New York City Mayor Eric Adams stepped into a Manhattan courtroom and into the history books on Friday when he was arraigned on federal corruption and bribery charges that could force him out of office.
“I am not guilty, your honor,” Adams told Federal Magistrate Judge Katherine Parker, during a brief court appearance in Manhattan.
Adams was allowed to leave without having to post bail and was told not to talk to any of the witnesses named in the indictment.
“He shall have no contact with any individual witnesses or others listed in the list to be provided by the government concerning the facts or circumstances as provided in the indictment,” Parker said.
Adams’ next court appearance has already been scheduled for Wednesday.
“We will be filing a motion to dismiss on Wednesday,” Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, told the judge.
When it was over, Adams emerged from court courthouse and gave a thumbs up to a small waiting crowd, which included a heckler yelling, “Lock him up.”
Meanwhile, Spiro slammed the prosecutors and called the federal case against Adams “shaky” and built on the testimony of a staffer who “has lied.” He did not name the staffer.
“This case isn’t even a real case,” Spiro said. “This is the airline upgrade corruption case.”
Adams surrendered to federal authorities a day after he was hit with a 57-page federal indictment accusing him of taking $100,000 worth of free plane tickets and luxury hotel stays from wealthy Turkish nationals and at least one government official in a nearly decade-long corruption scheme.
A 64-year-old former New York City police captain, Adams is charged with five criminal counts that include bribery, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national. He was expected to plead not guilty.
Adams is the first sitting New York City mayor to be indicted on criminal charges in the modern era.
The official mayoral schedule released by City Hall reflected Adams’ new reality with a seven-hour, unexplained gap between his 8:30 a.m. meeting with outgoing New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks and his staff, and a 3:30 p.m. meeting with the mayoral advisory committee.
Upon arriving at the courthouse in Manhattan, Adams gave a thumbs-up to onlookers but made no statement as he was escorted inside.
Ever defiant, Adams has vowed to fight the charges and stay on as mayor, even as a growing number of politicians have called for him to step down.
“We are not surprised. We expected this,” Adams said on Thursday after he was charged. “I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense before making any judgments.”
The alleged international pay-to-play scheme that ensnared Adams began after he became Brooklyn borough president in 2014 and helped to underwrite his successful mayoral campaign seven years later, the indictment says.
In return for free travel benefits and illegal campaign contributions, Adams performed favors for his foreign benefactors, including pressuring the New York Fire Department to allow a Turkish consulate building to open despite serious safety concerns, the indictment says.
The scheme, the indictment says, continued into this year, even after federal officers seized Adams’ electronic devices and raided the home of his chief fundraiser.
“This was a multiyear scheme to buy favor with a single New York City politician on the rise,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Thursday.
Adams’ indictment capped two weeks of turmoil in his administration, a period during which Banks, the city’s police commissioner, and the city’s top lawyer, have announced their resignations.
Several prominent politicians have called on the Democrat to resign, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., state Sen. John Liu, D-Queens, and Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, who is the dean of the state’s House delegation.
But so far the most powerful political figures in New York — Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries; and Gov. Kathy Hochul — have not joined the chorus calling for Adams to leave.
Hochul, who has the power to remove the mayor, released a lengthy statement late Thursday in which she said she expects Adams to “take the next few days to review the situation and find an appropriate path forward.” But she stopped short of urging Adams to resign.
The indictment of Adams centers on his relationship with a handful of well-connected Turkish nationals who provided the mayor with free travel and entertainment benefits as well as illegal campaign cash, according to federal prosecutors.
In 2021, Adams and his staff worked to disguise the foreign money by funneling it through U.S. citizens, the indictment says. His campaign received more than $10 million in matching public funds as a result of the false certifications.
From 2016 to 2021, Adams received free business class tickets or upgrades on seven trips to India, France, China, Hungary, Ghana and Turkey and other countries — all worth more than $123,000, the indictment says.
Ahead of one trip to Istanbul, an Adams staffer requested that the Turkish airline manager charge him a “real” price to conceal the travel gift, the indictment says.
“How much should I charge?” the airline manager asked in June 2021, a few weeks before the Democratic primary.
“His every step is being watched right now,” the Adams staffer replied, according to the indictment. “$1000 or so. Let it be somewhat real.”
Prosecutors say Adams kept fake paper trails and deleted messages to hide his misconduct.
Then in September 2021, a Turkish government official told Adams it was “his turn” to support Turkey after the official had helped arrange straw donations to his campaign, the indictment says.
What the official wanted was for a new Turkish consular building, a 36-story skyscraper, to be opened in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey’s president.
Adams then began pressuring the then-fire commissioner to do what was necessary for the building to get approval to open, the indictment says.
When Adams delivered the news that the building would be approved to open in time, the Turkish official called him “a true friend of Turkey,” it says.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington has, so far, made no public statements about Adams or the alleged scheme that threatens his political career.
Spiro, on Thursday, dismissed the indictment and case against the mayor as overblown.
“You could almost picture them trying to cobble this together and try to tell a story so that they could say, ‘corruption, corruption’ at a press conference,” Spiro said at a Thursday press conference.
But this is not the only federal investigation dogging the Adams administration.
This month, investigators working a separate probe searched the homes and seized the phones belonging to multiple top officials close to Adams. Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who was among those whose phones were seized, resigned Sept. 12.
Authorities also seized the phone of Caban’s twin brother, James Caban, a former police officer who owns a nightclub security business. Federal investigators were looking into whether bars and clubs in midtown Manhattan and Queens paid James Caban to act as a police liaison and whether those clubs were then afforded special treatment by local precincts, according to sources familiar with the matter.
There is also a public corruption investigation and another federal probe that resulted in a search of homes belonging to Adams’ director of Asian affairs.
“We continue to dig, and we will hold more people accountable,” Williams said.
