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It Will Take Years to Fully Grasp Eric Adams’s Corruption

21 9
21.01.2026

New York has inaugurated a brand-new mayor, but investigators and prosecutors will be processing the wreckage of Eric Adams’s scandal-plagued administration for years to come. The mountain of corruption seems to be far taller and stinkier than was generally known, and the ex-mayor has been busy adding new offal to the heap.

Just last week, Adams called reporters to Times Square, where he began hyping a digital asset called the NYC Token. It was part of what seems to be a grifty, multimillion-dollar memecoin hustle, known as a “rug pull,” in which investors are encouraged to buy a cryptocurrency asset by operators who quietly siphon off the invested money, leaving buyers with little or nothing. Adams and/or his unnamed partners in NYC Token may have netted a million dollars in the space of a few hours.

“The former mayor launches a memecoin, does a rug pull, and makes off like a bandit,” an exasperated former aide to Adams, Jonah Allon, posted on X.  “Maybe it doesn’t meet the threshold for illegality, it’s just tawdry and unethical like much of his tenure in public life.”

New Yorkers can be forgiven for concluding that the string of City Hall scandals over the last four years feel like one rug pull after another.

The day after the NYC Token crashed, Adams’s longtime ally Tony Herbert, who held a high-ranking community outreach position at City Hall under Adams, was indicted on fraud and bribery........

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