Behind the meteoric rise of New York City Mayor Eric Adams

Mayor Eric Adams likes to shrug he’s "perfectly imperfect." A swaggering ex-cop who's whipsawed between police detractor and police defender. A Republican before he became a Democrat. A self-described vegan who was unabashed when caught eating branzino. A prophet who knew that his election to the mayoralty had always been divine destiny.

"Thirty-something years ago, I woke up, out of my sleep in a cold sweat," Adams said last year. "God spoke to my heart and said, ‘You are going to be the mayor January 1, 2022.’ ”

Now Adams — criminal arraignment looming on federal corruption charges that he monetized his office, allegedly scheming to solicit foreign contributions in exchange for luxury travel — likens his struggle to that of the biblical Job, a blameless family man abruptly hit with a satanic test of faith in the form of harrowing catastrophe that robs him of everything he holds dear.

For Adams, it's all on the line: his freedom, his legacy, his mayoralty.

Adams, who is 64, was sworn in at the 2021-into-2022 Times Square ball drop, having run on a law-and-order platform and promise to awaken the nation’s premier city from its COVID-19 pandemic slump. 

A compelling story

On the stump, Adams, the rightmost Democrat of the 2021 field, told of his compelling biography: the son of a single mom in Jamaica, Queens, who feared the family could become homeless at any time; he turned his "pain into purpose" following a beating by the NYPD in Queens and his jailing at a Bronx juvenile hall, to become a cop himself, and later captain. He was also an activist in a fraternal organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, which was critical of alleged racist abuses by the NYPD. And Adams later ran for office, becoming a state senator and Brooklyn borough president.

His experience on both sides of the law, he told the public, made him uniquely suited to reverse a rise in crime.

In his mayoral campaign, Adams stitched together a coalition — the city’s business elite, who gave campaign contributions, voters who included blue-collar homeowners, Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants and Orthodox Jews — and won, but barely. His primary election victory was little more than 8,400 votes, about 1 percentage point, and he became the city’s second Black mayor.

Adams promised to get tougher on crime, from the petty to the felonious ("This is not a city where any and everything goes," he’s said), but also cut red tape ("We have become so boring as a city," Adams said. "I want to become a city of excitement.").

Sporting an ear pierced in celebration of victory, Adams became a habitué of the city’s nightlife, gallivanting out to the Hamptons for political fundraisers, partying, mingling with rich and famous New Yorkers. 

"If you’re going to hang out with the boys at night," he likes to say, "you got to get up with the men in the morning."

But Adams has long been inscrutable. During the campaign, it was never clear where Adams actually lived: Fort Lee, New Jersey? If in Brooklyn, at which of his multiple homes? And was he really sleeping inside Brooklyn Borough Hall?

In 2013, he was a star witness in federal court, testifying against the NYPD's stop, question and frisk practice, in a case that ended in a landmark court ruling finding it unconstitutional.

Bright political future

He and some pundits said he was the future of the Democratic Party. He called himself "the symbol of Black manhood in this city, in this country."

Soon after taking office, his mayoralty became bogged down by accusations of patronage, nepotism and cronyism. 

He tried to hire his own brother to be a $210,000 director of mayoral security, an appointment the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board quickly shot down. (The brother could work for $1 if he wanted, the board said.) Adams put other friends and family into senior posts, at a rate unlike any mayor in recent history.

It wasn’t the first time he’d raised eyebrows in public office.

He once starred in a YouTube video teaching parents how to search their kids’ rooms and bookbags for drugs and weapons. In 2007, as a freshman in the State Senate, he took to the chamber floor and channeled the Cuba Gooding Jr. character in the movie "Jerry Maguire," thundering that he deserved a raise: "Show me the money. Show me the money. That’s what it’s all about."

As Brooklyn borough president, Adams likened a critic who asked him and his staff not to park illegally in a public park to the terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

Adams, an unapologetic hater of rats who had made ridding the city of the scourge of the rodents a signature aspiration and policy initiative of his mayoralty, once gleefully helped trap rats to be drowned and killed.

"The rats don't run this city," Adams likes to say. "We do."

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.