Mr. Adams is a top fund-raiser in the New York City mayoral race, with key endorsements and strong polling, but he still faces questions about his preparedness for the job.

The New York City mayoral race is one of the most consequential political contests in a generation, with immense challenges awaiting the winner. This is the third in a series of profiles of the major candidates.

May 7, 2021

Nearly three decades ago, when Eric Adams decided he wanted to someday be mayor of New York City, he started a journal of observations about local governance, making periodic entries before bed.

He has now filled 26 notebooks.

The long arc of Mr. Adams’s career — from the son of a Queens house cleaner to a reform-driven New York City police officer, from state senator to Brooklyn borough president and now a leading mayoral candidate — is an ode to personal discipline. By his telling, his life has been carefully structured to land him on the precipice of the only job he has ever wanted, in the only city where he has ever really lived.

During an Easter Sunday visit to the Church of God of East Flatbush, Mr. Adams cited a biblical passage that describes a test of courage under duress.

“I believe in all my heart that this is an Esther 4:14 moment,” Mr. Adams, 60, told the parishioners. “God made me for such a time as this.”

To Mr. Adams, his broad life experience is what sets him apart in the vast and fractured field of mayoral candidates.

He speaks of growing up poor and Black in Queens, being beaten by the police at age 15, starting as a police officer during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic, and then, in later years, becoming a voice for police reform. In 2013, he was the first Black person elected Brooklyn borough president.

Yet there is a perception among some Democratic leaders, strategists and mayoral rivals that Mr. Adams’s career has been driven by self-interest rather than civic-mindedness, and that he is unprepared to lead the city as it tries to emerge from the pandemic.

That perception rankles Mr. Adams, who equates efforts to dismiss him to reductive treatment of Black elected officials.

His campaign, he believes, will surprise those he said have underestimated him and his ability to connect with the New Yorkers who make up his base: working class and older minority voters outside Manhattan, who prioritize authenticity in their politicians and issues like public safety.

This confidence gives Mr. Adams’s campaign stops — and his political strategy — a sense of assured purpose. He is not only trying to appeal to voters; he is seemingly running for personal validation, to prove that he is equally worthy to the rivals whom the city’s political class has deemed more polished, serious or qualified.

“For years, I’ve had people — for years — calling me an ‘Uncle Tom’ or calling me a sellout,” Mr. Adams said in an interview, adding that he was “immune” to such attacks.

“They don’t believe in me, but I believe in me,” he said. “Because I know me, and I’m a beast.”

He will nonetheless be tested by a changing city and Democratic Party. New Yorkers have embraced big personalities in politicians before, particularly in mayoral races, but brashness and Blackness can project differently when packaged together.

It may not help that Mr. Adams has had a history of embracing divisive figures, aligning himself with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, and the ex-boxer Mike Tyson after his 1992 rape conviction. Mr. Adams has also faced several ethics probes during his career, including one that questioned his role in allowing a politically connected company to gain a casino franchise at Aqueduct Racetrack.

He first rose to prominence in New York by challenging Police Department policies during news conferences, earning scorn from police officials that persists decades later. And bombastic statements, like a pledge to carry a gun while in City Hall and forgo a security detail, have fueled detractors.

Mr. Adams, as he darts around Queens and Brooklyn with less than seven weeks to go before the June 22 primary, thinks that unconventionality is a political superpower. He gives out his personal cellphone number to people on the street and often refers to himself in the third person. He shuns the popular language of progressive academics in favor of a relatable grit.

He is, at once, a candidate who desires to be taken seriously as a liberal policymaker, and one who mocks the idea that elite-educated activists get to determine what is or is not serious.

“I’m in these forums, and they’re talking about legal crack, legal fentanyl, legal heroin! Are you kidding me?” Mr. Adams said to a resident during a recent stop in the Laurelton section of Queens. “Do they remember what crack did to your communities?”

A son of two boroughs

Three omnipresent dangers loomed for a young Black man growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, in the late 1970s and 1980s: the crime, the drugs, and the police.

At age 15, Mr. Adams and his brother were arrested on criminal trespassing charges. Mr. Adams said he was beaten by officers while in custody and suffered post-traumatic stress from the episode. Yet it fueled his desire to become a police officer six years later, he said, after a local pastor suggested that he could “infiltrate” the department and help change police culture.

Beginning as a transit officer and rising to the rank of police captain, he made his largest impact not on the police beat but through his involvement in two Black police fraternal organizations: the Grand Council of Guardians, and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that he founded.

“Eric was always the guy who not just complained about the issues, but then pushed the group to organize to do something about it,” said David C. Banks, president and chief executive of the Eagle Academy Foundation in Brooklyn, which operates a network of schools for boys.

“He was a pain in the neck and a thorn in the side of the central command at the police headquarters,” said Mr. Banks, who has known Mr. Adams for 30 years. “A lot of other officers would be afraid to raise these kind of issues.”

Mr. Adams helped amplify cases of police brutality or errors, raising public awareness of uncomfortable policing issues, even if it did not sway top police brass, who tended to view him as an attention-seeking gadfly.

His reputation also suffered from a series of unorthodox stances or appearances while on the force: He traveled to Indiana in 1995 to escort Mr. Tyson after his release from prison; he repeatedly defended Mr. Farrakhan in the 1990s; and he was registered as a Republican during that same time period, when New York, a predominantly Democratic city, was led by Republican mayors.

Paul Browne, a former chief spokesman for the Police Department under Raymond W. Kelly, said it was “laughable” that Mr. Adams was drawing on his law enforcement career to run for mayor on a public safety platform.

“I don’t remember him distinguishing himself in any way, except promoting himself through 100 Black Officers in Law Enforcement Who Care,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Adams “would try to have it both ways — that he was a cop but that we were all racist. He would say Blacks that weren’t as radical were an Uncle Tom,” said Mr. Browne, who is white. “He’d be a disaster as mayor.”

Yet on the other side of the political spectrum, Mr. Adams’s law enforcement background is often viewed as a drawback, and as evidence that he is not the right candidate to bring significant changes to policing at a time when activists are demanding a paradigm shift.

Mr. Adams rejected that notion, arguing that he helped lay the groundwork for more recent social justice movements. He cited a 2013 federal trial over the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk program, when he testified that the police commissioner at the time had told him that it existed to “instill fear” in Black and Latino men. The judge cited his words in her ruling that the program violated the constitutional rights of those who were stopped.

“They’re marching now saying Black Lives Matter, they’re doing Chapter 2 — I was Chapter 1,” Mr. Adams said. “When no one else was doing this, Eric Adams was doing this.”

Rising up in politics

As early as 1994, Mr. Adams had decided that he wanted to be mayor — a desire he expressed to Bill Lynch, a deputy mayor under David N. Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York City.

Mr. Lynch gave him four pieces of advice, Mr. Adams recalled: get a bachelor’s degree, gain managerial experience in the Police Department, work in Albany, and become a borough president — a path that somewhat resembled the one Mr. Dinkins followed to his historic victory.

Mr. Adams followed the advice, but largely kept his mayoral ambitions quiet. It was better to be known as an earnest doer than an ambitious climber, he said, particularly as a Black man.

“I am the poster child of missteps, but I am also the poster child of endurance,” Mr. Adams said. “I had a plan.”

The first step was to leave the police force and enter politics. There was a failed congressional run in 1994, when Mr. Adams’s relationship with the Nation of Islam proved divisive. His switch to the Republican Party in the following years, while Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor and the party controlled the State Senate, seemed opportunistic; he explained then that “if you take a look at some of the concepts of the Republican Party, you’ll see that many of them are our values.”

By 2006, however, he was a Democrat again, in time for a successful run for State Senate. In the political career that has followed, Mr. Adams has often been ideologically fungible, displaying an independent streak as well as attention-grabbing skills.

He was an early supporter of marriage equality and continued to rail against policing practices, like stop-and-frisk, that were shown to disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities. He turned his focus to issues many other politicians would avoid, such as a “Stop the Sag” campaign that called on Black men to pull up their pants and emphasized personal responsibility as a response to racism. He also pushed for higher pay for elected officials — including himself.

“I don’t know how some of you are living on $79,000,” Mr. Adams said at the time. “Show me the money!”

The comments hurt Mr. Adams’s reputation among the city’s political class in the same way the police news conferences had in the years before. In 2010, a scathing state inspector general report said that Mr. Adams, then the chairman of the Senate Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, had given the “appearance of impropriety” by getting too close to a group that was seeking a casino contract at Aqueduct Racetrack.

The inspector general said Mr. Adams had attended a party thrown by the lobbyist, earned campaign donations from the group’s shareholders and affiliates, and conducted a process that amounted to a “political free-for-all.”

By 2013, Mr. Adams had left Albany for a successful bid for Brooklyn borough president, succeeding Marty Markowitz, and becoming the first Black person to head New York’s most populous borough.

As borough president, a job with limited formal duties but a sizable bully pulpit, Mr. Adams expanded the role that Mr. Markowitz pioneered as a garrulous cheerleader for Brooklyn.

He put himself through what he sometimes calls “mayor school,” reaching out to donors, community activists and business leaders to check their pulses on which direction they felt the city should go in.

“I knew I had to prove I was serious,” Mr. Adams said. “People had to see Eric had serious plans. They had to see Eric could raise the money and that I could articulate issues of impact.”

But he also drew more criticism over potential conflicts of interest. In his first year as borough president, the city’s Department of Investigation found that his office appeared to have violated conflict of interest rules in raising money for a nonprofit Mr. Adams was starting. No enforcement action was taken.

The final task

In the early stages of the mayoral race, Mr. Adams was viewed as one of three leading candidates, along with Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker. Only Mr. Adams was thought to appeal to large swaths of Black and Latino voters, especially outside Manhattan.

He also had longstanding relationships with union leaders and other elected officials, and a network of donors cultivated over the past decade.

But the dynamics have changed. Mr. Johnson is running for comptroller, not mayor. Mr. Stringer is now facing an allegation of sexual assault.

The Black Lives Matter movement has pushed younger voters and some white liberals to the left of Mr. Adams on racial justice and policing. And other top Black candidates — Maya Wiley, the former lawyer to Mayor Bill de Blasio and MSNBC analyst; Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street leader; and Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive — are in the running.

And then there is Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate who appears to be the front-runner, according to the limited polling that exists, and who has drawn donors and media coverage to match.

“Before Yang, I was the Chinese candidate,” Mr. Adams said. “I was the Bangladeshi candidate — which I still am. I’m going to get overwhelmingly the Muslim vote.”

Mr. Adams has sought to portray Mr. Yang as unprepared to be mayor.

“When I look over the lives of everyone else, I see moments of commitment. And I’m asking like, ‘Who is Andrew?’” Mr. Adams said. “Maya Wiley, I see a civil rights activist. Ray? Successful businessman. Dianne Morales, I see her commitment to fighting against injustice.”

He added: “They didn’t just discover that we have injustice in this city.”

In a statement, the Yang campaign pushed back against the idea that Mr. Yang had not demonstrated a commitment to service. “Andrew is known by the most New Yorkers in the race for starting a national movement on universal basic income,” said Alyssa Cass, Mr. Yang’s communications director. “While some candidates were handing out patronage jobs or getting investigated for corruption, Andrew was fighting poverty.”

Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang tend to have more moderate positions than some of their left-leaning rivals, like Mr. Stringer, Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales.

But Mr. Adams argues that his platform, which includes an expanded local tax credit for low-income families, investment in underperforming schools, and improvements to public housing, amounts to the systemic change progressives want.

His “100 Steps for New York City,” a plan he partly drew from his journal of observations that began decades earlier, includes a special focus on public safety initiatives like releasing the names of officers being internally investigated for bad behavior.

Mr. Adams has proposed diverting $500 million from the New York police budget to fund crisis managers and crime prevention programs, and has pledged to further diversify the police force.

He has also proposed restoring a maligned plainclothes anti-crime unit that was disbanded by the Police Department last year, and refashioning it to focus on getting guns off the streets. Mr. Adams says proposals like these showed a responsiveness to the city’s most needy residents, including some Black neighborhoods suffering the brunt of violent crime. Critics point out that the disbanded unit has been behind several police shootings.

“Those other candidates, their names don’t ring out over here,” said Takbir Blake, a community activist who shepherded Mr. Adams during a business tour in Laurelton. “It’s that you know he’s been on the front lines. But you also know he’s from the streets.”

As the primary approaches, Mr. Adams has begun to demonstrate the benefits of his long-honed political relationships. He has won major labor endorsements, including from the city’s largest municipal union, 32BJ SEIU, which represents private-sector building service workers. He has raised more money than his rivals participating in the city’s matching-funds program, yet has spent less than several of them — maintaining his war chest for the stretch run.

And he believes that he will eventually win over the party’s progressive wing, especially if it becomes clearer that Democratic voters still favor Mr. Yang as their top choice.

“The polls are not everything, or always honest, but it’s going to send a message,” Mr. Adams said. “They not only need a person that they agree with, but I’m the person that could win the race.”

Mr. Adams says he can form a coalition of the marginalized, who want a mayor who has not had an aspirational New York experience, but who has experienced the common struggle.

It is the path of Mr. Dinkins, laid out by Mr. Lynch, and executed over decades by the most disciplined loose cannon in New York City politics.

“Say what you want, but there’s very little misunderstanding about me,” Mr. Adams said. “When you pull that lever, you know who you’re voting for.”

“An actual, real blue-collar New Yorker.”