To hear Mayor Eric Adams tell it, he never had a fair shot.
The signs, he said, were clear long before the wheels fell off his administration — before the F.B.I. searches, the bribery allegations and the cascade of resignations that gutted his inner circle and bulldozed his approval ratings to historical lows.
And when a federal grand jury returned a five-count indictment against him in September 2024, making him the first mayor in modern New York City history to face criminal charges, Mr. Adams said he had already been prejudged and presumed guilty.
“My lack of success didn’t start because of the indictment,” Mr. Adams said in an interview this month. “It started from Day 1. The indictment just added on and gave them more stuff to dump on me.”
Mr. Adams, 65, has always been focused on his personal narrative. His 2021 mayoral campaign unspooled like a bildungsroman, leaning hard on his origin story of poverty, dyslexia and struggle.
He told voters about how he went from joining gangs to policing them. He spoke frequently of his mother, Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter, who sometimes worked three jobs to keep food on the table for him and his five siblings. New Yorkers bought in, electing Mr. Adams as the second Black mayor in the city’s history.
And when he was sworn into office in Times Square as confetti swirled and the crowd cheered after the ball drop, it did seem, at least to those looking on, that the hard-knock kid from Queens was living the ultimate New York City success story.
Not everyone was on board. In the Democratic primary, he got the most votes in four of the five boroughs, but failed to win in Manhattan, as well as in nearly all of brownstone Brooklyn, the wealthiest swaths of the city, home to power players and civic influencers.
“I was never one of them,” he said. “I was the outsider. I didn’t fit who they felt should be the mayor.”
Mr. Adams is treating his last weeks in office as something of a farewell tour, visiting foreign countries like Albania, Israel and Uzbekistan, jetting off to other U.S. cities and sitting with selected media outlets for exit interviews to defend his legacy and express his grievances.
He did much the same for this article, seated in the Peach Room at Gracie Mansion, the elegant, 18th-century Federal-style building that has been the official residence for New York City mayors for more than 80 years.
“We were never really given the opportunity to have what one calls a honeymoon period,” Mr. Adams said. “I talked about this over and over again. Everybody said you’re not supposed to talk about it. Like hell, I’m not.”
He was eager to describe his accomplishments.
He called his housing opportunity rezoning initiative, known as City of Yes, the most pro-housing effort in New York history and he promised it would build 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years. The initiative also included $2 billion for affordable housing at the City Council’s insistence, bolstering the mayor’s claim that roughly 425,000 affordable housing units will have been built, preserved or planned for during his tenure.
Mr. Adams takes pride in having cut the out-of-pocket cost of subsidized child care from $55 a week in 2022 to $5 a week for low-income families earning $55,000 a year. And after being criticized for cutting funds for preschool for 3-year-olds, he responded with small pilot programs aimed at further lowering child care costs for poorer families.
Crime in New York has plummeted, although felony assaults are up slightly over the past two years. Shooting and murders in particular, which are down nationwide, have declined more sharply in New York City than elsewhere.
And Mr. Adams has ushered in a move to containerize the city’s trash, which for half a century has been tossed to the curb in simple plastic bags, attracting rodents and grime. The mayor, who despises rats so much that he publicly declared war on them in 2022, is immensely proud that rat sightings reported to 311 are now down nearly 20 percent compared to this time last year.
Few of these things, he said, have gotten as much attention as he would like.
“I lived up to my promise,” he said. “I want New Yorkers to say, ‘Let’s go look at what Eric promised, and then say, did he deliver? Yes, he did.’”
Many New Yorkers may disagree. In a December 2023 poll, months before he was indicted, Mr. Adams’s approval rating had sunk to 28 percent in a Quinnipiac University poll, the lowest for any New York mayor since Quinnipiac began surveying the city in 1996. Voters criticized his leadership qualities, questioned his honesty and gave him his lowest marks over his handling of homelessness and the city budget.
The interview was conducted just off the Gracie Mansion foyer, where federal agents pushed through the front door to seize the mayor’s phone and search the mansion’s rooms on Sept. 26, 2024. His indictment, on bribery, wire fraud and campaign finance charges, was announced a few hours later.
Mr. Adams pleaded not guilty at a moment that he described as “warfare” and that he said came about because of betrayal by people who took advantage of his loyalty.
“There were people I trusted that I should not have trusted,” he said. “You get judged by the friends you keep.”
He resisted calls to resign and believes he deserved more credit for his perseverance.
“The greatest testament to this administration is to look at the day I was indicted and then look at everything we accomplished after,” he said.
After the indictment, he also cultivated a relationship with President Trump, stunning his Democratic supporters with a series of overtures that ended with the charges being formally dismissed in February. The events have been called a corrupt quid pro quo, hatched in exchange for allowing Mr. Trump to carry out his draconian immigration agenda in New York City, which the Adams administration denies.
Mr. Adams does not want to talk about that.
“God uses who he uses,” he said.
The damage to his political fortunes was irreparable. He bowed out of the Democratic primary in April, vowing to run for re-election as an independent. In September, he withdrew from the general election, and eventually endorsed former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, an opponent he had previously called “a snake and a liar,” in a bid to stop the momentum of Zohran Mamdani.
The effort, of course, was futile. Mr. Mamdani is the mayor-elect and will take office in January.
Mr. Adams’s own future is less certain. There was talk of possible ambassadorships, but none materialized. He insists that he will be better off pursuing a life outside the mayoralty than inside City Hall.
“When I see what’s waiting for me, I’d have to be stuck on stupid,” he said. “For four more years, I would have been restricted, and for what? Just to say hey, I did it for another four years? No man. There’s a whole life out there.”
Mr. Adams says he is still hammering out his exact plans for the future, but he wants to write a book; go back to school to get a Ph.D.; do international business or nonprofit work to expand on a diversity-building project he started as mayor; and be a commentator with a major network.
He also wants to expand the advocacy work he has been doing to combat antisemitism on behalf of the Jewish community, condemning the rise in hate crimes against Jews since the Israel-Hamas war began in 2023.
A recent flashpoint emerged last month, when a group of anti-Israel protesters gathered in front of Park East Synagogue in Manhattan as Jewish New Yorkers entered the building. Nefesh B’Nefesh, an Israeli nonprofit that advises North Americans interested in moving to Israel or Israeli-occupied settlements in the West Bank, was holding an information fair at the synagogue that evening.
Mr. Mamdani criticized the protesters but also took issue with the synagogue for promoting “activities in violation of international law,” referring to the West Bank settlements. (Nefesh B’Nefesh, like the Israeli government, does not consider West Bank settlements illegal.)
Mr. Adams responded quickly. He signed an executive order prohibiting mayoral staff members from boycotting Israel and directing the police to re-evaluate how they regulate protests near all houses of worship.
“History has shown that Jews and African Americans have been the victim of some of the most horrific attacks in history, and we need to do it for our own personal survival as well,” the mayor said. “This isn’t about Israel.”
As for his legacy, Mr. Adams, who made his bravado clear just three days into his mayoralty — “when a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger,” he said then in a speech — naturally wanted to have the last word, accepting his fate as New York City’s first one-term mayor since David N. Dinkins, 32 years ago.
“It doesn’t matter the number of terms,” he said. “My picture goes up in City Hall.”
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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