ERIC ADAMS TO NYPD: BE 'BIGGEST GANG IN TOWN'
SELF-PROCLAIMED 'SWAGGER MAYOR' TOLD SUPPORTERS AT AUGUST DINNER
New York City Mayor Eric L. Adams (2d from right), then a State Senator, and other elected officials holding up bullets in 2007. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
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Activists have long accused the NYPD of being a gang, including this 2007 book title. Now they have proof.
Three months before the FBI seized New York City Mayor Eric Adams' cellphones in a criminal investigation, the former NYPD captain urged a room full of active-duty NYPD officers and other supporters to "be the biggest gang in town."
The crowd erupted in applause.
The City's self-proclaimed "Swagger Mayor" made the statements during one of his Breaking Bread, Building Bonds dinners in Brooklyn's Industry City on August 10. Photographs posted by the Mayor's Office and the NYPD showed many attendees were NYPD officers. A few were religious clergy from various faiths.
"Most of them were cops," dinner guests said.
In exchange for speaking freely, The Free Lance promised not to name the guests.
"I was shocked," they said. "He shouldn't be telling cops to be more like a gang."
A video captures all of Mayor Adams's public statements at the event. He began by urging guests to sit with people they didn't know. But that, he quickly added, was "not how we're going to win."
Ominously, the Mayor warned, evil forces are forming wicked alliances against the City: the "bad guys are lining up together."
That meant, the Mayor said, the "good guys now need to know each other."
That's when the Mayor, who prides himself on his 22-year career with the NYPD, declared "And we should be the biggest gang in town. A gang of people who care for each other. And solving our everyday problems on the ground."
The dinner was sponsored by the Mayor's Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. The Mayor's Office claimed 400 people attended, but the guests said it was more like 150-200.
Mayor Adams developed a reputation for controversial statements early in his term. At a news conference three days in, he announced "swagger" would be the polestar of his personal governing style.
"When a mayor has swagger, a city has swagger," the mayor declared, in one way or another, a dozen times, NBC4 news reported.
Bill de Blasio, Adams predecessor, lacked the requisite swagger.
"And the leadership should have that swagger. That's what has been missing in this City," Adams charged.
A month into his mayoralty in 2021, a man who said he was an Adams supporter published a video of Adams speaking in Harlem in 2019.
"Every day in the police department, I kicked those crackers' ass," Adams says in the video.
Adams was referring to a group he co-founded in 1995 called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. The group spoke out against excessive police force and other injustices—including the rape of Abner Louima by NYPD officer Justin Volpe in 1997.
After the video was published, the mayor apologized and called his use of a racial slur "inappropriate."
But Adams has made so many "outlandish" remarks since then that, in August, The New Yorker judged his mayoralty the "administration of bluster". The mayor "is unusually ready to repeat things that are confirmably untrue," the magazine's damming profile says, or "seem very likely to be untrue."
The FBI seized two of Mayor Adams' smartphones and an I-Pad on November 6. Someone in law enforcement even publicly shamed the mayor by showing the New York Times' William K. Rashbaum the search warrant—which is supposed to be sealed per court order.
Just days earlier, FBI agents raided the home of the Mayor's chief fundraiser, 25-year-old Brianna Suggs. Agents seized two computers, three iPhones and a folder labeled “Eric Adams.”
Federal authorities are investigating whether Adams' 2021 election campaign illegally received money from the government of Turkey, possibly in exchange for favors.
Boyd Johnson, Adams' lawyer, says the mayor has not been accused of wrongdoing and “immediately complied with the FBI’s request and provided them with electronic devices.”
Activist Hawk Newsome, an Independent Black Lives Matter leader in New York, was unforgiving in his criticism of the City's second black mayor.
"I don't wish the Feds on nobody but your mayor ain't shit," Newsome said. "Look at this corrupt motherfucker."
Days after Mayor Adams urged the NYPD to "be the biggest gang in town," federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing one of its officers, Gina Mestre, of helping her gang-leader boyfriend flee the country and, with it, a murder investigation.
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