Culture
Bonus Episode: The Fall of Eric Adams
In this bonus episode of Empire City, host Changeri Kumaneca delves into the controversial rise and fall of New York Mayor Eric Adams, exploring the implications of his background as a former police o...
Bonus Episode: The Fall of Eric Adams
Culture •
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Interactive Transcript
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Hey everyone, it's Changer right here.
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Thanks so much for listening to Empire City.
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We've been hearing so many responses from y'all,
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and it's incredibly exciting to see more conversation about the history of the police,
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what that history tells us about what this institution is,
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how we got here, and how we could get somewhere better.
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One thing I've learned making this series is that history isn't just about the past.
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If you pay attention, it tells us things we need to know about the future.
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And I never felt that way more than when I started reading the headlines
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that were coming out right when we launched this series.
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Right now, we're seeing history being made.
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A former cop climbed up to New York's highest office,
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and he could fall because of alleged corruption.
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In 2022, Democrat Eric Adams became New York's mayor.
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Hi, Eric Adams.
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Do solemnly swear.
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Do solemnly swear.
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That I will support the Constitution.
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That I will support.
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And like most mayors, Adams painted the picture of a scary and dangerous city
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and reassured them that he had a plan to fix it.
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We cannot have a city where people are afraid to walk the streets,
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ride to subway or send their children to school.
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Because Adams sees safety and justice as key for our democracy.
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Oh, no way, that's not what he said.
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Oh, all right.
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Well, maybe it was more like safety and justice are important for all of our health and well-being.
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No, not that either.
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All right.
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Well, you know what? Let's just use his words.
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Safety and justice are the prerequisite of prosperity.
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Ah, prosperity.
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I keep forgetting safety and justice are important so some people can make money.
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When Adams was elected, a lot of people celebrated.
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And they saw the fact that he was a former cop is a good thing.
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And that's why they didn't listen to folks who were worried.
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Like movement lawyer, Aliyah Me O'Larene.
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She talked about one big warning sign on her YouTube.
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Let's unpack who Eric Adams is at his core, a black cop.
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He prioritizes the needs of NYPD above all else.
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Because he knows that there is nobody more powerful than the police.
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In a police state.
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And as we learned in episode three, he's repeatedly pushed back against attempts at police oversight.
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We cannot handcuff to believe. We want to handcuff bad people.
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As someone else who was determined to handcuff bad people or federal prosecutors.
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And there was one bad person at the top of their hit list.
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For the first time in New York City's modern history, we announced criminal charges against the sitting mayor of New York City.
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The feds accused Adams of engaging in what they call corruption for nearly a decade.
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And now, the indictments of other folks in this administration are coming down so fast that it's hard to keep track.
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Now that Adams is drowning in indictments, a lot of people are saying it was pretty obvious that this was going to happen.
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In this episode, I talk with John Tufl, who's an attorney and former police misconduct investigator in New York.
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John and I get into how paying attention to history and looking at the NYPD culture he was steeped in,
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could have told us what kind of mayor Adams would become.
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And what I really want to know is, if there were so many red flags early on, why did so many powerful people ignore them?
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I'm Changeri Kumaneca, and this is the bonus episode of Empire City, the fall of Eric Adams.
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I was a go to see you man. Yeah, I organized all of that by the way, the indictments, everything.
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That's all. That was you.
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Sorry New Yorkers. Yeah, it's good publicity. Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, exactly.
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John, like a ton has happened since we finished the show.
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Yeah, including the mayor is now indicted.
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Maybe more to come.
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Since we're a show that looks at the history of police, understanding more clearly what policing is.
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How is the policeness of Eric Adams responsible for this stuff?
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You talk about the copness of Eric Adams, right?
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And this notion that we're going to have a police officer being charged of a big city like New York and what that's going to look like.
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I would never claim, and I don't think any reasonable person would ever claim that every cop is corrupt.
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That's just not the case, at least not in terms of how we usually think about corruption.
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Not every cop is on the take. Most cops in fact are not on the take.
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Most cops are doing their job as that job is laid out and described to them.
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In my opinion, it would be to do the kind of harm that they do.
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That doesn't require corruption, actually.
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Exactly. If we're going to talk about what corruption is, think about this.
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Not every police officer is on the take, right?
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But does every police officer, if they're off duty and they're in their own vehicle and they blow a red light,
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or if they go too fast or something like that and they get pulled over, are they getting the ticket?
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No, they're not, right?
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Your proximity to law enforcement determines whether you're allowed to break, even if they are, quote, unquote, minor laws.
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You're allowed to break those laws. That's insane, right?
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But that is being a cop.
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Then when you're on duty, you're allowed to use force. You know that you are probably 99% of the time.
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You're not going to be held accountable even if you use too much force.
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You're not going to be held accountable.
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You can violate constitutional rights and not be held accountable.
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You will never be held civilly liable because of qualified immunity.
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So you are effectively untouchable.
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So Eric Adams spends years and years and years marinating in that culture.
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And then he moves on to politics.
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What does that do to a person?
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Right? In most cases, it's not a big deal because cops retire.
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They go become security professionals, private investigators, something like that.
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They don't hold any power over anyone, whatever.
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Eric Adams actually becomes more powerful than he was as a high ranking police officer.
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He was untouchable and marinating in this culture of untouchability for years and years and years.
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And then you make a mayor of the city of New York of 8.5 million people.
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What is going to happen?
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And I think we're seeing what's happening.
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I mean, this is that.
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What is he being charged with and who's involved?
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So Eric Adams is essentially being charged with two major things.
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One is bribery that he was effectively taking official actions in his capacity as mayor
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because he was given gratuities by entities connected to the government of Turkey.
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100%. I know in addition to that, there's also accusations that this was influencing his choices,
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like what regulations to enforce around buildings and things of this nature.
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Right.
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So it gets complicated.
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Right.
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You know, before all this stuff came out, I think most people weren't like, well,
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what I don't like about Adams is he's too friendly with the government of Turkey or whatever.
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Like, no, you know, that's right.
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What he allegedly did for Turkey was he pushed the department or the FDNY rather to allow Turkish government
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and own building to open even though fire inspections hadn't passed and the building should not have been allowed to operate.
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That's what he's alleged to have done.
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Is that a big criticism that people had of Adams?
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No, but I think in general, there has been this feeling throughout the Adams administration,
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mostly driven by his choice of personnel, that there is like a lax ethical standard,
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that he doesn't care about the appearance of corruption.
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I think that is generally the feeling that there was corruption.
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Adams has cultivated this larger than life persona that almost in a way,
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hearkens back to the more corrupt politicians of yesterday.
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You know what I mean?
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History repeats itself.
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We already know that the police department has been roped into some of these investigations,
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that some of the corruption does go directly to the police department.
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And we've only seen chapter one of this.
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And there's probably going to be quite a bit more that comes down the road.
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What does history tell us about how this federal indictment could play out for Adams and those in his administration?
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I do think that there are going to be more indictments just because of the number of investigations that are going on right now.
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These are serious charges.
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Whether Eric Adams is able to ultimately enter a plea deal,
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whether he faces these charges down and goes to trial.
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I mean, it has become more difficult to prove corruption and to prove bribery specifically under the laws.
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And we've seen other politicians manage to actually avoid conviction like the former governor of Virginia, for example.
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They've managed to avoid conviction on exactly the same type of charges that have been leveled against Eric Adams
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because the definition of an official act in the law has become very, very narrow due to the Supreme Court.
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So we reached out to Eric Adams several times for this series, but he declined to be interviewed.
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You can look at Eric Adams as kind of like a test case, right?
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Like a sort of experiment about what does it mean to have a city governed by a cop?
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I mean, he's not officially uniform in that uniform, but he holds his copness right out front.
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Absolutely.
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So how did he use his credibility as a former cop?
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And how did he use his story about himself to climb the ladder?
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Eric Adams rose very high in the police department. He had an impressive career.
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He is always like to paint himself as sort of a rabble rouser in the NYPD as a troublemaker.
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He was an integral part of 100 blacks and law enforcement, right?
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And he was a member of other black fraternal cop organizations.
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And he rose to the rank of captain, which is a very high rank in the NYPD.
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And he used that to move on to politics.
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And there's a way that Eric Adams is extremely talented at politics, right?
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He's charming and people really like him.
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And he managed to rise to a borough president in Brooklyn.
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And I think as a cop, you should look at the context of when Adams ran for mayor, right?
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So this feels like so long ago, right?
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So Biden had been in office for a year already by the time Adams is elected.
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Trump's in the rear view mirror, right?
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George Floyd in a lot of ways is in the rear view mirror, unfortunately.
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So Eric Adams comes along at a time when the sustained outrage that was really fed
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by having Donald Trump in office and by the visuals of George Floyd being publicly executed in front of us
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is fresh in everyone's mind and people are motivated.
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People are so up in arms about police violence, right?
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And it was the largest, spontaneous movement possibly in American history.
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I mean, the streets were filled, you know?
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And this was a kind of a problem for Democrats.
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Yeah.
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Why?
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Well, I mean, I think people expected some sort of action, right?
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Police violence.
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What are you going to do to fix it?
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Democrats.
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Because we knew Trump wasn't going to do it, right?
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We looked to our elected leaders on both the local and a national level to respond to this in some way.
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And you remember that famous photo of Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of other house Democrats kneeling in the Kentie cloth, right?
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I mean, that was kind of what we were doing at that point, right?
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I had successfully forgotten that.
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Oh, listen, it's burned into my memory.
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I will never forget that photo.
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I will never forget it.
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And you know, people looked at that and they said, this is dumb.
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Like, okay, we get it.
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It's a symbol, whatever.
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But tell us what you're going to do.
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And that's when the backlash came.
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I mean, in New York, you're talking about pissing off potentially 30 plus thousand.
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Absolutely.
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Police.
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And then when they're like 18,000 police departments across the country.
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Very powerful police unions.
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All related to people, of course.
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So what happens?
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Adams comes along after all of that is over with, right?
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And campaigns on this idea that our city is lawless, right?
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There was a spike in crime during COVID.
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There was.
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We can't deny that.
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Right.
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Crime did go up.
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But when you look at the statistics, crime went up to the levels that was at in about 2014, 2015.
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And that was well after people were saying New York City is a miracle of safety.
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New York City is generally a safe city.
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And it has been for decades now at this point.
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So Eric Adams comes along.
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He buys into this right wing framing, which is really what it is.
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A right wing framing that New York City is out of control.
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It's more lawless than it's ever been.
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Exactly.
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So that particular claim has zero empirical basis.
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Zero empirical basis.
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And he said that too.
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He said that New York is worse than he's ever seen it.
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Right?
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And so he 100% buys into this completely false narrative that the city is out of control.
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And you know, this is a very racialized narrative.
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It's fed a lot by the protests against police violence that the right wing was taking those protesting using them to paint this feeling of disorder or what have you.
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But you know, Eric Adams, I've looked at him as a way that the right wing has been able to launder right wing narratives into mainstream discourse.
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And make them kind of bipartisan.
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And first he did it with crime and later he did it with immigration.
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But this is what allowed him to really get elected was the focus on crime and disorder.
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I'm a cop.
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I can put this right.
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Oh, and by the way, I also am a reformer.
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I'm someone who was a rabble rouser in the police department.
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I can do that again.
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I can be everything to everyone.
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And that's eventually what got him elected.
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I guess this was like shortly after he's elected Nate Silver came out and said,
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he was like so hyperbolicly excited about Eric Adams.
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Yeah.
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That he says, actually think he could he was in his top five who could be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden.
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There were a lot of people of a centrist persuasion who were singing Eric Adams praises on high and who saw him as the future,
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quote, future of the Democratic Party, right?
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And I think that's a bizarre thing to think even setting aside the policing issues and the corruption stuff.
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I think it's weird for people to say that just because Eric Adams himself is such a personally odd individual.
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But Nate Silver was not the only one.
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A lot of people were saying this.
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So, you know, there was a lot of hopes placed on Eric Adams.
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So it's clear there are a lot of warning signs about Eric Adams.
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But what makes Adams so interesting is a case study is that he's been in office for two years.
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And we can learn a lot from what happened in those two years with a cop mayor.
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So when we come back, I talked to John about how it all worked out.
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Alright, so when Eric Adams becomes mayor, now he has the ability to appoint a new police commissioner and he hires someone named Kishant Su, right?
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And like, for a lot of people that was exciting, you know, Su, was the first black woman police commissioner in the unwappy these history.
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But what happens when she gets in office? Does she do anything different than the norm?
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As a little primer on police discipline in New York, the police commissioner ultimately has final say over whether cops get disciplined or not.
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Kishant Su will dismiss or reduced punishments against police officers at a greater rate than any of her prior police commissioners.
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And they did it at high rates too, which really tells you something. She bragged about it. The CCRB is out of control.
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It's bringing too many charges against police officers, right? So that's step one of what Adams does.
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Right. So, you know, again, it's kind of like business as usual.
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But I heard about this one case that was so wild that even Kishant Su couldn't ignore it. Could you tell us about that?
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Basically what happened is this retired police officer chases these teenagers around, pulls his gun and threatens them.
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Right. There's some kind of, you know, ruckus where maybe they had thrown something at his house or something of that nature.
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This retired cop is then arrested for doing this. This retired cop apparently has friends in high places.
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Because who shows up at the station house, but the highest ranking police officer or uniformed police officer in the police department, Jeffrey Madry.
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Jeffrey Madry starts demanding that this retired cop be released and the charges against him be dropped.
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Wow. So, Madry just like intervenes, right?
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To sort of stop this cop from having to go through the ordeal that most people have to go through when they get arrested.
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And I know like some people argued he's acting totally outside of his authority and they file a complaint which goes all the way up to Kishant Su.
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So, what does she do then?
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Su all to her credit eventually comes to the determination that he should be docked vacation days.
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That was what was at stake here. Eric Adams is not happy about that.
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But Madry is a personal friend of Eric Adams.
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Madry is a high ranking uniform police officer.
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Madry should be untouchable.
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So, the great irony of Kishant Su's tenure is that she bragged about how she was not disciplining officers.
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When a high ranking officer broke the rules in such a way that was even too far for her, she did decide to act and ultimately that led to her downfall.
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The one time that she really did try to take a stand.
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And eventually this is what leads to Eric Adams firing Kishant Su all.
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Now, of course they did this all in a nice orchestrated way where she was able to say I've decided to leave and I'm happy to have served the city of New York or whatever.
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But we know from reporting that this is what happened. Su all was forced to step down because of this.
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I'm thinking about this high profile incident at a subway station in Brooklyn last September.
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What happened is that you have these officers who like chased this guy down because he hopped the turnstile or something like that.
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And if you watch the body cam footage, he's really trying to get away from them.
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Right? Like at a certain point he feels threatened and appears to be holding a knife.
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But the dude wants to get on the train and get wherever he's going.
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And they chase this guy all the way down to the end of the subway stop.
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He gets on the train. Right? He's still trying to get away from them.
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They tease him and eventually they shoot not just hitting him but two bystanders and another cop.
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And like with all of that, technically they were doing their job.
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Oh yeah, none of them will be disciplined for that.
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I mean immediately after it happened Eric Adams came out and defended them and in fact said that they were brave.
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They were showing restraint. Yeah, exactly.
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You see on one hand these police officers who now work under Adams displaying that thing you were saying that they marinated.
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Right? This is an example of like how they function.
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And then you see this cop mayor now at the other side of his journey totally getting behind that.
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Yep. There's been no follow-up.
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I mean as far as the police department is concerned, the incidents over.
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If we understood the police historically and then you have this kind of like former police candidate,
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can we have predicted how someone like Adams would be as a leader?
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I don't think that we can ever really know who people are until we put them in these sorts of positions.
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I am biased obviously. I do believe that the psychology of policing requires somebody who is on some level corrupt and on some level power hungry.
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I think a lot of people are attracted to policing because of the level of power that they get to hold over others.
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Does that definitionally mean that no police officer could ever be an effective mayor?
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Maybe maybe not. Maybe there are people who are able to detach themselves from that power that is vested in them.
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But I didn't support Adams from the very beginning and I think a lot of people, I'm not unique in that sense.
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I think a lot of people felt the same way that he was going to be the cop mayor.
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And he turned out to be the cop mayor.
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So should we really be surprised? No.
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John, thanks so much for coming and doing this man.
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You just keep us up to speed on this stuff. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.
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André, my pleasure. It's been great to be here.
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When you look at the indictment, Eric Adams is facing.
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At first, it might seem like they don't have anything to do with policing or NYPD history.
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But then I zoom out a little.
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And I think about a culture of fear and retaliation where people employed by New Yorkers kind of operate like a gang that's against New Yorkers.
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I think about all the people the police chase down for minor infractions, while the mayor might have been breaking the law to raise millions of dollars for his campaign.
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And if you've been paying attention to the history of the NYPD, it all starts to sound like it's part of the same story.
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In a huge city like New York or a country like the United States, it's convenient to believe that thousands of police and police leaders are going to be the answer to all of our problems.
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But if there's one thing we've learned on Empire City, it's this.
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Whether you're talking about politicians who love police or politicians who were police, the more power they get, the more power we need to keep ourselves in our community safe.
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Empire City is a production of One Dree and Crooked Media.
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I'm your host and executive producer, Changerai Kumanika. For Crooked Media, our senior producer is Peter Breznan.
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Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Mariah Gossett.
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Executive producer at Push Black is Lily Worknet. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geissmer, Katie Long, Tommy VTour and Diane Hodson.
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Executive producers at One Dree are Nigery Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis and Jen Sargent.
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Ice Rades. Military rise police takeovers of major cities. Flagrant racial profiling and no due process.
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How do we get here? On Thursday October 9th at 6 p.m., I'm bringing Empire City off the podcast and into real life at the Brooklyn Bank in Brooklyn, New York.
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Join me, Changerai Kumanika, along with special guests for an urgent conversation.
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Together, we'll connect the history to what communities are doing right now to fight back, keep each other safe and hold police accountable.
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Reserve your spot now at CrookedIDS.org slash empire city.