When FBI agents asked New York City mayor Eric Adams’s security detail to step aside so they could enter the mayor’s SUV and confiscate his two cell phones and iPad in November 2023, the federal investigation into the city’s highest elected official, centered on his 2021 mayoral campaign (specifically, whether it was fueled by foreign campaign money) seemed to be heating up. After all, how could the FBI seize the mayor’s electronics — treating him like a common criminal, don’t they know he’s a police officer — if they didn’t have anything on him yet?

But five months later, Adams has yet to be accused of any wrongdoing, even as a growing number of aides and associates around him are subject to their own investigations. (For a great look at a major player in this web of graft, read David Freedlander’s “The Eric Adams Smash-and-Grab,” perhaps the article that captures the Adams era, and check out Hell Gate’s remarkably comprehensive interactive feature.) The mayor, like New York’s prior governor Andrew Cuomo, is facing a civil charge, filed under the Adult Survivors Act’s one-year window, which allowed individuals to bring lawsuits for sexual predation that would otherwise have been beyond the statute of limitations.

Yet the problems keep piling up. Eric Adams’s approval rating is at a dismal 28 percent — the lowest of any New York mayor since 1996 — and he cannot go a day without doing or saying something that is bad for the poor and working-class people of this city (usually for the sake of the wealthy, particularly those in the financial and real estate sector, or for his most prized constituents, the city’s police and correctional officers).