Brother Bernard will earn $ 242,000 a year
He’s been driving America’s largest city for a few days, but Eric Adams it is already at the center of the controversy. Some accuse him of handling the first appointments as “a family affair”, ignoring concerns on the ethics front. So within a week – he writes The newspaper – the new mayor of New York placed the younger brother Bernard in the prestigious chair of deputy chief of police and promoted his closest friend to deputy mayor, a former policeman forced to leave his uniform because he was involved in a corruption case. Both appointments, unlike the others, took place quietly, as if to confirm choices that were at least controversial and which raise legitimate doubts on the conflict of interest front.
Not that it’s embarrassing Adams, the former agent that his opponents define arrogant and a bit braggart in his always showing himself decisive and sure of himself. So much so that he, speaking in a school in the Bronx, replied to his detractors, riding on the criticisms: «When a mayor shows himself arrogant, the city shows bravado. Leadership should always have a fair amount of bravado. This is what has been missing in New York in recent years ».
Meanwhile, the brother Bernard (“We are separated at birth with Eric,” he said during the election campaign) will earn $ 242,000 a year working alongside the first female African-American commissioner in the history of the NYPD. Keechant Sewell. It is not clear – it always reads on The newspaper – if the ethics commission of the city – if only to dispel any suspicion – will evaluate the case of fact unprecedented in recent times. Because if Michael Bloomberg gave his sister a job at the United Nations and Bill de Blasio his wife Chirlaine for a program against mental illness, they were unpaid roles.
The appointment as deputy mayor of the companion also makes noise Philip Banks, who with the delegation for public safety will work alongside the other five female deputy mayors. Banks’s brother David had already settled in the city administration as councilor for the school. And even his partner Sheena Wright, nominated as a deputy mayor. “New Yorkers expect public administrators to be recruited on the basis of their abilities and not because they have kinship or friendship relations with the mayor,” attack some representatives of city associations.
And the choices of Adams they also create irritation within his own party, with the Democratic left already on a war footing over the positions of the “sheriff mayor” on security and public order and his criticisms of the severe anti-Covid restrictions decided by his predecessor.