Will New York ever find A Mayor Who Doesn’t Suck Shit? On June 24th, voters will line up once again to vote in the Democratic Party primary, as if to try their luck on a suspiciously proportioned Skee Ball machine in some dodgy corner of Coney Island.

New possibilities beckoned after the collapse of Eric Adams’ political support following a series of criminal indictments and slapstick corruption accusations, a freewheeling spectacle that concluded grimly this year with the mayor allowing ICE free reign of the city in a stunningly public quid pro quo for the Trump administration dropping charges against him. 

This state of affairs was seemingly a gift for Andrew Cuomo, who had been signaling his own return after his resignation as governor in 2021 amid his own wave of scandals. The logic was bleakly predictable- Cuomo is a scion of regional power, for whom a certain level of ruthless double-dealing is second nature; even in the midst of his own public disgraces, he never had to resort to Adams’ vaudevillian flailing. Cuomo didn’t waste too much time before portraying his resignation as a mistake, a well intentioned but naive feint towards a culture hopelessly bogged down by rampant, unchecked Wokeness. 

But last week saw the ex-governor’s support surpassed for the first time by Zohran Mamdani, the smiling thirtysomething state assemblyman whose unexpected rise has been propelled by an army of tens of thousands of volunteers, and whose chipper demeanor and populist appeal point away from the entrenched machine politics represented by Cuomo.

By at least one metric, Mamdani has dominated since the start; a New York Times map of individual campaign donors shows a broad swath of support for the young Democratic Socialist across the five boroughs. Comparatively, Cuomo’s donations come only from isolated pockets, and about a third of his donations come from outside the city. The possibilities presented by ranked choice voting give the upstart an additional advantage, and various Cuomo foes have united around the DREAM (Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor) strategy proposed by Cuomo’s old nemesis The Working Families Party. This week Mamdani and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander both cross endorsed each other, with each candidate urging their supporters to rank the other at #2.

But the scandal-haunted Cuomo still maintains a diminishing lead in some polls, having perhaps wisely pursued what for him is a long running strategy of ‘campaigning by not campaigning,’ Cuomo-speak for avoiding too much communication with the press or debate with rivals while riding a wave of big money donations and name recognition.

The pro-Cuomo super PAC Fix The City has raised over $10 million from the likes of WalMart’s Alice Walton, the CEO of Hess Corp oil company, as well as interests like DoorDash, various big real estate developers and hedge funds. The landlord super PAC Housing for All has raised an additional $2.5 million, hoping to stave off Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze. You can call it a Too Big To Fail campaign: in early May, an investigation for illegal coordination with the PAC resulted in losing over $600,000 of public matching funds; yet another $1.5 million was still approved the same day. 

In addition to the usual monied interests, Cuomo finds himself on the cutting edge of big money. During his years in the political wilderness he served as an advisor, through his company Innovation Strategies, to the crypto exchange OKX, advising them during an FBI investigation that eventually resulted in a half billion dollar settlement for money laundering. 

Unlike mayoral rival Scott Stringer, Cuomo has refused to release the names of his other clients during this period. However, through Innovation — headquartered at Cuomo’s home and seemingly consisting of just Cuomo himself — he also holds millions in stock options in, and served on an advisory board of, a company called Nano Nuclear Energy, which in 2024 announced plans to build nuclear microreactors for a crypto mining facility in Niagara Falls. A Cuomo mayorship would put him at the forefront of a Democratic Party increasingly aligned with the Big Crypto lobby in Washington, a newly powerful bipartisan behemoth that has rewarded crypto friendly Dems like Kristin Gillibrand, who recently co-sponsored the StableCoin Bill, and dumped millions into congressional races to crush progressive critics like Jamaal Bowman.

Part two of a three part series on the rise, fall and return of Andrew Cuomo.

Brian Jones Kraft is a writer based in Bushwick. Read part two here.