A surprising details arose in the backlog of documents released over the federal corruption case of Mayor Eric Adams: the mayor used at least seven different mobile telephone numbers during the period of the years in which he was investigated.
Mr Adams had an easy explanation why he had so many telephones.
“You have your office telephone, you have your personal phone – you can’t mix the two,” Mr Adams told reporters during the weekend and added: “Many New Yorkers have different phones. I also had my campaign telephone. There is a series of telephones you have.”
The mayor said he should get extra telephones after the federal authorities had stopped him on the street in November 2023 and his electronic devices took as part of the investigation.
It was a glimpse into the personal life of a man whose habits are often dressed in uncertainty – his place of residence is sometimes difficult to pin, and he is rarely seen in public with his old partner – and has long been the subject of public curiosity.
The mayor’s many devices were a prominent part of the federal research that led to His indictment in September on Five countsIncluding bribery, wire fraud and requests from illegal foreign donations. Mr Adams has maintained his innocence.
The FBI obtained Warrants to follow the location of Mr Adams with the help of mobile phone data and discovered that he had used seven different telephone numbers since the research began in August 2021, according to the roughly 1,700 pages with documents from his business that were released on Friday.
The charges against Mr Adams were eventually rejected after the Trump administration had asked to drop the case, a request that the Interim -Mamerican lawyer, Danielle R. Sassoon, to resign Instead of carrying out an order that she mentioned an apparent “quid pro quo” in exchange for help with the immigration efforts of Mr. Trump.
During the investigation, Mr Adams encouraged the use of so many telephones to ask the FBI to ask permission to use a “cell site simulator” to discover other devices near Mr Adams, it was known that they used, an attempt to identify new numbers that Mr Adams might have used.
The FBI approached Mr Adams in November 2023 and grabbed two or three iPhones and an iPad from him, but the mayor did not wear his personal phone, who called the FBI ‘the goalkellable’, according to the Warrant files. The next day Mr Adams’s lawyers turned that phone, a Gray Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max that Mr Adams said he had locked himself up and could not remember the password, and another phone.
When agents searched Gracie Mansion in September 2024, more electronic devices were seized: two more iPhones, an iPad with a “NYC Mayor’s Office” sticker and an Iridium satellite telephone that was in a protective case next to Mr. Adams.
In the town hall on Tuesday, Mr Adams brought to the tactics used by the federal authorities. He said it was his dyslexia who prevented him from remembering the password on his primary phone and that their deliberations about seizing his devices at the finish line of the 2023 New York City Marathon were meant to humiliate him.
“They wanted to take my phones with the damn marathon,” he said.
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