Rat haunting our mayor!
Adams bro spills on rodents
Mayor Adams has long been vocal about his hatred of rats — and it might have something to do with a childhood pet named Mickey, The Post has learned.
“I hate rats,” the mayor has declared dozens of times since taking office in 2022, including Wednesday when kicking off the inaugural National Urban Rat Summit.
Adams’ summit — a two-day symposium of rodent experts hobnobbing over the best ways to mitigate infestations — is only the latest volley in the mayor’s reputed lifetime war against rats.
The Post dug deep into Adams’ rat antipathy, exclusively speaking to his younger brother Bernard Adams about their ratty childhood home, trips to a pest-filled Alabama farm and the terrifying Mickey.
“The rat we had as a pet, I couldn’t even go near it,” Bernard said of Mickey.
Eric hated rats as long as Bernard can remember. The brothers, along with four other siblings and their parents, grew up poor in Brooklyn and Queens homes infested with rodents, Bernard said Wednesday. He recalled rats even jumping out of a breadbox.
“We grew up with all kinds of rodents, in our house, around our house,” he said.
In the run-up to the 2021 mayoral election, Eric recounted to The Post how his siblings adopted one rat, kept it in a box and called it Mickey, after Mickey Mouse.
The Mickey story, which Adams has told to other outlets, was listed in a New York Times report about the mayor’s many potential tall tales. But Bernard maintains Mickey was real, although he told The Post he was too terrified as a then-5-year-old to actually look at it.
“I’ll face the biggest criminal before I’d face a rat,” he said. “I have a fear — I just remember him being afraid also.”
City Hall officials did not have a photo of Mickey when asked by The Post.
But by the Adams brothers’ telling, pests were always around — even when they left the city.
The mayor, during his rat summit remarks, alluded to something always “scurrying around” his family farm in Alabama.
Bernard likewise told The Post that his family would “always” visit the farm in Alabama, where their parents hailed from. He recalled it had field mice nearly the size of rats.
After the elder Adams grew up and became a cop, rats remained a part of his life. Cliff Hollingsworth, a former transit cop who served with Adams during the 1980s, said rats were everywhere in the subway system. He believes that skin-crawling experience impacted the future mayor.
“Rats have always been a point of contention for us,” Hollingsworth told The Post. “No one liked them and all the dirt and filth in the subway system. Now, the rats have gone from the subway into the city.
“I know at one time that was his number one concern in the conversation I had with him,” he said.
Rats are more than a personal enemy for Adams; they’ve been a go-to issue, often while he’s in crisis. Hizzoner has evoked their scurrying specter as reasons for why New Yorkers are fleeing the city, to restore his administration’s unpopular budget cuts and to spearhead a “trash revolution.”