What Eric Adams’s Hires Say About Him: Loyalty Comes First

It was only his second week as mayor of New York City, and Eric Adams was fielding question after question about ethical concerns over his recent appointments.

“I’m going to hire the best people for the job that I have known throughout my years in government and their talents,” Mr. Adams told reporters at a news conference in Queens late last week. “And the reason I can do that is because I’m the mayor.”

All mayors surround themselves with people they trust. For Rudolph W. Giuliani, that included lawyers who worked with him in the U.S. attorney’s office. For Michael R. Bloomberg, it was top advisers from his company. And many high-ranking mayoral aides typically come directly from key positions on successful political campaigns.

Mr. Adams is following that practice. But his life experiences are very different from those of his predecessors, and in many ways, the people he has surrounded himself with reflect that contrast.

There is a former police officer who served with him decades ago in the Police Department. There are allies from Brooklyn, where he cut his political teeth and rose to borough president. And there is one family member.

Mr. Adams named two longtime allies to top posts: Frank Carone, a Brooklyn power broker and lawyer who will serve as his chief of staff, and Ingrid Lewis-Martin, a former deputy Brooklyn borough president who will serve as his chief adviser.

His schools chancellor, David C. Banks, was a key adviser to Mr. Adams on education issues; Mr. Banks’s partner, Sheena Wright, the president of the United Way of New York City, led Mr. Adams’s transition team and is now deputy mayor for strategic operations.

Mr. Adams also chose Philip Banks III, Mr. Banks’s brother, to be his deputy mayor for public safety, despite concerns that Philip Banks was an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal corruption investigation stemming from accusations that he doled out favors as a police chief in return for gifts. He was never charged with a crime.

But the move that caused the most consternation among good-government groups was Mr. Adams’s secretive hiring of his brother, Bernard Adams, to oversee the mayoral security detail. Several days after Bernard Adams was added to the city payroll at a salary of $210,000, the mayor retroactively sought clearance from the Conflicts of Interest Board to allow the hire, which would normally be barred by the city’s nepotism rules.

The mayor said that he trusted his brother far more than any Police Department official, saying that Bernard Adams “knows his brother, and he’s going to keep his brother safe.”

Mr. Adams is certainly not the first mayor in New York to give people from his family influence in his administration; his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, had his wife, Chirlane McCray, run an ambitious mental health initiative, though she was unpaid.

But Mr. Adams’s appointments show a clear preference for hiring allies, even when he knows that he could face blowback, his critics say.

“Everyone expected him to bring in some loyalists, but his cabinet and senior positions are almost all loyalists,” said John Kaehny, executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany.

The pace of Mr. Adams’s appointments has slowed in the last week, and City Hall officials recently put in place an “enhanced vetting process” that delayed at least one announcement, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Adams had planned to name Jessica Katz, the executive director of a nonprofit group, to a top housing post last Wednesday, but canceled the event that morning, according to another person who was familiar with the plans, because all candidates are now getting extra vetting.

Mr. Adams has argued that many of his predecessors had not faced similarly harsh scrutiny over hiring allies, saying that he believed he was being unfairly targeted because he was hiring “blue-collar people.”

The mayor has shied away from hiring Mr. Bloomberg’s top allies, despite soliciting his advice in the months before he took office. Instead, Mr. Adams has hired many veterans of the de Blasio administration.

Nor has Mr. Adams gravitated toward recruiting a big city police chief to run the nation’s largest police department. He selected Keechant Sewell to become the city’s first female police commissioner, choosing a relatively unknown outsider over a field of more experienced executives.

Commissioner Sewell is surrounded by Mr. Adams’s associates, including Philip Banks, who works from Police Headquarters. The department’s second-in-command, First Deputy Commissioner Edward A. Caban, a former Brooklyn inspector, is a longtime associate of Mr. Adams, who bypassed the department’s ranks of chiefs to promote him.

Mr. Adams is also considering hiring another friend, Timothy Pearson, a retired police officer and a vice president at Resorts World Casino, as a public safety adviser, a mayoral spokesman confirmed to The Times.

Bill Neidhardt, a former press secretary for Mr. de Blasio, said there were “bright spots” in the Adams administration like Lorraine Grillo, the first deputy mayor, who is a respected veteran government official who ran Mr. de Blasio’s pandemic-recovery efforts. But he questioned many of the mayor’s other appointments and expressed concern that Mr. Adams has not named a deputy mayor for housing to show how important that issue is to him.

“When you look at his appointments all together, you get the sense that one, he’s far more conservative than he let on,” he said, “and two, it seems like there’s going to be a strong need for a close look at corruption for the next four years.”

A moderate who has criticized left-leaning Democrats, Mr. Adams has named several Republicans to his administration, including James Oddo, a former Staten Island borough president who is chief of staff to the deputy mayor of operations, and Eric Ulrich, a former City Council member from Queens who was named senior adviser. He also named Edward Mermelstein, an international real estate lawyer from Ukraine who has said he was friendly with former President Donald J. Trump, as commissioner of the mayor’s office of international affairs.

Mr. Adams, who is the city’s second Black mayor, has received praise for the diversity of his cabinet. He named five women as deputy mayors; his police commissioner, schools chancellor and other top appointees are Black; and his transportation commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez, is from the Dominican Republic and has been a leader on issues important to immigrant communities.

Still, questions continue to follow his appointments. It is unclear if Philip Banks could obtain a top secret F.B.I. security clearance. The new correction commissioner, Louis A. Molina, fired a top investigator who examined complaints against officers for use of force.

More news reports followed: Mr. Pearson ruffled feathers by proposing the removal of police officers from City Hall, WNBC-TV reported. Carlo Scissura, who could lead the city’s Economic Development Corporation, helped secure real estate deals without being registered as a lobbyist, The City reported.

Many of those joining Mr. Adams’s administration stood by his side during a bitter and competitive Democratic primary last year, which he won by fewer than 8,000 votes. Brendan McGuire, a well-respected former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who will be his chief counsel, served as an adviser to Mr. Adams during his campaign and his transition.

“I don’t do a lot of new friends,” Mr. Adams has been known to say.

Joseph J. Lhota, a former deputy mayor under Mr. Giuliani who is now a Democrat, called criticism of Mr. Adams’s appointments “shallow and self righteous.”

“The mayor has every right to select his team,” Mr. Lhota said. “Evaluation and criticism should be held for performance.”

One possible appointment — former council member Laurie Cumbo as the head of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs — has faced pushback, including from Luis Miranda, a political consultant and father of the Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Mr. Miranda’s concerns, which were first reported by Politico, stem from Ms. Cumbo’s opposition to a City Council bill that gave the right to vote in local elections to noncitizens. Mr. Miranda believes that cultural affairs is the wrong position for her after she made comments about immigrants diluting the power of Black voters, according to someone familiar with his thinking.

Mr. Adams has signaled that he is more concerned about results than appearances, saying last week that he would not allow critics to “dismantle” his team and he would resist distractions and “grind.”

Referring to a recent fatal shooting in East Harlem, he made his priorities clear. “I’m so focused on stopping 19-year-old girls from being shot in Burger King,” Mr. Adams said.

Ashley Southall contributed reporting.