The ex-NYC mayor has spent years flirting with life abroad. Now he has the paperwork to prove it — and no one quite knows what he plans to do next.
Eric Adams has always been a man with one foot out the door. The former mayor of New York City — once the steward of the nation’s largest metropolis — is now officially a citizen of Albania, courtesy of a presidential decree signed by Bajram Begaj. The honor was granted at Adams’s own request, and while the move is largely ceremonial, it says something loud about where his head has been for quite some time.
His spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, confirmed the news after it broke in the Albanian press, calling Adams a longstanding ally of the Albanian-American community. The citizenship, Shapiro said, reflects years of mutual respect and deepens the cultural thread connecting New York to the small Balkan nation. It is, by most measures, a feel-good story — except that Adams has a history of feel-good gestures abroad that tend to leave people asking questions back home.
The Mayor Who Always Had Somewhere Else to Be
Long before he lost his reelection bid, Adams was telegraphing his desire to exit. He called himself an “international mayor” with a straight face. His adult son lived in Albania while competing on the country’s version of American Idol. In October, Adams flew out himself — one of several international trips crammed into his final months in office — and described the visit in the kind of poetic, borderless language that tends to charm hosts and confuse constituents.
Albania was not his first love affair with a foreign capital. In 2018, as Brooklyn borough president, he told an Azerbaijani community event that he planned to retire in Baku. Later, he told a Jewish publication that the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was his dream destination. Whether those were heartfelt confessions or crowd-pleasing improvisation, the pattern is consistent: Adams has long treated the idea of leaving as something close to an aspiration.
A Legal Cloud That Followed Him Overseas
Adams‘s taste for international travel was not without consequence. A federal indictment alleged that he accepted improper benefits from foreign nationals, with his frequent trips to Turkey drawing particular scrutiny. He denied the charges, and the case was eventually dropped by President Trump’s Justice Department. Afterward, Adams held conversations with Trump administration officials about a potential ambassadorship. Nothing materialized.
Shortly after dropping his reelection campaign, Adams made a four-day trip to Albania — meeting with Prime Minister Edi Rama, cabinet members, and local business leaders. Part of the trip was funded by the Albanian government, which, given his legal history, drew its own round of raised eyebrows.
What Adams Has Been Up to Since Leaving Office
Since leaving City Hall, Eric Adams has been spotted in locations including Dubai and the Democratic Republic of Congo, though his day-to-day life remains largely unclear to many New Yorkers who once voted him into office. In January, he introduced a cryptocurrency coin that he positioned as a response to antisemitism and what he described as “anti-Americanism.” The launch quickly drew scrutiny after the coin lost a significant portion of its value almost immediately. Critics and observers alike questioned the move, with many characterizing it less as a serious policy-oriented initiative and more as a publicity stunt than a strategic effort.
What he intends to do with Albanian citizenship is, for now, anyone’s guess. There are no announced plans, no diplomatic role, no formal agenda. But for Adams, that ambiguity seems almost intentional — the move fits neatly into a post-mayoral identity built less around a destination than around the act of going. He is a man in motion, collecting passports and goodwill in roughly equal measure, still searching for whatever comes after New York.
Source: Los Angeles Times