Where Eric Adams stands in the pantheon of New York City mayors will be for historians to decide, but in a single respect he joins only one other mayor, long forgotten: A. Oakey Hall.
Hall was the last New York City mayor indicted while in office , charged in 1871 with neglect of his official duties. He was supposedly on watch when Boss Tweed and his nefarious Tammany Hall cabal looted and pillaged what today would be untold millions of dollars through inflated city contracts and a remarkable variety of shakedown schemes.
The scope of perfidy was breathtaking. Tweed himself was found to hold a secret interest in the quarry that supplied the marble that built the Tweed Courthouse — a wildly inflated boondoggle that sits behind City Hall as an unrivaled monument to political corruption…