Who is Eric Adams?
After a single, tumultuous term as mayor, we’re not much closer to definitively answering that question.
At various points and to various people over the last four years, the mayor has been the future of the Democratic Party and MAGA’s man on the ground in New York. For federal prosecutors, at least for a time, Adams was a corrupt official who engaged in campaign finance fraud and illegal favor-trading with foreign governments. Adams is a magic-gems guy, a t-shirt guy, a fish-eating vegan. Adams is a kid who overcame poverty and dyslexia to rise through the ranks of the NYPD and public office. He’s accused of sexual assault. He lays his head in Brooklyn—or perhaps it’s New Jersey? Maybe he barely lays his head at all because he’s out with the boys and up with the men.
Adams always made his personal biography his political calling card—”I am you,” he told voters during his winning mayoral campaign—and his mayoralty was distinctively personal as well. He was an ambassador and a hype-man, raising innumerable flags and hitting the clubs like it was his job, which, as far as he was concerned, it was. His policy preoccupations—safe subways, school literacy programs—were personal issues for him. His relationship with the press was bitterly personal, returning frequently to his grievance at what he perceived as unfair treatment.
But as entertaining, perplexing, and even significant as Adams was, his mayoralty was hardly a solo act, and his time in office was defined even more by the company he kept: the people he hired into City Hall and elevated within the police department, his business contacts, the people who ran his campaigns and those he partied with—the machers, the wanna-bes, the wheeler-dealers, grifters, operators, friends, side-kicks and miscellaneous associates.
Adams is fond of the exhortation to “let your haters be your waiters at the table of success.” It’s classic Adams, a rhyming aphorism about self-confidence, indifference to criticism, and the realization of ambition. Repeated often enough (it was often), it also evokes the image of a literal table, a congregation of Arthurian knights or an Olympian feast, a bustling and convivial gathering where the board is bountifully laden for those lucky enough to have a seat.
It is, in short, an excellent organizing metaphor for the swarming cast of players who have populated the greater Eric Adams Cinematic Universe.
We first published the Table of Success in December of 2023. The response was positive. People thanked us for shedding light on the interesting personalities in the mayor’s orbit. The project won an award for the best political reporting of the year. We felt good about it.
But the movers and shakers on this list don’t sit still, and we’ve spent the intervening years furiously updating the Table to keep up with all of their new adventures. For some, this has included resigning in disgrace, having their homes raided by law enforcement, and facing criminal indictments and convictions. Others, once close to the mayor, have created a little more space in their relationships with him. Even as some have vacated their seats at their table, others have sat down to take their places.
With Adams’s decision to drop out of the mayoral race—against the urging of some of his most loyal associates—it became clear that the Table of Success was hosting its final meal. As the Adams administration enters its final days, we’ve devoted our energy to one final, definitive update to our own project. We’re calling it The Table of Success: The Last Supper.
If you gained something from perusing the Table in the past, this is a good time to take another look. Some favorite figures have taken dramatic turns, and new, late-franchise characters have been added, with their own remarkable backstories and relationships. But we also want the Table of Success to be a useful document for people looking back at this time and trying to understand it. For better or for worse, the people seated at the table helped to define Mayor Adams and the city he led. Future administrations will have their own tangled networks of power players and hangers on, and it will be our job, once again, to try to make sense of them for you. But there will only ever be one Table of Success.