Fines issued because Amazon delivery drivers leave their vans parked in the middle of the street with the engine running, polluting the air.
Jeff Bezos has publicly said, in an interview with CNBC, that Zohran Mamdani should stop going after billionaires. The next day, the Mayor of New York ordered Amazon to pay the city nine million dollars in back fines—nine million dollars that Amazon owed New York for its delivery vans leaving engines running beyond the legal limit (three minutes, no more) while parked on the city’s streets.
“Amazon is worth two trillion dollars,” Mamdani said in the announcement. “And yet it has failed to pay the millions in fines it accumulated while its trucks were illegally polluting our air and forcing New Yorkers to breathe their exhaust.”
This is not an exaggeration. Amazon’s logistics fleet was among the worst offenders in the city for this category of violations. These laws exist in New York to reduce air pollution in urban neighbourhoods. And the rule is simple: most vehicles are not allowed to idle for more than three minutes while parked or stationary.
Through its network of third-party transportation providers, Amazon had accumulated a debt that the New York City Department of Finance quantified at $6.88 million in adjudicated violations, plus another $2.15 million in pending ones. At the beginning of the year, on Mamdani’s direct instruction, the DOF Collections Unit launched a targeted initiative to recover the full amount.
There is a political logic to all of this that is worth underlining. Mamdani is the most openly left-wing mayor New York has had in decades, elected on a platform that explicitly took aim at the concentration of wealth and the power of large corporations. Bezos telling him to stop going after billionaires is precisely the kind of attack that, in this political context, turns an administrative fine into a story with a clear protagonist and antagonist.
“No company—no matter how large or powerful—is above the law,” the mayor said. It is a line that can be read as a general principle or as a direct response to Bezos, and it works both ways, because nine million dollars in fines for trucks polluting New York’s neighbourhoods is a fight even the richest man in the world would struggle to win.
Judging by the contents of Leo XIV’s first encyclical on AI, Big Tech’s diplomatic efforts, after sending its envoys to the Vatican in recent weeks, appear to have left him largely indifferent.