Almost the very moment Daniel Enriquez was senselessly murdered last Sunday on the Q train, Eric Adams, dressed in designer bright-red jacket and navy-blue pants, was pressing the flesh with celebs at an event a few blocks away.
I know Adams has been in the job only five months, but wining and dining with the cool kids is something our new mayor seems to enjoy — maybe a bit too much — as his campaign promise to reduce violent crime increasingly looks like a bad joke on New Yorkers.
Adams is a frequent customer at some of the city’s glitziest and most pricey restaurants (on a salary of around $250,000). He recently partied in Beverly Hills with Dave Chappelle after attending the Milken Institute Global Conference. And who can forget his Met Gala appearance? Adams was photographed on the red carpet sporting an “End Gun Violence” jacket — as if we all need to be reminded.
Last Sunday, Adams was hanging with Kanye West, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and others for a fashion show at the New York Stock Exchange’s heavily fortified headquarters when a maniac with nearly two dozen prior arrests allegedly shot Enriquez dead in a subway car.
Enriquez worked at Goldman Sachs; he wasn’t a fat-cat banker, but a very middle-class researcher. When he was murdered, he was taking the subway headed to Sunday brunch because he couldn’t afford to Uber it into Manhattan from his home in Brooklyn.
Does all this make Adams a bad mayor? No. Even our mayors need to have some downtime.
But it’s part of a growing narrative about Adams’ nascent mayoralty, particularly among the business elite, that he loves the trappings of the job more than doing it.
Letting down supporters
Buyer’s remorse is starting to roil the relationship between the mayor and the city’s business leaders. They were among his biggest supporters, writing checks left and right because he promised to make the city safe for them and their workers.
And now they’re worried that they’ve been conned because the rot that Bill de Blasio created as mayor and Adams promised to fix — out-of-control crime, homelessness and other quality-of-life issues — continues to place residents at the mercy of criminals and the criminally insane.
The business community has a lot at stake in Adams doing what he said he would do and it goes beyond profits and taxes. Most of the 500,000 people employed in banking, real estate and insurance in NYC aren’t super-rich traders or investment bankers. They are average people. They toil in back offices, or as tellers or researchers, like Enriquez.
They need to take public transportation, and Adams’ campaign promises gave them — and the people who run the companies where they work — hope they could survive their commute.
Yet crime is soaring, particularly on subways — felonies are up more than 50% in April compared to a year earlier — and bail reform has kept criminals on the streets. When you’re not being mugged, you realize taxes are still too high.
Despite the lawlessness, Adams said he wants business leaders to drop flexible pandemic work arrangements and bring the rank-and-file back to the office so they spend their money in city bars, restaurants and shops.
He even wants people to keep taking the subway, imploring JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon to ride the train to work because it’s “safe.”
Legitimate subway fear
Huh? Neither Dimon nor anyone I know who can afford an Uber is going near any subway platform out of fear they’ll suffer the same fate as Michelle Go, the Deloitte US employee killed in January when she was randomly shoved in front of an oncoming train.
Following the Enriquez murder, Kathy Wylde of the Partnership for New York City, Gotham’s largest business advocacy group, had this to say about Adams and crime: “Employers are eager to bring people back to the office, but they are not going to issue mandates that expose employees to personal injury or worse.”
In private, business leaders are less circumspect.
“Adams needs to stop traveling, stop bulls–tting everybody and stop going to hot clubs and focus on crime,” a CEO of a prominent NYC company told me.
Another suggestion: Stop leaking that you have your eyes on the White House while Gotham is burning.
Adams met with Wylde and about 100 business leaders on Thursday to discuss the Enriquez murder and crime, which could be the start of a dialogue that forces the mayor to come to grips with the situation.
They didn’t pull any punches, I am told. They told him the subways aren’t safe and that was even before last weekend’s slaying.
Let’s hope Adams got their message and, by all means, enjoys the city’s nightlife, restaurants and hanging with celebs.
But first live up to your promise to make sure people like Daniel Enriquez or Michelle Go are safe, or there won’t be much of a nightlife to enjoy.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
