THE ERIC ADAMS SMASH - AND - GRAB

It's a brazenly transactional era of government here in New York City.| FRANK CARONE is its master practitioner.

- DAVID FREEDLANDER

One afternoon last spring at Casa Cipriani, a members-only club at the foot of Manhattan, Frank Carone was sitting in a plush upholstered chair, barking into his phone. “You don’t have Waze?!” he said. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Apparently his app is broken.” Carone, a lawyer whose connections to Mayor Eric Adams allow him to charge clients with business before the city $20,000 a month, was on the line with a driver who was attempting to deliver several palm trees to his waterfront mansion in Mill Basin. The trees have to be planted anew every year after northeastern weather takes its toll.

Carone’s neighborhood, in the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, can feel more like Miami Beach than New York. His extravagantly decorated property—“Baroque is the word I would use,” said a visitor— is where he began hosting fundraisers in the early aughts for a rising generation of then obscure Brooklyn Democrats, including Bill de Blasio and Hakeem Jeffries. One of the regulars at his soirées was Adams, who was just getting into politics after a career as a police officer. Years before the 2021 mayoral race began in earnest, Carone went all in on Adams, soliciting donations and acting as one of his most trusted advisers. When Adams won, in part by following Carone’s advice to position himself as a centrist and ignore the party’s left wing, he rewarded Carone by naming him chief of staff.