Mayoral candidate Eric Adams grew up so poor in Brooklyn that he and his five siblings adopted one of the rats that infested their fourth-floor walk-up in Brownsville.
They called him Mickey, after Mickey Mouse.
“We put him in a box and he became our pet,” said Adams, a former police officer, state senator and current Brooklyn Borough President, in an interview with The Post last week. “We didn’t even realize the diseases that could come from it. As with any child, you normalize your environment. We didn’t know we were poor because that’s how everyone around us lived.”
Adams, 60, who holds a six-point lead in the polls in the Democratic primary race for mayor (early voting begins Saturday), said his family’s prospects changed for the better when his mother scraped together a down-payment for their own home by ironing clothes and cleaning houses.
“One day mom sat down and says, ‘I’m moving my children to Queens,'” he recalled, adding that his mother worked in the borough and felt she could carve out a better life there.
“There was this quiet in the room and then everyone burst out laughing. Moving to Queens for us was like moving to Mars. It was like breaking out of poverty, the ultimate in luxury.”
In April 1968, when Adams was a few months shy of his 8th birthday, Dorothy Mae Adams and Leroy Adams, a butcher, closed on their new home in Jamaica. When Dorothy went to the bank to finalize the mortgage she was shocked to find that one of her employers worked as the bank’s attorney. After he signed her closing documents, she went to clean his house. “Dorothy bought a house today,” the lawyer, who was white, told his wife. When she finished cleaning, he fired her, recalled Adams.
“He thought she was being too uppity buying a house,” said Adams. “She went to the subway station at 179th Street in Queens and as the train went by, she cried and yelled and screamed to get it all out, and then she dried her eyes and went home.”
Shortly after the move, Leroy left the family. Dorothy “struggled” to provide for Adams, who was the fourth of six children.
Adams also struggled — with learning disabilities he didn’t know he had, and racism.
When he was 15, Adams and his older brother Conrad had a harrowing encounter with the NYPD after being charged with trespassing at a neighbor’s home. “We used to help this go-go dancer who broke her leg,” he said. “When she healed and didn’t want to pay us for all the help we gave her, she called the police on us.”
At the 103rd Precinct station house in Jamaica, the teenagers were beaten by NYPD officers, Adams said. “They handcuffed us backwards and repeatedly kicked us in the groin,” he recalled. “When you are abusive, you are smart in your abuse. They didn’t hit us anywhere else because they didn’t want to leave marks.” The brothers briefly ended up at the notorious Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx, now shuttered.
“When I urinated, I saw blood in the toilet,” recalled Adams. “It was an emasculation that took place, and I had a lot of rage. The rage really engulfed me for years. I could not hear a siren without thinking about that. That’s what PTSD is all about: Reliving it over and over again.”
Despite his treatment by cops, Adams was fascinated with law enforcement. He also loved computers. But he was a D student and his prospects looked grim. “I was so frustrated all the time,” said Adams, who attended elementary school and middle school in Jamaica and was bused to a mostly white high school in Bayside. “I went through my entire public school career going to bed crying because I was getting Ds,” he said.
Sitting in a library when he was an undergraduate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he heard a documentary about learning disabilities that someone was watching in a nearby aisle. He realized he had a problem, and immediately sought help. “It was a combination of starting to listen, of tutoring and finding out what the problem was,” said Adams, who was diagnosed with dyslexia. “I went from a D student to the dean’s list.”
Adams took on a series of part-time jobs, including working as a mechanic and a mailroom clerk, in order to pay his way through college. He earned a BA from John Jay and a graduate degree in public administration from Marist College, through a city-based program that was in partnership with the NYPD, he said.
His decision to become a police officer, he said, was largely driven by a desire to change policing “from within” and was helped along by the man he considers one of his greatest mentors — a crusading pastor whose Brooklyn church was at the center of the movement for social justice beginning in the 1960s. Adams, who was interested in civil rights as a young adult, sought out one of the youth programs offered by Rev. Herbert Daughtry at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn.
Daughtry, now 90, is the former chair of the National Black United Front, a grassroots activist group founded in Brooklyn in 1980 to empower African Americans in the US and around the world. Daughtry was among the black leaders in the US who helped end apartheid in South Africa by demanding the release of Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in jail.
“Eric was a young man who showed unusual courage and concern,” Daughtry told The Post. “I encouraged him to join the police and create a model for what it means to be a good cop. The police then were not the highest career to be pursued. There was pervasive resentment and anger. And over the years, the faith and vision I saw in him proved to be correct.”
Adams was among the top in his class when he graduated from the Police Academy in 1984. He worked as an officer for the New York City Transit Police and the NYPD for 22 years, rising to the rank of captain before he left the force in 1996. Although he said he got along well with white officers on the force, he said he wanted to address head-on some of the difficult issues black officers were facing on the force. In 1995, he co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group that spoke out against police brutality in the black community.
“What was astounding to me was that he was the co-founder of 100 Policemen Who Care — a not so subtle condemnation of the department,” said Daughtry, who regularly hired Adams to work security at his Brooklyn church, including during Winnie Mandela’s 1990 visit.
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist strikes, Daughtry tried to make his way from his church in downtown Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge to help survivors. He spotted Adams, then still a police officer, helping with the rescue effort on the Manhattan side. “He helped me get to the World Trade Center and was one of the first to go there,” said Daughtry.
Adams, who was working in the 88th Precinct in Clinton Hill/Fort Greene when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers, called it the worst day of his policing career. He remembers sleeping at the stationhouse.
After he became a state senator in 2007, and Brooklyn borough president in 2014 (the first African American to hold the position), he continued to stay in touch with Daughtry and his church, although he never became a formal member, Daughtry said. In later years, Adams worked with Daughtry to help secure the building of a community health center from Forest City Ratner, developer of the $1 billion Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn.
Adams, who lived in his family home in Jamaica until just a few years ago, returned to live in Brooklyn where he bought a quadriplex in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 2003, public records show. His mother still lives at the old family home.
Adams recently gave the press a tour of his basement apartment following allegations that he is spending most of his time living in a New Jersey condo he co-owns with his longterm partner, Tracey Collins, an educator and author and former chair of Adams’ educational task force when he was in the senate. His E-Z Pass records show only a handful of trips to New Jersey in the last year.
Adams, who has never been married, has a son from a previous relationship with Chrisena Coleman, a former Daily News reporter, who covered entertainment and courts in the Bronx. They split in 1997 when their son — Jordan Coleman — was 2 years old. Although Coleman lived mostly with his mother in New Jersey, Adams remained close to his son, who is now 25 years old. Adams also continues to be close to his three sisters and two brothers, a spokesman said.
And he hasn’t forgotten where he came from, said Daughtry. Adams, he recalled, was the first to show up to a protest march after the shooting death of a toddler in his stroller in Brownsville in 2013.
As Adams and Daughtry were hammering out the details on the Barclay’s health clinic, Adams had a health scare of his own: He temporarily went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with diabetes — a disease that runs in his family.
Unwilling to spend his life taking insulin and other medications, Adams resolved to radically change his eating habits. He became a vegan overnight and quickly lost 35 pounds. After three months, the diabetes went into remission, according to his 2020 book “Healthy at Last: A Plant Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses.”
Where does he get his resolve?
Adams credits the lifelong example of his mother, now 85. When he wanted to show his gratitude for everything that she had done for him and his siblings, he focused on the family home in Jamaica.
“I gutted it for her and I rebuilt it for her,” he said. And made sure it was rodent-free.
