The Eric Adams era in New York City began with questions about whether the avowedly vegan mayor was ordering the branzino at a midtown Italian restaurant run by a couple of felonious old friends, and the food-related questions really never stopped. The “night-life mayor,” an ex-cop, insisted that everything he did was kosher, yet he and his associates were repeatedly caught in outrageous, petty, and asinine acts of snack-adjacent graft. He had a police commissioner resign after his twin brother was accused of shaking down bars and restaurants. A senior aide and old cop buddy of Adams’s, put in charge of migrant-shelter contracts, was, according to a lawsuit, known as Crumbs by subordinates, because he’d once said, “I have to get mine.” Another top aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, has faced a ream of corruption charges, including accepting money from a businessman who helped her son start a Chick-fil-A franchise. Adams himself was indicted last fall for accepting meals and other freebies arranged by a representative of the Turkish government, in exchange for fast-tracking building permits. (Each has denied wrongdoing, comestible or otherwise.) On Wednesday, the trail of treats, upgrades, and little favors appeared to reach its flavor-dusted peak, when a close adviser to the Mayor apparently attempted to pay off a reporter with cash stuffed into an open pouch of Herr’s sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.
The incident took place in Harlem. Katie Honan, a hard-nosed City Hall reporter for the nonprofit newsroom The City, was there to cover the opening of a new campaign office for Adams’s independent, desperate, long-shot bid to win reëlection. For the past four years, Honan has been a worm in Adams’s apple, scoring scoop after scoop about the dramas, inanities, and intrigues of his administration. Her handheld videos of Adams entering and leaving City Hall, while refusing to answer her questions, will be one of the enduring artifacts of this era of city politics. “Have you made attempts to try to remember it?” Honan asked Adams at a press conference in 2024, after the Mayor had his phone seized by the F.B.I. and claimed to have forgotten the passcode. “Is it someone’s birthday?”
During the office opening, Honan spotted Winnie Greco, a longtime Adams fund-raiser who has served as a paid liaison to the city’s Chinese American communities, and who briefly disappeared from Adams’s side last year after she came under scrutiny by federal investigators. (Among other questionable arrangements, Greco reportedly lived for nearly a year in a suite in a Queens hotel that had a city contract to house formerly incarcerated individuals.) According to Honan, Greco texted her after the event and asked to meet across the street from the new campaign office. The pair walked into the Whole Foods on 125th Street. Greco handed Honan an open bag of chips with the top crumpled. “Honan, thinking it was an offer of a light snack, told Greco more than once she could not accept the chips, but Greco insisted that she keep them,” Honan’s colleagues at The City wrote in an article published on Wednesday evening.
Greco left, and, when Honan looked inside the bag, she found a red envelope filled with money. “I can’t take this, when can I give it back to you?” Honan texted Greco. Greco initially said they could meet, but then stopped responding. Honan went to her office, where she handed the bag over to her editors. They contacted the city’s Department of Investigation. “Anticipating possible law enforcement investigations, THE CITY did not open the envelope or count the money inside,” Honan’s colleagues reported, though they spotted “at least one $100 bill and several $20 bills.” An investigator from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office soon came by to seize the bag, but not before The City’s editors immortalized it in a mug shot. Honan’s colleagues called Greco, who begged them to “forget about this” and call her lawyer. “I make a mistake,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It’s a culture thing. I don’t know. I don’t understand. I’m so sorry. I feel so bad right now. I’m so sorry, honey.” Greco’s lawyer took a similar tack. “I can see how this looks strange,” he told The City. “But I assure you that Winnie’s intent was purely innocent. In the Chinese culture, money is often given to others in a gesture of friendship and gratitude.”
Earlier this year, Adams cut a deal with the Trump Administration to get out from under federal corruption charges. He insisted there was nothing wrong with his actions, either as alleged in the indictment (the favors from the Turkish government) or in his new kinship with the President (he made an implicit promise to coöperate with ICE’s mass-deportation campaign). But Adams has barely attempted to account for the actions of his many aides who have faced their own investigations. Just this morning, Lewis-Martin was handed four new bribery charges, including one related to thousands of dollars in catering for events at Gracie Mansion, the Mayor’s residence. (She has pleaded not guilty.) The investigations into Greco and others, including former senior officials at the N.Y.P.D., are still presumably somewhere in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Time and again, when presented with the misdeeds of his friends, allies, subordinates, and appointees, Adams has feigned, at most, mild surprise. “We are shocked by these reports,” a spokesman for the Mayor’s reëlection campaign told The City on Wednesday, in response to the tale of the cash in the chip bag. “He has always demanded the highest ethical and legal standards, and his sole focus remains on serving the people of New York City with integrity.”
This kind of boilerplate has been intolerable all along, and is only more absurd now as Adams puts the city through the farce of seeking a second term, claiming that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, is somehow unqualified to hold the office that he has repeatedly turned into a national joke. From the start, Adams has insisted that the media is out to get him—at his weekly press conferences, which he’s lately suspended, he often reserved a special contemptuous smile for Honan—but, if anything, he’s been given leeway. He has surrounded himself with clowns, grifters, and obvious bad news, and asked the public to swallow it. He’s tried to live down the sketchy airline upgrades, the straw donors, the late nights at clubs and restaurants run by his buddies, the self-dealing of his associates, his alliance with Trump. In the end, the bag of chips might sum him up. He’s kettle-cooked. ♦
