Mayor Eric Adams and his high-priced lawyers have said they intend to fight to clear his name in the federal bribery and campaign finance charges he’s now facing, demanding a speedy trial and already taking pot shots at a key witness against him.
How he’s going to pay for all that remains a mystery. On Tuesday his legal defense fund disclosed it’s already $43,000 in the red.
The fund, set up by the mayor a year ago shortly after the FBI confiscated his electronic devices and raided the home of his campaign fundraiser, operates under the oversight of the city’s ethics board and limits donations to $5,000 per person. It has raised more than $1.8 million in donations over the past year and refunded $138,000, according to the filings made public this week.
That leaves $1.67 million. As of last week, however, the fund had already burned through $1.72 million, mostly to pay legal fees to two firms: Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, which is representing him in the criminal case, and Pitta LLP, which is running the fund and overseeing his 2025 bid for re-election.
Vito Pitta, co-managing partner of Pitta LLP and longtime legal advisor for Adams’ campaigns, did not respond to THE CITY’s questions about how the mayor intends to pay for his lawyers going forward.
Adams has already received some legal services at a steep discount, helping him stretch his funds further. In a case that centers on Adams’ alleged fraud in exploiting the city’s public campaign funds matching program by funneling in prohibited donations, his own defense could creatively keep its costs down — including by letting bills go unpaid, a strategy used by his predecessor Bill de Blasio.
Since the indictment against Adams was unsealed three weeks ago, the mayor has repeatedly proclaimed he intends to run for re-election next year and to fight back aggressively against everything Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams throws at him. That starts with his hiring of attorney Alex Spiro, who has been known to charge $2,000 per hour and who has a reputation for refusing to compromise for his high-profile clients, who have included Jay-Z and Elon Musk.
That line-in-the-sand strategy was on full display earlier this month when Spiro stood before Manhattan federal judge Dale Ho and demanded a trial as soon as possible while attacking the credibility of a former Adams’ staffer, Rana Abbasova, who is cooperating with prosecutors in the case against the mayor.
Ho set a strict schedule for both sides to lob legal attacks and counter attacks that stretches into late January. The judge has yet to set a trial date but if the case goes forward it’s unlikely to begin until the spring — not long before the June primary Adams hopes to win.
To date, Adams’ legal defense fund has spent more than $1.4 million just on Wilmer Cutler and Pitta LLP and has yet to disclose any payments to Spiro who works for a third firm, Quinn Emanuel. It’s not clear how much Spiro is going to charge the mayor, but when he previously represented the mayor in a civil sexual assault lawsuit, he gave Adams a steep discount, charging him $250 an hour.
On Wednesday a spokesperson for Spiro declined to comment on his financial arrangement with Adams as the case moves forward.
Cash Flow Slows
Under city Conflicts of Interest Board rules, no individual may give more than the $5,000 and people doing business with City Hall, and their family members, are not allowed to contribute at all.
The latest legal defense fund report, covering the quarter from July through September, shows new donors who include (along with family members) Madison Square Garden empire patriarch Charles Dolan, hedge fund manager and charter school champion Daniel Loeb, and music industry honcho Irving Azoff.
Yet the fund raised just $92,500 in all during the most recent three months, while Adams’ personal financial disclosures fall short of the sums that would be needed to mount the kind of aggressive defense his team promises.
Among the possible paths ahead for Adams is the one taken by former Mayor Bill de Blasio throughout law enforcement investigations into his political fundraising: as THE CITY has reported, de Blasio racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts to his law firm, Kramer Levin, which also does significant amounts of business with New York City government.
De Blasio left City Hall in December 2021 owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kramer Levin. Including interest typically charged on such debts, the sum now amounts to some $435,000, which appears to remain unpaid to this day.
De Blasio did not return THE CITY’s call asking whether he has paid the firm any of that, and Barry Berke, the Kramer Levin attorney who handled his case, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Meanwhile, Adams is also struggling to raise contributions for his 2025 re-election bid. Since his indictment was unsealed Sept. 26, he has received just one donation: $1,000 from a donor who lives in Miami Beach. And in his last campaign fundraising period from July through mid-October, he managed to scrape up $146,000, less than the $315,000 raised by city Comptroller Brad Lander and the $180,000 raised by former Comptroller Scott Stringer, both of whom are running for his job.
Still unknown is whether Adams will qualify for public matching funds, which provide $8 for every $1 raised up to $250 from New York City donors and are at the heart of the criminal case against him.
In his 2021 bid, Adams’ obtained more than $10 million in matching funds, more than the $8 million he’d raised from private sources. The federal indictment accuses the mayor of knowingly accepting illegal “straw donations” — with some of that money, including from foreign sources, funneled through New Yorkers to appear as legitimate small donations that qualified for matching funds.
The city Campaign Finance Board must now decide whether to grant Adams another round of matching funds in December, the next time it issues funding to candidates. Councilmember Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn), a consistent critic of the mayor, has already demanded that the CFB refuse to grant Adams any matching funds.
The CFB has said it is carefully reviewing the indictment as they weigh the campaign’s request for matching funds.
