One evening early in Eric Adams’ run for New York State Senate in 2006, the candidate and his advisers gathered for a small fundraiser at the now-defunct Ovation nightclub on Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn.
Adams had a message for the group, according to three people present.
As mayor, he said as he scanned the room, he would lean on the attendees to be his kitchen cabinet, like the advisers who supported Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty. Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Adams’ campaign manager, was perplexed.
“I said, ‘Eric, what the hell are you talking about? You’re running for Senate. Why are you talking about: When you’re mayor?'” she recalled. “He stopped it a little, but every so often, he would go right back to it.”
Adams went on to win the Senate District 20 seat, representing the heart of the borough through 2013. And as the former police captain climbed in politics and rose to Brooklyn borough president, he often drifted back to his Gracie Mansion dream, roaring in a 2015 commencement speech at Medgar Evers College about his plans to become mayor in 2022.
“Reach for the stars,” he told the graduates.
Now, Adams is on the cusp of achieving his life’s ambition. The Democratic mayoral candidate is just two weeks away from a Nov. 2 general election that he is widely expected to win against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican.
He narrowly won the Democratic primary, tapping into reservoirs of goodwill he had built up among union members and voters of color. Along the way, he battled questions about whether he was living at his second home in New Jersey, and negative late-hour headlines after his campaign suggested that a team-up between Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia — two rival candidates — amounted to voter suppression.
Adams, 61 and Black, grew up in poverty in Brooklyn and Queens. He joined a youth gang, was beaten by white cops and later, at the urging of a Black activist minister, became a police officer himself, making enemies as he brashly crusaded against police misconduct.
Adams promises a mayoralty born of the streets. He delivers speeches in a rapper’s rhythmic, boastful style and plays hardball politics, delighting in throwing rhetorical punches. During the primary, he called Yang a “liar,” a “fraud” and a “joke.”
To look closely at Adams is to find a bundle of contradictions. He’s deeply private — a self-described “socially awkward” introvert — yet he’s relentlessly pursued public office. He’s a workaholic who was known for running a tight ship as a police captain, yet he has cut corners on his tax records, filing error-filled documents that became a political liability.
And he’s a bike-riding, animal-loving vegetarian whose platform can sound progressive when he’s discussing housing or transportation, yet often rings right-of-center when he’s outlining his vision for business or education.
“I disagree with myself sometimes,” said Adams, who joined the GOP for a chunk of the 1990s in what he’s called a personal protest. “I should have never become a Republican, and I shouldn’t have allowed my emotions to get me to do that.”
His critics see a lack of vision and a tendency to sidestep specifics — someone who will say anything that helps him politically. His allies see a deliberate decision-maker with a willingness to reassess, an inveterate question-asker who often defers to experts before choosing a course.
“People can go back to Eric and say, ‘I know you said this, but could you rethink it?'” said Lewis-Martin, now Adams’ deputy at Brooklyn Borough Hall. “And he will.”
Adams has staked his mayoral campaign on his biography as much as on policy, a promise that his time on various sides of New York City’s power structure — as a lawbreaker, law enforcer and law writer — has uniquely prepared him to lead a city facing historic tests.
His identity and experience could serve as a shield for him during the bruising Democratic race, allowing him to speak about crime in sharp terms.
“Because he is African American, he can say a lot of things in good faith that maybe a lot of white folks in good faith won’t say,” said Ken Ramseur, a Black lawyer who’s worked with Adams for decades. “You want to be compassionate. But Eric can be more forthright and candid.”
And he was perhaps better equipped to brush off spies dispatched during the primary — surveillance notes from the Yang campaign described efforts to track him over 11 days and said he appeared to be sleeping at Borough Hall — after he was tailed by the Police Department for about 11 months in the late 1990s.
“He got direct hits,” said Bernard Adams, 56, a brother of the candidate who also served two decades in the NYPD, describing how police leadership reacted to his sibling’s activism. “They would have loved to have fired him.”
“What he went through in the Police Department, man, it was horrible,” he added. “You’ve got to have thick skin, and that’s what he had. He’s definitely going to need that now.”
Eric Adams was born Sept. 1, 1960, in Brooklyn. His mother, Dorothy, worked as a cleaner and cook. His father, Leroy, was a butcher who drifted in and out of the family’s life.
In Adams’ early childhood, the family scraped by in a four-story tenement in Bushwick. He spent his time pretending he was an explorer as he wandered into vacant lots, collecting bottles, he recalled.
“We had this rat that we caught, not even realizing all the disease that was connected with it,” he said. “That was like our little cat. We used to sneak down to the basement, give him cheese.”
Life changed dramatically when Adams was 7. His mother purchased a modest two-story wooden starter house with a detached garage in Jamaica, Queens, surrounded by low- and middle-income families.
Though the transition brought pain — Adams said his family lived “month-by-month” for the next decade — it also delivered a sense of normality.
He slept in a bunk bed in an L-shaped, tile-floored room with his three brothers. His two sisters shared a separate room, and Speedy, a protective tan dog with a white-striped chest, watched over the home.
Church was at the center of the family’s life, and Adams and his siblings played sports recreationally in fields nearby. For a year, he suited up for the junior varsity football team at Bayside High School.
“Then the streets took over,” Adams said. Frustrated by struggles in school, he entered a rebellious period, joining the Seven Crowns gang and plunging into fights.
In one scrum, at the intersection of Guy R. Brewer Blvd. and Sayers Ave. — the kids called it “Dead Man’s Hill” — Adams was struck by a bat with a nail in it, he said. A scar still runs across the back of his head.
A turning point came when he was 15. He and his oldest brother, Conrad, were arrested on a criminal trespass charge and hauled into the 103rd Precinct station house, according to Adams’ account. (Adams said Conrad was a well-behaved youngster and was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”)
Two cops beat them, kicking them repeatedly, until a Black officer intervened, saying, “that’s enough,” Adams remembered.
The brush with authority changed him, and he went on to become active in a civil rights group led by the Brooklyn-based Rev. Herbert Daughtry.
After a series of publicized incidents of police brutality against Black New Yorkers, Daughtry started recruiting young people of color to join the NYPD, including Adams. He proved a “hard sell,” Daughtry, 90, recalled. But the minister ultimately won the teen over.
Adams studied at Queensborough Community College, where he discovered he had dyslexia, and then continued on to night classes at the City College of Technology and at the New York City Police Academy, where he finished second in his class.
A white cop was awarded first, despite receiving lower marks, Adams recounted. “That was my first taste that the job wasn’t on the level,” he said.
He joined the New York City Transit Police in 1984 and initially proved more of a cop’s cop than a trouble maker. He was quiet and focused, according to officers who worked with him, with a knack for de-escalating situations.
But he could be goofy off the clock, hanging out with his colleagues at gatherings and baseball games, and souping up cheap, ragged cars that he sold as a side gig.
On Oct. 25, 1986, the night the Mets clawed their way back against the Boston Red Sox in an elimination Game 6 of the World Series, Adams joined some pals at a fourth-floor apartment in Prospect Heights.
Randolph Blenman, the cop who hosted the group, said Adams was riled up. “I’ll never forget it: Eric with a baseball bat, banging on the floor, saying: ‘You’ve got to believe,'” Blenman said. “That guy stayed confident in that room until they came back.”
The Mets won, and clinched in Game 7.
As Adams ascended through the ranks, he tilted his focus toward activism, and whispered about his plans to one day run the city. In 1994, he even dabbled with a congressional primary run against Rep. Major Owens, a Democrat, but failed to collect sufficient signatures.
The next year, as the NYPD swallowed up the Transit Police, he helped found 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group that worked to improve community-police relations and vigorously criticized Police Department leadership.
Critics said 100 Blacks, which held weekly news conferences, amounted to hot air. Wilbur Chapman, who is Black and was the NYPD’s chief of patrol at the time, said that Adams declined a request to help recruit people of color, and that his work was “solely political.”
“There was absolutely nothing he did, other than have these press conferences,” Chapman said. “He was of absolutely no help.”
Joseph Esposito, the NYPD’s chief of department from 2000 to 2013, said he disagreed.
“A lot of those opinions that he put out were shared by many members of the minority community,” said Esposito, who is white and was at odds with Adams in a 2013 court trial over the department’s use of stop-and-frisk. “So it’s just the opposite. I think he helped.”
By the end of his police career, Adams had been shot at in his car on Atlantic Ave. on a winter night in 1996. He had served in the subway, and in precincts in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In the ’80s, he had walked his younger brother’s beat on the Lower East Side, shadowing his sibling as he started off.
And he had publicly declared that dishonesty was rooted in the department’s training.
“It was not an easy road,” said Marq Claxton, a retired detective who was in 100 Blacks. “The Police Department felt threatened. They felt insulted.”
The NYPD investigated Adams repeatedly during his tenure, including an 11-month probe into 100 Blacks that started in 1998 and focused on Adams, according to the authorities.
He retired in 2006, fresh off departmental charges over a TV interview he gave criticizing the NYPD. He said at the time that it was the right note to go out on — fighting. By that point, he had been planning his Senate run since 2004, and had flooded notebooks with his plans for office.
He served four terms in Albany, pushing to legalize gay marriage, speaking out about gun violence and bombastically arguing for pay increases for legislators. In 2014, he became the first Black Brooklyn borough president.
Now, the reckless teen-turned-rebel cop has City Hall almost in his grips. He’s been preparing.
“I said to him about maybe 10 years ago: ‘Did you ever think this was going to go this far?'” recalled Kelvin Alexander, a former police sergeant who trained Adams in 1984 and later worked as deputy chief of staff in his Senate office. “He said, ‘Yes. Of course.'”
Check out our special section for the latest news on the critical 2021 elections in NYC. And to have the essential news and analysis sent to your inbox, sign up for our Campaign Diaries newsletter.
