“Look at a jewelry box. It might be a simple jewelry box, but you never know what your mayor might be hiding. It could be a cell phone with messages about a bribe from the Turkish government.”

Mayor Eric Adams, former Police Captain of the NYPD and the foremost figure on searching your child's room for guns and crack pipes, has been indicted on multiple criminal charges. The lengthy indictment includes charges relating to contributions to his 2021 campaign and stems back as far as 2015.

While New Yorkers and political rivals clutch their pearls and call for resignation and for the indictment to be unsealed, I think it’s important to acknowledge the role of the office. As a city mayor, it’s expected that you will manage the municipal estate, issue administrative decisions, and partake in some minor corruption. I.e., bribery, racketeering, and/or mail fraud.

Eric Adams continues one of the most storied political traditions of the office: accepting bribes, appointing friends, and extorting businesses for political and personal gain. What? Mayors can’t even be mayors anymore?

Good mayoral candidates are upfront about their intentions to exploit the position to their advantage. Mayor Adams, however, may have flown too close to the sun with his frequent dinners at upscale restaurants and odd public appearances. Including this bizarre praise of New York: “This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open. And, that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”

I guess being off-putting and unlikeable might have just been too much for the FBI to overlook his mayoral duties of bribery and corruption. The prosecuted mayor remains hopeful that a year-long investigation and multiple raids and seizures might just be a one-off. In a public statement, he shared, “I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers, I would be a target — and a target I became. If I am charged, I am innocent.”

Unfortunately, it does not look good for the Mayor. As he once said in a video about combating gun violence, “Where there is smoke, there is fire. Where there are multiple homes searched and phones seized, there is a corrupt mayor.”