Mayor Eric Adams has long expressed his hatred of rats, and it may have something to do with a childhood pet named “Mickey,” The Post has learned.
“I hate rats,” the mayor has declared literally dozens of times since taking office in 2022, including Wednesday when he opened the inaugural National Urban Rat Summit.
Adams’ summit — a two-day symposium of rodent experts discussing the best ways to mitigate infestations — is just the latest salvo in the mayor’s lifelong war on rats.
The bugs were gnawing at him for years before the vexing federal investigations now rocking his administration.
The Post dug deep into Adams’ antipathy toward rats, speaking exclusively to his younger brother, Bernard Adams, about his rat-filled childhood home, his trips to a pest-ridden Alabama farm and the terrifying Mickey Mouse.
“I couldn’t even get near our pet rat,” Bernard Adams said of Mickey.
“We grew up with all kinds of rodents”
Eric Adams hated rats for as long as Bernard can remember.
The brothers, along with four other siblings and their parents, grew up poor in rodent-infested homes in Brooklyn and Queens, Bernard Adams said Wednesday.
He recalled that rats even jumped out of his bread box.
“We grew up with all kinds of rodents, in our house, around our house,” she said.
In the run-up to the 2021 mayoral election, Eric Adams told The Post how his brothers adopted a rat, kept it in a box and named it Mickey, after Mickey Mouse.
The story of Mickey’s pet rat, which Adams has told to other media outlets, was included in a New York Times report about the mayor. Many potential fantastic tales.
But Bernard Adams maintains Mickey was real, although he told The Post that as a 5-year-old he was too terrified to look at him.
“I will take on the biggest criminal before I take on a rat,” he said.
“I’m scared. I just remember that he was scared too.”
City officials did not have a photo of Mickey when asked by The Post.
But, according to the Adams brothers, the plagues were always present, even when they left the city.
The mayor, during his speech at the rat summit, alluded to something that was always “running around” his family farm in Alabama.
Bernard Adams also told The Post that his family “always” visited the farm in Alabama, where his parents were from. He recalled that there were field mice there that were almost the size of rats.
After Major Adams grew up and became a police officer, rats remained a part of his life.
Cliff Hollingsworth, a former transit police officer who served with Adams during the 1980s, said rats were everywhere in the subway system.
He believes that chilling experience affected the future mayor.
“Rats have always been a bone of contention for us,” Hollingsworth told the Post. “Nobody liked them, and nobody liked all the dirt and filth that was in the subway. Now, the rats have moved from the subway into the city.”
“I know that at one point that was his main concern in the conversation I had with him,” she said.
Adams’ lifelong rat story doesn’t end there.
‘Public Enemy Number One’
Rats are more than a personal enemy for Adams: they have been a recurring problem, often when he is in crisis.
The lurid saga extended to his political career, such as the sickening spectacle in 2019 when the then Brooklyn borough president let out a alcoholic porridge of liquefied rodent corpses in front of a screaming crowd.
“I’m not just the BP, I’m the Pied Piper,” Adams proclaimed at the alcohol-filled rat trap demonstration.
As mayor, Adams had to deal with repeated and embarrassing pest-related issues at his Bed-Stuy home.
He also appointed New York City’s first “rat czar.”
Hizzoner has evoked his elusive specter as reasons New Yorkers are fleeing the city, to restore his administration’s unpopular budget cuts and to spearhead a “trash revolution” that’s more or less the size of a $50 trash can.
The rat summit, which was announced in May, had some fortunate timing for Adams.
Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabien Levy called city agencies last weekend looking for “big ideas” as part of a public relations campaign following the high-profile resignations of NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban and Chief Legal Counsel Lisa Zornberg and ahead of expected federal indictments against two retired New York City Fire Department chiefs, the sources said.
So when Adams spoke from the Pier 57 stage during the summit, he took on a favorite role: New York City’s number one rat hater.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a mayor in history who’s ever said how much he hates rats,” he said.
“Let’s find out how we unite against what I consider public enemy number one: Mickey and his crew.”
