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

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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.”