Denise Felipe-Adams and Eric Adams (no relation) are a match made in charisma heaven. According to Felipe-Adams, she met the future mayor at a Brooklyn Democratic Party event, where she said Adams “saw me working the room with so much energy and pizzazz.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Felipe-Adams entered the world of politics under the tutelage<\/a> of Brooklyn’s first Black state senator, William C. Thompson, whose private law firm she worked for as a paralegal and, later, a personal assistant. After connecting with Adams, she worked as his special assistant in the borough president’s office. During his mayoral campaign, Felipe-Adams, who is Dominican American, was his strategic adviser for Latinx alliances. (Felipe-Adams and Adams are close enough friends that she brunches<\/a> with him and fellow confidantes Eleonora Srugo<\/a> and champagne mogul William Benson<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it came time for Adams to make appointments to head the new Mayor’s Office for Innovation and Emerging Markets, an “obscure<\/a>” agency seemingly focused largely on cryptocurrency, he turned to his former assistant, as well as NYPD Lieutenant Jonathan Salomons. The mayor forgot to publicly announce<\/a> the office\u2019s creation, and a City Hall spokesperson declined, when asked by Crain\u2019s, to pinpoint<\/a> a start date for its operations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These days, according to Crain’s, which first reported on the office’s existence<\/a>, Felipe-Adams works out of 375 Pearl Street, the Lower Manhattan building where Adams has a sort of shadow City Hall operation\u2014as Crain’s wrote, <\/strong>“top Adams lieutenants Tim Pearson<\/a> and deputy mayor Phil Banks<\/a> also reportedly work there.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When asked during a press conference<\/a> to explain why he chose Felipe-Adams and Salomons, Adams praised Felipe-Adams for “her contracting construction background, her knowledge, [and] her ability to look through large volumes of materials and say ‘Is this presentable for my agency?'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What does that agency (the creation of which is very much in line with the thinking of Adams’s informal crypto adviser <\/strong>Brock Pierce<\/a>) do, exactly, and what makes it different from, say, the Office of Technology and Innovation? In the same press conference, Adams said the new office was basically the City’s sniff test for private companies looking to score contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In New York, this has always been a Bitcoin-, blockchain-friendly city,” the mayor said<\/a> at the Security Token Summit in May 2022, a conference that listed Felipe-Adams<\/a> as one of its speakers. “I took my first three paychecks in cryptocurrency, and it was more than just looking for the investment\u2014it was to send a message: This is a city that is going to be open to innovation,” he continued. “Innovation does not wait for the comfortability of regulatory agencies and individuals. It continues to progress.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n