Hizzoner aside, I don’t think NYC’s government is markedly more crooked than any other American municipality.
(NYC news is often national news, so there’s a double effect: transparency is a deterrent, and transparency makes the city look uniquely corrupt. If, say, Dallas had the same kind of persistent national coverage as NYC does, I’d expect to see roughly the same stuff.)
NYC has a markedly more pronounced history with organized crime - including that extant sort which is associated with the financial industry - and the municipal culture that develops to deal with it. Of course, this implies that now that Dallas is getting a stock exchange, your claim might become salient in a decade or two.
Emphasis on history: NYC very famously broke its organized crime groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It's what made Giuliani famous before he became a politician[1].
(I would hazard a demographic claim around organized crime: just about any mid-sized city with large suburbs almost certainly has more per-capita organized crime than NYC does. You just don't hear about it because most of it is of the "extortion for trash pickup" variety, not the "Murder, Inc." variety.)
I took pains to mention the extant nature of organized financial criminality which yet influences NYC (and state, and national) politics. Wall Street gets their way a lot when they shouldn't, and it's because government officials and elites are happy to pledge fealty to money over law.
As for Giuliani, he himself is a mobster; he's facing the same RICO charges he leveled at crime bosses as a prosecutor. I think this speaks to my point, which is that NYC corruption vis a vis organized crime didn't go away, it just became part of the institution.
I don’t think Wall Street is responsible for that much corruption at the city level. I agree about the federal level, but at the city level it’s probably mostly real estate with NGOs as a close second.
(But again, I don’t think it’s been evidenced that NYC is uniquely corrupt, which was the original claim.)
> As for Giuliani, he himself is a mobster; he's facing the same RICO charges he leveled at crime bosses as a prosecutor.
Except that the man is nowhere close to the halls of power in NYC, and hasn’t been so for three decades!
He is of course a crook, but that doesn’t evidence NYC being corrupt in 2025. It evidences Giuliani being a crook at the federal level.
(NYC news is often national news, so there’s a double effect: transparency is a deterrent, and transparency makes the city look uniquely corrupt. If, say, Dallas had the same kind of persistent national coverage as NYC does, I’d expect to see roughly the same stuff.)