Eric Adams

Eric Adams (born September 1, 1960, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is the 110th mayor of New York City, a position he has held since 2022. He previously worked in the New York City Police Department for more than 20 years, retiring with the rank of captain. He represented parts of central Brooklyn in the New York state senate (2007–13) and served as the Brooklyn borough president (2014–22). His tenure as mayor has been filled with controversies, and in September 2024 he was indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign donations. As of early October 2024 at least six of Adams’s top officials had resigned amid the federal probe, and a number of others were reported to be under investigation.

Early life and police career

Adams was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1960. He had five siblings. He was raised in South Jamaica, Queens, by a single mother who cleaned houses. He has said that when he was 15, he was beaten by police in the basement of a precinct house—and this inspired him to join the New York Police Department, hoping to change it from within (although he has told different versions of this story with conflicting details). He has also said that when he was 17, he washed windows at street corners for money. He graduated from Bayside High School in 1979.

Adams joined the New York City transit police in 1984 and later became a New York Police Department officer when the two departments merged. He worked stints in several neighborhoods, including Coney Island, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Greenpoint (all in Brooklyn). He served as chair of the Guardians, an organization for Black officers. In the early 1990s he expressed reluctance to endorse the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, for reelection—reportedly because Dinkins refused to meet with the controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

In 1995 Adams cofounded a group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care to combat racial profiling and police brutality. It started with 10 officers, each of whom was tasked with enlisting 10 more. This group donated $120 each for a fund to help residents in their precincts, and later it held seminars for young Black men on how to behave during stop-and-frisk encounters. In 1997 Adams registered as a Republican and retained this affiliation until 2001.

Political work

Adams retired from the police department in 2006 and ran for state senate, winning the election with the support of the influential assemblyman Dov Hikind. His voting record was mostly typical for a Democrat in the statehouse. In 2008 and 2009 he defended a fellow state legislator, Hiram Monserrate, who was charged with assaulting his girlfriend (and later convicted). In 2010, while chairing the state senate committee that deals with casino regulation, Adams was criticized by the state inspector general for raising money from bidders on a casino contract and failing to make sure the contract was issued according to ethical guidelines. The state has since reported that Adams apparently made false statements to investigators.

In 2013 Adams ran for Brooklyn borough president and won 91 percent of the vote, becoming the first African American to hold the position. In that role Adams advocated for free tuition at New York’s community colleges and supported efforts to reduce meat consumption in local schools. He drew controversy for a 2020 rant in which he blamed non-native New Yorkers for driving up the cost of rent. “Go back to Iowa,” he said. “You go back to Ohio! New York City belongs to the people that [were] here and made New York City what it is.” However, the New York Daily News reported that by that time, Adams had collected more than $800,000 from the real estate industry and donors who lived outside the city for the mayoral campaign he planned to launch later that year.

Election as mayor and scandals

In June 2021 Adams defeated a dozen other candidates in the Democratic primary for New York’s mayor, and that November, he won the general election against Curtis Sliwa with 66 percent of the vote. In office, Adams has made crime reduction a top priority. He has increased patrols on subways and relaunched a unit devoted to reducing gun crimes. Even so, by the end of 2022 overall crime had risen 22 percent from 2021 levels. Adams also struggled to deal with the arrival of some 210,000 immigrants who came to New York from an array of continents and had nowhere to stay.

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By the end of 2023 Adams had the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a New York City mayor since the poll was launched in 1996. Adams’s critics have characterized him as incompetent, saying he cares more about photo ops than the substance of governing. One Democratic operative told Vanity Fair that Adams was “very savvy about displaying his personality in a way that has allowed him to mask a pretty vacant agenda.” In November 2023 the FBI seized the mayor’s phones and iPad and raided the home of his chief fundraiser. In mid-2024 investigators subpoenaed the mayor and his election committee, and in September top officials at City Hall started resigning. Later that month, federal prosecutors announced the mayor had been indicted on charges of accepting more than $100,000 worth of illegal gifts (including hotel accommodations and free flight upgrades) from Turkish nationals, starting in 2016. Prosecutors said Adams had also sought campaign contributions from Turkish sources for his 2021 race and had created “fake paper trails” to hide the source of the money.

The prosecutors said that after Adams became mayor, a Turkish official told him it was “his turn to repay.” They said Adams pressured New York’s fire department to approve a new Turkish consular building without a fire inspection. In the days after Adams’s indictment was announced, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Jerry Nadler called for him to resign, while Gov. Kathy Hochul reportedly told him to “clean house.” An October poll also found that 69 percent of New York residents thought he should quit.