What do New York Mayor, Eric Adams, and Sean Combs aka Puff Diddy have in common?

They’ve allegedly fallen into what we call “The Croesus Trap.”

[According to the ancient Greek, Herodotus, Croesus was the richest man in Greece, who lost everything (ending up as the personal slave of King Cyrus of Persia)  because of hubris. He mistakenly thought that just because the gods had blessed him with so much, they must surely continue to do so. A fool’s errand if there ever was one.]

Whatever Messrs Adams and Combs allegedly did, they didn’t do it alone, and they didn’t do it all at once. 

Like the Enron scandal twenty years earlier, the alleged culprits had a network of help. Enablers. Partners in crime. People on the take. People at all social strata who were complicit. This network didn’t materialize overnight. It grew gradually, person by person, choice by choice. 

This worked fine until the dam started to break a few weeks ago. With high-ups in Adams’s administration suddenly the subject of a federal investigation and the Feds digging into the network of people who helped or covered up for Combs. 

Both New York politics and the music industry have always had its fair share of vipers. Now a lot of people inside both ecosystems are really worried about their futures. As they should be. 

But that’s the thing about corruption. It’s hard to do it alone because it’s cultural. 

More accurately, it’s a perverse form of “Culture Design,” with the same rules applying.

Values, mores, behaviors get normalized from the top, cascading through the ranks like a virus. Leaders don’t just make decisions; they set the tone for what’s acceptable. Before you know it, a reinforcing cycle of unethical behavior has started, creating an environment where right and wrong are about as clear as mud. 

As Heraclitus famously said: “Character is destiny.”

Nobody expects leaders to be perfect, they’re damaged goods, just like the rest of us, but to underestimate their larger effect on the culture can be a potentially fatal error. The fish rots from the head, and behavior is contagious. Whether it’s trust, kindness, or being a tool.