What to know about Eric Adams: The New York City mayor faces charges alleging he took bribes

Mayor Eric Adams likes to joke 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 has always been divine destiny.

“Thirty-something years ago, I woke up, out of my sleep in a cold sweat,” Adams said last summer. “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, scheming to solicit foreign contributions in exchange for luxury travel — likens his struggle to 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.

Adams, now 64, became New York City mayor in 2022, having run on a law-and-order platform and promise to wake the nation’s premier city from its COVID-19 pandemic slump. On the stump Adams, the right-most Democrat of the field, told of his compelling biography: son of a single mom in Jamaica, Queens, who feared the family could become homeless at anytime, he turned his “pain into purpose” following a beating by NYPD cops to become an NYPD cop, and later captain, activist in a Black-officer fraternal organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, state senator and Brooklyn borough president. His experience on both sides of the law, he told the public, makes him uniquely suited to reverse a rise in crime.

Adams stitched together a coalition — campaign contributions by the city’s business elite, voters who are blue-collar homeowners, Black, Hispanic, immigrants, Orthodox Jewish — and won, but barely. His primary election victory was fewer than 10,000 votes, and he became the city’s second Black mayor in its history.

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.”)

He became a habitué of the city’s nightlife, gallivanting out to the Hamptons for political fundraisers, and partying and mingling with rich 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.”

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 in patronage, nepotism and cronyism. 

He tried to hire his own brother to be a six-figure director of mayoral security, an appointment the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board quickly shot down if he was to be paid anything. 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 disseminated a YouTube video, starring himself, 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.” Soon after becoming 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.

And Adams, a self-described hater of rats, once gleefully helped trap some 100 rats to be downed and killed.

"The rats don't run this city," Adams said. "We do."