The Twenty-Fifth Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The Mayor of New York City, a place where you can get a bagel and it’ll be a really good bagel, the mayor of that place, Eric Adams has a podcast, The Get Stuff Done Cast. No one listens to it except a dog walker in Queens named Dave, hi that’s me, I do a podcast about that.

We have been, for the past few episodes, looking at the books Eric Adams wrote, since he stopped doing his podcast at the end of October, but he’s back to podcasting, so I’m trying to knock out the back half of his 2009 book, Don’t Let It Happen, as quickly as I can. If you haven’t yet listened to the other episodes I’ve recorded about this extremely bad book, I’d say it’s probably in your interests to go back and listen to them, but if there’s one thing I know about you, Toretto, it’s that you live your life by your rules, a quarter mile at a time. So, listen in whatever way feels best to you. Today we’re going to talk about a couple more chapters of this infernal document.

First, though, there’s a story moving fast enough that, although I’m handling all of the last half of the book in one go, and this is the second of three episodes I’m releasing back to back, I still need to break in here to discuss it before we continue on. This one is about a sexual assault that Adams was previously accused of, the details of which have now come to light, and I’m going to talk about these details, so if that’s not something you want to hear about, skip forward.

As mentioned previously, at the end of November of last year a woman came forward to accuse the mayor of sexually assaulting her in 1993. This was at the very end of the window provided by the Adult Survivors Act, which opened a grace period during which the statue of limitations on suing for past sexual assault was done away with. The initial filing was very light on details. That filing was just updated in the last couple days, and we now have a great deal more in the way of details. I’m just going to read from the great Katie Honan, writing in the great outlet, The City:

“The plaintiff, Lorna Beach-Mathura, was a civilian employee in the Transit Bureau of the city’s police department starting in the 1980s when she met Adams, who was pushing for better treatment of Black officers, according to the civil complaint.

In 1993, her complaint alleges, she approached him for help in getting promoted after she was recruited to join the Guardians Association, a fraternal organization of Black officers within the New York City Police Department…

According to the complaint, Adams offered to drive Beach-Mathura home to Coney Island after work, picking her up in his police-issued vehicle. But instead of heading south, he drove the opposite direction, parking in a dimly-lit lot near the Hudson River, the complaint alleges.

After asking her a few questions, he then pressed her to perform oral sex in exchange for his help, according to the complaint. She “repeatedly and adamantly refused,” she alleges, but then Adams grabbed her hand and placed it on his erect penis. When she refused, he masturbated in front of her, she alleges. 

Beach-Mathura alleges she was retaliated against after refusing Adams’ demands — saying she was technically “promoted” but transferred to the probation department, where she lost her seniority and didn’t supervise any employees.

She also says in the complaint that, although she told friends of the incident at the time, she did not officially report it out of fear of further retaliation. Nonetheless, “the effects of that sexual assault, betrayal, and astonishing abuse of power, continue to haunt” her to this day, she says in the complaint, which is seeking “compensatory, punitive and exemplary damages.”

The article goes on to note that Adams denies these charges or that he knew Beach-Mathura at all. Adams has since tapped the city’s Law Department to defend him against these claims, which he says is appropriate given that he was a city employee at the time. The Law Department of NYC employs Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix, New York City’s corporation counsel as their top attorney, so it was the taxpayers of New York who paid for her to make the initial response denying the claims and adding that Adams "was one of the most prominent public opponents of the racism within the NYPD, which is why the suit's allegations that he had any sway over promotions of civilian employees is ludicrous." Did you catch it? The plaintiff never said he had definitive power of hiring and firing. The plaintiff says she approached Adams informally for help. He was the head of a powerful group within law enforcement, and so he might be able to ask around, maybe do a little of the things well connected people do behind the scenes, which is literally how getting a promotion works. And, in the plaintiff’s telling, in order for him to do her that favor, he wanted something for himself. Did the second part happen? Did the first part happen? I don’t have any way of knowing for sure, but I don’t think “this couldn’t have happened because of an org chart issue” is a winning argument for the defense, and I’m very interested to see what the friends of the plaintiff have to say when they are presumably asked about the conversations they had with the plaintiff after this incident.

All of this is to say that this sure looks like it could have happened, and though I cannot know either way for certain, nothing I’ve seen yet has shaken my belief that this woman should be assumed to be telling the truth. People talk about the burden of proof and being innocent until proven guilty and these are important concepts for our justice departments and should shape the behavior of the police (and that’s a load bearing “should”). But I’m just a guy with a podcast. I’m allowed to weigh the evidence I have by a standard that goes something like “false reports are rare, and so far I haven’t seen anything that seems to shake the details of the story” and decide what I think might have happened. You can do that too, maybe you’ll come out different. Time may provide more information, or not, and if it does, well, anyone is allowed to have been wrong. People talk about Me Too like it’s a mob, but you’re allowed to have an opinion. Me Too is only a mob if people start acting like a mob, but if people believe public accusations like this one that doesn’t mean we all go and pick up torches, it means we go about our day with something we believe about a mayor somewhere in our heads. That’s not any more a mob than people who go about their day believing the opposite. We’ll see.

Let’s get into the book. 

Chapter 8 is called Guns. Guns are an It that can Happen, and so Adams wants to make sure that gun safety is taught to kids and adults.

The second paragraph of this chapter is the one that got Adams to disavow that this book had even been published. That paragraph reads as follows:

“When I was a child, a friend of mine brought a gun to school…to show off to the rest of the students. This was my first time seeing a real gun. After years of playing 'Cowboys and Indians' with toy guns, I did not believe the gun he was showing us was real. I laughed at his stupid trick and grabbed the gun from him. 'If this gun is real,' I said, 'then it should go off.' I pointed what I thought was a toy gun at my group of friends and pulled the trigger. A round discharged, and only by the grace of God and my poor aim did the bullet miss my friends. The incident scared me so much that I dropped the gun and ran.”

Hell Gate, the excellent local outlet I keep mentioning here as deserving your support and subscriptions, did some great coverage of this, and here’s what their reporter, Christopher Robbins, wrote about it when this came to light, and I hope you’ll forgive me reading a fairly significant portion of this article, but it’s full of gold:

“Adams was asked about the passage in his 2009 book, "Don't Let It Happen," which the website Byline wrote about… and which Adams begins with the declaration, "All of the incidents in this book are true."

"I fired—what book is this?" Adams said in response to a question from an AP reporter. "I never fired a gun in school," Adams said.

The AP reporter then read Adams a portion of the excerpt from the book. (That’s the same excerpt I read just now).

"You said fired in school?" Adams said on Monday. "I think the person who, the co-author of the book, may have misunderstood the exact—someone," the mayor said, reaching for words. "There was an incident in school where someone pointed what they thought was a toy gun and they may have misunderstood—that book never got into print because we never went through the proofreading aspect of it."

…

Asked about the mayor's statement, City Hall Press Secretary Charles Kretchmer Lutvak repeated the mayor's contentions that "the book should not have been published, and the mayor is looking into it. As he said, the coauthor may have misunderstood the story."

This left us with several follow-up questions.

• Given that no co-author or collaborator is named in the book, who is the mayor referring to?

• If the mayor is saying the incident did happen, but to someone else, not him, who did it happen to?

• And was the mayor unaware until today that the book was in publication? He hasn't received any money from book sales?

…

A mayoral spokesperson wrote Hell Gate in an email that the mayor is asking the publisher to stop selling the book.

"The mayor has already contacted the publisher, who is working to take the book out of circulation," the spokesperson wrote.

According to the Mayor's Office, the book was written by a ghostwriter, and Adams never reviewed the version that was read to him today. The Mayor's Office also insists that Adams had no idea the book was publicly available until today, and that the mayor never made any money off its sale.

Hell Gate followed up with three questions:

• Who was the "ghostwriter"?

• Xulon Press is a self-publishing company. Is the mayor saying that the ghostwriter self-published this book without his permission or knowledge?

• Does the mayor disavow the whole book?

The Mayor's Office responded to our email, but did not answer the questions, and merely reiterated that Adams never reviewed the book before it was published.

Hell Gate has filed a Freedom of Information Request for communications between Xulon Press and the Mayor's Office regarding Adams's request that the book be pulled from shelves.”

Well all of that is nuts. I genuinely believe that the mayor never fired a gun in a school, just like I believe that just about every story he tells is, at best, a massive embellishment. But he also, no, of course didn’t use a ghostwriter on this book, it’s too badly written for that, and he knew the book had been published, it’s been on the market since 2009, his partner wrote the foreword, press outlets quoted from it during the campaign. He’s a bullshitter, and the type of guy who needs his story to be The Story, and this time he got caught in the lie. This type of behavior is deeply obnoxious, but also, and with respect to the outlets who reported on this book, not anywhere near the most important thing that’s revealed about the mayor in its pages.

This chapter, in particular, is incredibly weird. Adams talks about the parts of a gun, which he classifies as the frame or stock, the barrel, the trigger and the hammer. This… is extremely incomplete, vague, and doesn’t get into things like the differences between revolvers or automatics, rifles or submachine guns, assault rifles and shotguns, etc. This chapter is reasonably long, for this book, about 10 pages, but it’s notable for what it doesn’t say, and the extreme lack of specificity in what it does say.

Adams notes that he isn’t opposed to gun ownership. He cites a bunch of statistics about how many households have guns, how many kids are in those households, how many of those guns are typically unlocked, and how many kids die every year in gun accidents. The numbers are the ones you know, and they’re bad.

Adams advises the stuff everyone advises when keeping a gun in the home, lock it up, store the ammo separately, hide the keys where the kids can’t get them, tell your kid not to handle a gun they find, etc.

One of the problems, of course, is that if you own a gun and keep it in your home, the reason, rational or otherwise, is often that you think you might have to use it in defense of your home, and every method of making it safer makes it harder to make the gun hot in a hurry. I’m not advocating anything, I don’t own a gun, I have no plans to ever own a gun, and I don’t think most people should. I mean, have you seen the public? Most people shouldn’t operate shopping carts.

Look, keep a gun for defense if you want, all stats say that if you wind up firing it in your house you’re gonna use it on yourself or a family member. I don’t think most of us are too special for the stats.

Adams doesn’t talk about that, though. It’s another thing he doesn’t say. A page after writing out a list of ways to keep a gun safely in the home, one of which is “Store ammunition in a separate location from the firearm”, Adams says, in a section that is entirely in bold type, which is the first time he’s employed bold outside of section headings, “The question that is always asked by gun owners is "Should we leave our firearms loaded?" This is something that you must decide on your own. When making this decision, look at the figures that show the number of innocent people who have lost their lives due to the presence of loaded firearms. On the other side of the coin, take into consideration the number of individuals who were unable to use a firearm to fight off a home invader. Many gun owners become anxious when they have to use their weapon during an emergency. Which side of the coin you choose is up to you and your family.” I guess he forgot what he said a page ago, but again, why write this chapter if all you’re going to do is shrug your way through it?

Adams advises putting a found gun in a bucket, which is extremely specific and also weird. I think he’s talking here about if you, like, find a gun on the street. He says you shouldn’t handle guns if you can avoid it, but then tells you to put them in buckets or paper bags to avoid calling attention to them while waiting for law enforcement to arrive. Personally, I don’t have many thoughts on what to do if there’s, like, a gun just lying on the sidewalk, but I don’t think picking it up and getting your fingerprints on it is the move.

Turning to the possibility that a loved one may bring a firearm into your home and not tell you, particularly if they’re a teen, Adams notes that previous chapters about how to conduct a drug search of your child’s room can also be applied here, in fact, good news “you can even conduct these searches at the same time.” So that’s nice. I do like the idea that a parent comes across, like, a Mac-10 in their kid’s room and puts it back under the mattress, muttering, “Stay focused, Barb, the gun search is on Wednesdays. This is the PCP search.” That’s my Barb voice.

Now Adams turns to advising you on how to detect a gun on a loved one’s person. If you notice the telltale signs of this (keeping a hand on a waistband, not swinging one’s arms when walking, pinning an arm to part of the body when running) Adams says “walk over to your loved one and give them what I like to call the “because I love you” hug. This allows you to hug your loved one around the waist area to determine if they are carrying a firearm.” I’m not gonna unpack it more than to say that it's gross in several ways!

Be aware, Adams writes, of changes in your loved one’s dress, like if they suddenly start wearing their shirts untucked, or wearing a coat when it’s warm out. Again, if you see these flags, employ the “because I love you hug,” what a normal thing to advise.

Adams also says it’s a red flag if your kid is wearing a bulletproof vest, and, yeah, I agree that it’s pretty troubling if your kid thinks there’s a reasonable chance they might be shot, probably wanna address that.

Adams is troubled by toy guns that look real, which is reasonable.

And here’s the equally reasonable way he ends the chapter:

“Car traps are compartments that are used to hide stashes of guns and drugs that have been built into the frame of the interior or exterior of a vehicle. If your loved one is fortu- nate enough to have a vehicle, take the time to have a body and fender specialist look over it. Many of the more elaborate traps will go undetected by the untrained eye. A trained collision expert will be able to detect these traps and possibly open them to allow you to examine the contents. Although it is not illegal to have a car trap in New York State, a person who has one of these in their car may be involved in some sort of illegal behavior.”

Why build a trusting relationship with your loved one when you can surreptitiously arrange to have a body shop rip all the interior panels off their car? To be fair, if you actually did try to do this, I’m pretty sure any body shop in NYC is gonna tell you, “sure we’ll get right on that, just come back in a couple hours,” park the car behind the shop, go to a nice long lunch, and when you return they’ll tell you the car is clean and that’ll be 200 bucks.

This chapter was real weird and it’s not clear that Adams knew what he was trying to say.

The next chapter is Gangs, and it’s 20 pages long, should be fun.

Adams kicks things off by telling us that we must wake up to this new threat: gangs. We mustn't wait until it’s too late, like we did with crack. “How serious is the problem? Take a look at these figures from the US Department of Justice and decide for yourself:

• Street gang violence in the cities has been high since the 1980s and expanded into the suburbs during the 1990s.

• The percentage of law enforcement agencies in cities, suburbs and rural areas reporting gang activity in their jurisdictions increased from 45% in 2004 to 58% in 2008.

• The most significant increases were in the East and Southeast regions of the country, most likely as a result of the migration of gang members from urban areas such as New York City and Chicago. Reasons for this migration include law enforcement tactics, the razing of large housing projects, the abundance of drug suppliers and the higher profits associated with suburban drug operations.”

Only one of those three things that Adams claims are figures is in fact a figure. It’s interesting that Adams brings this all up because during the same timespan, as the worst generation in history aged out of violence and into political power seeking that they still refuse to relinquish, figures also show that violent crime fell off a cliff in America.

Adams references the Trenchcoat Mafia, the kids who shot up Columbine High School as a gang, by way of illustrating that gang members needn't be urban kids of color, and while I agree with the overall point, boy is that a terrible way of making it.

“Most criminal gangs have the following three things in common. A unique manner in which they identify themselves, the use of colors, signs and symbols to identify themselves, participation in some kind of criminal behavior.”

The Eric Adams dictionary defines a criminal gang as a gang that commits crimes.

“Reputation means everything to a gang member.” Ok, sure. “Juice is a slang term for honor.” That’s nice. “Respect is something that all gang members desire.” Wow, cool. I'm learning so much.

Unstated is why people join gangs. 

Stated is that gang members use graffiti to communicate about their deeds and territory, that gangs are constantly on the lookout to recruit new members in schools, and even on the internet, and that they deploy a mixture of coercion and lying to get kids to join up. They even get females to join this way. Gracious me.

Adams briefly notes that Neo Nazi gangs and skinheads exist, so, he says, take care to note if your kid is wearing Nazi emblems.

Imagine the parent reading that, spitting out their orange juice and yelling “Bert, get down here right now, I’ve just been made aware that your swastika neck tattoo might mean you’re affiliated with white supremacists!” That was Barb again, Barb has a lot going on in her house.

Adams goes long on gang initiations, which according to him include forcing new recruits to commit assault, robbery, murder, be themselves assaulted, do a drive by, commit sexual assault, or have sex with members of the gang. These sorts of allegations about gangs get mentioned frequently, and I’m not exactly here to debunk them, since I don’t have any personal experience with gangs at all, but I’ll just note that if you’ve got someone new to your organization, and you don’t know if they’re cool or not, it’s probably not wise to order them to commit the type of crime that you can go to jail for the rest of your life for ordering them to commit. It’s just… not how I understand people to behave. People tend to be self-protective and from the standpoint of protecting oneself, it’s simply illogical to be like “I’ll give this kid a gun and tell him to shoot someone.” Kid’s gonna fuck it up, even if he goes through with it. Kid might well get caught, and he’ll sing, he’s new, he has no reason to lie on your behalf. It’s nonsensical. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, people do illogical shit all the time, but if it did, I can’t imagine the gang would stay in business very long.

Adams lets us know that we can listen to hip hop if we want to get a feel for the slang gangs use. Additionally, he says, the local PD’s gang unit will have a comprehensive local slang database and you can ask them to see it and… no they don’t and no you can’t.

Gang members wear gang tattoos and certain types of clothing. Adams doesn’t get more specific about tattoos, but he does list just about every type of clothing as potential indicators that a person is in a gang.

For hairstyles, he only lists two, shaved and mohawk. That’s it, that’s the only way gang members wear their hair.

Adams lists several gangs by the colors they wear. “Bloods: red, Crips: Blue, Latin Kings: Yellow and black, La Grand Familia Nation: Green White and Red, Neta: White and black, Asian Gangs: No identifiable colors.”

“Asian gangs: no identifiable colors” is going to be an intrusive thought I have for a while. Something deeply weird and racist-adjacent going on with listing specific gangs and their colors and then being like “all Asian gangs get one listing, and who can say what colors they wear.”

Adams urges you to spy on your kid when they’re out of the house to see if they change into gang colors or act differently, and to make sure they know that if they do wear gang colors they’re more likely to be stopped and frisked. As we discussed in a previous episode, and as the list of gangs and their colors above nods to, the NYPD lists literally every color as gang colors. Kids weren’t getting stopped and frisked in good faith, in one year at the height of stop and frisk more Black people were stopped in NYC than live in NYC, meaning the average Black person in New York City was stopped and frisked more than once. Pretty sure it didn’t have much to do with what they were using to cover their skin.

Adams gives us a long list of the ways we can tell that a loved one may be in a gang, and just to give you a sense of the utility of this list, one of the items is “Letting everyone know they are in a gang.” Not gonna tease apart the rest of this list, if that’s ok.

Adams wants you to get to know your kid’s friends and where they spend their time. Not so that you can deepen your relationship to your child, but so you can more thoroughly comb through the breadcrumbs of their existence for evidence of their gang affiliation. 

Adams has a list of advice for parents to prevent their kids from joining gangs, and it’s mostly nonsense about communicating what you expect from your kids and always knowing where your kids are and having a zero tolerance policy for gang related items in the house, all of which is vague and useless, but one thing stood out to me: “Give young people options. During our country's economic lean years, youth programs were the first to have their funding cut. After the country recovered, we failed to restore many of these programs. This had a major impact on our youth. Work with your community to create programs that give young people something to do after school and on weekends and holidays. Just as adults become bored when we can't find anything to do, so too do young people. These programs should be fun and exciting enough to keep kids coming back. One way to ensure the success of these programs is to allow young people to participate in the planning process. Programs can include everything from sports to tutoring and mentoring.”

Aside from how vague “these programs should be fun and exciting” is, it’s pretty rich for this guy to be lamenting our failures to invest in programs for kids when in just a little over a decade after writing this he’ll be closing libraries on weekends and slashing youth programs in every department.

Adams offers more advice on how to deal with established gangs and how to get out of gangs, and again, it’s mostly useless. The getting out of a gang section includes the suggestion of moving to another city and starting fresh, to give you some idea of what a realistic thinker Adams is in these regards.

Adams gives advice to single parents that includes set aside quality time with your children. Famously single parents have scads of time to set aside.

That’s gangs, so let’s wind this episode down. Both Guns and Gangs were long and mostly useless chapters. I don’t think it was the goal to be useless, but Adams has thought himself into a corner, hasn’t he? There’s no role for government in any of this, so parents must be the people who handle these issues, the material conditions of the parents and their kids notwithstanding, which are often the result of government policy. Since we can’t talk about changing society, or policy, and it’s those policies - as Adams expressly admits when talking about drugs - that have put families into a place where this stuff is happening, what advice could there possibly be that would actually help here? If your kid’s in a gang, how much meaningful stuff is there to be done if you aren’t well resourced? If your kid is carrying a gun, how are you supposed to actually stop them from believing they should, particularly if they are in legitimate danger? So what’s the advice? Here’s a list of colors and give your kid weird hugs.

Until next time, I recommend reading and supporting The City and Hell Gate. If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it. You can rate it, you can review it, I’m not going to stop you, I’m not going to encourage you either.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

My thanks, as always, to John Coyne.

See you next time.