-corruption investigation of accepting thousands of dollars from vendors seeking city contracts. He called them “gifts” and was never charged. But Gov. Al Smith — a post-Tweed Tammany leader with a squeaky-clean reputation — told Jimmy his days in politics had run their course. Walker resigned in 1932 and fled to Europe with one of his chorus girl acquaintances.
Mayor Jimmy Walker, 1932. Courtesy Muncipal Archives. Credit: Chicago Albumen Works
In the 1950s New Yorkers witnessed the rise and fall of William O’Dwyer, a prosecutor who had brought down the mob world’s assassination combine, Murder Inc. Elected mayor in 1945, O’Dwyer resigned on Sept. 2, 1950, nine months into his second term amidst a cop scandal involving organized crime. Investigators alleged payoffs to dozens of cops, and one cooperator claimed some of those payoffs wound up going to O’Dwyer. He was also accused of appointing friends of the suave gangster kingpin Frank Costello to city patronage jobs.
O’Dwyer denied wrongdoing and ultimately escaped accountability after President Harry Truman appointed him ambassador to Mexico. But a year later a fire union chief testified at a Senate hearing that he had made a $10,000 payoff to O’Dwyer at Gracie Mansion. O’Dwyer denied that the payment was a bribe but a federal tax court later ruled he owed taxes on it. No prosecutor brought charges related to this finding.
By far the most notorious late 20th century City Hall scandal unfolded under Mayor Ed Koch, who was never personally implicated in any specific corrupt activity. Instead his reputation tanked due to his choice to allow the city’s most powerful political machine strongmen to divvy up municipal agencies and install their cronies to run them.
They included Queens Borough President Donald Manes; Bronx Democratic Committee head Stanley Friedman; and Meade Esposito, the longtime boss of the Brooklyn Democratic machine Manes ultimately fatally stabbed himself after being implicated in a wide-ranging bribery scheme. Friedman was tried and convicted as a participant in that scheme by then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani. Esposito was later convicted in a separate payoff scheme.
Giuliani would go on to win City Hall in 1993, but his legacy would also suffer because of his choice of Bernard Kerik as police commissioner. After his tenure at One Police Plaza, Kerik pleaded guilty to a wide variety of crimes, including obtaining discounted bathroom renovations from a contractor and making false statements to the White House officials vetting his appointment as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Giuliani’s successor, billionaire businessman Mike Bloomberg, managed to get through two of his three terms unscathed by corruption allegations. His run of good luck came to an end in 2011 when the city’s Department of Investigation and federal prosecutors announced indictments against several consultants hired to oversee the digitizing of the city’s payroll system under a program dubbed CityTime. The scam ripped off taxpayers for $600 million through inflated invoices and shell companies.
Bloomberg — after first defending CityTime — finally admitted he’d failed to adequately keep an eye on the program.
Bill de Blasio also came close to indictment after the Manhattan U.S. attorney found evidence the mayor had solicited donations for a nonprofit he controlled from real estate developers, businessmen and lobbyists seeking favors from his administration. That included the owner of a restaurant operating on a city-owned barge on the East River trying to get out of paying thousands of dollars in back-rent he owed the city.
The restaurateur ultimately admitted he threw two free fundraisers for de Blasio and claimed when the mayor said he needed him to raise a certain amount, Singh said he could only do that via straw donors. Singh alleged de Blasio responded, “I don’t want to know how you do it.” De Blasio denied that claim.
In the end, the Manhattan U.S. attorney, Cy Vance Jr., declined to bring charges. Vance also demurred on another de Blasio effort involving fundraising aimed at switching state Senate leadership from Republican to Democrat. The DA determined that de Blasio’s role in funneling funds violated the spirit of campaign finance rules — but not the law.
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