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Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York
It’s a brazenly transactional era of government here in New York City. Frank Carone is its master practitioner.
At Casa Cipriani. Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine
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.”
“I am only 39, and my memory only goes back a couple of decades, but I can’t recall anything like this in New York City,” said Lincoln Restler, a City Council member from Brooklyn. “I cannot remember another person who was in the inner circle, among the closest of advisers to the mayor of New York, trading on his influence at the beginning of that mayor’s term in office. By going into government and becoming the most powerful person in the administration of Eric Adams, he dramatically enhanced his rolodex and his ability to make boatloads of cash on behalf of special interests and translate it into a Fifth Avenue firm with global reach. I guess this is what you get when you appoint a hacky Brooklyn apparatchik as chief of staff.”
At Casa Cipriani, an opulent space that resembles a Gilded Age ocean liner, Carone and I were approached by Boyd Johnson, a lawyer who leads the New York office of the white-shoe firm WilmerHale. It was hard to imagine a more disparate pair. Carone, who is 55 and stocky, with a nearly permanent five-o’clock shadow, is from the streets of Canarsie and went to community college, St. John’s, and Brooklyn Law. Johnson is lantern-jawed, tall, and lean with degrees from Hamilton and Cornell. Carone had just been discussing the reprobates he used to associate with, while Johnson is a former deputy U.S. Attorney and represents some of the city’s most powerful corporations. And yet here they were sidling up next to each other.
“I think you are setting the example for the new kind of back-and-forth between government and industry,” Johnson said. “You are like the unicorn at the stuff that you do. Folks think that you are about fixing people’s problems. You do fix problems — but that is not the client you are trying to get or that WilmerHale is trying to get. We’re all trying to get clients who have to interact with the government because that is their industry, who care about their reputation with the government, and who care about their brand and the sustainability of their business. So onetime fixes, or fixing a parking ticket, doesn’t do anything for anybody. But having a situation where you have a different kind of car that you can park in different places, consistent with the law? That’s durability.”
If Johnson’s vehicular metaphor wasn’t entirely clear, the upshot of his tribute was unmistakable: Far from being a liability or something to be ashamed of, Carone’s spin through the revolving door is something to be celebrated in the Adams era. After 20 years in which mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio made an effort toward transparency and good government, the people now running New York are grubbier, more transactional, and not at all embarrassed about it. Not since Ed Koch has the pay-for-play spirit been so manifest.
“I have been able to make great friends and good relationships in City Hall,” Carone said. “And the circle grows.” Johnson got up to leave, and Carone called after him: “That other topic. Let’s follow up on it.”
The dynamic that powered Carone’s rise could take him higher if Adams wins a second term. It could also destroy him if Adams — or Carone himself — is indicted. Investigators from the Southern District of New York are engaged in a sprawling probe into whether the mayor and his top advisers broke fundraising laws. In November, FBI agents made coordinated raids on the homes of Adams’s chief fundraiser, an aide in his office of international affairs, and a Turkish businessman who had a position on his transition team. A few days later, in a dramatic confrontation on a Manhattan street, federal agents climbed into Adams’s official government vehicle, ordered his security detail out, and demanded the mayor turn over his phones and devices. Adams denied wrongdoing and hired a criminal-defense attorney to represent him: Boyd Johnson.
The legal peril is getting more complex. Recently, the FBI raided properties tied to Winnie Greco, a senior Adams aide, fundraiser, and liaison to the Chinese community, as part of an investigation launched by prosecutors in New York’s Eastern District — an entirely separate inquiry.
Many City Hall watchers have been surprised that the probes have not, to anyone’s knowledge, touched on Carone yet. Adams never listed him as an official bundler while running for office, but he was instrumental to his fundraising efforts. Carone was so intimately involved with Adams’s campaign that for a time much of it operated out of his law office free of charge — an illegal in-kind contribution that Adams fixed only after it became the subject of news reports. To some, Carone’s apparent distance from the federal investigations suggests the possibility that he’s informing on Adams. In January, Carone flatly disputed it. “I have not been contacted by any law enforcement ever,” he told me. “And if I am, I’ll happily cooperate.”
Another possibility is that the government plans to charge Carone himself. (Carone maintains he’s done nothing wrong.) “There is something inherently fascinating to people about Frank,” said Max Young, Adams’s former communications director. “I don’t know if it’s his hardscrabble upbringing or if the fact that he made a lot of money coming from humble beginnings creates an assumption that there was malfeasance or dastardly deeds along the way. But I tell you this: Some of the city and the nation’s great enterprise reporters have tried to find something on Frank and have been unable to do it. Frank is scrupulous about following the rules and doesn’t care about appearances.”
Others aren’t so sure, and they wonder if Carone’s skill at navigating the intersection of power, politics, and money in Brooklyn can continue to protect him now that he is playing the game at its highest level. “I just don’t think Frank has the instincts to understand where the lines are,” said a former federal prosecutor. “As you walk toward the cool breeze, you have to be careful that it’s not a propeller you are walking into.”
With Mayor Eric Adams in September 2022. Photo: ZUMA Press/Alamy
When Carone and I first spoke, last spring, he said he couldn’t care less about how his operation looked to his critics. Carone had been traveling the world to solicit new business, and he suggested we meet not in Mill Basin or at Oaktree’s Fifth Avenue offices but at a five-star resort overlooking the Florida coast, near where he lives part of the year. Dressed in sandals, shorts, and a black T-shirt, Carone ordered scrambled eggs with Baeri Royal caviar and talked about some of the 16,000 contacts in his phone. He said he had just been named the godfather for the grandson of Eduard Slinin, who owns one of New York’s largest limousine fleets, which meant holding the baby right after his bris. He seethed about people who had betrayed Eric Adams in the 2021 election, including a local leader who told Carone he was backing Andrew Yang. “Ridiculous,” Carone said. “I wanted to throw him through a plate-glass window.”
Carone grew up in Canarsie a block from where his parents, the children of Sicilian and Puglian immigrants, had been raised. The neighborhood was undergoing rapid demographic change, as Italian and Jewish families moved out and Black and Caribbean families moved in. His mother worked as an assistant principal; his father was an exterminator who switched to reselling estate-sale goods at flea markets in the West Village. Frank’s father revered Tony Genovesi, a fearsome state assemblyman who ran Canarsie as a fiefdom. (He was a protégé of Meade Esposito, the legendary Brooklyn political boss who kept a baseball bat by his desk and was reported to be a hero to a young Donald Trump.) Young Frank was thrilled when Genovesi presided over the rehabilitation of the local Little League field, and one day his father arranged for him to go by the famed Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club in Canarsie to meet him.
On his 12th birthday, he went, alone. Genovesi and another local ward heeler, Frank Seddio, were there. “And they treated me like gold,” Carone said. “I didn’t want to get into politics. I wanted to get out of Canarsie in the worst way. But that was my indoctrination.”
In a sense, Carone never really left the Thomas Jefferson Club. After law school and two years in the Marine Corps, he started working for Seddio’s firm at $200 a week. At night he handled arraignments for a criminal-defense lawyer, which entailed calling a 24-hour hotline to find out when clients facing charges for DUI, domestic violence, grand theft auto, assault, and similar offenses were due before a judge. His most memorable case was a heroin murder conspiracy. The client, whose brother was the head of a local gang, had sold tainted dope to someone who later died from it. Carone met with him at a mall in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and convinced him to surrender on federal charges.
“I was very easily able to disconnect,” Carone said. “I didn’t even think about it. It didn’t matter how egregious the charges were. To me, they were just a set of words on paper. It’s funny — when you read the charges, it gives you one set of emotions. But when you’re talking to a human being, they don’t sit there with horns coming out of their head. And I always said to myself, The government has a lot of resources focused on this person, and the one person they have to keep the system honest is me.”
Meanwhile, he helped Seddio launch a long-shot congressional campaign, licking envelopes at a desk wedged up against a toilet. Like everyone else in politics, Carone didn’t like politics at first. “But I couldn’t say ‘no’ to a friend,” he told me. “Finally, I guess, I became what I am without me realizing it.”
In the early aughts, Carone took a brief detour to start a mortgage-banking business, Berkshire Financial, which packaged loans together and sold them to investors. (When I asked Carone how this differed from the subprime lending that precipitated the financial crisis, he said, “It was exactly that.”) He sold the company in 2006 and rededicated himself to the Brooklyn Democrats. “Frank was a guided missile,” recalled Jeff Feldman, who was executive director of the county party at the time. “At heart, the guy is a Marine. He was going to take the hill by whatever means made the most sense. He adapted to the political culture, and he made a conscious mental effort to figure out what goes on in these power circles and find the best approach. And he enjoyed the challenge of getting people to give you money. The more you get people to contribute, the more you develop a coterie of people.”
One of those people was Hakeem Jeffries. Now the likely next Speaker of the House, Jeffries was just an outsider angling for the State Assembly in the mid-aughts. The party power brokers had a reputation for going to war with anyone who crossed their incumbents, and Jeffries recalls that Carone was distinctly different — gracious and helpful. “I never saw him as a political operative,” Jeffries said in his office on Capitol Hill, sitting beside a throw pillow that reads “If you don’t know, now you know.” “He never struck me as someone with an ax to grind on behalf of a particular political leader that prohibited his ability to get along with people from other parts of the party.”
The Brooklyn Democratic Party was not a beacon of clean government. One chairman was investigated for extorting money from judicial candidates, then jailed in 2007 for soliciting illegal campaign contributions and falsifying business records. (“A tragedy in my mind,” Carone told me. “A missing receipt, and you get consecutive terms. That blew me away.”) His successor was Vito Lopez, a gigantic man with a protruding belly and menacing affect. “Not a very easy guy to work with,” recalled Feldman. “Vito was tough. He ruled more by fear than by love. Frank was able to steer him.” In 2011, Carone became the county party’s chief counsel. “You don’t hire a lawyer to tell you what you can do; you hire a lawyer to help you do what you want to do,” said Feldman. “Frank made Vito seem like more of a reformer than he was otherwise. I don’t know another political leader who needed that level of babysitting. No one wanted to be around the guy, but Frank had the patience for it.”
Although Lopez was under three investigations (two federal, one city) for the sprawling patronage mill he ran, he was never charged. What finally did him in was that multiple female staffers accused him of sexual harassment. In 2013, it fell on Carone to tell Lopez he had to resign. Carone scheduled a meeting at Pinocchio’s, a dimly lit Italian restaurant in Mill Basin. Lopez showed up with ten allies, but Carone stood firm. “When we are in the ring together, I can be a real motherfucker,” Carone told me.
Carone had recently begun a law firm with Seddio, which they merged with Abrams Fensterman, then a small outer-borough practice. They grew it from 30 lawyers to 120, representing 21,000 clients; some of the biggest had business before city government, among them yellow-cab companies, major developers, the union representing correctional officers, and two large hospital networks. After Lopez’s resignation, Seddio became the new boss of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. That put him and Carone in a position to determine who would be the next Brooklyn borough president, with term limits opening up a vote in 2013.
They liked Eric Adams. Carone had known about Adams since his days as the boisterous head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. As a state senator, he had proved himself a loyal soldier in the battles the county party was waging against a reform faction. After Adams entered the race for borough president, “We were able to eliminate the competition,” Seddio told me. “It’s not a pressure thing. We just convince them that it is not the best option for them at that time.” Adams won with 90 percent of the vote.
Later, Adams came by the Abrams Fensterman office with a whiteboard and an easel and laid out exactly how he was going to become mayor, drawing a chart with himself and various rivals. As the 2021 election neared, Carone called in the chits he had accumulated after a quarter-century in Brooklyn politics, especially among the Hasidic community. He played the heavy when necessary, joking with some local leaders that if they didn’t back Adams, they would have to move out of New York. When Adams was sworn in on January 1, 2022, Carone was among a small group that joined him onstage.
Frank Carone has a simple theory of reciprocity. He is a voluminous consumer of business self-help books, and in 2020, he co-wrote one of his own, titled Everyone Wins! How You Can Enhance Business Relationships Just Like Ultra-Wealthy Entrepreneurs. “You take certain actions to help those in your business relationships explicitly achieve their self-interests that are distinct from your own self-interests,” reads one passage. “Because you’re helping them achieve their goals and agenda they ‘owe’ you. In order to pay you back, they’ll be strongly inclined to fulfill your requests, take your recommendations, and so on. Simply put, when you help others get the results you want, they often become ‘indebted’ to you. This can then motivate them to be helpful to you in achieving your goals.”
Adams’s victory gave Carone an opportunity to put his approach to work in the public sector. “Frank likes people, he likes doing things for people, and he likes being in the mix,” said Young, the former Adams spokesman. “Frank’s superpower is around relationships and using those relationships — and I don’t mean in a bad way — to achieve good ends. People trust him, they want to be around him, and they believe he can facilitate mutually beneficial situations.”
Carone pledged to put his holdings in a blind trust and establish a firewall between his new job and his old one at Abrams Fensterman. “That’s a previous life,” he told Politico New York. Despite these good-government moves, the papers were filled with unsavory stories about Carone: about how he was subpoenaed as a witness for advancing money to a group of doctors who allegedly defrauded Geico; about how he invested in BolaWrap, a somewhat preposterous crime-fighting tool out of Spider-Man, then saw his investment skyrocket after Adams touted it at a news conference; about his work for a homeless-services provider that was under federal investigation for corruption; about how he was meeting privately with campaign contributors and real-estate executives at lavish restaurants like Mark Joseph Steakhouse and Wayan.
Carone seemed to be on a mission to meet every billionaire in New York, and the City Hall he ran was a relatively fun one. He was a macho, almost martial, presence, but he also started a book club, leading staffers through motivational titles like Grit by Angela Duckworth and Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Every Friday, he bought pizza for the staff and for the press corps in Room Nine, and he liked taking low-level staffers out to Cipriani.
While Carone had Brooklyn wired, he was relatively unknown in elite political circles, and several of the lobbyists that have long represented billionaires and old-money interests told me that Carone seemed eager to shed his reputation as a “Court Street lawyer.” He bought an apartment for $2.2 million on Sutton Place and became the mayor’s designee on the board of MoMA. When City Hall proposed closing parts of Fifth Avenue around Christmas to better accommodate the hordes of tourists that descend on the city, Carone threw himself into it, befriending the retail and real-estate titans who make up the Fifth Avenue Committee. “He loves the power. He loves the influence. And he loves the money, if we are being quite honest,” said one longtime friend. “This is a guy who likes living well, and likes that people have a perception of him as powerful, and likes the access that it gives. He loves being able to walk in the circles of certain people.”
Curiously, for a person so well versed in politics, Carone was unfamiliar with the playbook used by the largest and most powerful operators in the city. Contrary to popular understanding, the real work of lobbyists and consultants isn’t about buttonholing officeholders and convincing them to vote or govern a certain way. One longtime lobbyist told me that in 30 years she had never once called any mayor of New York about anything. Instead, the job of achieving a desired outcome involves running what are called “campaigns”: getting stakeholders, activists, and community groups on your side, plus getting stories placed in the press, maybe an editorial if you’re lucky. An apex fixer creates conditions that prompt politicians to act a certain way of their own accord, because the politics makes sense for them. (A classic recent example is Uber. In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan that would limit the company’s growth. Acting for Uber, Bradley Tusk unleashed a multipronged campaign: advertisements featuring sympathetic drivers; media coverage that said the de Blasio idea was discriminatory; celebrity comments from Kate Upton, Ashton Kutcher, and Neil Patrick Harris. The coup de grace was a new “de Blasio” tab on the Uber app that showed how terrible it would supposedly become.)
All this was outside Carone’s ken. One lobbyist recalls visiting Carone early in his tenure and being asked what their job entailed. Carone seemed confused. What did they mean they ran campaigns? They put pressure on politicians by using the press? How did that work? “It was, ‘I don’t understand. People do things because I am Frank Carone. I raise money for them and I am their friend and we get together in a room and we sort it out,’” the lobbyist recalled. “He didn’t understand political interests. He just seemed to understand transactions, like ‘You do this for me and I will do that for you.’” (Carone said this encounter did not happen.)
To cynics, that context explained a lot of Carone’s priorities. He took a noticeable interest in the rebuilding of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a $5.5 billion undertaking that stands to be a lobbying frenzy. Such a project is usually the purview of the Department of Transportation, not the mayor’s chief of staff. The way Adams and Carone shaped the plans has outraged locals and activists, who say their proposal will harm Brooklyn Bridge Park and be more expensive and take more time than the available alternatives. “It is as close to public-policy insanity as I have ever seen, and it makes no goddamn sense,” said a person who has worked on the project for years. “The only way it makes sense is if these guys have something weird going on.”
After our breakfast in Boca, Carone climbed into his massive black Escalade, a pair of golf clubs rattling around in the back, and set off to meet with some Oaktree clients. One was a Hasidic businessman who was flying down from La Guardia to meet with Carone for an hour and immediately return to New York. “He is the Waze of City Hall,” a rival said of Carone. ‘He tells you where to go to get what you need done. It’s: ‘Here is the key staffer for this issue. Let me call him and tell him you are reaching out.’”
In Florida, Carone spent part of the day on the deck of the Princess Nauti Natalie, an 80-foot yacht owned by a childhood friend from Canarsie. “I am an open book,” Carone said, and reminded me that as chief of staff, he once released his schedules and convened a call for reporters to ask him whatever they wanted. During the session, someone from the Times asked if he took any NYCHA residents to Casa Cipriani. “Really cute,” Carone responded. “I hope you are proud of yourself.” What the journalists didn’t know was that Carone conducted his end of the call from the yacht. “Right here, right on this boat!” he told me.
The ship’s owner, Frank Grasso, poured some anejo tequila into a couple of inscribed Nauti Natalie glasses. Carone recently hired his daughter as an intern. “I like to do that for friends,” he said. “My clients, by the way, are mainly friends, and I have no problem blending the two. I tried this very strategically. In the morning they call, we talk about what’s going on, we talk a little socially, we talk personally, and then we get to some of their business problems.”
Carone bills Oaktree as existing “at the intersection of legal, regulatory, and political.” Its website describes services from “issue advocacy and market positioning” to business development to crisis PR. But Carone has never worked in communications, Oaktree is not a law firm, and until his brief stint in City Hall, his strategy sessions were confined to the back rooms of Brooklyn. I put the question to Carone directly: What do you do for clients? “Executive problem solving,” he said. What does that mean, exactly? “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. It’s about looking at their policies. Looking at a market they want to enter. It could be an RFP they want to apply for, and they want to prepare themselves. It could be, you know, a merger, and they want to know how to get past the immovable object. And I may not have all the answers, but I do know how to get the answers.”
“So we do all-in C-suite executive problem solving,” he continued. “Branding. Business development. Clients asking me to introduce them to other clients or people that I may know throughout my 30-year history or have access to one phone call removed. If they are having a difficult time getting their product in front of someone, I can grease the skids.”
Plenty of people are convinced that as long as Adams is in office, Oaktree has a lucrative edge. “I think there is a big difference between selling access — which is ‘I can do this for you’ — and understanding how government works,” said a second rival consultant. “He is the person that gives you the real personalities of the people who make decisions. He knows their rivalries in a way that other lobbyists only wish they knew. And he knows you can have as many meetings with as many commissioners as you want, but that real decisions take place in rooms that the commissioner doesn’t even know about, in bars and restaurants, places like Zero Bond, where there aren’t any lobbyists in the room but Frank Carone is. Every other lobbyist is at a disadvantage.”
In my conversations about Oaktree with the city’s influence peddlers, the comparison that came up most often was Teneo — a notorious consulting firm co-founded by Doug Band that traded on his close connection to Bill Clinton in the years that Hillary Clinton was the front-runner to be the next president of the United States. That business was built on the perception of access: access to the Clintons and, ouroboros style, whatever other companies were paying Teneo for access. After the Clinton political dynasty ended, Band and the family had a spectacular falling-out — but not before he got incredibly rich.
I asked Carone what he saw his business as being modeled on. “Teneo,” he replied.
At Oaktree, Carone offers his expertise to clients in an unusual manner. Complying with city ethics guidelines, he did not register as a lobbyist until a year had passed since his departure from the Adams administration. During that interval, he employed lobbyists, but he could not legally discuss clients’ business with lawmakers directly. Carone is also generally not his Oaktree clients’ primary attorney. He told me that “very often,” Oaktree clients retain him through their existing law firms. He cited a federal precedent that allows law firms to hire architects and engineers to advise them on cases and said it allows his customers to enjoy attorney-client privilege with him even though he is not, technically speaking, their lawyer. “I am not appearing before agencies; I am not communicating,” he said. “I am teaching them how to do so through their law firm.” I had heard that Carone had set up this unusual arrangement with the powerful hotel trades union, which he confirmed.
The scheme would seem to run right up against the city’s strict laws governing the influence industry, which require all lobbyists to register publicly; their meetings with lawmakers are recorded in a searchable database, along with who is paying them and what they talked about. John Kaehny, the leader of the good-government group Reinvent Albany, told me that Carone’s arrangement was nothing more than an end-run around reporting requirements. “Carone gambled that he could get away with skirting lobbying rules for an entire year, and he did,” he said. (Oaktree says that Carone’s practice is “consistent with his ethical obligations and the law,” and that the relationship is “standard practice.”)
Another Oaktree situation that comes awfully close to ethical lines involves the competition to build a casino in New York City — one of the biggest development deals of this century. Carone is forbidden from working on matters that he had a hand in at City Hall, and he met with several casino executives while he was there. SL Green, the real-estate behemoth that is trying to site a casino in Times Square, has Carone on retainer. It’s being finessed by the fact that Carone is not lobbying per se, but rather building community support.
Does he know what is going on inside the hall of government? No question,” one real-estate executive said about Carone. “Does he play with fire? Also no question. He has got a lot of friends that a lot of us would find unsavory, but Eric doesn’t seem to care. He has been vetted up the wazoo and no one has tagged him with crossing the line.”
Who is hiring Frank Carone, how much they are paying him, and, most important, why has been one of the great mysteries among the lobbyists, consultants, operatives, and PR pros who make up the permanent governing class of New York City. Carone wouldn’t let me see his full client list, but he did say that he has about 100 clients and that his minimum fee is $20,000 a month for at least a year. Northwell Hospital Systems has been reported as a client, as well as Saquon Barkley, the star running back for the New York Giants. “I mean, Saquon Barkley!” said one lobbyist. “I am envious of that alone. I don’t even know what Frank does for him, but it certainly boosts Frank’s image in all the right places.”
“He tells you straight up what it is and what it ain’t,” Barkley told me. “He worked with the mayor in one of the hardest cities in the world and dealt with all the scrutiny that comes with that.” Carone advises him on charitable work, branding, and how to handle the media. Barkley found Carone through one of his representatives, Ken Katz, who sat next to Carone in the owners’ box at a Giants game. “I talk to Frank almost every day,” Katz said.
Carone told me that he also represents London’s Halcyon Gallery, which the Art Newspaper once described as a contender for the title of “the worst gallery in the world.” Carone is helping Halycon seek public-art commissions and expand to New York. He said his other clients include an English sustainable-vodka company, theaters, sports arenas, nonprofits, and developers.
Carone watchers like to scour his social media feed for clues. Why was he visiting dignitaries in Georgia and Azerbaijan over the summer? What to make of his photo with former LiveNation CEO Michael Cohl in London or his visit with the fashion designer Philipp Plein at his boutique? What was Carone doing at Representative Jim Clyburn’s fish fry, that famous stop for presidential contenders? That one may have an obvious answer: Carone believes Adams could one day be the commander-in-chief. “One, he has law-enforcement experience,” he told me. “He is center. African American — so he identifies with the experiences therein. He is articulate. He is a hard worker. He knows how to run a campaign. He is not afraid to attend fundraising events, which people don’t want to hear but is part of a campaign. What else is there?”
First, Carone needs Adams to win reelection, something that is beginning to look shaky. One recent poll of registered voters by Quinnipiac University found that just 28 percent of voters approve of the job Adams is doing, while 58 percent disapprove — almost unheard-of numbers. “I don’t believe those approval ratings are real,” Carone said. “When the mayor walks around the city and attends events, he’s greeted with great adulation and great affection. There’s a disconnect between what you see in everyday people, what you hear in cocktail parties, what you hear in bar mitzvahs and communions, and what this poll said.”
So far, the only potential mayoral candidate who has announced an exploratory committee is Scott Stringer, the former comptroller, who has pledged a return of technocratic governance and a City Hall less focused on the mayor’s outings and outfits. Carone, who raised money for Stringer before Adams signaled he was going to run, is dismissive of his chances.
That, of course, assumes that Adams will make it to Election Day without being indicted. “I know what you know,” Carone told me in January during an apparent lull in the investigation. “I know the mayor to be an incredibly conscientious person, respectful of the law. He surrounds himself with incredibly gifted law-enforcement alumni. I do believe that the mayor has done nothing inappropriate. You know, you go to events, you don’t know what half the people are. Sometimes you count on your team to vet people, but you don’t know exactly what’s in the back of their brains. You just know your own behavior. I’ve watched the man for many, many years, and he treats law enforcement and the law as sacrosanct.”
At Casa Cipriani, Carone told me about his efforts to sign LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian golf venture, despite that country’s brutal human-rights violations. “There is no such thing as negative attention,” he said, describing how to lean into media coverage and turn it to one’s advantage. “We all make mistakes. But it is the collection of mistakes, more than the successes, that make me who I am.”
I asked him what mistakes he was referring to. “Probably allowing people in my life I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Putting my guard down for folks and having too much confidence in my own judgment and what I perceived to be my indestructibility. Hubris. I just have to remind myself that I am fallible like everybody else. So my mistakes were in befriending folks — investing in projects without the proper due diligence, without realizing how spending time in the mud with a pig, you are going to get dirty.”
“Those are things I regret,” Carone said. “Strike that. I don’t regret any of it. I learned from it.”
The Eric Adams Smash-and-Grab
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