Last Friday, the day Eric Adams made history as the first sitting mayor of New York City to be arraigned in federal court, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his chief adviser, stepped off an international flight at J.F.K. airport and found federal and state law-enforcement agents waiting for her. Representatives from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office wanted her phones. “I need a phone,” she told them, jet-lagged and annoyed. An investigator suggested that he could have her arrested right there in the terminal. She gave up her device. A federal agent then stepped forward and handed Lewis-Martin a subpoena. Lewis-Martin, who many consider the second most powerful person in New York City government, borrowed a friend’s phone to call her lawyer, Arthur Aidala.
Aidala was once profiled by the Times under the headline “The Nice-Guy Lawyer for America’s Tabloid Villains.” About a year ago, Lewis-Martin began doing a weekly interview segment on his talk radio program, “The Arthur Aidala Power Hour.” After the airport, Lewis-Martin went to Aidala’s office and, after debriefing with him, went on his evening program, as scheduled. “This is something I would definitely not normally do, which is put a client on the radio,” Aidala said, acknowledging the unorthodox situation. But in all his years as a criminal-defense attorney, he said, he had never had a client “so adamant in the fact that they did nothing wrong.” Lewis-Martin had insisted that they play her regular intro music: the 1979 disco classic “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” by McFadden & Whitehead. She then delivered a line as revealing about local politics as anything ever said by the proud bosses of Tammany Hall. “We are imperfect, but we’re not thieves,” she said. “We have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the D.A.’s office to investigate us.”
It was typical of Lewis-Martin to talk of “we” and “us.” Despite having little public profile outside the tightly knit world of municipal politics, no one has had closer access to or more influence over Adams during the course of his political career. Lewis-Martin, a Christian chaplain and former public middle-school social-studies teacher, ran Adams’s 2006 campaign for a seat in the State Senate, when he made the jump from the N.Y.P.D. to elected office. (Lewis-Martin’s husband and Adams were buddies at the police academy in the nineteen-eighties.) As Adams’s profile in the city rose, Lewis-Martin deliberately cultivated a reputation as his enforcer and watchdog. “I’m not Michelle Obama,” she once told a reporter. “When they go low? We drill for oil.” She added, “I’ll meet you down in the subbasement.”
Few in or around City Hall can give you a concise description of Lewis-Martin’s role in Adams’s administration. “She could get Eric to do things that others couldn’t get him to do,” a former administration official told me. At a meeting with senior staff, Adams once used a football metaphor to describe her role, saying that Lewis-Martin ran his “special teams,” according to two people familiar with the meeting. No current or former city official I spoke with was surprised that she’s been caught up in a federal investigation. On “The Arthur Aidala Power Hour,” Lewis-Martin said that, despite talk from reporters covering City Hall that she was coöperating with investigators, she was standing by Adams. She’d merely spent the previous two weeks on an oddly timed vacation to Japan with several Adams associates. “They had the big rumor flying, that I went away and I’m never coming back,” she said. “I’m going to be with my brother.”
Whether Adams will stay loyal to his people, and vice versa, is a central question of Adams’s remaining time as mayor. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who has called Lewis-Martin to testify in front of a grand jury, clearly hopes everyone will flip on everyone. On Wednesday, a public-corruption prosecutor from Williams’s office told a federal judge that it was “likely” that they would bring charges against additional people in connection with Adams’s criminal case. It sends quite a signal, charging Adams first. Why would anyone stand up for a boss who’s already going down? When I contacted Aidala to ask whether Lewis-Martin planned to answer any questions that might be put to her in front of the grand jury, or whether she might plead the Fifth, he told me, “We’re going to coöperate to the best of our ability. But there’s things that they’re asking and looking for that don’t exist.” He added, “She’s not going to hurt Eric in any way, shape, or form.” A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.
Loyalty, of the kind he learned while wearing an N.Y.P.D. uniform, is the secret code of Adams’s politics. It explains much of what seems inexplicable about his tenure as mayor. According to documents I obtained last year, Lewis-Martin has continued to work for him even through periods when she felt her own life was in danger. “I am reiterating and stating for the record that I am in fear of my personal safety,” she wrote in an e-mail to Adams in the summer of 2018, when he was Brooklyn borough president—around the same time period that federal prosecutors now say he was accepting flight upgrades, posh hotel stays, and meals courtesy of Turkish officials and citizens. “This is an extremely bad situation,” Lewis-Martin wrote. Her e-mail concerned an altercation that she had with a Brooklyn grifter close to Adams named Lamor Whitehead, known in the tabloids as the Bling Bishop, whose exploits I wrote about last year for the magazine.
In response to the corruption scandal now engulfing his administration, Adams has insisted that he holds those around him to the same high standard he holds himself to. The documents I have undercut this claim. They show just how tolerant he can be of those he lets into his inner circle. His enabling of Whitehead even tested his relationship with Lewis-Martin, who took drastic steps to try to get him to see things her way. “I am officially notifying you, as my principal, about the threats and attempted assault,” she wrote to Adams. “If anything happens it is on your watch and under your rule.”
In 2021, Vanity Fair asked Adams to name the best concert he had ever been to. “Curtis Mayfield at the Wingate Concert Series,” he said, referring to an infamous show Mayfield played in Brooklyn in the summer of 1990. During the performance, a lighting rig above the stage got knocked loose in a wind storm and fell on Mayfield, leaving him paralyzed. “It was an amazing concert before that happened,” Adams said. “Just so unfortunate.”
Free summer concerts in Wingate Park are an old political tradition in central Brooklyn. With support from the borough president’s office, private companies with interests in the borough sponsored the free outdoor shows—an arrangement that drew some scrutiny in Borough President Marty Markowitz’s day. But big acts came through—Wyclef Jean, Salt-N-Pepa, Aretha Franklin—and the shows drew large, grateful audiences. In 2014, when Adams succeeded Markowitz as borough president, he enthusiastically inherited the concert series. It was a highlight of his calendar every summer.
In 2017, according to records I received from Brooklyn Borough Hall in response to a Freedom of Information Law request, the shows almost didn’t happen. The organizers of the shows got into a billing dispute, and pulled out at the last minute. Lewis-Martin, as senior adviser to the borough president, got involved to save the event. She got in touch with Whitehead for help. Whitehead was a church leader who had done time in Sing Sing for identity theft, and Lewis-Martin never liked him—she had been complaining to Adams about Whitehead since he first popped up near Adams a few years earlier. But Whitehead had connections in the music and entertainment industries, and Lewis-Martin apparently put aside her concerns for the sake of the concerts. “I spoke to President Adams,” she wrote in an e-mail to a group of people including Whitehead that May. “We know that we must use a not-for-profit. He and I will conduct outreach calls to some sponsors who we feel will be able to quickly generate some funds.” With Whitehead’s involvement, the shows went ahead that summer. Performers included Erica Campbell, Big Daddy Kane, and James (D-Train) Williams. Sponsors listed on promotional materials for the shows included Con Edison, Pepsi, and Investors Bank.
Adams has always denied involving Whitehead in any official government function, or being involved himself in any of Whitehead’s various business ventures. Whitehead spent years trying to build his church and advance his private interests by dropping Adams’s name all over town. His involvement in the 2017 Wingate concerts seems to have emboldened him. One night during the series the following summer, he and Lewis-Martin had a fight. Lewis-Martin memorialized the event in an e-mail to Adams’s official Brooklyn Borough Hall account, which is archived by law. “Good afternoon President Adams,” she wrote. “Attached is a copy of a police report.” According to the report, at 11:35 P.M. on August 15th, Whitehead had confronted Lewis-Martin in a “restricted” backstage area, waved a finger in her face, and screamed, “I’m going to take care of you” and “I’m going to do you in.” In her e-mail, Lewis-Martin said that she wanted Adams to put “safeguards” in place to keep Whitehead away from her. “I am concerned for my safety and welfare, as well as for members of my immediate family,” she wrote. “One should be able to be at work without fear of being physically or verbally assaulted.”
