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HOW NEW YORK’S LAW AND ORDER MAYOR ENDED UP FACING PRISON  
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Michael Daly
September 27, 2024
The Daily Beast
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_ “He was not a real cop,” said a retired NYC Transit Police
officer who was as real as they come. _

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Four decades before he made history as New York
[[link removed]]’s first indicted
mayor, Eric Adams
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with what was then known as the “Oh” police.

The New York City Transit Police got that nickname because of the
response they often received when they sparked interest in a new
acquaintance by saying they were a cop, then added they patrolled the
decidedly unglamorous subway.

“Oh.”

Some transit cops back in the days when their radios often failed to
work underground joked they should really be called the ”Oh s--t”
police. That was because they were liable to find themselves
confronting a hulking psycho who had just spat in their face on a
moving train when any hope for back-up was a half-hour away.

One result of such confrontations was that transit officers, who city
police dismissed as “cave cops,” got a lesson in who they really
were at their very core. Some took it as a challenge and became
determined crime fighters. Adams instead became what some termed a
“house mouse,” contriving to spend much of his time in the
department’s underground headquarters.

“He was a clerk,” a retired transit cop who made more than 1,000
arrests told the Daily Beast on Thursday. “He was inside. He
wasn’t really out there.”

“He was not a real cop,” said another retired transit officer who
was as real as they come. “I think he got nine collars. And they’d
all be misdemeanors.”

When cops collared a robber or a rapist, they would call it in and
Adams would demonstrate his organizational skills while preparing a
report at the operations desk. He proved to have a knack with
computers when he was assigned to data processing. He also prepared
for promotion exams by studying the patrol guide, the penal codes, and
the rules of criminal procedure. Test scores alone determined a
cop’s rise to sergeant and then lieutenant and then captain.

At the same time, Adams achieved a certain distinction among cave cops
as one of the senior members of two associations of Black police
officers: The Guardians and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.
That helped make him a viable candidate for deputy commissioner for
community affairs when onetime top transit cop Bill Bratton became the
head of the NYPD in 1994. But the then-mayor, Rudy Giuliani
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deemed Adams to be too close to community activists in Brooklyn.

In 1995 the Transit Police merged with the NYPD, which began to
achieve an historic reduction in crime due to the strategic genius of
a former cave cop, Deputy Commissioner for Operations Jack Maple.
Adams was assigned for a time as a captain in a high-crime Brooklyn
precinct and then in low-crime Greenwich Village. His disciplinary
record through all his years was clean, save for a single departmental
complaint in 2006 for speaking to TV news without authorization.

That same year, Adams retired and made a successful run for state
senator in Brooklyn as a Black former cop with social justice cred. He
was elected Brooklyn Borough President in 2014 and gave a measure of
his self-importance when Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, a longtime community
planning board chairman, refused to follow a command to fire a highly
regarded manager without cause.

“I’m the Borough President and you do what I tell you,”
Goldstein remembers Adams saying.

Adams had ascended from the Oh Police to a certain level of outer
borough prominence. But he faced a common problem for politicians:
Even though he could consider himself a big shot, he did not have
big-shot money. He was able to get a table at a hot restaurant, but
there remained the question of the check.

To his manifest delight, he encountered plenty of people who did have
big-shot money and were happy to pay. He discovered that there was
even the government of a whole country, Turkey, willing to upgrade him
to business class when he flew on its national airline. He even
managed to get upgrades if he just stopped in Turkey on the way to
other destinations.

Of course his Turkish pals were only doing it because they figured he
was in a position to help them. And they proved willing to provide him
with some of what he knew he needed to keep that position.

“You win the race by raising money. Have to raise money. Everything
else is fluff,” he texted a supporter, according to court papers.

He needed much bigger sums when he decided to run for mayor in 2021.
Along with Turkish friends he sought out money from anybody who might
be willing to kick in. If they were ready to give more than the legal
maximum, he allegedly put it in other people’s names. Prosecutors
say he also did that with the cash from the Turks, who as foreigners
were not allowed to contribute at all.

That way, he allegedly collected enough illegal money to bankroll his
campaign as a law-and-order candidate. He won on a promise to make the
city safe.

Adams could have hired the best of the best to run the city, but they
might have noticed that the people who gave his campaign money
occasionally wanted something in return. They might have wondered why
he flew into Istanbul on the way to France, even though it’s not on
the way. They also might have asked why he was so anxious to have the
FDNY set aside its safety concerns regarding Turkey’s new high-rise
consulate building in Manhattan. Somebody might have noticed the
building was certified for occupancy just before Turkey’s president
arrived to open it with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Adams instead collected a crew of cronies who said nothing because
they did not want anybody asking questions about what they themselves
were doing. Many of them were former cops Adams knew from Transit or
Brooklyn. They included Phil Banks, who resigned as NYPD chief of
department after federal prosecutors named him as an unindicted
co-conspirator in a major corruption scandal in 2014. Adams made Banks
deputy mayor for public safety, with authority over the police
commissioner and the rest of the NYPD. Banks and the rest of Adams’
cronies became the subject of at least three federal investigations.

A fourth investigation focused on Adams himself and the result was an
indictment that was unsealed on Thursday
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He will be arraigned on Friday morning on charges of bribery, fraud,
and soliciting a political contribution from a foreign national. Court
papers suggest that as good Adams was at studying the rules as a house
mouse, he was not very very skilled at breaking them as the mayor.

One section of the indictment describes his apparent effort to thwart
the FBI after agents executed a search warrant for his electronic
devices on Nov. 6, 2023.

“Although Adams was carrying several electronic devices, including
two cell phones, he was not carrying his personal cell phone, which is
the device he used to communicate about the conduct described in this
indictment. When Adams produced his personal cell phone the next day
in response to a subpoena, it was ‘locked,’ such that the device
required a password to open.

“Adams claimed that after he learned about the investigation into
his conduct, he changed the password on November 5... and increased
the complexity of his password from four digits to six. Adams had done
this, he claimed, to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently
or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone because, according
to Adams, he wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the
investigation.

“But, Adams further claimed, he had forgotten the password he had
just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that
would unlock the phone.”

Oh.

_Michael Daly is a special correspondent with The Daily Beast. He was
previously a columnist with the New York Daily News and a staff writer
with New York magazine. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for
commentary in 2002 and has received numerous awards. He is the author
of Under Ground
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Book of Mychal
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His third book, Topsy
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was released in 2013._

_Send him tips: [email protected]
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You can also use our anonymous document submission system,
SecureDrop. Click here to find out how
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* Eric Adams
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* political corruption
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* New York City
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