David Paterson

The former governor has connections to everyone—but goes way back with Mayor Eric Adams. 

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In 2021, former Governor David Paterson didn’t play a huge role in the Democratic mayoral primary, but he did endorse his long-time pal Eric Adams, describing him as a unifier of Democrats in the city. 

“Eric Adams has been to the most diverse places in the city,” Paterson said at the time. “He has sought support from every community. He has sought support from communities that sometimes have been antagonistic to each other, but they both trust him.” 

He shared a similar message to the New York Times shortly before Adams was elected: “You know who was ringing my phone saying, ‘You’ve got to endorse Eric’? It wasn’t African Americans. It was people I knew in the Orthodox community in Brooklyn.” 

He added, “This should be a very interesting experience for us, having him as mayor.” 

Paterson would know, given that their relationship stretched back decades to when Adams was a state senator and Paterson was the lieutenant governor, and then governor after Eliot Spitzer resigned in 2008. 

And while history has not been kind when it comes to Paterson’s tenure (he appointed Kirsten Gillibrand to the vacant U.S. Senate seat left by Hillary Clinton, for one, and presided over several rocky austerity budgets as New York tried to claw itself out of the 2008 fiscal crisis), it was one particular episode involving then-State Senator Eric Adams that today, looks even more dubious with the benefit of time.. 

In 2010, Paterson handed out a deal to AEG, a developer that wanted to run video slot machines at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, in exchange for a $300 million payment from AEG that Paterson was counting on to balance the budget.

But state investigators were somehow tipped off that during the contract bidding process, legislators had been leaking information to AEG, and that Paterson, who was running in that year’s gubernatorial election, had steered the deal to AEG in an effort to win an endorsement from a prominent Queens pastor, kicking off a far-reaching investigation. In a 308-page report, investigators found the deal signed off on by Paterson was marked by what the state’s Inspector General termed “militant indifference” to the public’s best interest. 

Also implicated in the deal, according to the investigators’ report? Eric Adams, who investigators found exhibited “exceedingly poor judgment” as the chair of the State Senate’s Standing Committee on Racing, Gaming and Wagering, whose job it was to oversee the bidding process. 

Investigators zeroed in on a January 2010 Manhattan dinner attended by Adams, then-Governor Paterson, and the soon-to-be indicted Leader of the Senate’s Democratic Conference John Sampson. During that dinner, Adams (who had taken campaign donations from AEG, after the state’s Democratic Senate Campaign Committee solicited donations for senators including Adams) and Sampson (who allegedly leaked internal state documents to AEG to help its bid) urged Paterson to select AEG for the slot machine contract. 

Of that dinner, Paterson told investigators that “my understanding was that Senator Adams was asked by Senator Sampson to conduct an evaluation of all the groups, that they had some kind of a process, and at the end of the process that Adams became convinced that AEG was the best alternative.” Why did he agree with Adams and Sampson? “What was in my mind was the budget. I just wanted to get this over with,” he said. 

But Adams denied to investigators that he was at that dinner. Instead, in his telling, he simply came across Paterson, Sampson, and an AEG lobbyist at a restaurant and just, in Adams’s words, “said hello to them, and I moved on.”

The investigators were less than impressed. 

“​​Adams’s version of events strains credulity,” they wrote in the report. 

All of the alleged scheming ended up being for nought. The state agency in charge of licensing the casino refused to hand over the gaming license to AEG, tossing out its bid. (Despite the IG report concluding that the process was “a veritable case study in dysfunctional and politically driven government,” no corruption charges at the state or federal level were ever filed because of the shenanigans.) 

The casino-bidding scandal, along with allegations that he engaged in witness tampering to help one of his staffers who was facing a domestic violence charge (the staffer eventually pled guilty to second-degree harassment) doomed Paterson’s political future. He dropped out of the gubernatorial race that February. Weeks later, he was embroiled in scandal once again, after an investigation by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo into whether he unlawfully accepted five free Yankees tickets,

But he hasn’t gone away—or forgotten his old friends (Cuomo and Paterson reconciled after Cuomo became governor). 

Since his extremely short time as governor, Paterson has had a brief stint as an MTA board member (appointed by Cuomo) and was head of the state’s Democratic Party during the 2014 elections, where he, along with Cuomo put up almost no effort to help Democrats gain power of the state legislature.

Through it all, however, his tight friendship with Eric Adams has remained (mostly) intact. 

“When I got accused of any, everything that ever happened, when there was a storm, it got blamed on me,” Paterson recalled recently of his time as governor. “Eric would call me once a week to see how I was doing.”

As Adams’s mayoralty began to go sideways, Paterson remained a staunch defender of the increasingly beleaguered mayor, working as a “booster” for Adams’s legal defense fund, which formed after his campaign staffer Brianna Suggs was raided by the feds in 2023. At the time, Paterson told the New York Post that “the allegations and rumors about the mayor and his campaign are unsubstantiated, and it is vital that New Yorkers understand no formal accusations have been made.”

As those “allegations and rumors” became a federal indictment in September 2024 and multiple politicians called on Adams to resign, Paterson said those calls were “really outrageous.” (Paterson was perhaps going through it, as they say, at that time, as in addition to defending his pal, he also found the energy to fight a group of teens on the Upper East Side, after he and his stepson told the teens to stop climbing up a fire escape.)

That stepson, BTW, is the child of Curtis Sliwa and Mary Paterson (formerly Sliwa). The Sliwas divorced in 2012, and Paterson married Mary Sliwa in 2019, yet another incredible connection that Paterson has to the players in the 2025 mayoral election.  

When 2025 rolled around, it was pretty safe to say Paterson wouldn’t endorse Curtis, but it wasn’t at all clear if he would stand by Adams.

He started out the campaign season by signing on as a strategist for the independent candidate Jim Walden, but he was fired by Walden in December 2024 for (truthfully) saying that Walden was “not a factor” in the race.

That gig seems to have upset Adams. In November 2024, shortly after Paterson had taken the role with Walden’s campaign, an anonymous adviser close to Mayor Adams told Politico that Paterson had “disgraced himself” by working for Walden. 

“The former governor is a flat-out failure, and he’s willing to betray his friend in order to secure some shekels,” the anonymous source said. Paterson told Politico in response to the bad-mouther that “karma will visit them.” Maybe it did! We’ll never know. 

Perhaps some hurt feelings remained between the two. After leaving Walden’s campaign, Paterson didn’t endorse Adams, but backed Cuomo for mayor just two weeks before the June primary. He was with Adams, he said, until “he had these problems.”

We’ve reached out to Paterson for comment, but have not received a response. 

After Cuomo was embarrassingly defeated in June, Paterson engaged in some soul-searching in order to find the right candidate to defeat Zohran Mamdani. At a July press conference, alongside his radio employer John Catsimatidis and fellow 770 AM radio personality Sid Rosenberg, Paterson convened a group of, in his words “New York political leaders and stakeholders” to share their proposal: choosing just one fearless leader to take Mamdani down in November.

“What I’m trying to focus on today,” said Paterson, “is who will emerge from that group to lead the City,” referring to all the independent candidates at the time—Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and Jim Walden. Paterson added that Mamdani was a “poison,” asking the crowd “tell me where socialism has ever worked?”

Just a month later, however, the proposal had apparently run its course: Paterson was coming home to Eric Adams. 

“His scorecard is incredible,” Paterson said of Adams when endorsing him for reelection, six weeks before Adams dropped out of the race.

The same could not be said of Paterson’s. A few weeks before Election Day, he endorsed Cuomo, again. 

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