#149 - Eric Adams Indictment Party
or: "perks from the turks!" - brian lehrer
On Wednesday night, I was at a comedy show (a likely place for me to be) and Caleb Hearon asked the audience if we had any fun juicy gossip (and while I am on record for hating crowd work, I <3 gossip so I was willing to let this slide) and from the back a voice rang out.
"ERIC ADAMS WAS JUST INDICTED."
I love to be part of a crowd gasp. It's so funny to me that humans all have these shared reactions. Laughing is one of the weirdest things we do, and we all have signatures, and we do it together in crowds more often than we do it alone.
It's contagious, it's healing, it's maybe being leaned on a little too hard as a coping mechanism in modern times but that's a different story.
I grabbed my phone (something I never do I love being The Best Audience Member I Can Be as if there's some award for being appropriate and projecting outwards when laughing) and confirmed it via the NYT tweet and felt a cool tingle zip up my arm and down my entire body.
And then we all, for the first time in our lives (#queercomedycrowd), unironically chanted U-S-A! U-S-A!
We (the people of New York City) have been waiting for this for a while. Like, I sent this to a friend over a year and a half ago:
And happen it did!
Eric Adams is a fraud. A 57 page-long indicted multiple times for multiple crimes fraudulent "democrat" who switched parties because NYC doesn't elect republicans and wanted to be Top Cop because he couldn't climb the ranks of the NYPD because they also hated him. (For different reasons than I do! But he's also just really hateable!!)
He lies about weird stuff.
And if there's one major life lesson I took away from my life getting (lightly) ruined by a con man it's this: people who lie about small/weird shit are the biggest liars of them all.
(Do not trust them, they are fugly sluts etc. but like really it's the biggest warning sign because what are they even getting out of lying besides the thrill? It's like people who are rich but still shoplift because their lives are too dull and they have a need for speed that they have not figured out how to get fulfilled in healthy ways.)
It would be funny, but his actions have consequences for 8 million people who live in this city.
The impulse to roll ones eyes at anything pertaining to New York is a thing I understand. I get it, bodegas are just corner stores and we can't figure out how to use trash cans (we did until the 70s but the cans themselves got too damaged and we should just have big corner dumpsters because this city doesn't have alleyways but noooo everyone is too afraid to give up ANY PARKING booo hissss) and we (rightfully) think we're the greatest city in the world so I get why that's grating.
But we are also a city of incredible diversity where more languages are spoken than anywhere else in the world and I love this city so much I will go toe-to-toe for it any day of the week and I think that loving where you live is so important so I hope everyone feels that they live in the greatest city/town/county/hillside/plot of land in the world!
But also there are 8 million of us here so when shit happens, it affects all 8 million of us. The Mayor of New York is actually really important because they oversee more people than many governors do. Certainly than any other mayor does. And we give them weird power so like he's been able to fuck up a lot of shit since being in office – and I'm not even just referring to the blatant corruption and worsening of the NYPD which he has not only turned a blind eye to but outright encouraged.
He promised that every child would have access to Pre-K and when the assignments rolled out some kids were in schools in different boroughs. He's a deeply unserious weirdo individual who doesn't even LIVE IN NEW YORK HE'S A REPUBLICAN FROM NEW JERSEY AND I HATE HIM SO MUCH BUT NOW HE'S SURRENDERING TO THE FEDS SO HAHAHHA FUCK YOU ERIC!!!
If you want a brief overview of everyone else who he has brought down with him in his silly little schemes he's been running for a decade, the above link from Hellgate is great.
Also, huge shoutout to TheCity where I get all my local coverage. I donate $5 a month because I think local journalism is really important to support and if you live in New York (or have a spare $5 to give to some very cool journalists) I'm sure they'd love to have you as a supporter too!
Greg B. Smith, Yoav Gonen, Gwynne Hogan
(Katie Honan should know she's a celebrity in my group chats.)
Okay! So.
He was receiving bribes from Turkish officials in exchange for favors.
But he was also defrauding the city via campaign fund fraud.
NYC has a program that matches small campaign donations 8:1 – it's supposed to balance out the unfair influence that those who can donate more will have over a candidate.
Adams would receive lump sums and then divvy them into small donations and say they were from random New Yorkers in order to get them matched by public funds.
I think this program is really stupid. Not only because I have to imagine we have far better use cases for that money than to be siphoned into bloated campaigns so candidates can up their adspend, but because it admits to the problem and then doesn't even pretend to solve it.
Just cap how much campaigns can spend. Cap individual donations to an obscenely low amount because like mmmm no one should actually be able to buy politicians?
And I know in America that's a radical idea but like lobbying shouldn't exist. It's weird that when we codify corruption we pretend like it's no longer corrupt.
We're admitting money influences politicians. And then we invent ways for them to get even more money but don't worry this time it's from The Poors who they'll never care about anyway because they just admitted it's a money game and guess who will never have enough chips to sit at the table with the sharks?
Everyone always talks about the middle class as if it's not horrific to imply that America will always preserve a lower class in order for the middle to exist in the first place.
I mean I know the class system isn't great but at least the British have the decency to call it "working" class. Y'know? The thing that we all have to do while the upper class...doesn't and yet it's about "work ethic" or whatever. Nepo baby discourse is a whole other thing because that's about artists and I think that art is always going to get more flack when I have less of a problem with like the idea of Billie Eilish having parents who are agents than I do with the people who fail upwards but still get into Wharton via donations and then go on to be slumlords but get in with the Mafia enough to build a concrete building in new york city in the 80s and put their last name on it real big and then sell news of their scandalous divorce to Page 6 in order to establish themselves as a celebrity Who Is Rich despite only being rich because their landlord dad (who never hugged them) gave them money and when someone can shoot the gun until they hit the target it's a lot less impressive when they finally do but anyway that person did get a tv show and then become president and he! is! a! nepo baby! but its landlords and estate inheritance and we're uncritical of that in this country because we were founded by Robber Barons so it's written into the tax code and celebrated when The Rich evade taxes. Good for their lawyers and accountants! Look at them finding all those loopholes!!!! (That their parents and their lawyers lobbied to make part of the tax code in the first place!!!!)
And then that Nepo Baby's kid married another slimy real estate nepo baby who then got access to White House Security Clearances and still has backchannels to governments he uhhh shouldn't have access to and he's literally been sued by his tenants for neglect while also selling off overpriced apartments in money laundering schemes with oligarchs from a certain country in his little apartment building that his daddy gave him and the 666 Park Avenue address is just so fucking on the nose it's almost impossible to not laugh.
Jared Kushner raked in $112 million in fees from his Saudi sugar daddies while returning them zero dollars in profit. I’m sure all the folks who were angry about Hunter Biden will also be outraged by this blatant corruption. pic.twitter.com/6JuySzn0Co
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) September 25, 2024
Because you really do just kind of have to laugh!
It's all corruption all the time these days!
And the ones who aren't corrupt are apparently cowards?
Like I don't think any foreign government is using Hochul as a mark (in particular, even though one of her aides was a unregistered chinese government agent) I think she's car-brained and genuinely thinks its a plight to have to spend $15 to bring your car into the city and thinks/wants to have a higher chance of winning over moderate republicans to vote for her (she won't) because she haaaaates progressives and their beloved trains. (It costs over $15 to take the train in from surrounding areas but we're not having a subsidy conversation about that despite it being good for the planet and the train is going this direction anyway so it could be FREE!) (her attempt to throwout the lawsuit going after her for illegally halting congestion pricing just got denied by the court though so hahahaha) Hochul sees herself basking in the light of being accepted by "fiscal conservatives" and loves being lightly bribed by lobbyists so she has no interest in alternative energy plans or infrastructure because why do that when she could give $850 million dollars in subsidies to the Buffalo Bills for their new (not public despite being publicly funded) stadium.
(I don't care that it happened over two years ago I'll never stop bringing it up her husband works for them it's so clearly a favor ahhhhh!!!! She took funds from Seneca Nation casino's and then "reallocated" it to a team named after an animal that was cruelly hunted to near-extinction in order to deprive tribes of one of their major resources during the genocide enacted by the US government against the indigenous tribes of this land AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH american history is so rancid so it shouldn't surprise me that the government still STINKS!)
This week was chaos at 141 Worth Street. Resignations happening constantly, reports of more raids and cell phones being taken from new commissioners taking recently-vacated roles. Daily reminders that all of the "Deputy Mayors" that Adams appointed during his tenure make a quarter of a million dollars in taxpayer-funded salaries and all of the positions are made up and they are all apparently there to commit crimes for him.
I don't think I've ever been as dedicated to a job as these folks were to making sure he was getting those first class plane seats from Turkish Airlines.
Merrick Garland has been asleep at the wheel throughout his tenure as head of the DOJ so, while we in no way have to hand it to the FBI in general – it was nice to remember that sometimes the government is capable of taking things like blatant corruption and foreign bribes seriously.
Sarah Kendzior
Apparently this shit has been ongoing since 2014 with Adams, so at what point does the FBI become negligent in their handling of the case because...why was he able to even run for mayor?
(These charges barely scratch the surface of other stuff we know he has going on too btw, there's one thing in here about FDNY rushing through a fire inspection and preferential selection of a Turkish construction company but like we KNOW shit's going on with Winnie Greco as well so I expect way more will come out in the next few weeks/months/years.)
Ashley R. Williams, Celina Tebor
He won the democratic primary (which essentially IS the mayoral race because we, say it with me, don't elect republicans! but did get a little lax on vetting whether the guy claiming to be a democrat had any democratic policies! Except my best friend who has been bringing that very astute point up since he appeared on the scene but voters didn't even care about his very weird apartment tour so we have to understand that the city was in crisis mode and the preferred progressive candidate turned out to be such a shit boss she had to drop out of the race and then he only won – on the first ranked ballot ever –) by .9%. Hmmmm wonder if his giant fraud budget was literally instrumental in eeking out that victory!
I think it's bad that there's so much corruption within our government. And it's really annoying that the most russian-swampy fuck of all time took the phrase "drain the swamp" because actually that's a bipartisan issue we can all get behind!
I'm sick of the day trading and I know we put a little cap on it but it's not enough I need the representatives to make minimum wage from all of their states and only receive public healthcare benefits they allow because I'm tired of being represented by people who Don't Get It because they own more than one home in a country where the vast majority of people own NONE!
Out of touch! Weirdos who can't open their own emails! Day trading elitist liars who are chill with each other at the gym which they think makes them look like the Bigger Person when it really just makes them look like waffley cowards who don't believe in any of the shit they say – and that goes for both sides!
"We don't have any money for education, transportation, healthcare, public infrastructure, renewable energy– " take it out of the defense budget. Stop investing billions into Navy ships that then get retired within the next five years. Wasteful spending is actually really easy to identify because the budget takes up such a hilariously large chunk of the pie at this point.
Anyway, the little fucker is determined to not resign because his lawyers will be giving their all to the case while he stays giving his all to the city.
Like, okay, whatever, Nixon refused to resign for a while too.
(And isn't it wild to think that we as a people used to trust politicians? Like it was shocking the president could lie at one point. Everyone should watch All The President's Men and then think about the ending for a week and then email me their thoughts please!)
The case feels big. There's more charges coming, I'm sure of it. This is only the SDNYs case, I'm sure there are others because this dude looooves real estate fraud and making handshake deals at his favorite nightclub.
(There are also allegations of sexual assault and, once again, if we took the claims of women being mistreated as the serious issue they actually are and then applied the ability to abuse one person to the likelihood of being an abusive leader, we could save the world a whole lot of trouble. But then we would have to respect women as people, and that seems like really difficult for a lot of folks.)
A lot of people have now called for his resignation. Kathy Hochul could remove him from office immediately, but she's never been able to make a popular decision in her entire career so if I hold my breath on that one I will perish before I get to see Adams official fall from public office & esteem.
Apparently when the announcement happened, New Yorkers opened their windows and banged pots and pans together like it was 2020 @ 7pm all over again.
“Eric Adams indicted” pic.twitter.com/shwrU2BHBJ
— grant👨🏻🦱 (@urdadssidepiece) September 26, 2024
Actually his indictment was also a cause for bipartisan celebration even if me and my Loud Neighbor have very different reasons for being excited!
So, for now, I feel hope. And a little proud of someone for finally holding blatantly corrupt politicians to account. And the city has very competent people ready to step into the job so I'm not worried about what happens after he leaves so much as what he'll be able to get away with in the interim chaos.
We'll see where this goes but, for now.
NYC BABEEEEY!
Greatest city in the world!
New York or nowhere!!!!