Benny Polatseck

A City Hall staffer that often also worked on Adams’s campaign, Polatsek is an example of how badly Adams blurred the lines. 

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On Friday, September 5 of this year, as rumors swirled that he’d be dropping out of the mayoral race and sources blabbed to reporters about a possible Saudi ambassadorship and secret meetings with the Trump administration, Eric Adams called a last-minute 4:30 p.m. press conference at Gracie Mansion. Surely, this was it, the announcement we’d all been waiting for.

After gathering the media on the mosquito-ridden lawn of the mayoral residence, Adams’s campaign press secretary had one final question before the mayor strode out: “Benny, you ready?”

The “Benny” was Benny Polatseck, who is nominally a City Hall staffer but who, more often than not this year, was seen moonlighting as Eric Adams’s campaign videographer.

Polatseck jumped out into the front of the press scrum to make sure his camera captured Adams calling Andrew Cuomo a “snake and a liar” and his pledge to stay in the race until the bitter end (a promise that did not last a month); his video was posted on Eric Adams’s campaign account almost immediately after the press conference.

After the five-minute press conference, reporters asked Polatseck, quite fairly, where his taxpayer-funded job ended and where his volunteer campaign gig began. He didn’t answer. 

The rules for City workers are incredibly clear on when employees can do work for political campaigns. They state, “You may not use City time or City resources to engage in political campaign activities and may not use your City position to coerce others to engage in political campaign activities.”

Polatseck has made a lot of Adams’s campaign content, both videos and photos; Hell Gate personally saw him behind the lens in Flatbush in early September when Adams was filming campaign content, which featured some extremely awkward interactions with local business owners. 

Polatseck was not alone when it came to blurring the lines between City Hall staffer and campaign worker—other City Hall staffers, like Fabien Levy, also used parts of their days (and often their nights) to go to bat for Adams the candidate in person and on social media, posting direct responses to critics of the campaign during regular business hours. Asked by reporters about attending an endorsement event by law enforcement unions for Adams, Levy said it was his “lunch hour,” echoing the official City Hall line: that City employees take time off from their official jobs in order to engage in campaign-related activities.

Levy at a law enforcement endorsement event for Eric Adams reelection campaign. (Hell Gate)

According to John Kaehny, the executive director of the good government group Reinvent Albany, it’s nearly impossible to get accountability for this type of behavior. “The law seems really clear, but when you get down to the ‘oh it was my lunch hour,’ it can get way more complicated,” Kaehny said. “There’s no doubt they’re violating the spirit of the law completely, and maybe even violating the letter, but you would need to file a complaint with specifics like dates and times. But it’s almost impossible in New York City to call the ethics police to have them look into this stuff—COIB is small given the massiveness of the City bureaucracy.” 

In response to questions Hell Gate asked about Polatseck, Levy, and City Hall Press Secretary Kayla Mamelak possibly using City time to work on the Adams campaign, Mamelak wrote back, “Curious, how long do you think it takes to post a tweet? Are you seriously suggesting it takes an hour? All accounts you’re referring to are personal and that is reflected in their (my) bio. Any actual work Benny did (e.g. video) was done in his personal capacity and not during work hours.”

But a few hours after Mamelak sent that email, she appeared to realize that she’d fessed up to City workers posting on taxpayer-paid time in support of a mayoral campaign. 

Benny asked for time off or volunteered on days off when he did any work for the campaign.

For any event Fabien attended or when he gave help on the campaign, he always did it during nights/weekends or deducted it from work hours and marked it on his calendar. If he tweeted, he never did while in the building and always took the mere minutes it would take to post off the time he worked on any day.

I always did the same for posting and on my personal phone. I personally did not do much work on the campaign (outside of expressing a personal opinion on my personal page). There was one time where the mayor gave a campaign speech from Gracie (the “Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar” speech) that I assisted with in my personal capacity. I took those hours off and did not use any work resources to assist.

Hell Gate filed FOIL requests to obtain the timesheets of Polatseck, Levy, and Mamelak, in order to determine whether they match up to the times we saw them working for the campaign. And while we eventually received the timesheets, they only show the total hours worked each day by each person, and not when they took breaks during the day to do other things. On the Friday in September when Polatseck filmed the “snake and a liar” video, he only officially worked one hour that day, according to his timesheet. 

Levy and Mamelak’s timesheets however, show regular marathon workdays for the both of them, regularly clocking 11 to 13-hour days, even though they were only compensated for the regular 7-hour city workday. (Given how many hours they worked…maybe they could have gotten some better press for their boss?) 

Levy said while he was pulling long hours, it wasn’t for the campaign.

“I wasn’t very involved on the campaign, so it was only a handful of hours, but every time I volunteered in any way for the campaign or attended an event (for example his kickoff) on a weekday, I marked the time on my calendar as being off,” Levy told Hell Gate when reached for comment. “I then made sure those hours did not count towards my daily total number of hours worked on my timesheet.”

We asked the campaign (or what’s left of it) if it had kept track of how many hours Polatseck had volunteered for it. We have not heard back. We asked Polatseck a bunch of questions too, and haven’t gotten a response yet either. 

Much like other Adams comms staff (see Levy and Mamelak), Polatseck seems to view his role as being an entirely too online attack dog for the mayor. He is the owner of an X account that vacillates between promoting City initiatives; sharing his work for City Hall; defending Israel; retweeting Adams campaign material (often in the middle of the work day); and, like many of his colleagues, going after the mayor’s political antagonists, such as mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, Comptroller Brad Lander, and City Councilmember Justin Brannan.

Brannan, an antagonist of Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, one of Adams’s staunchest allies (until recently!), has long been a fixation of Polatseck. 

About Brannan, Polatseck wrote in late September, “Justin is a fraud posing as a man of the people, a political hack who never forgave the Mayor for not backing his quest for Speaker. Instead of serving New Yorkers, he spent his time scheming for revenge, blocking critical initiatives, and undermining the city’s progress.” 

In a post on X (sent in the middle of a workday), Polatseck wrote of Lander: “Brad Lander’s campaign is a $300K consultant fantasy: dress him up, strap him to a tractor, and pray voters ignore the fact he has the charisma of a dial tone.”

(Polatseck is paid $100,000 a year for his services on behalf of New Yorkers.)

The dubiousness of City Hall staffers “volunteering” for their boss’s campaign aside, we’re dying to know the answers to other questions: Was Polatseck involved in the now-infamous “morning routine” campaign video that clearly showed Adams lying about when he was filming his routine? (City Hall says Polatseck did not film it.)

And was Polatseck the videographer who, according to New York Magazine, stuck around until after midnight on a Sunday morning to film Eric Adams’s strange nine-minute video announcing he was no longer running for reelection? But to whoever shot and edited it on the campaign (or at City Hall), we do appreciate the stirring strings of Sinatra’s “My Way” that kicks it all off. 

Only in America. Only in New York.
Thank you for making my story a reality. pic.twitter.com/efHuyBnITJ

— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) September 28, 2025

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