(AFP) – New York’s self-described mayor of “swagger” who held late-night court at Manhattan clubs, Eric Adams vowed to be a city leader unlike any other. A promise fulfilled: Adams on Thursday became the first ever sitting mayor of New York criminally charged on allegations including bribery and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations — a bombshell reversal of fortune for the ex-cop once floated as having national political potential.
New York’s second Black mayor won the city’s highest office with a centrist, tough-on-crime platform as the metropolis reeled from the economic and social toils of the pandemic and experienced an uptick in gun violence. But the (sometimes) vegan ex-cop who ran on little sleep was perhaps more famous in the city for his idiosyncratic persona and a penchant for pithy one-liners than his ability to get much done.
New York is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, with prices for food, entertainment, and housing soaring to unprecedented levels. Adams’s approval ratings are dismal, at one point sinking lower than any mayor in the city since Quinnipiac University began surveying almost three decades ago. Many critics saw his solutions as mere gimmicks, including cryptocurrency, or the police robot that was momentarily stationed in the Times Square subway station.
His rivals on the left flank of his own party were among Adams’s fiercest critics. Early on in his tenure, he brought back a disbanded special crimes unit. Since then, a monitor found illegal police stops had risen under Adams’s leadership, and rivals have criticized his strategies as overly aggressive. And as he confronted a migrant crisis saturating New York’s shelter system, the mayor said new arrivals in the city, historically famous for welcoming immigrants, would “destroy New York City.”
He declared war on New York’s notorious rat population, nominating a so-called rat czar before holding a National Urban Rat Summit. Meanwhile, he was ticketed again and again for allowing rat infestations at his Brooklyn property as he resided at Gracie Mansion.
– ‘Table of Success’ –
Born in Bushwick, Brooklyn in 1960, Adams was raised in a large family in a working-class neighborhood of Queens. His mother was a cleaner and his father was a butcher. When he was 15 years old, two NYPD officers repeatedly kicked him in the groin after arresting him for criminal trespassing. He says he then decided he wanted to become a police officer. “I didn’t want any more children to go through what I endured, so I sought to make change from the inside by joining the police department,” Adams wrote in The New York Times in 2014.
He joined the force in the mid-1980s when crime was rife in New York City, serving 22 years and rising to become a captain. He retired from the force in 2006, winning election to the New York State Senate that year where he served until 2013 when he was elected Brooklyn borough president, providing a springboard for his mayoral ambitions. Eminently quotable, his at-times mind-boggling one-liners were the stuff of social media gold.
When he was in state office, Adams recorded a public service announcement for parents on how to search kids’ bedrooms, a much-ridiculed clip that has since gone through several cycles of virality. He was roundly mocked after describing New York as “a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center through a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open.” He wrote a book on his vegan diet, which he credits with reversing his diabetes. But he was occasionally seen in public eating fish. Among his most famous maxims was “All My Haters Become Waiters At the Table of Success.”
With Thursday’s indictment, the tables have turned.
– Maggy DONALDSON
© 2024 AFP
