He swept in as the mayor of “swagger.” He was an enthusiastic participant in New York’s nightlife, swanning around clubs into the wee hours, and then holding early-morning meetings in City Hall.
He was a self-proclaimed vegan who dabbled in fish, and he hardly slept. When he did, no one knew quite where. He had an apartment in Brooklyn, an official residence at Gracie Manor on the Upper East Side and a girlfriend in Fort Lee, N.J.
From the moment Eric Adams took office on New Year’s Eve 2021, he promised to be a mayor such as New Yorkers had never seen.
“I’m like broccoli. You’re going to hate me now, but you’re going to love me later,” he once said.
Mr. Adams has been both a constant public presence and an unknowable figure — quick with an incomprehensible quote, increasingly irritated with reporters, riding a wave of bravado and bluster in a city faced with multiple crises.
He upended some of the city’s political borders: a Democrat who embraced the Police Department and clashed with the more liberal City Council. A streetwise kid who grew tight with the business community and surrounded himself with loyalists.
It all came crashing down on Thursday as a federal investigation that had plagued the mayor for nearly a year culminated in an indictment.
A former police officer, Mr. Adams had promised to bring order to the city, often seeing salvation in technology: He championed a squat police robot that briefly patrolled the Times Square subway station. Though crime has fallen during his tenure, trickles of random violence have made many New Yorkers feel unsafe.
When a flood of migrants arrived in 2023, overwhelming the city’s shelter system, the mayor declared that migrants would “destroy New York City,” adding, “I don’t see an ending to this.”
He found another nemesis in the city’s vermin, declaring war on rats. He sponsored a National Urban Rat Summit, appointed a rat czar and announced an Anti-Rat Day of Action in his Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone, one of four such areas. But he also fought off a $300 fine for an infestation at his apartment in Brooklyn.
Like many mayors before him, he seemed not to accept any criticism. When his approval numbers dived a few months into his administration, he responded, simply, “ “A C is not an A, but a C is not an F.”
Yet discontent followed him. Faced with a budget shortfall, which he blamed on the migrant crisis, exaggerating its effects, he made unpopular budget cuts to the police, schools and libraries.
Stories and questions swirled. Did he live in New York, or in the New Jersey condo he owned with his domestic partner, Tracey Collins? A Florida woman accused him of sexual assault in 1993, when he was a member of the New York Police Department, which he denied.
In other ways, he was just impossible to peg.
“I’m not a traditional mayor,” he said, unnecessarily. He showed up to a news conference wearing a guayabera, and promised more sartorial ensembles from New York’s immigrant groups: “When I rock their clothing, I say I’m going to rock for you as a mayor.”
But he was usually seen in expensive, impeccably tailored suits, featuring dazzling cuff links or a pin collar shirt secured with minuscule studs — a little flash of metal.
Then there were the aphorisms, the most famous of which he repeated often: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.”
There were more:
“Borough presidents don’t die, they multiply!”
“I’ve got the swagger.”
Constituents never really knew where he was going to pop up next.
He was in Washington Heights, embracing a Chihuahua; he was at a nightclub in Midtown, sitting in a booth next to the rapper French Montana; he was at a party thrown by a bank, bobbing his head as the model Cara Delevingne danced beside him.
Mr. Adams called himself “the hip-hop mayor,” and insisted that gallivanting was part of the job. “This is a city of nightlife. I must test the product. I have to be out,” he said on a late-night talk show, adding: “We used to be the coolest place on the globe. We’re so damn boring now.”
He was once called New York City’s most famous vegan — and compared cheese to heroin — but he later clarified that he merely tried to stick to a plant-based diet. Those who questioned him about eating fish or meat he branded “the food police.”
He never stopped championing his hometown, even as he held flag-raising ceremonies to honor nation after nation.
“New York City is the Tel Aviv of America,” he said. It was also, he said, the Athens of America, the Istanbul of America, the Kyiv of America, the Seoul of America and the Zagreb of America.
“Everyone who moved to Florida, get your butts back to New York City, because New York City is where you want to be,” he said.
On Thursday morning, New York’s most unpredictable mayor said that nothing that was transpiring was impossible or unforeseen.
“We are not surprised. We expected this,” Mr. Adams said, speaking softly at a news conference while more than two dozen supporters around him nodded.
It is a day that many New Yorkers had anticipated after the long months of investigation. Perhaps even Mr. Adams envisioned it. On the “Breakfast Club” radio show in March, he took a stab at writing his own legacy:
“When my gloves are hung up,” Mr. Adams said, “people will look at, listen, that was an authentic bald‑headed, earring‑wearing brother that did his thing as the mayor of the city of New York.”
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