The Mayor and the Con Man

Bout a year ago, not long after Eric Adams was sworn in as the mayor of New York, an old friend and church leader named Lamor Whitehead went to an auto shop in the Bronx, to drop off a Mercedes-Benz G-Class S.U.V. that had been in a crash. Whitehead led a small church in Brooklyn called Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries. People called him Bishop. The shop he visited, No Limit Auto Body, was operated by a man named Brandon Belmonte, who was involved in real estate. Federal prosecutors would later refer to Belmonte as “a businessman.”

The Mercedes was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar job. Belmonte paid the thirteen-thousand-dollar bill for a rental replacement while the work was getting done. Whitehead wanted more. “He basically says, ‘You got to give me another five grand,’ ” Belmonte recalled. “I said, ‘Bro, the job was only twenty-five thousand. Thirteen and five is eighteen. The parts were seven grand. I’m gonna make zero.’ ” It occurred to Belmonte that Whitehead wasn’t trying to negotiate—he was asking for a kickback. He promised to make it worth Belmonte’s while. “I got City Hall in my back pocket,” Whitehead said, according to Belmonte.

On a friend’s advice, Belmonte called an investigator at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan. “I said, ‘I think the mayor of New York is on the take,’ ” Belmonte recalled. “And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ ” The investigator patched in colleagues, and Belmonte told them his story. “I said, ‘The mayor of New York City is trying to extort me, through someone else,’ ” he said. The next morning, F.B.I. agents arrived at Belmonte’s door. They asked Belmonte to call Whitehead, and began recording. Belmonte told Whitehead that he was ready to do business with him, and with the Mayor.

Since the early days of his political career, Eric Adams has had to fend off allegations of corruption. In 1994, when Adams, then a thirty-three-year-old transit cop, mounted a long-shot campaign for Congress, his opponent, Representative Major Owens, accused him of staging a break-in at his own campaign office. Nothing came of a police investigation into the matter. In 2010, during Adams’s tenure as chairman of the State Senate’s Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, a report from the state inspector general implicated him in a bid-rigging scheme for a Queens “racino”—a gambling and racetrack establishment. Adams maintains that the report was orchestrated by Republicans.

Some of Adams’s rivals in the 2021 New York City mayoral race believed that reporters, constrained by the pandemic and distracted by a crowded field, didn’t dig enough into Adams’s background. “We all know you’ve been investigated for corruption everywhere you’ve gone,” Andrew Yang said to him, during a debate in the Democratic primary. With Adams, though, it has sometimes been difficult to distinguish between the unusual and the unethical. For example, city records show that he and a woman named Sylvia Cowan purchased a one-bedroom apartment together in 1988. When The City, a local news Web site, asked Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign whether he still owned the property, the campaign claimed that Adams had “gifted” his half to Cowan.

Later, Adams amended fifteen years of financial-disclosure forms to reflect that he still owned half the apartment. He blamed his former accountant, Clarence Harley. Harley had gone through “some difficult times,” Adams said. “I had an accountant who was homeless,” he explained. “I let him continue to do his job, even when he lived in a homeless shelter and because of that, it caused him to make some bad decisions.” It came out after the primary that Harley hadn’t simply fallen on hard times. Until 2017, he had lived in an affordable-housing building in Harlem, where he did the books for the building’s board. The board discovered that Harley appeared to have siphoned tens of thousands of dollars from the building’s accounts, and evicted him shortly thereafter. (Harley could not be reached for comment.)

Adams has dismissed much of the critical coverage he’s received as racism. “Black candidates for office are often held to a higher, unfair standard—especially those from lower-income backgrounds such as myself,” he said just before primary day, when the Times examined his past fund-raising practices. The newspaper took a close look at the One Brooklyn Fund, a nonprofit that Adams controlled while serving as Brooklyn borough president. The fund received donations from real-estate developers, some of whom had business with the city. Adams denied any impropriety. “I hope by becoming mayor I can change minds and create one equal standard for all,” he said.

On January 1, 2022, Adams was sworn in. He soon appointed to important posts an array of friends and close connections. For his deputy mayor for public safety, he chose Philip Banks III, a former N.Y.P.D. official who had resigned in 2014, amid a federal investigation into favor trading and bribery. For his chief of staff, he picked Frank Carone, a Brooklyn Democratic Party power broker who has drawn scrutiny for his business dealings. He tried to install his brother to run mayoral security at a salary of two hundred and ten thousand dollars a year. (An ethics board forced him to knock the salary down to a dollar.) He appointed Timothy Pearson, another N.Y.P.D. friend, to be a senior adviser on public safety, even as Pearson continued to work an outside job—at the same racino for which Adams had been investigated. Lisa White, the former treasurer of the One Brooklyn Fund, with whom Adams once shared an apartment, was installed as deputy commissioner for employee relations at the N.Y.P.D., at an annual salary of roughly a qua