Mayor Eric Adams says feds' plan to raid him at NYC Marathon shows they meant to 'humiliate' him

Josephine Stratman, New York Daily News on May 12, 2025

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NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams said Monday that the feds intended to “humiliate” him with a plan to carry out a search warrant on him at the New York City Marathon finish line.

Federal agents considered intercepting the mayor at the finish line of the marathon in 2023, a trove of documents released Friday as part of Adams’ now-dismissed federal corruption case revealed. In the end, agents approached him near Washington Square Park the next day, seizing four of his devices.

“They were contemplating grabbing my phone at the end of the marathon,” Adams said to reporters after an unrelated news conference. “What was that about? You knew where I lived. You knew what City Hall was. You knew what Gracie Mansion was.

“The entire globe is watching the end of the marathon, where I’m holding the tape, and they were going to come and wanted to humiliate me. That’s personal. That’s not professional, that’s personal.”

The documents released Friday showed the probe into the mayor was broader than previously known. The investigation into the mayor began in August 2021 and continued until just before President Trump’s Department of Justice put the kibosh on it on Feb. 10, according to the filings.

Warrants on the mayor’s associates were carried out just days before the Justice Department shut it down, and the feds executed a warrant on Adams’ iCloud account after it was signed off on by Manhattan Federal Magistrate Judge Stewart Aaron in December 2022 — nearly a year before the probe burst into public view.

Adams has said he did nothing wrong. The released documents “show that federal authorities made false, reckless accusations with absolutely no evidence in a relentless, shameless assault on the mayor,” Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for the mayor’s reelection campaign, said in a statement Friday.

Locating and accessing Adams’ seven phones became an issue during the probe, the documents show. An agent accused the mayor of lying after he claimed to not remember his personal phone’s passcode and said he had left it at City Hall, even as the phone appeared to be traveling with him, the released documents show.

In a September 2024 request to search Gracie Mansion with a cell site simulator and an electronics-sniffing dog, investigators noted that the mayor “regularly spends the overnight hours of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday” at the Upper East Side residence.

Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho ordered the release of the search warrant data and other materials following news outlets’ request. Adams’ case was dismissed last month.

The documents also detailed raids carried out at a Fort Lee, N.J., apartment the mayor shares with his longtime girlfriend, Tracey Collins, and Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.

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