Mayor Eric Adams has made no secret of his affinity for New York City’s business community and his willingness to take private meetings with wealthy people. But a new report exposing how a group of billionaires pressed Adams to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University showed an exceptionally direct level of influence on a highly fraught issue.
A Washington Post article published Thursday took readers inside a WhatsApp group chat, formed with the intention of shaping public opinion on the Gaza war in Israel’s favor. Its members included billionaire Len Blavatnik, real estate developer and department store founder Joseph Sitt, investor Daniel Loeb and Kind snack food founder Daniel Lubetsky.
The story revealed that members of the chat held a Zoom call with Mayor Adams on April 26, days after he first deployed police to arrest protesters at Columbia. The members also described plans to hire private investigators to help the New York Police Department, and tried to organize campaign donations to Adams in hopes of rewarding him for suppressing what they viewed as antisemitic activities, the Post reported.
Some of those involved in the influence efforts have interests before the city that go beyond what was described in the article. Sitt, who reportedly suggested hiring the private investigators, is among the real estate developers angling for a lucrative casino license, pitching a Coney Island project that would require support from officials including Adams.
“As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them,” Sitt reportedly wrote in the chat on April 27, the day after their call with Adams.
Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born business magnate, was among the people who donated the maximum $5,000 to Adams’ legal defense fund, created to defray the costs of the federal probe into his 2021 campaign. (Blavatnik gave another $2,100 to Adams’ campaign to support his “stand against antisemitism,” a spokeswoman told the Post, although the April donation has not yet appeared in campaign finance records.)
John Kaehny, executive director of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, said the reported behavior is “par for the course” in a city where wealthy people have long enjoyed greater access to elected officials. More troubling, he said, is the fact that private citizens appeared to believe they could influence the actions of the NYPD.
“Deploying the city’s armed police to do this kind of intervention, that’s the biggest concern,” Kaehny said. “That’s a government action that is oriented towards the use of force, and it’s discretionary.”
The article makes no claim that the chat members had any direct effect on Adams’ deployment of the NYPD, which came only after Columbia administrators allowed police onto campus to arrest protesters on two occasions in April. The mayor’s office said private investigators never assisted the NYPD, and the mayor’s top spokesman accused the Post of trafficking in antisemitic stereotypes by describing a secret influence campaign.
“To be clear, both times the NYPD entered Columbia’s campus — on April 18th & April 30th — were in response to specific written requests from Columbia University to do so,” Fabien Levy, the deputy mayor for communications, wrote in a Friday morning post on the website X. “The suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false.”
But some who were already critical of Adams’ decision to authorize force against the protesters — and his coziness with the business world — pounced on the article.
“It couldn’t be more obvious that Mayor Adams is taking his cues from his billionaire donors,” said Jasmine Gripper and Ana María Archila, co-directors of the left-wing Working Families Party, in a statement Friday. “Mayor Adams continues to act in the interest of the ultra-rich, while ignoring the real and urgent needs of the working people who keep our city running.”
Adams, who once famously proclaimed “I am real estate,” regularly meets with — and receives campaign donations from — a wide range of business leaders. Crain’s reported in January that his personal calendar, obtained through a public records request, showed meetings with figures like Extell Development CEO Gary Barnett, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and hedge fund magnate Bill Ackman — whom the Post also identified as a member of the WhatsApp chat.
Adams’ April 26 Zoom call with the pro-Israel businesspeople, reportedly held around 11 a.m., was never listed on the mayor’s public schedule that day. Kaehny, of Reinvent Albany, argued that the mayor should have disclosed the talks.
“This is the kind of thing that the mayor should talk about publicly — ‘By the way, I am getting asked by major figures, world billionaires, to do this kind of thing,’” Kaehny said. “This strikes to the heart of transparency and basic notions of democracy.”
Nick Garber , 2024-05-17 19:29:28
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