Eric Adams, Part 1

Hello.

Today, we are going to do it.

We are going to sit at the table of success.

Have your haters become your waiters when you sit down at the table of success.

First up, I do want to say the plan was to do Eric Adams eventually when everything was sort of said and done.

Yeah, we were going to culminate in Eric Adams.

Yes.

Maybe like a live show.

I'm going to let you all in on a secret.

When we were planning this episode, we were frantically sending different crazy mayors.

Not this episode, this podcast.

We were frantically sending the Wikipedia articles of different crazy mayors back and forth to one another,

convinced increasingly that this was a good premise for a show.

The one thing we all agreed on was that we are going to do Eric Adams after quite a while.

Yes.

You got to build to Eric Adams.

Yeah, we had on the schedule a goofy one with a similarly sort of goofy bonus.

Yeah.

However, the cruel haters, haters, the fates, have dealt us a different hand.

The haters in many ways fulfilling the role of the Greek errions or furies.

Or the Greek waiters at the Greek restaurant.

As we say, let the furies become your furries at the fur con of success.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Do we say that?

I'm always

the Greek waiters of vengeance smashing plates over me at the table of vengeance.

My souvlocki was on there.

Oh, fuck.

Hi.

Hi, everybody.

It's No Gods, No Mayors.

So Eric Adams has been indicted.

So we're going to cover the man that you could say is the sort of grand mayor of this very podcast in a lot of ways.

We're going to start at the beginning and we're going to go up through his recent troubles.

We wouldn't be here without him, I think.

And that is right.

It is time for Eric Adams, part one of two parentheses for now.

It's no gods, no mayors.

It's Maddie in the driver's seat.

I'm here with Nova.

I'm here with Riley.

It's Maddie in the Mayor's seat.

It's Maddie in the Mayor's seat.

It's No Gods, No Mayor's.

Let's dig in, girls.

Okay.

You know what?

I'm going to dig into.

You know what I'm going to dig into?

I'm going to dig into my...

Popular knapsack with many different locations.

The thing about Eric Adams, right, is that he provides a great deal of drops for me to use on the soundboards.

This is going to be.

The hardest act of rileying I'll ever have to do, I think, to keep to keep this one on rails.

It's going to be really, we're going to be here for six hours for part one.

Entirely plausible.

Okay.

We're having a 12 course dinner at the table of success.

Yeah.

You, you are the mater D at the restaurant of podcasts.

And we, we, uh, you know, we are dining well.

So Maddie's saying so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so.

Count one.

Uh, so,

so.

We have to understand that Eric Adams is maybe one of the more like prolific liars and self-aggrandized aggrandizers to like maybe ever hold the office of mayor in New York City, which is saying so.

Which is really impressive.

But most of his biographical details I could find were mostly from like a flurry of like very hagiographic pieces during the 2021 mayoral election, which were all very like serving his tidy little narrative about how he was going to reform the NYPD from the inside, whatever, because he was very popular with the press at the time.

Anyways, so what I, here's what I got.

He was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1960, which is a like a very, it is long considered the capital, the murder capital of New York City.

High dropout rates in school.

In many ways, the New York City of murder.

Yeah, it's a lot, it's the murderopolis of New York in a lot of ways, which I haven't had.

I've never fancy murderopolis yet.

And I hear very mixed reviews, you know?

It's really, I think it's worth watching.

It's very messy.

Everyone, there's a lot of, there actually is a murder in it.

Okay.

So it's got very poor public health, even besides that, like a lot of poor neighborhoods in New York, you know, poverty, gang, drug-related violence, et cetera.

When he was eight, his family moved to the safer and quieter Jamaica Queens.

I'm taking liberally here from an Atlantic article from Fox News contributor Juan Williams titled, quote, Eric Adams is making white liberals squirm.

I mean, in the sense of like squirming into indicing him, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah, but this is from the sort of period of like.

They can't indict you if you're doing the worm.

That's what I mean.

Eric Adams break dancing out to his own customized empire states of mind.

Yeah.

In this article, he charged that by the time he arrived in 1968, Jamaica was, quote, changing for the worse.

By the time he was 14, he was in a gang called the Seven Crowns, named for the Scotch brand.

According to Adams in a brawl with the Savage Skulls, which is a real gang, which is a mostly black and Latino gang from the Bronx that would wear like Nazi stuff.

What?

Yeah, they're the sort of decognitive dissonance boys.

That's so surreal.

Like, Eric Adams was in like the second reel of the Warriors.

Very

Also, I imagine the Savage Skulls were not really looking at ideological consistency so much as like, these are the baddest guys from history.

Yeah, they were trying to upset everybody.

Oh, like all the Eastern European guys who are like,

I think the Nazis were like good at war.

So I guess like, yeah, sure.

Good at war, hated the Russians, good enough for me.

Yeah, they were very much doing, are you triggered?

Also, I agree with them on a bunch of stuff.

Yeah.

This is so, like, one of the baseball guys from the Warriors just becomes mayor of New York City.

Baseball Furies.

Yeah.

Of success.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Eric Adams opens a press conference by banging two beer bottles together on his fingers.

I would really like a kind of a Warriors style gang where their whole bit is mayors.

They're all, they've all got the sashes.

Like they're coming out of the hideout.

They're all putting on the mayoral sashes.

That's the shirt for the episode, obviously.

Okay, so, but hey, baby new year, get him.

This is our pal, Big Boris.

You don't want to piss off Big Boris.

Anyways, so

during that brawl with the Nazi guys, someone hit him in the back of the head with a bat with a nail in it.

And his life was never the same.

Yes.

But the same article says that at the age of 15, he was just like a normal, like a sort of normal Brownsville kid who was

dabbling in the seven crowns or whatever.

And he was just going to grow up to maybe get out of it and like do whatever job he would have done.

But instead, he got hit in the back of a head.

But instead, someone hits him in the back of the head and it perfectly, precisely obliterates the parts of the brain that makes you normal.

Yeah, he's got it lodged in there like Phineas Gage.

His brain was rearranged permanently, a bunch of neurons disconnected and reconnected.

And like he now has the synaptic pattern of mayor yeah the camera zooms in through the wound and around the brain like with all the electricity going i mean this is the thing this is a theory that i've been meaning to get to on this podcast for a while which is that mayor mayor is not an elected office right as eric adams understands deeply mayor is a state of mind assigned mayor at birth correct yeah you don't get elected mayor mayors are not like you know they're not made they're born or i guess in this case reborn by a kind of like nazi

gang neurosurgeon who just perfectly obliterates the back of your head.

Yeah.

A non-denominational Dr.

Mengela, get him.

I hate those Simpsons treehouse of horror and credits.

A non-denominational Joseph Mengela.

Okay.

So I just like all of his neurons just also sprout sashes.

Little top hats.

Okay.

So at the age of 15, he was known as, I'm quoting from the article here, a tough little guy.

Okay.

He was arrested in 1976.

He was taken by an older crowd when hanging out at a strip club.

This is all like genuinely so traumatic and like bad for like any kid, right?

Yeah.

So he was, yeah, he was hanging out with one of the workers at the strip club.

They, him and his brother had let themselves into this

stripper's apartment.

and they stole a TV set and a money order.

And the police caught on to Eric when he tried to cash the money order and him and his brother were arrested.

And this is sort of like his origin story is that him and his brother, while under, under in police custody, they were beaten by the NYPD, where he says they were beaten by two white NYPD officers until a black officer put a stop to it.

And him and his brother left with a great hatred of cops.

Understandably.

I mean, very much so.

Yeah.

And also, incidentally, just doubling down on the like whole traumatic brain injury thing, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, and this is very much like his, again, again, like his big origin story when he's trying to get elected is I am a cop who was beaten by the cops.

I understand this issue from all sides in a way that nobody else possibly can.

Like I grew up as a young black man in like the bad time, like the bad old days of New York, and I'm a cop now.

So I understand this thing in a way that the, the abolished, the protesters, all these people in the streets cannot possibly understand.

So what you're saying is Eric Adams is a wear cop.

Yes,

that's what I said.

I said he's the wear cop.

It's more like he's kind of like, he's able to like, he has a kind of transdimensional understanding of this that eludes mortals who never became cops, right?

Because like a lot of people have been beaten by cops.

A lot of people have been cops, but the Venn diagram doesn't have a huge overlap.

Yeah, it feels a little bit like the end of the argument that's like, you can't talk to me about gun control unless you can assemble this AR-14.

AR-15 blindfolded.

I don't know if an AR-14 is real.

It might be.

Don't tell me.

I'm not curious.

Okay.

I'm not curious about it.

Well,

I'm going to vacate.

I need to sit there stewing for the rest of the hour

about the guns that you know.

No, Bever, just say if it's real.

Is it real?

No.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

She just ran out.

She's gone.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

She took her mic with her.

Okay.

John Browning being like, very few people have been like both shot by guns and have designed a gun.

Therefore, I'm like better equipped.

Yeah.

In the Atlantic again, he says, Eric was drawn to power.

He thought the cops had a great hustle.

He was deeply impressed that a black cop in the station house had enough clout to tell white cops to stop beating two black kids.

This isn't like a sort of like naive understanding from like a guy who is in a gang to be like, holy shit, these guys are a way better gang than us.

Yeah, they're like they're the gang.

Yeah.

This black guy was able to go amongst these white guys and stop this.

He got juice j-u-i-c-e as the kids would say adams told me in 1999 he experienced nypd wasa and was therefore like drawn into this organization yeah so he so he decides that he wants to become a cop as well um he says that he wanted the free stuff and he wanted to be fear huh uh two things that come back More honest about those motivations than about a billion other people who become cops for those reasons.

Like you would think maybe that the whole like gang-member, like, uh, theft thing might militate against being a cop, but I'm glad that they, you know, you know, yeah, he sees it as just a continuation of what he was doing, but it's like, oh, I get, oh, I get to administer the beating.

Yeah.

Oh, that's so much better.

Yeah.

And you're saying the state has a monopoly on administering the beatings.

May I administer them on your behalf?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's a guy who realizes that the only game in town, you know, is the cops.

Yeah.

He also wanted to be, he claims, he wanted to be a hero in his neighborhood.

Uh-huh.

But he also wanted free stuff and to be feared.

He wanted free stuff, which comes back later.

I mean, who wouldn't want all three of those things, I guess.

Yeah, I love to be adored and to be given free stuff.

I don't want to, I mean, I don't want to be feared because I'm normal.

Being the kind of like Julius Caesar or like Augustus of Brownsville, where I'm like, you know,

I'm loved, but I'm also feared.

The difference between him and like Vito Corleone and Godfather 2 is the coat.

That's the difference between him and Vito Corleone and the Godfather 2.

Correct.

Is the outfit.

Well, Vito Corleone didn't get hit in the back of the head with the mayor bat.

That's true.

I haven't seen Godfather 3.

I don't know if he becomes a mayor in that.

Not really.

In the secret, if you watch Megalopolis Backwards, it actually does answer that question.

Yeah.

Let your haters become your waiters when you sit at the toilet of gun.

That one ran out of steam.

And for that,

I really like the toilet of gun.

The toilet of gun.

So he doesn't have good grades in school, but he applies to enter the NYPD Academy anyways, which has never happened before.

He's the first dumb guy to get into the NYPD Academy.

Yeah, previously they're all sitting around talking about like Camus in the precinct.

Yeah, I was going to say most of them are talking about SART.

Hey, have you ever considered that the school is quite a bit like what we do?

Fuck, that's good.

Okay.

Wow.

Wow.

He's got a good NYPD voice.

It's crazy.

That's really good.

I think an important thing also to mention in terms of like the big, the, the sort of like ocean currents of history here is, you know, at this point, the NYPD is finally starting to allow black men to be officers.

After for most of the history, it was like a way for your sort of like white ethnics to enter the middle class, but they kept black people out.

But

the late 70s, they needed cops badly and they started to allow black men in finally.

So there's this growing cadre of black men finally allowed in the force.

He tells a story about early in his career, he was chasing down a couple of perps in plain clothes and a bunch of white officers pulled a gun on him despite him telling them in secret cop cod code that he did.

Yeah, he claims that he told them in secret cop code that he was undercover, which is, quote, I'm on the job, which is an incredible incredible thing to remember for later.

I'm undercover.

Hello,

I'm an undercover police officer, quote unquote.

He was the only cop to actually believe the, if they ask you if you're an undercover cop, you legally have to tell them thing.

He was the only person to believe that and be an undercover cop.

Yeah,

this incident, of course, ended when another black officer got them to back off.

He keeps returning to these kinds of stories during his rise.

The implicit meaning, of course, being you can trust the NYPD if I'm in charge of it.

And by 1993, he's a sergeant and chair of something called the Grand Council, the Grand Council of the Guardians.

Oh, I think they were declared a terrorist organization by the UK last year.

Yeah, the IDF has launched several ballistic missiles on these guys.

That's right.

They are the fraternal organization of black officers.

And they're actually supporting another organization of police officers in South Jersey.

as a proxy.

It's really cool.

And I say cool in a way that suggests that it isn't cool, that everything in America has like a bunch of secret societies, but then it also has secret society brackets black because of segregation yes like like prince hall masons and stuff where it's like oh yeah there's also this like black version of this that's in some ways like way worse internally

yeah i think that's fine you know no reason to feel strange about that whatever

So there's a bit around this time that comes back to haunt him a little bit later in his political career is where he appears on stage with Louis Farrakhan and played a horrible stinger, put flashlights under our chins.

I don't have that.

All I have is have your haters become your waiters when you sit down at the table of success.

He sits on the stage of public appearance with the Louis Farrakhan, which causes, which causes a psychoferal.

He tries to run for Congress in 1984.

He condemns the incumbent Major Owens for denouncing Farrakhan, but doesn't get enough signatures to get on the ballot.

He rose relatively high in the NYPD rate.

He gets to be mapped out in the

Transit bureau.

Yeah.

So which will prefigure a whole bunch of being insane about subways as well.

After a friend of the show and former guest Rudy Giuliani takes over

friggin Giuliani himself, Adams founded a new organization of black officers called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

I'll capitalize.

It really trips off the tripping off.

You know, and their whole thing was to oppose like the sort of racialized police brutality we talked a little bit about under Giuliani.

But mostly it seemed to be about educating young men on how to remain completely docile if they were getting pulled over, which if you've been keeping up with the American news for the last one to 200 years doesn't super work.

Yeah, the whole kind of like simply react in like no, like have no reactions whatsoever.

Yeah.

And the cops can't do anything to you and won't.

It was a great way to center by Luke voices, though.

By Luick.

Bailuik.

Yeah, there we go.

Bailuik.

Uh-huh.

It's, it's, yeah, there we go.

You know, he, he, uh, he agreed with the campaign against against so-called like quality of life crimes, your broken windows stuff, but disagreed with the racial overtones, uh, which is with his public position, which is insane.

Yeah, the kind of uh radical centrism.

Radical centrism.

Why can't why can't we do broken windows policing on like uh rich white people neighborhoods, which is a funny idea that genuinely like, yeah, but that's like what he that is like, that is his, his basical, his basical, his basic political core is like, what if we did stop and frisk to everybody?

That's how he did it.

even the cop gets in trouble.

We need to get a hundred police officers in Murray Hill alone doing broken windows policing.

This is, this is so insane that I see why it's kind of compelling to be like in cop world, everyone's a cop.

You would get out of bed, get dressed in your cop uniform, get into your cop car and like respond to the scene of you going to work as a cop.

And you're constantly arresting everybody and being arrested by everyone else for like misdemeanors and minor infractions.

Yeah.

You know everybody by like body outline because you've frisked and been frisked by everyone you've ever passed.

Imagine the intimacy of that, that you frisked everybody you've ever met.

Is that the daredevil vision because he's frisked everybody in the city?

Yeah, and you won't even have time to do any crimes because you have so much paperwork to do from being a cop, which is your job.

Yeah, everybody has a captain that's up their ass.

Eric Adams was going to be the captain who was up New York City's entire ass.

Yeah.

Just to sort of like get through the rest of his police career here, he passes the lieutenant exam twice, but doesn't get called up.

He says it's because of his propensity to speak out against the department.

I think it's just because there were no ships at the time.

And also, like, all the people who were getting called up to lieutenants, like they'd been on ships' books since they were like two years old.

It's crazy how well the NYPD mirrors the Royal Navy in like 1805.

He ends up being promoted.

Oh, wish me joy sir i've just been made lieutenant in brownsville he was he was post captain of the transit bureau okay if i'm not allowed to talk about dune you guys are not allowed to talk about aubrey matchurin i have never said you're not allowed to talk about dune i've i've encouraged you to talk about okay well i'm not well fine talk a little bit more about aubrey matcharin i guess

no i'm not i didn't say that I didn't say that.

So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so.

So, so, so.

The count goes up to two.

The town goes up to two.

You know, he, um,

you know, this is sort of like in a land of contradictions for this gentleman in 1999.

He was saying stuff like, the father of blue-collar crime is white-collar crime, which is correct.

True, true.

Correct.

Correct Amundo, but he also described, quote, his constituency, which is an insane thing to say when you're a cop,

is not people who bum up the police department and shout kill the pigs, but my constituency is people getting up when that alarm clock goes off, getting their kids dressed and making sure their butts are in school.

So it's already very like heavy on like respectability stuff

at this time.

I'm always always saying bum up the police department that's that that's the thing i'm so often saying yeah i mean he's up everyone's ass right he's the captain that's up everyone's ass

yeah in 2006 he is a captain at this point he is investigated by the nypd for appearing on tv and criticizing future guests of the show michael bloomberg uh over his handling of a terror threat It really seems like he just wants to be a politician and basically checks out of being a cop, or like he tries to fold in being as much of a politician as he can into being a cop.

Thus the like my constituency.

It seems like he like gave some wrong information to the public that was not supposed to be out there and he got investigated.

He was charged with disseminating misinformation, divulging official police business and speaking as a representative of the department without permission.

I just don't think it's believable that Eric Adams would have disseminated misinformation or said anything that's not true.

No, he was found guilty.

of speaking as a representative of the department without permission and then retired.

Ooh.

You know, at this point, he was close enough to the, like, the Brooklyn Democratic machine and had his eye on the, the, the mayor, the mayorship.

So disgraced former cop is like not enough of an impediment to like.

No, because you could just say, I'm a cop.

I was a cop and I got, I got fired for truth.

Yeah, I got fired over.

So they're like, you know, they fissed me up.

Basically, um, he runs for the New York State Senate, representing his old neighborhood of Brownsville and a couple other neighborhoods around there.

And that's when he truly unleashes a lot of what we can call Eric Adams madness.

Is this when he grows the little pencil moustache?

I believe so.

I don't have a timeline of the mustache in the notes.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's important to me because at some point he grows the little mustache.

He's like always been bald as far as I can tell, just like sort of shaving his head really early.

Yeah.

And just as soon as he got into politics, spent a lot of time in like nightclubs and like going out and just kind of like

doing pickup artist shit, really, of which I consider the little pencil moustache to be a part.

Yeah.

When you say pencil moustache, do you mean this one or this one?

Not the Hitler.

No, no, no, not the Hitler.

The Marie Chevalier.

The like

the little like thin horizontal line.

Yeah.

Yes, yes, yes.

So what he sort of looks like the mask of Zorro, basically.

Yeah, a little bit.

It's a little bit swashbuckly, you know?

Gotcha.

Oh, oh, swashbuckle.

Oh, okay.

I'm interested.

Oh, God.

Was that the secret word?

Was that the secret word?

Pulling the big brain.

I was speaking to you in secret cop code to indicate that I'm a cop.

But using the normal word swashbuckle in a sentence.

I'm indicating to you that I've also read the Aubrey Manorin books.

So I'm looking at the clock and having a panic attack.

Okay.

So around this time, some early Eric Adams hits, Stop the SAG, was his first big foray

into the public eye, which he took out of these bizarre billboards around Brooklyn that said,

like, stop the sag.

And it was like, pull up your pants.

Fuck a screen actors guild.

Like, yeah.

No, I, I, I, well, because I remembered like it was, it was a thing.

It was in at the time to like wear your pants really low.

Yeah.

Right.

And this was immediately a like racialized thing.

Yes.

And his whole thing was.

This will get you killed.

I'm quoting here from a Gothamist article from the time

by a writer named

Jaya Saxena, who I've never met and I'm not married to, and wrote this article.

Quote, prior to the sagging pants, it was, this is from Eric Adams, prior to the sagging pants, it was the shoestrings out of sneakers.

All this is born out of prison.

We took the shoestrings and the belt from the prisoners.

This is probably not a perfect science, but if you start looking at how your child is dressing is an indicator of who his friends are and what group he's associated with, it's all in the clothing.

So it's like, this is like these pants.

will will kill you yeah well there was a lot of this along the lines of like your kid is gonna become like a a bad kid and get involved in like drugs and gangs and shit.

Precisely.

This is around the time where he cuts the very famous contraband video.

Oh, yeah.

Search your child's room.

Search your child's room with

a popular knapsack with many different locations.

And if you do search the popular knapsack with many different locations, you might find.

Something simple as a crackpipe.

A really important thing about that video.

the clips that you were playing is you can hear this like score in the background.

Yes.

This very bizarre, disconnected score about it.

It's like royalty, like license-free guitar music, I guess.

Yeah.

Over him being like, why don't you, why don't you like cut open all of your kids' pillows to make sure that she doesn't have a gun in there?

It is bizarre.

It is like, look behind the television.

That's what they're keeping there.

Crack cocaine.

Like it's very.

It's very bizarre.

It is like, it's unscripted.

This way of speaking, which gives you sentences like something simple as a crackpipe.

Yeah,

I found a Vice interview with the guy who filmed it, and it says that the video is filmed by Matthew Kulvicki, who worked at the director of production for the New York State Senate at the time.

According to Kolvicki, Adams gave him virtually no time to prepare.

Instead, he just told Kulvicki to show up at his apartment ready to shoot.

I mean,

that's right, though, because all Eric Adams had to do is just...

sink into mayor space and then just open his eyes and begin to say stuff like something as simple as a crackpipe or for

a place to store bullets is behind a picture frame mayor space is very intense and you need a lot of aftercare after it usually in like federal prison you've got a revolver in your pillow apparently the music is there because he quote had to put something over it because he took these long pauses to look around the place trying to remember where he hid whatever thing

so that means while that while the camera guy is on his way to adams' apartment eric adams is like stashing pistols and pillowcases and putting fake crack in the fucking backpack um like running around his marketing.

What if he didn't find all of what he stored?

And he was like, yeah, that's good enough.

And then he's planted drugs in his own kid.

Do you think he was using real drugs for realism?

There are so many different locations in that popular knapsack.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

You're right.

You're right.

But like planted a gun on his own kid then.

Behind a picture frame, you can find bullets.

Mr.

Adams said, finding bullets behind a picture frame in what appeared to be his own home.

This is from the New York Times.

There are bullets behind picture frames everywhere for those with eyes to see.

He pushed for legislative pay raises as a freshman,

state senator in 2007, shouting from the Senate floor, show me the money in 2007.

That's such a perfect dumb guy movie as well, Jerry Maguire, for him to like.

Yeah, for him to be.

I mean, he's the Ralph Siferotto of the New York State Senate,

but he's swapped in Jerry McGuire for Gladiator.

I was elected to be the state senator with swag, like Jerry Maguire would have been if he was a disgraced police officer.

That's right.

This is also when a little grift begins, where he became the chairman of the Senate's Committee on Racing, Gaming, and Wagering, where he raised money prodigiously from the industry.

Lawmakers and lobbyists praised him as curious and engaged, willing to spend hours on the road visiting racetracks.

and conveying deep interest in his audience.

Quote, I was really impressed with how smart and inquisitive he was, said Rory Whelan, a Republican lobbyist who who hosted fundraisers for him.

Then I realized, okay, of course, he's a former police officer.

He asks a lot of questions.

Such as, how much are you giving me?

In what form will I receive my brand?

Such as, where's the money?

When will I receive the money?

Republican gambling lobbyist in the New York state senate is such a uniquely rancid vibe as well.

Yeah, so like him and a bunch of the other casino,

the people in the Senate Committee on Racing, Gaming, and Wagering ended up under investigation by the state inspector for

dealing in bribes.

They had enough evidence that they referred it to the feds, but it never went anywhere, which is like my time machine moment is like federal investigation of Eric Adams in 2010, please.

But to be fair, this is to be fair corner.

We must.

He voted for marriage equality before it was legal nationally.

He authored some bills expanding affordable housing for veterans.

He provided key testimony against the NYPD where Stop and Frisk was ruled unconstitutional.

The judge cited his testimony specifically this comes back insanely because guess who brought stop and frisk back uh-huh when he's in office um incredible well he's it's it's like crossfit you're trying to do muscle confusion for like the general population he's doing basically morals confusion at this point it's it's it's like it's like napoleon you know the the the ancient regime is gone right but all of its worst excesses are going to come back when they're personally convenient to me yeah at the at napoleon's table um

But he, this is also like sort of a recurring theme in Eric Adams is he has surrounded himself with the worst fucking people on earth, like evil people and also petty grifters, whatever.

His buddy Hiram Monserrat was expelled from the Senate after being convicted of a misdemeanor assault, which included dragging his girlfriend down a hallway and slashing her with a piece of glass.

He was one of the very few state senators who opposed the measure, getting out of him.

He helped install this former, this Senate majority leader, John Sampson,

who he helped install, but then he also tried to keep in when he was removed for a bunch of ethics violations he was later tried and convicted by the feds for embezzlement all of these guys have like strongly ethics violation names and i don't really know what i mean by that other than the fact that a state senator being called something like john sampson john sampson yeah yeah yeah it's it's you could you can really imagine the phrase the embattled sampson 54.

Yeah, the embattled Montserrat.

So this is also when the trips begin.

The trips.

You know, Istanbul is always the first stop.

But first, Seoul was the first stop, maybe.

In 2011, him and Mr.

Sampson and his girlfriend, Tracy Collins, and an energy lobbyist all went to Korea in 2011 on what seemed like an official trip, but they wouldn't tell anybody what about.

How come you think they came back looking so good, but then couldn't frown?

That's right.

They all got those weird, like, the doughnuts on their forehead that people were doing for about six months around then.

Yeah, no, I just, the South Korean lobbyists being like, we have to entertain these embattled oaths from New York City.

To what end?

What did South Korea want with them?

Like, do we know?

Nobody fucking knows.

Surely, like, one thing South Korea does do is a lot of investing abroad.

So, I, and I, I'm, especially because an energy lobbyist was there.

Yeah, and the four, and John Samson, after he got ousted.

After he was ousted, how useful is he?

What does he know?

Weird.

He knows Korean.

korean we like the samson guy yeah yeah he's just a good hang so he becomes borough president in 2013 clearly with his eye on again the mayor's throne of new york borough president of uh of brooklyn right borough brooklyn sorry the borough president of brooklyn which um very quickly i've mentioned this before on other podcasts it is not a real job in 1990 they took away all the power of borough presidents of new york and it is a parade position it's you operate a big pair of scissors neat he operated that pair of scissors more confusingly than anyone else to hold that job.

Yeah.

Like he basically like got really into veganism as borough president.

That was his big thing because he was diagnosed diabetic and became a big vegan guy.

Comes back.

Again, though, trips.

He was obsessed with sister cities.

You know, sister cities.

Oh, sure.

I love, yeah, I love a sister city when a city is twinned with someone.

Yeah.

And they're just like, hey, did you know?

uh Zagreb and Des Moines, Iowa are friends.

And it's like, okay, sure.

Yeah, this is, I've drawn my city as like a, as like a woman, and I've drawn your city as a woman and their sisters.

And their sisters.

He got at least five of those going with Brooklyn specifically.

He traveled to Senegal, Turkey, Cuba, Jordan, Saudi, the UAE, Oman, in an official capacity, and also China.

Oh, he went to Turkey there eight times, he said, while Brooklyn borough president.

This is when, as we later discover, like various Turkish lobbyists are circling him.

Yeah.

Like sharks circling a gigantic stake that's just been dumped into the water.

Yeah, this is when he starts rowing his little boat down the Bosphorus every day of the year.

Something that's really funny as well is that he gets really into flag raising.

I just know about this off the dump because I've been reading about the indictments.

He gets so into like raising the flags of like different countries in order to celebrate like Brooklyn's, you know,

say, say, as a like Azeri community, right?

Because like New York City, it's got like somebody from everywhere in the world.

And he will raise a flag for it.

And one of his successors as Brooklyn Borough president is like realized that when he got into office and the schedule hadn't changed, he had to abolish flag raising on the basis that it was technically illegal purely because Eric Adams' precedent would have had him doing more so much flag raising, he wouldn't have time to do anything else.

That's amazing.

That same Brooklyn Borough president.

At that point, you're just doing naval signaling as well.

Mayor in distress.

That same borough president, incredibly, when he came in, had to return like a golden tea set that he just found in his office.

What that Eric Adams forgot?

Yeah.

Yeah.

365 days of flag raising.

Yeah, 365 day flag boy.

Bumping that.

Raising that.

Raising that.

Raising that.

Raising that.

So he, but a part of this whole thing with his international whatever is that he went to, he went to China seven times as a Brooklyn borough president trying to get one of those like Chinatown archways built in Sunset Park, which is like Brooklyn's Chinatown.

It was this huge debacle.

It cost a lot of money.

They were like, it was, it was like all he wanted to do was borrow president and never got done.

Thomas Heatherwick was involved.

He claimed he was going to retire in Israel and Lebanon and Azerbaijan.

You can just travel, you know.

Yeah, at the Baku Palace restaurant in Cheapside Bay, which is in Brooklyn in 2018, he said, when I retire from government, I'm going to live in Baku.

That might still be true.

That might still be.

Honestly, what's our extradition with them like?

Yeah, if he can get out of the country, like he could probably, he would have such a good time at the Baku Grand Prix, one of the

an Eric Adams-shaped diplomatic bag leaving

from the Azeri embassy to Baku.

Yeah.

The one guy to leave an embassy in a suitcase where it's actually good for him.

Very good.

Very good.

I want to talk very quickly about what is called the rat soup incident,

which was my introduction to Eric Adams and how I, me knowing about who he was.

That was essentially, that was your version of him getting hit on the head with that bat.

Yes.

So this is in

2019.

I know about this because I know some people working at the website Gothamist.

And one day, a bunch, the entire like local press is called to

Borough Hall in Brooklyn.

And there, Eric Adams has decided that he has solved.

This is also the beginning of, he hates rats.

He hates them, hates rats.

He's very anti-rat.

He's the first mayor to hate rats.

That's reasonable, I guess.

I mean,

it's trillions of New York City citizens, but sure,

that you're trying to eradicate from the rat community, but okay.

You're doing a rat flag raising over Brooklyn Bar Hall.

You know, you know, New York is a

anyways.

So he says that he has solved the rat problem for New York City and he's going to demonstrate it, which is he does not say, I'm working with this company.

We're going to install these things.

He's like, no, I've installed these traps all over Borrow Hall and they are sort of like contractor buckets with lids that if something steps onto the lid of the contractor bucket, it swings in and drops the thing into the, into what's inside the bucket.

Now, and they put, you know, they, and they, and they put some food or whatever on top of the lid so a rat will go onto it and fall in.

And what is inside of it is a sort of poison goo.

And what happens is it drowns the rats in the poison goo.

And to show off that this is how it works, he did not like show a diagram.

He got one of the buckets, he opened it up and he started ladling possibly months old dead rats out with a ladle and showing them to the press.

We got to get this guy into higher office.

Yeah.

For what's here's a quote from the article from, was it Jake Offenharts?

Yeah.

For what seemed like a very long time, we gazed upon dozens of bloated rat corpses bobbing around in this thick cocktail of death.

Their clumps of fur were tinged green by the alcohol solution into which they'd been lured and subsequently drowned at some point over the last month.

We were told they would not smell, and while it was not overpowering, there was definitely a smell.

Eventually, the sodden carcasses were fished out with a ladle and dropped into a trash bag.

They made a sad, waterlogged noise.

Plop.

Now, that's that's journalism.

That's beautiful writing.

Yeah.

This is a profoundly strange man.

Yes.

Imagine waking up and being like, all right, I know what I want to be.

I want to be powerful.

I want to be feared.

I want to be a hero.

I want free stuff.

What am I going to do today?

Yeah, this is my rat ladle.

Let me just grab my rat ladle that's going to inculcate the spirit of like civic respect I deserve.

Today is a big day in front of the cameras for me when I'm going to be like announcing my crusade against the rats.

And how I'm going to do that is by like showing people a bunch of decaying corpses.

Oh my God.

This is not a well man in a lot of ways.

This is not a well man.

Okay.

So he decides, oh, he gets, he gets in a little bit of trouble.

He visited Israel a lot.

He loved Uber.

He establishes the One Brooklyn Fund, which is a nonprofit, which was criticized as a conduit for pay-to-play contributions from developers and lobbyists.

A theme.

Oh.

He was investigated twice by the city over the fundraising, one for licensing the Brooklyn Borough Hall for the event without, you know, for his own fucking thing.

Just like, hey, come to Borough Hall.

It'll be cool.

Don't mind the rat buckets.

Don't mind, yeah, just to step around those.

Don't step into them because your foot will fall.

It is the dip from Who Frame Roger Rabbit.

You can't put your foot in there.

I got a cartoon foot.

I'm just

walking with one cartoon boot.

New York City is the toontown of America.

Honestly.

Raising the Warner Brothers flag over.

And the Disney flag.

Don't forget.

They would be equal time.

So it's 2021, and there is a new mayoral election.

Future friend of the show, Bill de Blasio, a sleepy oaf, is exiting office.

There are 13 candidates on the ballot in a really crowded field.

This is also like almost like ranked preference voting as well, right?

It was the first time they ever did ranked preference in New York.

A lot of people didn't understand how it worked and thought they had to rank everybody.

But like, it was a crazy time.

The world was in 2020 to 2021 in New York City was like the epicenter of the pandemic.

It is hard to describe to you as someone who lives here in the big apple, New York City, go nicks, go mets, et cetera.

It's hard to describe to you how much it felt like the world was ending.

And like people were insane.

Everything was nuts.

You heard sirens all day, every day.

I remember like corpse freezers.

There were corpse freezers.

I remember the front page of the New York Times, there was just a list of dead people.

Yeah.

Umphi, who was like a paramedic in New York City, was talking about how it was just like you press button on radio, receive person who dies of COVID, press button on radio, receive person who dies of COVID all day, every day.

Yeah, it felt like the apocalypse.

You could like drive from like one end of the city to the other end clear in like 15 minutes because there was nobody on the road because all the rich people fled and they're the only people with cars.

So 13 candidates on the ballot, really crowded field.

The contenders, aside from Adam were Catherine Garcia, who was like the, the liberals pick, which was like, they got the, she got the New York Times, you know, thing

endorsement.

Sorry, thank you.

She was a former sanitation commissioner.

Maya Wiley got the SEIU endorsement, which is like the big catch-all union around here, which is another, which is like the progressive big thing to get.

Driam Rales had some real progressive bona fides, but she union busted her own staff.

I remember this.

Which was a crazy, which was like, we could sync your campaign in 2021 because everyone was like very progressive for about six months.

Andrew Yang was his big competitor right at the beginning of things.

Remember him?

God.

Remember Andrew Yang?

He was going to

finally take politics forward.

I remember that.

That's right.

He was wearing a blue hat and that was going to solve the problems.

But him and Yang like hated each other because they were trying to occupy the insane guy position.

Also, someone else going for that.

Wasn't the fucking Guardian Angels guy in the election.

So Curtis Sleewa

was the Republican nominee.

Okay.

And they had a sort of, I, I, I, like, I cannot get into Curtis Sleewa on this fucking episode because we'll be here for six hours because he's been a guy longer than I've been alive in New York City, and I know so much about him.

And he loves cats also.

He's insane.

He's a crazy, he's like a vigilante man.

Google the Guardian Angels and go insane for the rest of your day after you finish the episode.

They were, they were in London for a bit.

They used to be a thing here.

They spelled the Guardian Angels with an extra U.

you'll never guess where it is you'll never guess but him and him and yang used to like get in real tangles on the debate stage uh and also like the the captains union endorsed yang and not adams and then adams was like uh i didn't even want it actually and yang was like i know you wanted it they told me and then they yelled at each other and then later eric adams was like i wasn't yelling i was meditating

Maybe you only heard yelling because of the yelling in your your own head.

Yeah.

You know, and then he wants to bring back stop and frisk, calling it stop question and frisk.

Uh-huh.

That's better, apparently.

Yes.

We were stopping and frisking people based on their ethnicities and the communities they were in.

That will never happen under my administration.

Yeah.

So he promises to stop and frisk everybody.

Yeah.

He was definitely the big choice of like the real estate.

The traitors be your perpetrators at the Wall Street of Crime, he said.

Uh-huh.

That's a direct quote from him.

Yeah.

That's a direct quote from Eric Adams.

He was definitely the choice of like the real estate lobby and like money people yeah because he's so bribable yeah he's he's very biased he's like walking around wearing a sandwich board that says please bribe me i'm i'm in it for the bribes actually it's like everybody who's anybody in new york would know that he's been like flying to santiago via istanbul for a while because he loves getting bribed yeah It's like he's in it for this.

You could bribe him with monopoly money, I think, because he just loves being bribed.

It's a kind of swag.

Yeah.

During the election, he also, this is when the Where Does Eric Adams Live saga begins.

Oh, I remember this.

It appears most of the political press, it seems obvious that him and his partner, Tracy Collins, are living in Fortley, New Jersey, right across the river.

But to prove he was a city resident, a month before the primary, he gave the press a tour of his, quote, Brooklyn apartment, which is obviously where his sons.

It's like full of like sneakers.

There's like the world's largest salmon steak in the fridge.

He's a vegan.

My time machine moment for investigative journalism is when he's showing off the sneakers and the reporters are asking him, like,

are these yours?

Are these your sneakers?

And he's like, yeah, these are my like perfect new Air Force Ones.

But try on the shoes.

Eric Adams, try on the shoes.

No, you don't understand.

You need to get shoes for the size you want to be.

The size of the shoe reflects the like immensity of my soul.

Yeah.

Some intrepid reporters from New York Magazine at this time stake out the apartment, and he does show up there driving down the sidewalk

why

because he's a cop and if you walk around the outer boroughs especially in the outer boroughs cop cars are just parked on the sidewalk all the time cop cars cops are just like i can go wherever i want there's a bike lane outside my house cop cars go down it the wrong way constantly cool yeah it's very cool stuff um this is also when he gives my favorite my personal favorite eric adams quote that i cannot skip which is that he claimed in a vanity fair interview that his favorite concert ever was performance in Brooklyn by Curtis Mayfield, in which a lighting rig fell on him, paralyzing him before he performed.

Here's a quote.

My favorite concert, Eric, Curtis Mayfield of the Wingate Concert Series, at that concert, there was a rainstorm and the lights fell on Curtis Mayfield and they actually paralyzed him at that concert.

He died a few years ago, but it was an amazing concert before that happened.

Just so unfortunate.

He's referring to the sound check?

I don't know what he's talking about.

He likes to be a part of history.

He's like, hey, you know what?

History happened at that concert.

And, you know, usually, usually, you know, if you just go see, when I would go see The Weekend perform at One Oak, it's like, well, I don't really mind.

It's like, it's a good enough performance, but nothing about like anyone's life was changed there.

However, yeah, now, now a concert where someone gets paralyzed for life, that's that's something, you know?

Yeah.

So then he, so this is all before he gets elected, by the way.

How could you, how could the fuck could anyone vote for this man?

He wins the ranked choice after like a couple of rounds of

eliminations in the ranked choice.

You know, it's not, it's one round.

It's one vote, but then there's a bunch of rounds of eliminations.

Yeah.

And he, he, he kind of eks out a victory.

Uh, he coasts a victory over the insane man, Curtis Sleewa, and he becomes the mayor of New York City insanely.

I have it, I have to ask a question here at this point, which is I don't follow New York City politics closely other than just the sort of the clowning about of Eric Adams.

So I, what I want to know is, like, other people seemed more reasonably placed for either machine politics or kind of that six months when everyone was progressive to like win them the nomination.

What happened to all the people who should have won?

How come it went to the kids' table?

Yeah.

So I think what happened was there were so many candidates that there was like two really pretty good progressive candidates who split that vote.

Taylor's old as time.

Yeah.

And then I think it just sort of like, I think, again, people thought they had to rank everybody which is a theory i've been seeing floating around there because it was the first time they'd ever done rank voting and america doesn't really have that in most elections it was my first time people love to use it for like mayoral votes and it's always terrible same for boris i mean i think it'd be better than the way it was working here generally i think i mean i've i have better higher hopes for the next election but you know so i think what happened was there was a tremendous amount of vote splitting there were too many candidates it was a really truncated weird election i think everyone was also insane like i'd love to tell you what happened, but this is also from a period of my life where nobody I know, including myself, was making memories.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like I was, I was reading something I wrote with a couple of friends the other day that we wrote like 2020 into 2021.

And I was reading it and I was like, I don't know who wrote these jokes.

I don't remember writing these.

It's like a ghost that inhabited my body.

It's cool how the world kind of ended.

Like

it very much did.

And I think it was just like, I think he snuck in kind of by accident, but he acted like he had a mandate.

And he gets all these, there's all this, this press about how he is like the future of democratic politics at this time.

But this is, this is why we know like from the indictments now that like Turkish lobbyists are texting each other like, this guy's going to be president.

Yeah.

They're also referring to him as the president because he, when he was the borough president, I think he made people refer to him as President Adams.

As he should have.

That's right.

Of course, because he wants to be loved and also feared.

That's right.

He made all the wrath refer to him as Mr.

President.

So he took his first three mayoral paychecks in cryptocurrency.

I remember this too.

I went and checked on this.

He actually did do it.

New York City had to put out a press release about it that said, due to U.S.

Department of Labor regulations, New York City cannot pay employees in cryptocurrency.

By using a cryptocurrency exchange, anyone in the U.S.

dollars can have funds converted into crypto before funds are deposited into their account.

So like the office had to be like, he's not actually getting paid in crypto.

Yeah, it's least.

This is like not the first nor the last sort of financial irregularity with Eric Adams' time as mayor of New York City.

Yeah, that Atlantic article is from around now.

And yeah, like the whole future of the Democratic Party thing, it's like,

it's all articles like that that are just like, they are not comfortable with the current language or they're not comfortable with Eric Adams because he didn't win Manhattan's white affluent neighborhoods he's like for the people or whatever well it's also this is there this is like if you are an atlantic art uh columnist and you have to form an opinion every week you are desperately a news guy who writes for the atlantic sometimes which is jesus but also it's like horrible you are and the reason i think a lot of people bought this there was like oh yeah eric adams is the future of the democratic party seems to me to be that it's like well he's something he should it's whatever this is clearly isn't working so let's just pick another thing yeah and he's like he is if nothing else, another thing.

That's true.

That is 100% true.

He's a new shambling monster.

Yeah.

He's slouching towards Soho.

He's at one of his first ever press conferences.

I'm going to run through some of his greatest hits of the first half of his first term.

Saying his first term and assuming he'll get a second.

Oh, yeah, obviously.

Like, we're all supporting that.

We're all donating.

Yeah.

We're all doing get out the vote for Eric Adams.

I'm rattling my big contractor bucket full of rats and bleach.

All prayer warriors report to Eric Adams headquarters.

We're doing a spirit bomb

for our mayor and yours.

At one of his first ever press conferences, he claimed to be the first ever mayor of New York City to wear a hoodie, which like there's like dozens of photos of Bill de Blasio doing this.

Uh-huh.

No, no, that's not a real hoodie.

It's not a real hoodie.

Bill de Blasio was not wearing a real hoodie.

He actually had a hood sewed on.

to uh to an LL bean sweater.

Really, really enjoying the idea of someone fact-checking this and going back and finding one of the Dutch mayors of New Amsterdam wearing a kind of like hoodie-like garment.

Peter Stuyvesant wearing a howdy.

It's the hardest part of that is getting your peg leg through the leg hole of it.

So

at a press conference in October

2022, Adam said, everybody knows one thing about me.

I hate rats.

That's when he appointed his rat czar, Catherine Karatti.

Yeah, the rat czar.

Which was part of this was debuting the incredible invention of the wheelie trash ban with a top that closes

this is why they took him out right this is why they couldn't let him stay mayor is because he was he was treading on the sanitation department's turf of just of the the the beautiful new york city tradition of just throw loose bags of garbage out on the street i will say just in defense of the piles it is very hard to affect the change changing that in New York City because we don't have alleys and there's no place to put dumpsters And to

put dumpsters on the street where trash can go, you'd have to eliminate parking spots.

And if you eliminate parking spots, you get a community board meeting full of the most insane rich business owners in the world screaming fucking bloody murder at you.

It is actually a very hard, it is a legitimately hard problem to solve.

But he does come out saying, like, I fixed the trash.

Here's Empire State of Mind playing while I show you the wheelie trash bin.

And the thing is, a couple of things here, right?

First of all, wheelie trash bins, like everybody in Britain is insane about bins, right?

All British politics goes through the locus of bins for very similar reasons, right?

And like if there are never enough of them, they always suck.

The New York City, like branded trash bin, it looks like a nice bin.

It's a well-designed bin.

It's got the like rugged wheels.

I'm a big fan.

Big fan.

You can take a bath in there if you want.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, and that is how New York City will become the London of America is me taking a, like using it as a kind of like a, like a paddling pool during a heat wave.

That's right.

And more greatest hits last december during an interview with local nate local news station pix11 he was asked to describe new york in one word and he said new york this is a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our trade center to a person who is celebrating a new business that's open when when we started this podcast the first thing that i had in mind and the first thing i posted from the account was that because we were celebrating a new business that was open very close to on 9-11.

That's correct.

I believe it was 9-11.

Yeah, it actually was.

He put a robot police officer, the Nightscope K-5 security bot, which weighed 400 pounds and moved three miles an hour into the Times Square subway station with the intent of filling the city with them.

Yes, it may have replicated the weight.

of a New York City car, but it was three times as fast.

It was about as productive.

I really like the idea.

I'm coming back to the bins again because the bins capture my imagination of like, only Nixon could go go to China, right?

Only Eric Adams, only someone this insane could like break the like pile of trash bag monopoly.

The Nightscope robot could not maneuver around our woefully inaccessible subway system and it was mothballed.

Didn't he also try and bring in a bunch of the like robot dogs as well?

He wanted to bring the robot dogs for the fire department.

There was one painted like a Dalmatian.

He wanted to have drones as well.

Yeah.

What I like is I like that the Nightscope K5 K5 security bot is like going into the Mayor's Wacky Schemes storage cupboard alongside the Boris's water cannon.

Yeah, it's just like we want to do a bunch of weird shit, including alarmingly fascist things.

Yeah, I think I want to make the episode art the photo here of Eric Adams making the half a heart to the robot.

Let me let me have a look at this here.

It's in the zen, it's in the chat.

It doesn't have arms.

It doesn't have any sort of a heart design on the other side.

Why is he doing this?

I told you he got hit in the head when he was 15.

Oh, it really does replicate the body shape of an MYPD officer as well.

That's beautiful.

He was going to convert office buildings into apartments, then remembered that they, of course, need windows and egress.

Very importantly, like our last friend of New York, Rudy Giuliani, he spent like every night at this one restaurant called La Baya.

He loves to party,

which is run by two friends of his.

This leads to my favorite line of his, something which goes astoundingly hard.

This is, I believe, the thing about which he said, I might go out at the club with the boys in the evening, but I wake up with the men in the morning.

Which really sounds gay, but also like incredibly hard.

I've never slept.

He claims to only sleep four hours a night.

I believe him.

This is genuinely a guy who is severely sleep deprived.

Yeah, he's always on a plane.

He

yeah, he's hanging at this restaurant every night, holding court behind like a frosted glass pane.

It's run by his two friends who do not hold the liquor license because of felony convictions.

He eats there for free.

He's always hanging out at this place called Zero Bond, which is a members-only club in downtown Manhattan.

Also, maybe for free, he appointed the owner to the board of the Met Museum.

This is so good.

It's honestly like Eric Adams being mayor of New York is like when Nero appointed a horse consul of Rome.

Except it's just like people who have different felony

convictions preventing them from doing things.

It's like if Nero, it's like when Nero

appointed the horse, but Nero was also a horse in this scenario.

He claimed to carry a photo of an officer friend killed on duty in the 80s for years.

And then, but then it turned out that he had a staffer make a wallet-sized photo and weathered it for a photo shoot, like with T.

No.

Like he did like the high school, school project.

Again, he's so easy to catch in a lie is the thing.

It's why I wish they'd done the like, can you try on the Air Force Ones, please?

Yeah.

You know, he at one of his

flag raising ceremonies that he loves so dearly.

He still had time to do those when he was mayor?

He does them constantly still.

I think he did one yesterday.

This is also where

whatever country it is, he says, we know that New York City is the capital of that country, of America.

Like there's one of him wearing a Croatian football shirt saying, we know that New York City is the Zagreb of America, which is beautiful.

There's like a whole montage I found of like every single one of it that someone on Twitter made incredibly.

And most of them, he's wearing a shirt that is sort of of the country.

And my favorite is when he says doublet, he's wearing a big sweater.

i'm gonna i'm gonna be the coziest mayor

he's wearing like a green like very like irish looking sweater uh-huh at a philippines uh flag raising ceremony in june of 2023 so if new york is the greatest city on the globe that makes me the greatest mayor on the globe and it means that the greatest economic developer is from your community that's the greatest on the globe.

He somehow made it through his entire speech without calling New York City the Manila of America, which is incredible.

He blanked on Manila.

He blanks that.

He presented that as a kind of like logic problem.

So we all know that I'm the mayor of the greatest city on the globe, but that means that your community

just ending his speech with QED.

Yeah,

during the montage, he does it for Islam.

Eric demonstratum.

He does it for Islamabad, but has to clearly look down in his notes before he says it.

But

he.

Oh, he also fucks up Pakistan and India several times.

Yes, I believe he's, I think he does that, like he references Pakistan at the India flag raising ceremony.

It has to be corrected by the like Indian consult.

Yes, and this is also like right at, there's a big controversy.

This is recently.

There's a big controversy where like

it was the Indian Day parade in New York and they were going to, they wanted to float, have a float of the

what's the

temple, yeah, the Ayodhya, I think.

Yes, the one that they built on top of the mosque that the destroyed in a race riot when Modi was the governor of the UP in the 90s.

And they wanted to have a float of this like, you know, this like Hindutva temple basically down the street.

And there was a big controversy about it.

And after Aaron's like, yeah, let's do it.

It's all fine.

He appeared and then called,

he called it Pakistan to all the Hindutva guys, which is.

It's muscle confusion.

Yeah, you can absolutely do your like fascist Hindutva triumph thing.

Love you guys.

Shout out to Pakistan.

When he does all this stuff, the first time he did it as mayor, he was wearing a Gayabera to show his commitment to New Yorkers of various ethnic communities.

And he said, here's the quote for all this behavior.

When I rock their clothing, I say I'm going to rock for you as mayor.

And he rocked.

He rocked as mayor.

Were he a more normal mayor, I would strongly support this, right?

Like, I don't think it's cultural appropriation when a mayor does it.

I think a guybera looks really good on most people.

Yes.

So, like, yeah, I strongly support this, were it not for the fact that he

is also insane in like several other worse ways.

Look, look, look, stop and frisk is up 9,000%.

Bribes to the mayor are up 40 million percent.

But poison rat drownings are also up by 500,000%.

But yeah, I want this.

I want normal mayors to do this.

Like Sadiq Khan, right, who I consider to be broadly a normal mayor.

I want him to do a St.

Patrick's Day thing, coming out in the Eric Adams green sweater.

Yeah.

I think that would be cool, you know?

Yeah, I think I love that he, like, he shows up like in Chinatown for like the Lunar New Year thing, and he's wearing like a Han Fu jacket, but also an NYPD hat.

Which

I put that photo in the notes, and I put a photo of him wearing like the Nepalese hat.

I think it's it's called the Daki.

Oh, that's magnificent.

Yeah, he looks great.

He looks like he loves dressing up.

And you know what?

Goomstamong Us, right?

That's the thing.

Eric Adams, Eric Adams, certainly has a sense of with a lot of politicians that like November and I have also talked about on other shows.

You get the sense that they hate being there doing that job.

You get the sense that Boris Johnson fucking hated being London mayor.

Yes.

Right.

Like they're Eric Adams is the only one who clearly is having the best time of his fucking life.

I love the like Hanfu NYPD photo so much because it's like a bad cyberpunk thing.

Yes.

Like 2017, I mean, fuck, 2024, the mayor of New York dons his like police issue Hanfu.

Yeah.

Important to note here that he is still

evil.

Yes.

He's fun.

He's funny, but he's evil.

He loves to sweep homeless encampments, which is what it's called when the NYPD steals everything you own.

The police can now commit mentally ill people to psychiatric institutions involuntarily.

Power that is not abused.

Yes.

Do New Yorkers at this point feel about him the same way that Londoners feel about Boris, where unless it's their shit being thrown into the back of a garbage truck, they're like, this guy's funny.

Or is it funniness okay?

In January 22, which is when he starts his mayoralty, his approval rating is 64% by 2020.

Which makes sense.

love people loved his like crazy videos.

They loved how he found bullets behind a painting.

And also like he gestured towards some progressive stuff when he was running because he had to.

By June of that year, so five months later, it's down to 29%.

That's like star-maresque.

I mean, New Yorkers love to hate the mayor.

We hate the mayor always.

Friggin' Giuliani.

It's a very, a big no-gods, no mayors kind of city.

We are ungovernable as a fucking group.

Greatest city in the world.

Yeah.

And the Mets won last night.

But, you know, he, again, zero tolerance policy for homeless people sleeping in MTA cars or stations.

And then,

you know, he's reintroducing plainclothes police units that build a blaster disbanded after the George Floyd killing and protests.

Violent crime is like continuing to rise a little bit at this point.

He does not believe in the separation of church and state and said that explicitly.

Don't tell me about no separation of church and state.

State is the body, church is the heart.

You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.

I can't separate myself because I'm an elected official, he continued over scattered applause.

This guy would have made such a good president.

Yeah.

I mean, you know what?

In America, these of days, who fucking knows?

Maybe he will be.

And in 21 and 22, we got a bunch of migrants seeking political asylum, either showing up here.

or getting sent here by other states.

He mostly reselled them elsewhere in the country or made them stay in, frankly,

I saw it with my own eyes, very inhumane conditions out at a fucking airfield in Brooklyn in the winter, no heat.

Britain has formed for this.

We were repurposing like abandoned and derelict military base after abandoned and derelict military base as like punishment housing for people coming here seeking asylum.

He is a monster in this regard.

And the guy in charge of it, I think, was indicted recently.

No.

Yeah, I think he's, he's caught up in it.

Eric Adams being president from jail would be a really funny sequel to Trump being president from jail.

We just have back-to-back jail presidents.

Yeah.

While he's been mayor, the NYPD has been really acting incredibly out of pocket.

They're still on their like silent fucking like traffic, like not enforcing traffic violations strike.

Don't the NYPD also still hate him personally as well?

I think so.

That's this weird vibe I've always gotten is that like, although he is the cop mayor and he like dines out a lot on that and he gives the cops everything they wanted yes the impression i get is that personally they still can't stand him yeah i think i think that seems to be the the case i mean it's the same thing with they didn't like giuliani either they don't like anybody

yeah i guess so but not even not even a cop not a prosecutor not a cop it doesn't matter it doesn't matter yeah but you know he loves to let the police drive wherever they want uh car chases are up 600

yeah okay

just really wants to see like a cop car with the like uh flashing lights stuck to the roof drive through a bunch of boxes down an alley.

He watched Tom Walker's stream.

Yeah.

The light speed Grand Theft Auto stream.

Yeah.

I think it's important also.

He is a very car-brained man, which is unusual for a New Yorker to be.

At least the mayor should not be car-brained, but he loves cars.

When he was talking about like dining shed stuff early in the pandemic, he said the dining sheds were great because you could be driving around and you'd see, quote, a piece of eye candy sitting at one of the dining sheds and you could drive up to her and get her number.

He could not imagine in his wildest dreams walking up to a woman.

The thing resurfaces, the pickup artist stuff resurfaces, you know?

Yeah.

Like the little moustache grows back for a minute.

He thinks he lives in the New York City from Seinfeld, I think.

I think.

Yeah.

I'm just remembering that when he was younger, when he was in State Center, he also used to wear a lot of like silk shirts as well.

And I'm thinking about the, I'm thinking about the playlist that implies.

I'm thinking about a lot of like R and B, you know,

which is just not, not good vibes, I don't think.

There's a really incredible New York Times article from this year that's like inside the mayor's closet that I found that was just like a bunch of photos of his fucking suits.

And they're all horrible.

The fits are interesting because at one point we, I think you posted a photo of Eric Adams like getting indicted in the group chat.

And I lasered the fuck in on the sneakers, the like leather dress sneakers he was wearing with this suit and i i spent like two days trying fruitlessly to identify what the fuck these were um just because i i i've never seen anyone who dresses quite like him yeah i mean i will say he he he is representative of a certain uh gentleman of his age and uh

cohort and uh location he is from i feel like i could walk around downtown brooklyn and see some guys dress like him for sure

but it is interesting that he's kept it up as mayor and then also will put, you know, a traditional Chinese silk coat over it.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

He, um, oh, one last bit of little evil thing that he did.

He was confronted by a housing activist last year who's also, or early, I can't remember what it was, maybe this year, who's also a Holocaust survivor about his connections to real estate.

And he yelled at her, don't stand in front like you treated someone that's on the plantation that you own.

Which he yells to a Holocaust survivor talking to him about rent.

What?

Yeah,

he's a really, he's really touchy.

He cannot handle anyone criticizing him.

He's got very thin skin, despite him saying that.

That's so good for a politician is to be super touchy and defensive and a really short temper.

So that brings us to the middle of his first term as mayor.

So we're in about November 2023.

On the 22nd of that month, a Florida woman.

that worked under him in the NYPD in 1983 filed a sexual assault lawsuit against him,

which is still unresolved.

Going back a little bit, November 2nd of that month, FBI agents seized three phones and two laptops from his chief fundraiser.

On November 6th, his Adam's iPad and phone were seized.

Yeah, the way they did this was fucking insane, by the way, because they didn't want him to try and delete anything from them.

So while he was like moving from like restaurant to like armored suburban, car

the fbi just like ducked between his security detail and took his phone and his iPad from him while he was getting into his car, which that's never a good sign when that happens to you, I don't think.

Yeah.

And then November 12th of last year is when we all found out, that's when the New York Times reported that the investigation was, of course, pertaining to alleged influence by the Turkish government to have his consulate in Manhattan building approved by city authorities despite some safety issues.

And a Turkish immigrant-run construction company that helped raise the funds for the Adams campaign in May 2021 was also being investigated by the FBI.

So

in our classic fashion, could we say it was a normal, cloudy November morning?

When?

New York City is the Istanbul of America.

Again, we promise we're not going to keep splitting up the episodes like this, but we were handed our fate.

by the haters atop Mount Olympus.

At the table of success.

That's right.

And so we are forced to sit upon the table of success and around the table of success.

And we can't do this as a one-parser because we will be here for 12 hours.

Yeah.

So we were next week will be on the Patreon part two of Eric Adams, which is the rest from November of 2023 until now, October of 202024.

That one's going to be five hours long, and we're going to get some guests on.

I think we're going to get our first guest on.

Our first guest?

Uh-huh.

And that's going to be on the Patreon, which you can listen to every other episode of No Gods for Mayors for a mere $5 a month will get you into the mayor's benevolent fund.

What's No Gods for Mayors, Maddie?

Minor, minor error in name of podcast detected.

It's fucking over.

Oh, no gods for mayors.

No gods, four mayors.

I'm bringing religion back.

A mayor for each human.

That's right, that's right.

No gods, four mayors.

Giuliani, Ward, Boris, and Adam.

Yeah, it was a pun for the the number of episodes you've done.

Riley, you idiot.

They seated around

the table of success.

That's correct.

Boris Calaric.

Rob Ford

fucking

Bile.

Yeah, yep, yep.

Uh-huh.

Giuliani.

Black Bile.

Black Bile.

Rob Ford's yellow bile.

And Eric Adams is phleb.

He is the most phlematic mayor.

I believe this.

Yeah.

But we'll have part two next week.

Thank you so much for listening.

Oh, yes.

And we'll talk to you then.

Absolutely.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.

Something as simple as a crackpite.