Why Are New York Politicians So Corrupt?

The federal corruption probe engulfing New York City Mayor Eric Adams never seems to end. Adams has pleaded not guilty to five counts of corruption charges, while his lackeys in both city government and private industry are busy resigning from their positions or being indicted themselves. City Hall is running out of people who aren’t implicated in Adams’s many alleged crimes. There are few politicians whose unscrupulous activities have been as well-documented and conducted so openly as Hizzoner, and Adams now made history as the first of New York City’s 110 mayors to be indicted while in office.

Adam’s alleged misdeeds, documented in excruciating detail in his 57-page indictment, are notable, but make no mistake: He is standing on the shoulders of giants. New York State is a mecca for disgraced politicians. If there’s a crime to be committed, an elected official in New York has probably done it, or at least been charged with it.

Over the last two decades, New York has produced Rudy Giuliani, Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo, George Santos, Anthony Weiner, and, of course, Donald Trump, the most New York politician there ever was. Before that, there was Robert Moses, who illegally seized land, crafted explicitly racist policy, and displaced entire communities to build highways; Mayor Ed Koch, whose third term was derailed by multiple City Hall corruption scandals; Mayor Jimmy Walker, who rewarded businessmen who bribed him with municipal contracts; and the decades of Tammany Hall, whose cronyism and petty corruption are too vast to give an accounting of here.

Corruption isn’t unique to New York; according to a report from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Louisiana has the highest number of federal public corruption convictions per capita after Washington, DC, with Illinois right behind. Still, New York has enough of it to stand out.

Some of it is a matter of scale. New York has the fourth-highest population of any state in the country. New York City’s government alone employs around 300,000 people, maintaining a bigger workforce than most state governments. In a city with 8.3 million people, astronomically high income inequality, 800 languages spoken every day, and approximately 100,000 new immigrants arriving in the city every year, there is no median New York voter. City politicians often get elected by cultivating fiefdoms for themselves, making it so they never have to try too hard to appeal to voters outside their dedicated base.

New York’s state government sometimes seems deliberately designed to empower corruption and make accountability difficult. Albany is a relatively insular state capital, far away from major population centers and media markets. Studies have shown that state capitals that fit this profile are significantly more likely to be corrupt.

New York’s state campaign finance laws give big donors much more power than they have in many other states. The amount individuals can give to candidates far outstrips the national average, even after recent reforms. What’s more, candidates for state office can now receive matching public funds while still raking in unlimited amounts of private contributions.

In a state that is home to the world’s real estate and finance capital, corporate interests pay to play. From 2019 to 2023, the real estate lobby spent $13.6 million on campaigning for and lobbying New York state lawmakers, contacting some of them thousands of times. Under that kind of pressure, elected officials upstate often face little incentive to vote against corporate interests, since the brunt of those policies would be inflicted on the city. Most districts throughout New York State are ideologically polarized toward one party or the other, giving politicians cover for political pressure from their constituents.

With so much legalized corporate wheeling and dealing going on, is it any wonder that so many politicians make the leap to breaking the law?

New York politicians appear to feel almost entitled to their corruption. In 2015, disgraced former state Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver was tried on federal corruption charges for extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud. He was found guilty on all seven counts and sentenced to 12 years in prison. “It makes some people uncomfortable, but that is the system New York State has chosen, and it is not a crime,” his defense attorney said of the charges during opening statements. New York City’s current elected officials probably agree.

New York has the most expensive media market in the country, including some of the biggest newspapers and television studios in the world. Thanks to media consolidation, fewer and fewer owners control the outlets that serve the state’s public. Rupert Murdoch has owned the New York Post for decades, turning what was once a respected daily newspaper—the oldest in the country, founded by Alexander Hamilton—into a tabloid rag stoking right-wing crime panic.

Throughout its more than 200-year history, the Post has rarely been profitable. That’s not why Murdoch owns the paper. He gets to control a mouthpiece for his right-wing political agenda, and he’s been doing so since the beginning. When Ed Koch ran for mayor in 1977, he faced a crowded primary with considerably more-progressive candidates. No one was paying attention to Koch’s appeals to the center-right. Murdoch, who had bought the Post a few months before, saw an opportunity. When Koch received a call from Murdoch one morning letting him know he had the Post’s endorsement, he said, “Rupert, you have just elected me.”