It's His Town Now

As he coasts to general-election victory, the post-technocrat, post-progressive Eric Adams mayoralty has already begun.

- Text by David Freedlander

BO DIETL SAYS ON THE PHONE to come by the South Street Seaport at six, where he’ll be hosting a fund-raiser for Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee and all but assured next mayor of New York City. Dietl favors shiny suits and gold watches the size of a baby’s arm, and he was, like Adams, a New York City police officer for two decades. Unlike Adams, Dietl went into the security-and-private-investigation business. Then he made a name for himself as a loud and gruff commentator on Fox News and Don Imus’s radio show, where he once said Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, wanted to build a privacy fence around Gracie Mansion so they could “doobie-doobie-doo,” by which he meant, apparently, smoke marijuana. A longtime acquaintance of Donald Trump’s, he was encouraged to run for mayor back in 2017, first as a Democrat, then as a Republican, and, still unsuccessfully, as an independent, spending much of his time heckling “Big Bird de Blasio.”

Down at the Seaport, Dietl’s company Jeep with the words BEAU DIETL & ASSO­CIATES SECURITY AND INVESTIGATIONS written on the side (he has been hired by Fox News to dig up dirt on the women who accused Roger Ailes of sexual harassment and by Steve Bannon to do the same for an ex-wife who accused him of domestic violence) is parked in front of the restaurant. Inside, the crowd looks more like the kind found in a high-roller room in Atlantic City than at a fundraiser for a Democratic politician: blonde women in cocktail dresses and half-inchtoo-high heels, men sporting two-tone collared shirts and thick pinkie rings.