Heading into Memorial Day weekend, a poll had just shown Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams with his largest lead of the contest, and the mayoral candidates were spread out across the city, trying to catch up. Scott Stringer was down at One Police Plaza for a press conference on cutting bureaucratic bloat in the NYPD; Kathryn Garcia was in front of Moynihan Train Hall, rolling out a detailed plan for infrastructure projects in every borough. Maya Wiley was in Morningside Heights, pushing for the State Legislature to give victims of sexual abuse more time to sue, and Andrew Yang was in Tribeca, unveiling a proposal to help low-income seniors stay in their homes.

And Adams was in a park in Inwood, talking about dirt bikes.
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By his side was Adriano Espaillat, the uptown U.S. representative and someone whose endorsement is one of the few in New York City politics that can actually move votes. Espaillat had been with Stringer before two-decade-old allegations of sexual harassment upended the city comptroller’s mayoral campaign. Before issuing his endorsement, Espaillat spoke with Adams about how dirt bikes and ATV’s were overrunning the streets, and here was the payoff: The congressman, surrounded by a half-dozen current and former uptown elected officials, singing the praises of a future Adams administration while Adams addressed a concern of his district.

The 2021 race for mayor is, as all political campaigns are, an experiment, an answer to the question of what kind of city New York is. Is it one that has taken a sharp left turn, highlighted by the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and last summer’s racial-justice protests? (Based on recent polling, it seems decidedly not.) Is it one where municipal ties are so weak that someone who has never evinced much knowledge or even interest in city government can win based on cultivating a certain kind of internet fame? (Andrew Yang is hoping the answer is “yes.”)

Or is New York City still a town ruled by the same kind of party machines that controlled its governance for most of the 20th century: one of backroom deals, Brooklyn clubhouse politics, big real-estate money, and mutual back-scratching.

This is Eric Adams’s bet.

“This whole race has been about people trying to create different frames for it. Is it an ideological-left frame? A pragmatic-manager frame? A businessman-outsider frame?” said David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert in New York City politics. “But instead it is Eric Adams, building a coalition inside the shell of the Democratic Party of labor unions, Black homeowners, real-estate interests, and other Democratic Party politicians. If he pulls it off, he will be one of the most powerful mayors New York has had in a generation. It is the return of the permanent government, and Eric Adams is going to be at the center of it.”

Among the more than 30 former colleagues and staffers and current lobbyists, lawyers, and local elected officials who talked about Adams for this story — almost all of them anonymously, citing the fear that he would soon be mayor and look to exact revenge — most pointed to a moment from his first year in office as especially illustrative of how he would govern.

In 2007, Governor Eliot Spitzer demanded that state lawmakers receive raises only if they agreed to a series of reforms designed to clean up Albany’s cloudy way of doing business.

Adams, a Brooklyn native who had recently become a state senator after two decades in the NYPD, wasn’t having it.

“I don’t know how some of you are living to tell you the truth. With $79,000, you qualify for public assistance. This is a joke,” he said in a speech on the floor of the State Senate.

“We are not being paid enough,” he continued. “Don’t be insulted for yourselves. You should be insulted for your children, that you are not allowed to give your children an affordable, decent form of living.”

Politicians are not supposed to admit that they are interested in money for anything other than funding their campaigns. They are there to serve, after all. And they are especially not supposed to admit they are interested in money when they are making more than the median salary in the state for six months of work and their job comes with all sorts of perks, including per diems when they work in Albany. But Adams was willing to go there.

“I’ll be darned if I’m ashamed to say it,” he added, his voice echoing off the chamber walls. “I deserve to be paid more. And I’m only a freshman and I’m already complaining. We better vote on a raise and make sure we get paid more.”

The little speech became a headache for Democrats, who had been locked out of power for 40 years in the State Senate and were trying to retake the majority. Republicans jumped on the opportunity to cast a Black Democrat as gruff and greedy — especially the last part, when Adams turned to his colleagues and said, “Show me the money! Show me the money! That’s what this is all about! We deserve more money.”

Adams was a well-known figure in the city’s political scene before then, if an idiosyncratic one. To this day, those who know Adams describe him as deeply committed to racial justice. In 1995, he had started a group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care from his perch in the NYPD, pushing for Black and Latino officers to have more of a role in the department’s operations. He was described in New York Magazine in 1994 as a ”radical” and “contentious” transit cop, “[b]etter known for his strident, unaccommodating comments than for his leadership,” and someone who “seems always on the brink of inciting controversy,” such as when he criticized mayoral candidate Herman Badillo for marrying a Jewish woman instead of a Latina. He ran for Congress in 1994 against Representative Major Owens, a revered figure in central Brooklyn, on the grounds that Owens should never have denounced Louis Farrakhan. Adams lost.

He was investigated by the NYPD four times, once for traveling with other cops to Indiana to escort Mike Tyson from prison, violating the NYPD’s policy forbidding officers from associating with known felons. Despite being a self-described “conservative Republican,” he clashed with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s over the mayor’s defense of the police in misconduct investigations. Four years after Giuliani left office, Adams would again find himself sparring with allies: This time, the police commissioner. While running for State Senate, the now-retired captain Adams appeared on television and cited his rank while voicing criticisms of the department. By repeatedly mentioning his rank, the commissioner at the time found, Adams had “imbued his claims and comments with the credibility derived from his official position and, in so doing could have confused, misled, and panicked viewers into believing that he was speaking on behalf of a department he had criticized and contradicted.” (“Those investigations were an attempt to disgrace him that failed—and they did not lead to any discipline aside from a wrist-slap for ‘appearing on television without permission,’” said Evan Thies, a spokesperson for Adams. “Eric was despised by the leadership of the NYPD for speaking out against police abuse and racism, and they targeted him and slandered him every chance they got.”)

Once in Albany, Adams developed a reputation as one of the most camera-ready, charismatic members of the State Senate. He helped lead the charge against the practice of stop and frisk in the Bloomberg era and worked on anti-gang and anti-gun initiatives. But he also made his colleagues cringe with embarrassment, like the time he started a campaign to get teenage boys to pull their pants up or released a PSA teaching parents how to search their children’s baby dolls for guns or drugs.

Adams had an eye for where the power centers were and knew what powerful politicians needed, but he also made some problematic associations. He developed a close friendship with Hiram Monserrate, another ex-cop with a devoted following in his district in Queens. Monserrate threw the state government into chaos in June 2009, when, along with fellow Democrat Pedro Espada, he bolted the conference and joined the Republicans in an attempt to shift control of the Senate.

Former colleagues of theirs said that Adams and Monserrate bonded over the fact that they were both former cops. After Monserrate was arrested in December 2008 for slashing his girlfriend in the face with a piece of glass, Adams claimed that police were railroading Monserrate because he, like Adams, had been a reformer inside the department. As State Senate Democrats debated what to do about Monserrate and launched a four-month investigation into the incident, behind closed doors Adams became one of his most vociferous defenders. “He was just so dismissive of the fact that any of us thought this was a serious issue,” one lawmaker said. “It made my skin crawl.”

When Democrats voted to expel Monserrate following his assault conviction in 2010, Adams walked out of their meeting. “Fuck all y’all,” he said, according to two lawmakers present. (Through his spokesperson, Adams strongly denied saying this and put me in touch with Diane Savino, another Democratic senator who said it never happened.) He later claimed that his opposition was on procedural grounds, writing in a letter to constituents that “I decry all domestic violence behavior; to condone violence against women would violate all standards of decency, run counter to my commitment to end domestic violence, and violate my core values!”; Adams later attended Monserrate’s wedding and a campaign birthday party in 2018, when Monserrate was mounting a political comeback after serving 21 months in prison on federal corruption charges. (Adams publicly broke with Monserrate in February of this year.)

Adams had a way of becoming the power behind the throne, getting close first to State Senate Democratic leader Malcolm Smith, then becoming a top lieutenant to the man who replaced Smith, John Sampson. “It’s odd to see him running for mayor because he was always the guy behind the guy,” said one State Senate Democrat.

Former colleagues remember Adams as constantly trying to play different angles. In 2013, the Republicans, who were responsible for making committee assignments and who had not a single Black member in their body, offered Adams and another Black Democrat, James Sanders, chairmanships of committees. Sanders declined, but Adams accepted, becoming chair of the Committee on the Aging. The role came with a salary boost, a bigger office, and access to donors. His fellow Democrats saw it as a sign that he would be with the GOP on tough votes, and when they approached him about the need for Democrats to maintain a united front, Adams was dismissive. “He just wasn’t a team player,” recalled one senior Senate aide. “In a way that’s true for everybody in politics, but you always got the sense that the thing Eric Adams cared most about was what was in it for Eric Adams.”

“There is a certain kind of New York politician for whom The Godfather is their favorite movie,” recalled one former colleague. “Eric Adams is one of those politicians.”

Although he never joined the group of breakaway Democrats who caucused with the Republicans known as the Independent Democratic Conference, he was seen as quietly supportive of them, and after he left the Senate, Adams was replaced by a former staffer who did promptly join the group. “We called him ‘Captain Chaos,’” one lawmaker said. Adams would also disappear for weeks at a time for foreign travel. He and Sampson traveled to South Korea with a high-powered Albany lobbyist and with staffers from their offices. (Later, as Brooklyn Borough President, he’d accept thousands of dollars in travel to China, Turkey, and Azerbaijan paid for by the host countries.)

The schemes could occasionally shade into something more serious than a lack of judgment. In 2010, Adams and Sampson were in charge of recommending which company should win a contract to open up a new casino at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens. Sampson later admitted leaking an internal State Senate document assessing the bids to the company that later won the contract, AEG, while company representatives attended a Grand Havana Room fundraiser for Adams and donated to his campaign. Adams joined a company representative and Sampson and then-Governor David Paterson at a dinner but later denied that he was there, saying he just happened to be at the same restaurant and saw them there, something that a state inspector general wrote “strains credulity.” After recommending the contract to AEG, Adams later attended a victory celebration at the home of the company’s lobbyist, which the inspector general said “reflects, at a minimum, exceedingly poor judgment.” Adams continues to deny that his conduct was improper; his spokesperson called the inspector general’s report “a political hit piece.”

The saga led to Sampson’s getting booted from his position as Democratic leader in favor of Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Adams stayed by his side. Sampson at the time was under investigation for stealing $400,000 on the sale of foreclosed homes and asking a friendly prosecutor he knew to turn over the names of those who were testifying against him so he could “take them out.” But he still fought to hang on to his leadership post, and Adams was in charge of rallying Democratic lawmakers to support Sampson. Sampson refused to step aside, certain that Adams had procured him a majority. In the end, Democratic senators overthrew Sampson in a landslide, leading Adams to once again storm out of their conference meeting. “He doesn’t know how to operationalize anything,” one lawmaker present said.

Adams was treated with such suspicion by his fellow Democratic lawmakers that one senator, Shirley Huntley of Queens, started taping her conversations with him while she was under investigation for corruption, hoping that she could use them to stave off any jail time. Huntley was sentenced to a year in jail; she recently reappeared at the opening of Adams’s Queens campaign headquarters.

“He became the shadow leader of the conference when he was here,” said one lawmaker who served alongside Adams. “But I tried to stay away from him, and I think others did too. We always assumed he was wearing a wire.”