How Eric Adams's Press Shop Blurred the Lines Between City Hall and His Reelection Campaign

In case you haven't noticed, we just updated the Table of Success for the final time, with a few key new additions to our rolodex of Mayor Eric Adams's inner circle of confidants and allies. Benny Polatseck is one of those additions—someone who has stood by Adams's side through thick and thin, and also, at points, held a video camera while Adams was campaigning during work hours. Polatseck didn't really do any more or less for the failed Adams 2025 campaign then anyone else in the press office, but he did help capture some of the campaign's most beautiful moments. You can check out his entry on the Table of Success here, or continue reading below.

On Friday, September 5 of this year, as rumors swirled that he’d be dropping out of the mayoral race and sources blabbed to reporters about a possible Saudi ambassadorship and secret meetings with the Trump administration, Eric Adams called a last-minute 4:30 p.m. press conference at Gracie Mansion. Surely, this was it, the announcement we’d all been waiting for.

After gathering the media on the mosquito-ridden lawn of the mayoral residence, Adams’s campaign press secretary had one final question before the mayor strode out: “Benny, you ready?”

The “Benny” was Benny Polatseck, who is nominally a City Hall staffer but who, more often than not this year, was seen moonlighting as Eric Adams’s campaign videographer.

Polatseck jumped out into the front of the press scrum to make sure his camera captured Adams calling Andrew Cuomo a “snake and a liar” and pledging to stay in the race until the bitter end (a promise that did not last a month); his video was posted on Eric Adams’s campaign account almost immediately after the press conference.

After the five-minute press conference, reporters asked Polatseck, quite fairly, where his taxpayer-funded job ended and where his volunteer campaign gig began. He didn’t answer.