Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Room 9, the press room at City Hall, is full of memorabilia from past administrations: a binder full of de Blasio tabloid covers, “IRISH FOR MIKE” and other Bloomberg campaign pins. Katie Honan, a reporter for The City, was regaling me with stories about the absurdity of covering the Eric Adams administration when Justin Laub, a photojournalist, entered the room with a new memento. “So, Katie, I went on my mission,” Laub said, pulling a bag of chips from behind his back, “and succeeded.” It was the exact flavor and brand — Herr’s sour cream and onion — Honan had been given by Adams’s longtime hanger-on Winnie Greco weeks earlier, after Greco had stuffed it with more than $100 in cash. “I don’t know why Herr’s hasn’t donated money to our nonprofit newsroom,” Honan joked about the free publicity the story generated. “Just give us $300,000.”
The apparent bribery attempt was the cherry on top of a tumultuously entertaining four years for the city’s press corps, which had been charged with covering an idiosyncratic mayor whose tenure began with mystery around where he lived, what he ate, and whom he clubbed with, then disintegrated into ignominious scandal: arrests, phone seizures, and indictments of Adams’s cronies and himself. “He’s one of the oddest people in politics that I’ve ever covered,” said Politico’s Sally Goldenberg. “I was just completely captivated by it.” One City Hall reporter told me, “He always said, ‘This is going to be one of the most interesting administrations you’re going to cover,’ and honestly, I agree.”
In the days since Adams dropped his flailing reelection bid in late September, reporters have told me about the unique challenges of covering a mayor who both radiated charisma and openly loathed the press, who could connect with voters even as he delivered one head-scratching sound bite after another, and who could be maddeningly opaque about the most trivial matters while signaling quite clearly that his administration would be corrupt. “If you can’t be honest about what you eat and where you sleep, what else are you lying about?” the City Hall reporter said. Adams was a source of tremendous content — but at what cost?
As early as the 2021 primary, it became clear that Adams was hiding some very basic facts about his life. Goldenberg started staking him out at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, where he was borough president, and found he was actually sleeping in the government building where he and his staff worked. “That was my first foray into trying to uncover the very strange world of Eric Adams,” Goldenberg said.
Following reports that he was not living at his purported primary residence in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and amid speculation that he actually lived in New Jersey, Adams gave the press a bizarre tour of his Brooklyn apartment, the basement unit of a multifamily home. It only raised further questions. He’d said he couldn’t live without a hot bath with warm roses, but his supposed primary home lacked a tub; there was fish in the fridge despite his professed veganism; and journalists spied red high-top sneakers that appeared to belong to his adult son. “People were examining it like it was the Epstein files,” said Honan. Goldenberg added, “Nothing made sense about that house tour.”
New York staked out his house for a week. Kevin Dugan, the reporter on that story, recalled how Adams illegally parked in front of an active garage when he arrived there late at night and how, a few hours later, the garage workers had to tow his Prius a few feet to clear the blockslong traffic jam he had caused. Adams came out of his house to find the driver’s side of his Prius blocked by the jam. “He gets into the car from the passenger side, shimmies over to the driver side, drives the car on the sidewalk and up the rest of the block,” said Dugan. “Afterwards, we reached out to them for comment, and they were like, ‘Are you sure it was Eric Adams, or was it just someone who looked like him?’”
After Adams was inaugurated as mayor in 2022, Goldenberg and her Politico colleagues visited Osteria La Baia, an upscale midtown restaurant where they’d heard Adams liked to take meetings; he was often accompanied by Johnny Petrosyants, a restaurateur who had been charged in a federal money-laundering case years earlier. “The maître d’ seats us and says, ‘That’s the future and past of New York City,’ and it was de Blasio and Adams eating,” Goldenberg recalled. She told him she would have what the mayor was having. “‘The branzino, okay,’” Goldenberg remembered the staffer replying. “I was like, ‘I thought he was vegan’ — the guy has no idea I’m a reporter — and he says, ‘No, pescatarian; he just doesn’t like olive oil.’”
“I distinctly remember saying to my editor — because she was really playing up the branzino — that this is a story about him in his fancy restaurant hideout with people with questionable pasts, and now it’s just going to be about a piece of fish,” Goldenberg continued. “But she was right, obviously. It’s an enduring thing about him because he lied about such a basic part of his biography.”
“The Fishgate thing is funny and stupid, but it also really embodied the fact that, from the start, we understood that we could not trust what he said,” noted one City Hall reporter. “He’s a fabulist, which presents a difficult dynamic if you’re trying to cover an administration.” Adams “always kept a part of himself hidden” and “was very protective of his personal life,” another reporter said. “His story was always changing.”
Charlotte Klein
Reporters came to know Adams as something of comedian, such as when he made off-the-cuff remarks about how he used to “jump the turnstile” to visit “a shorty” out in Rockaway, or wore a two-sizes-too-small shirt that said “In God We Trust” in Italian, which he nevertheless insisted was in Spanish. He was also extremely thin-skinned — a defensiveness he “just couldn’t overcome,” as one journalist put it — and this quickly eroded his relationship with the press. Six weeks after taking office, following a New York Daily News headline about an unsuccessful trip to Albany, Adams railed against the largely white press corps, suggesting racial bias was resulting in unfair coverage. “The way in which he called that out was to use it as a shield to claim that anything reporters were writing about his administration was somehow racist,” said a City Hall reporter. “Saying that shortly after taking office, when not that much bad shit had even happened yet, was just kind of jaw-dropping.” From there, it was “a steady downward spiral,” said another reporter.
All mayors think the media treats them uniquely unfairly. “But it’s just fascinating to me how much things soured, to the point where so many of his interactions with the press were hostile, and then he stopped answering questions at his press conferences and implemented off-topic Tuesdays,” said a City Hall reporter, referring to the once-a-week opportunity for questions that Adams had instituted in October 2023. The animosity persisted. This June, the mayor banned Daily News reporter Chris Sommerfeldt from off-topic Tuesdays for being, as the mayor put it, “disruptive” and “disrespectful.”
“He’s actually an exceptional communicator, and it’s really sad that he let his anger, and his staff’s anger, at the local press corps color that relationship as badly as he did,” said Goldenberg. “He can light up a room, he can deliver a message, he has charm. That doesn’t mean the press would ever go soft on really serious stories about him, but it could have bought a lot of goodwill to just make the experience less hostile. And it’s unfortunate that he took one of his gifts and turned it into a curse.”
Every administration holds an annual Christmas party for reporters at Gracie Mansion. Unlike his predecessors, Adams didn’t mingle; he would say a few words and get out of there. And while previous mayors had commissioners and deputy mayors in attendance, Adams’s “press team restricted it to only press officials from the agencies,” Honan noted. “It spoke to their obsession with control. Like someone’s going to pass me information in the bathroom of the party?”
Another piece of memorabilia in Room 9 is a copy of Don’t Let It Happen, Adams’s 2009 book, which had been mentioned in articles but was largely forgotten until Byline Byline highlighted it last January. That prompted Honan to order the book from Amazon, “literally just to make my colleagues laugh,” she said. At a news conference a few days later, an Associated Press reporter asked Adams about a story he told in the book about firing a gun at school. The mayor claimed that not only did that not happen but that the book “never got into print,” at which point Honan had a colleague grab her copy so she could present the mayor with it. “This man — a book is in existence, and he claims it doesn’t exist,” said Honan.
If Adams had been merely touchy and eccentric, devoting his first term to his “war on rats” and abiding by his own dictum to “stay focused, no distractions, and grind,” he might have turned out to be a pretty popular mayor. Instead, his administration was engulfed in various overlapping scandals that sent reporters into overdrive. By last September, it was nearly impossible to keep track of who in his administration was being indicted, who was being investigated, where the FBI was showing up, and whose phones they were seizing. “When the feds asked his security detail to step aside near NYU and got into his car, presented a judicial warrant, and took his devices — that was just fucking insane,” said one reporter. But it was hardly unexpected, they added: “The specter of corruption hung over him from the beginning and then he did himself no favors by surrounding himself with people who had really checkered pasts.”
What’s remarkable about Adams is that virtually everyone in the press corps expected him to be corrupt and was on high alert for illicit activities — yet he went ahead and did them anyway, for which he was ultimately charged with receiving bribes and illegal campaign contributions. “A lot of people predicted that this was going to be a one-term mayoralty and that he would be indicted for corruption, and both of those things happened,” said another reporter. An early indication, a third reporter recalled, came when he defiantly appointed Phil Banks — who had resigned from the NYPD under de Blasio and just escaped being indicted in what was then one of the biggest corruption scandals in department history — as his top public-safety deputy at City Hall. “From that moment on, reporters, political types, everyone, was like, ‘What the fuck is this guy up to, and why would he do a thing like that? It’s attracting trouble,’” the reporter said.
The low point came when Adams began all but begging Donald Trump for help; Trump obliged as his Justice Department requested the charges be dismissed. This inaugurated a Trumpian turn in Adams’s persona. In his first comments after the charges were dropped in April, Adams whipped out FBI director Kash Patel’s book Government Gangsters “like it’s a Bible,” Laub recalled. “I think I’m probably heard on my own audio saying, ‘What the fuck?’” said Honan. “I was floored,” said another City Hall reporter. “That signaled to me that it wasn’t just a front that he was pretending to be Trump friendly; he had actually been radicalized.”
The entertainment Adams provided, and for which he’ll likely be remembered, obscured some of the deep dysfunction in the Democratic Party that allowed him to get elected in the first place. “The totality of people around him who were investigated, whose property was seized, and who were indicted, speaks to a severe lapse in judgment about who should be in a position of power — which is, by extension, a position of privilege — in City Hall,” said Goldenberg. “There’s a tragic element in this for Adams himself, but he left the job somewhat unmanned for four years and that’s tragic for New Yorkers.” On Sunday, Adams announced he was taking a four-day trip to Albania.
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