Eric Adams, New York City Mayor, reveals the top 10 contradictions


Eric Adams, New York City Mayor, reveals the top 10 contradictions

NEW YORK — Eric Adams had just been elected the 110th mayor of New York, and he had something people needed to hear.

“Trust me when I tell you, there’s never going to be another mayor like me,” Adams said at a political conference in Puerto Rico in November.

It sounded like hyperbole. What politician doesn’t use hyperbole to boost their brand?

But it’s only taken six weeks for Adams to prove how right he was.

From dining with disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to crying over the death of a man he’d never met, from declaring “God” told him he’d be mayor to entertaining at a private club by night, Adams has kept New York’s famed tabloid newspapers busy every day.

Adams has also been in the national spotlight, drawing President Joe Biden to the city earlier this month to discuss gun violence. He is becoming a Democratic Party model for a leader who’s both tough on crime and wants to reform the criminal justice system given his background as a Black retired NYPD captain who worked to diversify the police department from the inside.

Understanding what makes the mayor tick can be a fool’s errand. He’s complex and unpredictable, and often seems like a walking contradiction.

He was vegan until, it turned out, he likes to eat fish.

He was a self-described conservative Republican until, it turned out, he was a Democrat.

“I’m perfectly imperfect,” he said last week.

Here are the top 10 paradoxes of New York City’s one-of-a-kind new leader



Eric Adams, New York City Mayor, reveals the top 10 contradictions

1. He’s a vegan who eats fish.

POLITICO this month broke what’s become known as “FishGate.” While publicly professing strict adherence to a plant-based diet, Adams privately dines on fish at high-end Manhattan restaurants. The mayor was forced to admit he sometimes strays from his veganism, leading critics to ask what other gaps there might be in what the mayor professes versus what he practices.

2. He’s a health nut who only sleeps a few hours a night.

While it befits the City That Never Sleeps, Adams claims to get by on just four hours of shut-eye while also preaching the aforementioned healthy lifestyle. He kept a mattress next to his desk at Brooklyn Borough Hall when he was the borough president and now has one at City Hall so he can work until he drops. He makes up for the lack of rest with a daily meditation practice.

3. He’s a “blue-collar guy” who vacations in Monaco and parties at a private club.

Adams, who grew up as one of six children teetering on the edge of homelessness, said he’d be the “first blue-collar mayor” shortly before launching his campaign. He used his roots as a former cop to connect with outer-borough voters. “I am just a blue-collar guy scraping along,” he claimed last year before taking a mystery vacationIt turned out Adams was hush-hush about the “personal trip to Europe” because he was in Monaco cruising on a yacht. Back home in the city, Adams became a regular at a $4,000-a-year, members-only club in Noho called Zero Bond where he hobnobbed with rapper Ja Rule, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and actor Forest Whitaker at a private election-night party.

4. He paid for a trip on a bitcoin billionaire’s jet through a travel agent.

In a game of one-upmanship with now-former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Adams told reporters he went to the Puerto Rico conference last year that’s a see-and-be-seen event for New York Politicians on “my dollar, my dime and my time” after the outgoing mayor admitted he stuck taxpayers with the bill for his trip. But POLITICO reported the mayor-elect hitched a ride to the island on a plane owned by cryptocurrency giant Brock Pierce. An Adams spokesman insisted the trip wasn’t a freebie — claiming he paid for his seat through a travel agent.



Eric Adams, New York City Mayor, reveals the top 10 contradictions

5. He was a police captain, yet doesn’t trust cops.

Adams spent 22 years as a member of the NYPD but doesn’t back the blue when it comes to his own safeguarding. The mayor hired his brother to head up his security detail — despite nepotism charges — because he said he only trusted his sibling to protect him. “He knows his brother, and he’s going to keep his brother safe,” Adams explained about the unusual arrangement. A city ethics board later ruled that Adams could keep his younger brother Bernard on board, but could only pay him $1 instead of the $240,000 salary he’d first been given. Bernard retired from the NYPD as a sergeant, but more recently served as assistant director for parking at Virginia Commonwealth University.

6. He’s a devotee of cryptocurrency — but not crypto-mining.

The mayor is famously taking his first three paychecks in cryptocurrency and wants to make the city a hub for trading the digital coins, but he recently came out against the mining process required to mint the money. “I support cryptocurrency, not crypto mining,” Adams said at a budget hearing in Albany last week. Environmentalists say the mining threatens the state’s climate goals. “I support life but not clean air or water. Oops,” New York Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, a Manhattan Democrat, quipped in a tweet about the contradictory statement.

7. He’s a former state senator who took a while to meet with Senate leadership.

Adams served in the state Senate for seven years but hadn't sat down with leading lawmakers over a month into his tenure. Top Democrats in both Assembly and Senate majority conferences said initially they had little to no interactions with Adams or his staff despite the need to work together on pressing issues for the city, from crime to Covid-19. “The mayor was a former senator, he understands the importance of being able to work together to get a lot of things done. … I’m sure he’ll reach out at some point soon,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said earlier this month. Shortly after POLITICO’s article on his absence from the state Legislature ran, the mayor booked a trip to Albany, and he appeared with them Monday.


8. He’s a lover of bubble baths whose primary home doesn’t have a bathtub.

During one of the Democratic primary debates Adams said he couldn’t live without a hot bath with warm roses. “Men like that too,” he said on the debate stage as his opponents gave more traditional answers to a question about what they couldn’t live without like “my kids” and “my wife.” And after he clinched the primary in June, he joked he was looking forward to “taking that bubble bath” once the race was over. But when he invited reporters over to his Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse for breakfast shortly before the primary in June, they noticed he just had one small bathroom with a stand-up shower — and no tub.

9. He was a Brooklyn borough president whose own tax filings raised questions about where he really lived.

About that townhouse. POLITICO broke the seminal story of the mayoral race by showing Adams had provided conflicting information on official documents about where the then-Brooklyn borough president resided. He owns the Bed-Stuy row house where many neighbors didn’t know he lived and a city buildings inspector left notices that went unanswered. He also shares a co-op in Fort Lee, N.J., with his partner and bought a Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, co-op with a former girlfriend in 1992. He continued to list the Brooklyn apartment on official records while claiming he hadn’t lived there in a decade. To further confuse things, Adams, he of little sleep, mostly called his Borough Hall office home during the pandemic, treating his desk-side mattress as a makeshift bedroom.

10. He had a homeless accountant.

As for the confusing paperwork — including tax documents stating he doesn’t actually live at the Bed-Stuy row house he claims as his primary residence — Adams blamed a homeless accountant. “He came to me when he reached the point of his homelessness, and he stated: ‘I’m under a lot of pressure, I’m going through some difficult times, and I understand you have to fire me,’” Adams told the news site The City in September when asked about the filings. Adams said he took pity on the tax preparer and kept him on even though he was living in a shelter. “And because of that, it may have caused him to make some bad decisions,” Adams said. The error forced Adams to file amended tax returns — for the second time in a year. In May, following an article by POLITICO, he had to refile his returns for failing to report $36,000 in rental income from the Brooklyn townhouse.

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By: Julia Marsh
Title: The top 10 contradictions of New York City Mayor Eric Adams
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/2022/02/17/contradictions-new-york-city-eric-adams-00008586
Published Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2022 04:31:00 EST

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