This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Given Eric Adams’ win, this Queens City Council member was already looking at years of being called “Adrienne.” So she found an alternative: call her Madam Speaker. Just two weeks ago Adams was down and out in the speaker race, but she – like the mayor – kept her head down, stayed focused, and kept grinding. Now she’ll be the first Black woman to hold the city’s second-most powerful position. 

After a 15-year-long saga, former Buffalo police Officer Cariol Horne, finally received her pension after getting fired for intervening when a white officer had a Black suspect placed in a chokehold. Horne’s story gained attention last summer amid a national conversation pertaining to police brutality and systemic racism – and now she’s finally got her due!

Christmas came early for convicted felon and Cuomo loyalist Joe Percoco. The former executive deputy secretary to ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been quietly released from a federal prison, more than two years ahead of schedule. It’s unclear when exactly he was freed. The Albany Times Union reported the news on Monday, after noticing his inmate page on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website had been updated to show he was moved from Otisville Correctional Facility in Orange County to an unidentified halfway house. Percoco, 52, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 after his conviction on three corruption-related charges for taking bribes to steer government contracts. He worked for both Andrew and Mario Cuomo, and maintained ties to the family from behind bars. 

Whoever said opposites attract should take a look at the Independent Redistricting Commission. With membership split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the commission was meant to minimize political gerrymandering and create bipartisan legislative district lines. But it seems that Chair David Imamura and Vice-Chair Jack Martins have officially broken up. Martins and his fellow COP commissioners released a letter effectively saying negotiations were over because of Democrats’ intransigence. Imamura and his Democratic compatriots shot back just hours later saying that they tried their best to find compromise and blamed Republicans. The real losers here are the nonpartisan redistricting maps they were meant to have made along the way.

This is why the MTA can’t have nice things. Back in 2020 the agency had a perfectly good boat that two of their workers abandoned in the choppy waters by Coney Island. An investigation revealed that there were no official rules for manning the boat, and of the two guys who sunk it, the ‘captain’ had only taken the ship out once before in his life – and his first mate couldn’t even swim! 

New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams has had quite a week. With his hand-picked candidate losing the speaker race and canceling his inauguration next year due to a spike in COVID-19 cases, you’d  think the hindrance would end there. When the topic of solitary confinement made headlines last week, after Adams said that he doesn’t support the practice but supports “punitive segregation” (which still involves putting incarcerated individuals into isolation as punishment for misconduct), the conversation spiraled into deeper controversy this week when 29 members of the City Council responded to his stance in a letter by calling on him to ban the punishment. In response to the backlash, Adams put the council members on blast and said he is going to “ignore them,” and “if they like it or not, I’m the mayor.”