The former transit police officer Eric Adams took charge of the largest city in the US in 2022, the second Black person to be elected New York mayor, while the city was still recovering from the disruptions of the Covid pandemic.
At his swearing-in, the cop turned Democratic politico indicated he planned to return some personal panache to a metropolis knocked by a pandemic, political strife and, at times, his unpopular predecessor, Bill de Blasio.
But there were often questions about his career and life, mostly unexplained and sometimes quite strange. In 2011, while serving as a state senator, he had made a video describing how to search for “contraband” – guns, drugs and other illicit paraphernalia – that children may have hidden around the house.
In it, he explained how a jewelry box might actually conceal a firearm and rummaged through the pockets of backpack to find a used crack pipe. Behind a bookshelf there was a giant bag of fake cocaine, along with bullets, a sack of weed and another gun, in odd hiding spots.
There were even questions of whether Adams actually lived in New York with a lot of focus on his owning a property in New Jersey as well as in Brooklyn.
Then there was the question of whether he was vegan, as he repeatedly said he was. The issue came up after he said he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2016, which he said he was was able to reverse after switching to a whole food, plant-based diet. As mayor, he ordered the city’s public schools to implement “vegan Fridays” and incentivized grocery stores to supply health foods. But the New Yorker magazine also reported that Adams liked to nibble on chicken and others claimed he favored fish when ordering at his favorite restaurant.
On his first day at work, he took the subway to city hall to be at his desk by 8.30am, and held a cabinet meeting half an hour later. Adams presented himself as an non-ideological alternative to De Blasio, one more accustomed to the rhythms of the city, and vowed to improve its relationship with its businesses and to crack down on street and subway crime.
He promised to restore the city’s reputation as the city that never sleeps and dubbed himself the “nightlife mayor”. “I’m just as flexible as the city. I’ll be in New York,” he said. “The 24/7 city that never sleeps. We have heard the alarm clock. We are up now.
“When you’re out at night, it helps decrease crime. It attracts tourists to the city,” he added, saying that every time a New Yorker goes to a restaurant “we’re making sure that a dishwasher, a cook, a bartender and a waiter is employed”.
The mayor’s nocturnal ramblings soon brought unwanted attention. It was reported that he’d visited the Italian restaurant Osteria La Baia – owned by two brothers with past felony convictions – 14 times in a month and had made it his unofficial meeting place. Adams declined to offer proof of who picked up the check.
He employed his younger brother Bernard as head of his security detail, sparking nepotism claims. It was unclear, in the early days of his administration, if he owned a home in the city.
Reports soon began circulating that federal authorities were scrutinizing how city contracts were awarded, including how the Turkish consulate had been quickly cleared to extend its embassy despite concerns by the fire department. Then there were questions about whether the former police commissioner’s twin brother, a nightlife fixer, had profited from insider connections.
Adams was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and often spoke of his impoverished upbringing. He told how he’d joined the New York City police department in 1984 with the purpose of reforming the force from within after being beaten by cops at age 15.
In 2006, he successfully ran for New York state senate. He was accused of accepting campaign contributions from a politically connected group bidding to bring a casino to a racetrack in Queens. Seven years later, he was elected Brooklyn borough president.
Adams is facing re-election next year and has vowed to become a two-term mayor. But as federal authorities raided his home on Thursday, after weeks of resignations by figures in his administration as federal investigators intensified their probe, that goal may prove elusive.
The city dysfunction that Adams promised to reform had itself visited him, with accompanying federal corruption charges that Adams called “entirely false, based on lies”.
