Almost the same time Daniel Enriquez was senselessly murdered on the Q train last Sunday, Eric Adams, dressed in a bright red jacket and navy blue pants, was pressing flesh with celebrities at an event in a few blocks.
I know Adams has only been in the job for five months, but our new mayor seems to like it — maybe a little too much — because his campaign promise to reduce violent crime is looking more and more like a bad joke. New Yorker.
Adams is a frequent customer of some of the city’s most glitzy and expensive restaurants (with 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 appearance at the Met Gala? Adams was photographed on the red carpet sporting an “End Gun Violence” jacket – as if we all needed a reminder.
Last Sunday, Adams was hanging out with Kanye West, Vogue editor Anna Wintour and others for a fashion show at the heavily fortified headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange when a maniac with nearly two dozen prior arrests allegedly shot Enriquez in a subway car.
Enriquez worked at Goldman Sachs; he was not a big banker, but a very bourgeois researcher. When he was murdered, he was taking the subway to Sunday brunch because he couldn’t afford to take an Uber to Manhattan from his home in Brooklyn.
Does all of this make Adams a bad mayor? No. Even our mayors need downtime.
But it’s part of a growing narrative about Adams’ fledgling town hall, particularly among the business elite, that he loves the trappings of the job more than doing it.
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Let down the supporters
Buyer’s remorse begins to trouble relations 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 fear they’ve been ripped off because the rot Bill de Blasio created as mayor that Adams promised to fix — runaway crime, homelessness and other quality of life issues — continues to place residents to the mercy of criminals and insane criminals.
The business world has a lot to gain from Adams doing what he said he would do, and that goes beyond profits and taxes. Most of the 500,000 people employed in banking, real estate and insurance in New York are not very wealthy merchants or investment bankers. They are average people. They work in back offices, or as cashiers or researchers, like Enriquez.
They have to take public transportation, and Adams’ campaign promises have given them — and the people who run the companies where they work — hope that they might survive their commute.
Still, crime is skyrocketing, especially in subways — crimes rose more than 50% in April from a year earlier — and bail reform has kept criminals off the streets. When you are not the victim of an assault, you realize that the taxes are still too high.
Despite the anarchy, Adams said he wants business leaders to ditch flexible pandemic work arrangements and bring the grassroots back to the office so they spend their money in bars, restaurants and shops across the city. town.
He even wants people to keep taking the subway, imploring JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon to take the train to work because it’s “safe”.
Legitimate fear of the subway
Eh? Neither Dimon nor anyone I know who can afford an Uber approaches a subway platform for fear of meeting the same fate as Michelle Go, the American Deloitte employee killed in January when she was randomly pushed in front of an oncoming train.
After Enriquez’s murder, Kathy Wylde of the Partnership for New York City, Gotham’s largest business advocacy group, had this to say about Adams and the crime: “Employers are eager to bring people back to the office, but they’re not going to issue warrants. that expose employees to bodily injury or worse.
In the private sector, business leaders are less circumspect.
“Adams needs to stop traveling, stop bullshitting everyone, and stop going to hip clubs and focusing on crime,” the CEO of a major crime corporation told me. New York.
Another suggestion: Stop saying you have your eyes on the White House while Gotham burns.
Adams met with Wylde and about 100 business leaders on Thursday to discuss Enriquez’s murder and crime, which could be the start of a dialogue forcing the mayor to come to terms with the situation.
They didn’t throw any punches, I’m told. They told him the subways weren’t safe and that was even before the murder last weekend.
Let’s hope Adams got his message and, by all means, is enjoying the city’s nightlife, restaurants, and celebrity hangouts.
But first keep your promise to make sure people like Daniel Enriquez or Michelle Go are safe, otherwise there won’t be much nightlife to enjoy.
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