Mayor Eric Adams has long been open about his dislike of mice, which may have something to do with a childhood pet named Mickey, The Washington Post has learned.
“I hate rats,” the mayor has said at various times, literally dozens of times, since taking office in 2022. On Wednesday he kicked off the first-ever National Urban Rat Summit.
Mayor Adams' summit, a two-day symposium where rat experts will discuss the best ways to mitigate rat infestations, is just the latest salvo in the war on rats that the mayor has been fighting his whole life.
The pest has been plaguing him for years, even before the troubling federal investigation now rocking his administration.
The Washington Post delved deeper into Adams's hatred of mice, speaking exclusively with his brother, Bernard Adams, about his rat-infested childhood home, trips to a vermin-ridden Alabama farm and the terrifying Mickey Mouse.
“I couldn't even get close to the rats I had as pets,” Bernard Adams said of Mickey.
“We grew up with all kinds of rodents.”
For as long as Bernard could remember, Eric Adams hated rats.
Bernard Adams said Wednesday that the brother grew up with four other siblings and their parents in a poor, rat-infested home in Brooklyn and Queens.
He remembered mice jumping out of bread boxes.
“We grew up with all kinds of rodents in and around our home,” he said.
Ahead of the 2021 mayoral election, Eric Adams told The Washington Post how his brother got a rat, kept it in a box and named it “Mickey” after Mickey Mouse.
Adams' story about his pet mouse, Mickey Mouse, which he told other media outlets, was featured in The New York Times' Mayor's A lot of potential myths.
But Bernard Adams maintains that Mickey was real, though he told The Washington Post that as a five-year-old at the time, he was too frightened to actually see him.
“Before we face the rats, we're going to face the biggest criminals,” he said.
“I feel scared, and I remember him feeling the same.”
City officials did not have a photo of Mickey when asked by The Washington Post.
But the Adamses say that even after they left town, the pests were always around.
During his speech at the Rat Summit, the mayor alluded to something always being “running” around his family's farm in Alabama.
Bernard Adams also told The Washington Post that his family “regularly” visited the farm in his parents' home state of Alabama, where they found field mice the size of mice.
Even after Adams grew up and became a police officer, rats remained a part of his life.
Cliff Hollingsworth, a former transit officer who worked with Adams in the 1980s, said rats are found throughout the subway system.
He believes that horrifying experience influenced the future mayor.
“Rats have always been a contentious issue for us,” Hollingsworth told the Post. “Nobody likes rats or the filth and squalor of the subway system. Now the rats are gone from the subway into the city.”
“I know that in my conversations with him, that was his No. 1 concern,” he said.
Adams' lifelong rat story doesn't end there.
“Public Enemy Number One”
Rats aren't just a personal enemy to Adams; they often become a problem in times of crisis.
The eerie story extended into his political career, for example, in 2019 when then-Brooklyn Borough President Slurry containing alcohol Liquefied rat corpses were thrown in front of the screaming crowd.
“Not only am I a BP, I'm also a piper,” Adams loudly asserted during an alcohol-filled mousetrap demonstration.
Mayor Adams has had an embarrassing run on repeated pest control violations at townhouses in the Bed-Stuy area.
He also appointed New York City's first “Mouse Czar.”
Hizzoner has invoked the ghosts of New Yorkers fleeing the city as a reason to reinstate his administration's unpopular budget cuts and spearhead a “garbage revolution” that's essentially just $50 trash cans.
The Rat Summit, announced in May, came at a lucky time for Adams.
As part of a public relations push following the high-profile resignations of NYPD Commissioner Edward Cavan and his chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, and expected federal indictments against the two former NYPD chiefs, Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabian Levy called city agencies over the weekend looking for “big ideas,” according to sources.
So when Adams spoke from the stage at Pier 57 during the summit, he played his favorite role: New York City's biggest avowed rat hater.
“I don't think there's ever been a mayor in history who has publicly stated how much he hates rats,” he said.
“Let's figure out how to unite against Mickey and his friends, who I consider to be public enemy number one.”
