The New Yorker:

Newly obtained e-mails show that Ingrid Lewis-Martin stuck with Adams even when she feared for her safety. Will she stay by his side through a federal investigation?

By Eric Lach

Last Friday, the day Eric Adams made history as the first sitting mayor of New York City to be arraigned in federal court, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his chief adviser, stepped off an international flight at J.F.K. airport and found federal and state law-enforcement agents waiting for her. Representatives from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office wanted her phones. “I need a phone,” she told them, jet-lagged and annoyed. An investigator suggested that he could have her arrested right there in the terminal. She gave up her device. A federal agent then stepped forward and handed Lewis-Martin a subpoena. Lewis-Martin, who many consider the second most powerful person in New York City government, borrowed a friend’s phone to call her lawyer, Arthur Aidala..

Aidala was once profiled by the Times under the headline “The Nice-Guy Lawyer for America’s Tabloid Villains.” About a year ago, Lewis-Martin began doing a weekly interview segment on his talk radio program, “The Arthur Aidala Power Hour.” After the airport, Lewis-Martin went to Aidala’s office and, after debriefing with him, went on his evening program, as scheduled. “This is something I would definitely not normally do, which is put a client on the radio,” Aidala said, acknowledging the unorthodox situation. But in all his years as a criminal-defense attorney, he said, he had never had a client “so adamant in the fact that they did nothing wrong.” Lewis-Martin had insisted that they play her regular intro music: the 1979 disco classic “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” by McFadden & Whitehead. She then delivered a line as revealing about local politics as anything ever said by the proud bosses of Tammany Hall. “We are imperfect, but we’re not thieves,” she said. “We have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the D.A.’s office to investigate us.”

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