The New York City mayor has made an art form of telling stories about himself that are nearly impossible to verify, adding fresh details to often-told anecdotes.
If there is one thing that Mayor Eric Adams has shown in his rise to power in New York City, it’s that he knows the value of telling a good story.
There was the one about the family’s pet rat, Mickey, and the one about the gang fight, when he got hit in the head with a bat with a nail in it.
And just last week, Mr. Adams recalled a new detail from the oft-told story of his teenage arrest: Soon after he was taken into custody, he said, the police discovered he was carrying fake gold chains.
“I used to go and sell them on Canal Street to the tourists,” he said at a community event. “Listen, the statute of limitations is over.”
Two days later, Mr. Adams casually mentioned that he had been a skateboarder and “knew how to do a few tricks.” Ample evidence, including his very brief attempt at gingerly boarding a skateboard last year, suggests he may be rusty.
You could look it up, as Casey Stengel, the fabled New York Yankees manager, was fond of saying many decades ago. But in the mayor’s case, you often cannot.
Since beginning his run for mayor in 2021, Mr. Adams has made an art form of telling stories about himself that are nearly impossible to verify, often adding fresh details to well-worn anecdotes.
Many of his stories seem intended for dramatic effect to help him connect to voters, rather than mislead them, as Representative George Santos did in misrepresenting his education, work history and background. But when Mr. Adams’s tendency to hyperbole strays into policy, there are more serious implications.
In early May, the mayor twice claimed that New York City schoolchildren “start their day going to the corner bodega buying cannabis and fentanyl,” despite there being little evidence of the trend.
The mayor recently told reporters that nearly half of New York City’s hotel rooms were occupied by migrants, suggesting that the influx of asylum seekers was hurting the tourism industry and taking rooms away from vacationers.
City Hall officials later walked back Mr. Adams’s claim, explaining that the mayor had meant to say that migrants had taken up 40 percent of the occupancy in the city’s midsize hotels. Hotel industry leaders said that migrants had not hurt tourism and that more than 20,000 rooms remained unoccupied.
Mr. Adams has also tried to put pressure on federal officials to help pay for what his administration is estimating will be $4.3 billion in migrant-related costs by next summer — even though the Independent Budget Office has said the price tag should actually be between $2.7 billion and $3.7 billion.
“At a time when the city is facing real crises, how can New Yorkers tell if the mayor is telling the truth when he keeps misleading them?” said Monica Klein, a Democratic political strategist and a deputy press secretary for former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Part of the mayor’s campaign strategy involved highlighting his working-class upbringing, underscoring the challenges he said he faced growing up in Queens and his understanding of the struggles that many New Yorkers face.
By the time he was 17, he has said, he had been a so-called squeegee man, a gang member and a victim of police brutality.
Mr. Adams’s press secretary, Fabien Levy, questioned the fairness of suggesting that “memories from the mayor’s youth and young adult life never happened without anything to substantiate these suggestions.”
“In his 62 years on this planet, the mayor has experienced more than 32 million moments, the vast majority of which have not been documented by even the most zealous members of the New York City press corps,” Mr. Levy said, apparently suggesting that Mr. Adams has, on average, had a moment for each minute of his life.
Even the mayor’s foundational story — his arrest and subsequent beating by two police officers — has undergone revisions.
He had long said that he and his older brother entered the home of a prostitute to take money she owed them for running errands. By late 2021, in an interview with The Times, Mr. Adams had changed the occupation of the woman to “a go-go dancer who we were helping that broke her leg.”
Kenneth Sherrill, a professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College in Manhattan, said that some of the mayor’s exaggerations or dramatic anecdotes appear to stem from his eagerness to connect with New Yorkers.
“Maybe I’m being too generous, but it’s entirely possible that this is his way of saying, ‘Listen, I understand where you’re coming from — I’ve experienced things like this, too,’” he said. “And then comes the fable which has some basis in truth.”
Indeed, in recent weeks, Mr. Adams has told worshipers that he received a divine message telling him to “talk about God, Eric.” He spoke about the fake gold chains a block or so away from the former Spofford Juvenile Center in the Bronx, where Mr. Adams said he was held after his arrest.
And his window washing story came in the late stages of the 2021 mayoral race, when Mr. Adams was asked about the nuisance of squeegee men in Midtown Manhattan. He said that he understood their plight because when he was 17, he, too, washed car windows at street corners.
“I had a dirty rag with some Windex that I watered down, and used to stand at the corner of Jamaica Avenue washing windows so I could save up enough money to give my mother the money so we could have a meal to eat,” Mr. Adams told reporters.
I. Daneek Miller, a former City Council member from Queens and a political ally of the mayor, said that part of Mr. Adams’s allure was his ability to connect with ordinary New Yorkers, in part by relating shared experiences.
“You can’t govern from an ivory tower, sending out memorandums saying, ‘I want everyone to do this,’ without them knowing why,” Mr. Miller said. “You have to get buy-in.”
On the rare occasion when the mayor is presented with evidence of a lie, he has clung to the “perfectly imperfect” defense.
When Mr. Adams, an evangelist for veganism who wrote a book about his diet, was confronted by reporters last year over witness accounts of him eating fish, he first sought to rebuff the queries, while his top aide denied the accusations. He finally acknowledged, “I am perfectly imperfect and have occasionally eaten fish.”
He used that phrase again last week when he was asked about his story of selling gold chains.
“When I go through my journals that I’ve been keeping for a long time, I look at a whole lot of things that have not been told,” he said. “All I can tell you is that you’re looking at a perfectly imperfect mayor that has gone through a lot, and I’m qualified to help people who are going through a lot.”
There have been other concessions. Mr. Adams said that he graduated from Bayside High School in 1978, but he actually graduated in January 1979, according to a copy of his high school transcript. Asked about the discrepancy, Mr. Adams acknowledged that he graduated late.
At a 2019 commencement address, Mr. Adams told a story about intimidating a neighbor whose dog was befouling his yard. He acknowledged to The Times in 2021 that the tale had been co-opted from another source. It was not that it didn’t happen, he said; it just didn’t happen to him.
There were also campaign questions about where Mr. Adams lived — a topic still somewhat unresolved. After concerns were raised about whether Mr. Adams actually lived in Fort Lee, N.J., he invited the news media into a property he owns in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, hoping to prove that he lived there. But questions persisted: The Brooklyn apartment included non-vegan food and sneakers that appeared to belong to his son.
As for being an experienced skateboarder, Mr. Adams is sticking to his story.
On Tuesday, the mayor’s office put out a statement insisting that Mr. Adams had skated as a child nearly a half century ago, asserting that he had made his own skateboard with metal wheels and a piece of plywood.
There were no skate parks then, nor was there a World Skateboarding Federation, Mr. Levy, the mayor’s press secretary, said. So Mr. Adams made simple ramps with cinder blocks and plywood. “It was called skate, fall and get your ass up,” Mr. Levy said.
Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.
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