Why Eric Adams Is Resisting Pressure to Oust Members of His Inner Circle

Mayor Adams has been loyal to longtime aides despite growing calls for them to resign. It is a trait he has shown through his career.

As Mayor Eric Adams has risen in New York City politics, he has remained extremely loyal to longtime allies, elevating them to key positions in his administration. Now those ties could contribute to his political downfall.

As federal and city investigations swirl around several of the mayor’s closest aides, Mr. Adams has resisted growing calls to clean house, rejecting his advisers’ focus on an exit strategy for his close aide and friend, Timothy Pearson.

Federal agents seized Mr. Pearson’s phone earlier this month. In four lawsuits, he was accused of sexually harassing female subordinates; the city Department of Investigation is also examining Mr. Pearson’s role in a physical confrontation with security guards at a migrant shelter, as well as the conduct detailed in the lawsuits.

At least two senior administration officials said they were pressuring the Adams administration to fire Mr. Pearson, according to people who are familiar with the matter. The mayor’s refusal to consider doing so was a key factor in the abrupt departure of his counsel, Lisa Zornberg, over the weekend.

Mr. Adams also faces pressure from advisers to dismiss Philip Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety, and Winnie Greco, the mayor’s Asian affairs director.

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Instead of resigning or retreating from public view, Mr. Banks appeared at a lunch for the Police Athletic League on Tuesday to promote the mayor’s public safety agenda, and Ms. Greco helped host an event at Gracie Mansion last week with the Chinese community.

Mr. Adams’s unwavering support of those in his inner circle is a trait he has displayed throughout his career in the Police Department and in politics, and it came into sharp relief after he was elected mayor in November 2021.

As Mr. Adams was filling out his administration, he prized loyalty and went against conventional wisdom to bring aboard Mr. Banks, who had previously been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an expansive 2014 federal corruption case. Mr. Adams hired Mr. Pearson while allowing him to keep his job overseeing security at the city’s only casino; brought on his own brother to manage his security detail; and hired others with troubling records.

He argued that people deserved second chances and that he himself was “perfectly imperfect,” joking that he would draw the line at hiring a serial killer.

Nearly three years later, some of those appointments have backfired, including that of his second police commissioner, Edward Caban, who was first elevated by Mr. Adams to the department’s second-highest job over more qualified senior police officials, and then was awarded the top job.

Mr. Caban resigned last week at the request of City Hall, which had asked him to step aside after federal agents seized his phone as part of a criminal investigation. Other Adams officials whose phones were seized included Mr. Banks’s brother, David C. Banks, the schools chancellor, and Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor and the chancellor’s partner, according to a source who was familiar with the matter.

After the seizures, Ms. Zornberg wanted Mr. Adams to remove all five officials whose phones were seized, along with Ms. Greco, whose homes were searched by federal agents in February, and gave the mayor an ultimatum on Saturday to do so. When the mayor balked, she resigned, the people said.

The mayor, speaking at his weekly open availability with reporters on Tuesday, challenged assertions that Ms. Zornberg quit because of an ultimatum.

“Unless you were in that conversation, I don’t know how any people can say what’s the reason that she left or didn’t leave,” Mr. Adams said. “No one was on that conversation but the two of us.”

The mayor also disputed the notion that New Yorkers are concerned about the avalanche of investigations enveloping his administration, and defended his decision to retain Mr. Pearson and other aides in the face of mounting calls to fire them.

“If I’ve had someone around me that I believe violated their oath of office, they would not be in my office,” Mr. Adams said.

The Adams administration did force out a low-level aide named Raymond Martin, who with Mr. Caban’s twin brother, James, was demanding kickbacks from a Brooklyn business facing noise complaints, NBC News reported.

Mr. Martin, an operations coordinator in the mayor’s Community Affairs Unit, violated the terms of his contract, the mayor said on Tuesday, and was fired last week.

The move to pressure Mr. Adams to oust Mr. Pearson was first reported by Politico New York.

The swarm of investigations has given ample attack lines to the mayor’s political foes like Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running against him for mayor in the election next year. Mr. Lander held a news conference on Tuesday to propose measures to prevent corruption in government contracts. Asked whether Mr. Pearson and Philip Banks would be employed in his mayoral administration, Mr. Lander said: “I would have fired them long ago.”

Mr. Lander paused and then added: “I wouldn’t have hired them in the first place.”

When his news conference in Lower Manhattan ended, Mr. Lander walked a block to another one, on the steps of Tweed Courthouse, where an infamous political boss was convicted of corruption 150 years ago, with groups opposed to the mayor’s contentious amendments to the City Charter.

There, speaker after speaker questioned how the mayor’s administration could be trusted, given the number of investigations surrounding it.

“Why was the City Council trying to increase the capacity to hold the mayor’s leadership choices accountable? Because they witnessed the abuses of this administration,” said Ana María Archila, co-director of the New York Working Families Party.

Mr. Adams has “a closed circle that abuses their power,” Ms. Archila said, adding that the “mayor’s judgment is skewed toward his inner circle” and not the needs of New Yorkers.

Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said that the mayor’s decision not to put Mr. Pearson and Mr. Banks on a leave of absence as the federal investigation proceeded was problematic.

“What angers me most is that the mayor is not providing the leadership to match the moment,” he said. “We have a cloud of suspicion and a crisis of confidence.”

Mr. Adams has sought this week to move on from the bad headlines over the four federal investigations into his administration, but that has been difficult. A City Council member and three state lawmakers have called for the mayor to resign, and a second councilwoman joined them on Tuesday.

Alexa Avilés, a progressive councilwoman from Brooklyn, joined her colleague, Tiffany Cabán, in calling for Mr. Adams to resign.

“The common denominator among all these leaders that are under investigation?” Ms. Avilés said. “The mayor.”

George Arzt, a former aide to Mayor Edward I. Koch who has known Mr. Adams for decades, said that the mayor is “very loyal to the people who came up through the ranks with him, and that’s a good thing, and that also has its faults.”

Mr. Arzt said that “cleaning house in one fell swoop” — like Mayor Koch did in 1979 when he removed three deputy mayors and demoted two others — would leave a hole in his administration and “really is not something any mayor would want.”

At City Hall, Mr. Adams repeated his calls to allow the investigation to unfold. He said he had seen too many “runaway” investigations, pointing to Yusef Salaam, a member of the so-called Central Park Five who was later exonerated and now serves on the City Council.

“I saw what happened to Yusef Salaam,” Mr. Adams said. “I saw what happened to others. Let the process take its course.”

Mr. Salaam, who served nearly seven years in prison after being convicted based on a coerced confession, did not respond to requests for comment.