Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York

[Gunnar Larson]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/frank-carone-eric-adams-mayor-new-york.html



The Eric Adams Smash-and-Grab It’s a brazenly transactional era of
government here in New York City. Frank Carone is its master practitioner.
By David Freedlander, a writer covering New York and national politics for
New York Magazine

At Casa Cipriani. Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading
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One afternoon last spring at Casa Cipriani, a members-only club at the foot
of Manhattan, Frank Carone was sitting in a plush upholstered chair,
barking into his phone. “You don’t have Waze?!” he said. He looked at me
and rolled his eyes. “Apparently his app is broken.” Carone, a lawyer whose
connections to Mayor Eric Adams allow him to charge clients with business
before the city $20,000 a month, was on the line with a driver who was
attempting to deliver several palm trees to his waterfront mansion in Mill
Basin. The trees have to be planted anew every year after northeastern
weather takes its toll.

Carone’s neighborhood, in the furthest reaches of Brooklyn, can feel more
like Miami Beach than New York. His extravagantly decorated property —
“Baroque is the word I would use,” says a visitor — is where he began
hosting fundraisers in the early aughts for a rising generation of
then-obscure Brooklyn Democrats, including Bill de Blasio and Hakeem
Jeffries. One of the regulars at his soirées was Adams, who was just
getting into politics after a career as a police officer. Years before the
2021 mayoral race began in earnest, Carone went all in on Adams, soliciting
donations and acting as one of his most trusted advisers. When Adams won,
in part by following Carone’s advice to position himself as a centrist and
ignore the party’s left wing, he rewarded Carone by naming him chief of
staff.

Like Adams, Carone took an unusual delight in his new job. While the role
is usually about managing downward, keeping the bureaucratic trains
running, Carone’s Instagram feed showed a man living his best life:
speaking at a conference in Istanbul, touring the Holy City with the mayor
of Jerusalem, talking whiskey with Liev Schreiber, hanging out on the
sidelines of New York Giants games. At the same time, powerful developers
and businessmen say Carone was remarkably responsive to their needs, with
an ability to get any government official on the phone and smooth things
that needed smoothing. “Things he got involved in got done,” said one
lobbyist. “Things he didn’t, didn’t.”

Carone’s priorities reflected that Adams, for all his talk of being the new
face of the national Democratic Party, was at heart an old-school Brooklyn
clubhouse pol. Before 2022, Carone had never spent a day working in an
elected official’s office, and in his career he had represented any number
of outer-borough scoundrels, including slumlords, insurance fraudsters, and
disreputable operators of homeless shelters. People in the city’s permanent
government wondered if Carone was treating his time in power as a chance to
level up, prospecting for richer clients — suspicions that hardened when
after just nine months he announced he was quitting to run both a
consultancy, Oaktree Solutions, and Adams’s reelection campaign. One labor
leader told me, “It’s the worst smash-and-grab operation in the history of
city government.”
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