On Friday, federal prosecutors in Eric Adams’ corruption case urged the judge to deny a motion from the mayor’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, to dismiss the bribery charge against him. Adams is accused of accepting lavish gifts from Turkish officials, including heavily discounted flights, hotel stays, cruises, and other perks valued collectively at over $100,000. In exchange, he is alleged to have pressured the New York City Fire Prevention Chief into waiving the inspection for a new Turkish consular building, which the country’s officials wanted open by the time the country’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would visit the city for the UN General Assembly in 2021.
Internal FDNY communications laid out in the indictment against Adams show officials saying that the building would not have passed an inspection due to serious construction and safety issues, including a glass exterior panel that fell ten stories onto the pavement in the summer before the building’s opening. The indictment further alleges that the FDNY Chief of Department made clear to the Fire Prevention Chief that refusing to open the building would cost him his job. The Fire Prevention Chief then issued a “conditional letter of no objection” allowing for the building to open without an inspection, a move which was not standard procedure.
“Adams claims that accepting tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of benefits in exchange for pressuring a City agency is ‘routine’ and ‘common,’” the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office wrote in the reply brief to Spiro’s motion, “but however routine that may have been for Adams, the law permits a jury to conclude that it was nonetheless illegal.”
Spiro’s motion last month claimed that the bribery charge against Adams was “extraordinarily vague,” and encompassed “perfectly lawful acts.” Central to his argument is a Supreme Court decision from this summer, resolved in a conservative majority 6-3 vote, which found that public officials could accept “gratuities” for official acts after the fact “as a token of appreciation.” That case involved a Republican mayor from Indiana who took $13,000 from a trucking company after having steered around $1 million of city business its way.
Eric Adams is the first New York City Mayor to ever face criminal charges while still in office. The prosecution’s reply brief comes as the mayor’s legal fund – which can solicit donations from the public – is apparently drying up, with public records showing only one new contribution since the charges against the Mayor dropped at the end of last month.
