HOW MUCH LONGER CAN THE ERIC ADAMS MACHINE LAST? CITY HAUL

In mid-september, shortly after the New York City police chief resigned amid a federal criminal investigation and Mayor Eric Adams’s chief counsel quit, apparently because her client wasn’t heeding legal advice, and a couple of retired Fire Department officials were arrested on bribery charges, Ingrid Lewis-Martin disappeared from City Hall.

- Andrew Rice

At federal court in Manhattan on September 27.

Lewis-Martin had long been the most loyal and indispensable of Adams’s advisers—he brings the swagger; she swings the stick—so her sudden absence was noted in the building. “She’s not in this country,” one Adams critic told me. “I hear she is on a beach.” Questions kept bubbling up. Was she fighting with Adams? Was she cutting a deal with the Feds? Was she gone from City Hall for good?

In fact, Lewis-Martin was in Japan on what her attorney later described as a personally financed “friend trip,” sightseeing with a group that included the city official and former state senator from Brooklyn Jesse Hamilton, real-estate executive Diana Boutross, and former state assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV. “It was pure vacation,” says Powell, who chronicled his highlights—resort hotels, bullet trains, a night out in Roppongi, a geisha show—on Instagram. The whole time, though, LewisMartin’s phone was buzzing. One day, the FBI was searching the interim police commissioner’s house, reportedly looking for classified documents. The health commissioner announced he was on the way out the door and was soon followed by the schools chancellor, whose phone had been seized. City Hall reporters were pestering Lewis-Martin for comment. Rumors were rampant that the mayor was about to go down. On September 26, at around 10 a.m. Tokyo time, the news leaked that Adams had been indicted on corruption charges—a long-anticipated but nonetheless shocking moment in the city’s history.

The next day, Lewis-Martin flew home to a city on the brink of a municipal civil war. Some prominent officeholders, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had already called for Adams to resign.