Mayor Eric Adams won his office four years ago pledging to deliver New Yorkers from chaos and calamity — a former lawman entrusted to tame a proudly unruly city.
It hasn’t happened that way.
Over nearly 100 interviews with aides, allies and adversaries spanning Adams’s life and career, The Times Magazine found a mayor and a city unmoored, their fates entwined whether or not residents want them to be. Long before his indictment last fall on federal corruption charges, Adams became the avatar of New York’s day-to-day disorder, a volatile leader to match (and contribute to) volatile times.
His chosen path out of his personal crisis, many details of which have not been previously reported, involved cozying up to a new president whom most of Adams’s constituents oppose — and offering those constituents, federal prosecutors have said, as human collateral to the Trump White House.
Here are five takeaways from our reporting:
Adams (and Trump) have played the long game
President Trump and Adams, two sons of Queens, seemed to understand each other from the start. When Trump encountered the mayor at a charity dinner in October, weeks before the presidential election, he put his arm around him in private. Adams’s friend, former Gov. David Paterson, said that Adams was quiet for the rest of the night. “Almost like he’s thinking about it,” Paterson said. “Like: ‘Is this possible? Boy.’”
Trump urged Adams to “hang in there” before publicly suggesting that both men had been persecuted by the Biden Justice Department. Adams, a Democrat who criticized Trump’s “idiot behavior” during the president’s first term, has not said a cross word about him since. By January, he was flying to Florida to dine with Trump days before the inauguration. And Trump had acquired a useful new friend in his native city: a mayor straining to cling to both his office and his freedom.
Adams is a political shape-shifter
Adams has always been an adaptable politician, comfortable flip-flopping between the two major parties as the winds shifted. He was a Democrat, then a Republican in the 1990s, then a Democrat again. He briefly considered running in 2021 as a Republican. And he has considered it again in 2025.