Transcript: Mayor Adams Appears on “Conversations With Coleman” Podcast With Coleman Hughes

July 8, 2025

Coleman Hughes: Welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Eric Adams. Eric Adams is the current mayor of New York City and former captain of the NYPD. He has spent more than two decades in law enforcement. He represented Brooklyn's 20th State Senate District from 2007 to 2013, and he served as Brooklyn Borough President from 2014 to 2022.

In this episode, we talk about why Eric Adams defended the police even at the height of the BLM movement, as did I. We talk about Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral hopeful that has come seemingly out of nowhere to become the favorite in the race, as well as how Adams plans to beat him.

We talk about the mistakes that Andrew Cuomo made in his failed bid to grab the Democratic nomination. We talk about how to make housing affordable and subways safer. We talk about the problems posed by e-bikes. We talk about how to make the streets of New York City cleaner and much more. So without further ado, Eric Adams. Alright, Mayor Adams, thanks so much for coming on my show.

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you, thank you.

Hughes: Okay, so we have something in common, which is that in 2020, at the height of the defund the police movement, when people wanted to strip the police of all their tools and all their funding, we both defended the police at a time when it was unpopular to do so in New York and around the country. And there's an added wrinkle in your case, which is that as a kid, you were beaten by the cops. And so for many people, that would lead you to grow up and hate the cops. But for you, it didn't. For you, you became a police officer. So tell me about that decision.

Mayor Adams: An amazing journey. Life is very interesting. My brother and I, we were, I was 15, he was 16, and we were arrested by police officers for criminal trespass. And that story in itself is just part of the Eric Adams saga.

But when they arrested us, they were filling out their paperwork. And the guy just said, you feel like a beatdown? They didn't chase us. There was no reason. And they took us down to the basement of the 103rd precinct, where they just kicked us in our groin over and over and over again.

And I remember, he and I never talked about it until later, that, you know, we were urinating blood for a whole week. We never even told our mother about it. It wasn't until adults that there was a New York Times story on it that my mom and I, we sat down and we talked about it. And there was a Black cop that looked, poked his head in the room. He said, that's enough. And, you know, it was traumatizing. You felt as though you were [emasculated.] And, you know, you're a young boy, you're 15, you're impressionable.

And then a short time later, Clifford Glover was killed. And Reverend Herbert Daughtry, who I later, he later became a spiritual father for me. He sat down and told 13 of us, there was a series of murders with police and black communities. Clifford Glover, Randolph Evans, and Arthur Miller, prominent businessman. He died from a chokehold. And he said, that's enough.

We need you young Black men to go into the Police Department and fight from within. And I was like, man, you on crack? Are you kidding me? But I had so much respect for them that I did it. And little did I know, if you have a demon inside you, sometimes you have to go in to get it out of you.

Because I was traumatized. If I saw a police vehicle, I relived that beating. If I saw a police show, I wouldn't even watch a police show, because I relived the beating. If I saw an officer walk down the block, I'll relive it. So I was going through PTSD. And he empowered me to fight from within. And because of that, I was able to get that demon out of me. And I felt empowered because of that.

Hughes: Yeah. And then you became someone that really was a defender of the police at a time when it was very controversial to do so. And I think that explained part of your appeal in 2020 and 2021. Because I was, you know, I've said this, my podcast listeners have heard this a thousand times, they're bored of hearing it.

But at the height of 2020, Gallup polled black Americans and asked them, do you want more police in your neighborhood, less police or the same? And 80 percent said more or the same. Which meant only 20 percent of just black people, to say nothing of other demographics, did not want less police. And yet, if you read the New York Times, or you just paid attention to media, you would never get that sense.

Mayor Adams: You know, what you are saying is so important on many of these topics. We have the intellectual elite who are deciding what is good for the communities. And they have created a narrative where when you go to the average person, they're like, that's not what we want. And so I do a lot of town halls. And when I go into the town halls, the adult town hall, older adult town halls, youth town halls, even young people, I have never heard one person stand up and say, I want less police.

Either they want quality policing, no one wants to be harassed or disrespected. But they're like, we're all cops. And we did youth town halls last year over the summer. And it was unbelievable how young people were saying, we want to feel safe. We want a good relationship with our police officers. So the intellectual elite who have either private security on their blocks, or who could care less about public safety, they are not speaking on behalf of those who want their police where they are on their blocks, on their corners, in the subway. They want their police.

Hughes: Okay, I want to get to crime more in a moment. But let's talk because it's the big news right now. Zohran Mamdani, he's taken the city by storm. He beat Cuomo. And he has a huge appeal, especially to younger New Yorkers.

Younger New Yorkers, they see Zohran Mamdani, they see a guy that goes out on the street, puts a microphone in front of New Yorkers' faces and says, what do you need? He goes to a halal card and says, you know, why is chicken and rice so expensive? They see someone who's in touch with people on the ground and has pragmatic solutions. So why are they wrong about that?

Mayor Adams: Well, first of all, all he did was take, he took a page out of my book. I'm the mayor that's on the subway. I'm the mayor that, you know, stops in the middle of the night and go into the beauty salon after they close and sit down, smoke a cigar with them and say, hey, what's going on the ground in the community? That has always been my trademark.

I enjoy this entire city. You can find me in a Sukkah one day. You can find me in the Diwali celebration. You can find me at a Kwanzaa event. I am an authentic New Yorker. So what happened here? If you do an analysis of this, six months ago, I told my team he was going to beat Andrew Cuomo and that we needed to be ready in the general election. And there was a whole science behind that. He had a ready-made army.

There were a large number of people who were already on our college campuses, angry, protesting, with all sorts of radicalizing ideas that were put inside them. We were having thousands of people who were marching every day in our streets, just about. We had almost 4,000 marches in the city over the Palestine, Palestinian and the Israeli issue.

Then you had the anti-Trump energy that was real. So you had the intersectionality of three major events that people were already in the streets. He came along and basically became the funnel of all of that anger. People wanted to put it out. And then you add to the fact that we were dealing with national affordability issues. We were dealing with national issues around housing and all the things that young people say, wait a minute, I'm making $100,000, but why [aren’t] I able to feel as though I'm doing well?

So you're dealing with all of that. And he became the symbol of that for a pocket of people. Because remember, 9 percent of the voters voted, 9 percent. 91 percent, they have yet to speak. 2.5 million Democrats have not voted, 1 million independents, 700,000, 800,000 Republicans have not voted. So there's a whole body of people who have yet to communicate what their feelings are.

It was a great feat on his part. Andrew Cuomo was lazy. He took New Yorkers for granted. I keep telling people all the time, New Yorkers have five fingers. They love the middle one the most. If you are not authentically willing to go out there and engage with New Yorkers, you can't just play this game. He did not want to be mayor. He saw this as a stepping stone. He stepped down from being a governor. He thought this was an easy, I'm Andrew Cuomo, so this can happen. And it didn't happen. The polls showed him winning by 32 percent. He lost by 12 percent.

Because the new voters, and that's what's going to determine this race. So the same energy you have with this group of young people who are buying what he's selling, there's another energy that's out there of a group of young people that are saying, hold on here. This is not what I believe in. And I believe that we could continue to come here and move up through the ranks. So that's the message I have to get out.

Hughes: So Mamdani and many of his supporters are proud democratic socialists. What do you think of democratic socialism as a set of policies for New York City at this time?

Mayor Adams: Great question. And 70 percent of New Yorkers are not anti the term socialism. And many people don't really understand the term socialism and what it means. I've been to Cuba. I've been to Venezuela. I've been to countries where socialism exists. I saw the empty shelves in the ration books in Cuba and what it means.

So we're romanticizing the terminology. And it always sounds good, that I'm a socialist. But when you dig into what it means, you understand. When you get stuff for free, someone is paying for it. And so that delivery worker who was giving us 12 hours on that bike or moped delivering food, people who are getting things for free, that delivery worker is paying taxes.

So all these things that when you are really frustrated, you have a tendency to believe that what he is selling, he could deliver. And he can't. Just look at the free bus conversation. In order to get free buses, you need $3 billion. He says, well, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to tax the 1 percent in New York. And I'm going to get the $3 billion from them. Here's the problem. Mayors can't raise income taxes. Assemblymen can. He's an assemblyman. He didn't do it. So why does he believe he's going to do it now when the governor said that is not going to happen?

Or his socialist theory of, let's open government supermarkets. Hey, what about the bodegas, brother? What about those men and women in the Korean community that opened up supermarkets, that opened up stores? What about the Chinese community or the Arab community? All of these communities have used their feeding of their constituencies as a way to hire people and to move up in the American dream. So we're going to totally disregard them and collapse the entire industry.

Or look at this great socialist idea of emptying Rikers Island. We passed bail reform. So to get on Rikers Island, you have to be one of the most dangerous people in the city of rape, robbery, homicide, murders. 7,400 people are there. His mindset is we're going to close down Rikers and put them back into the communities. They're going to go back into the Black and brown communities where they victimized for years. When you think about the theory, this is an intellectual elitist that is actually doing some form of experiment. And I'm saying we need real experience to get this done.

Hughes: So a few days ago, the New York Times reported on a hack of Columbia University's admissions program, which found that Zohran Mamdani as a 17-year-old identified as not only Asian, but also Black or African-American when he applied to college. What do you make of that?

Mayor Adams: Well, when you go back during that time, remember they had to identify certain seats that would go to particular groups. They had to make sure that the diversity and the mix was correct. He was not an American at the time. He claims that he could not find the appropriate box when there was a box that I think it said mixed race or something of that nature. So there was a box there. And then he stated himself.

When someone asked him about does he consider himself to be an African-American, he said, no, that would be misleading. And so yet you check the box and say, A, you're saying it was misleading. It's the inconsistency. What he should have done, as I did for the last few months of going through that lawfare that I experienced of having an indictment that was unfairly dropped on me, what I did, I went to New Yorkers and I said, I'm sorry for putting you through this. I should not have trusted people that did things that I was not aware of. I never broke the law. But I'm sorry, New Yorkers.

What he should have just done, I'm sorry. He should say, I'm sorry that I mocked Hanukkah and a very real holiday in the Jewish community. I mean, we can't be so big to not say, listen, bad thinking, should have done it differently. As I look back, I'm sorry. But he can't say he's sorry because he wants to be perfect. I'm perfectly imperfect. I made a lot of mistakes in my life. And I'm not ashamed to say perfection is not one of my trademark. Dedication is my trademark.

Hughes: So I want to ask you about that too. In your perspective, you were unfairly persecuted. But a lot of New Yorkers really believe that the crimes you were accused of, you've been accused of corruption, taking bribes from foreigners and engaging in a quid pro quo with Trump in order to get those charges dropped. So with all of that baggage, why should New Yorkers trust you with another four years?

Mayor Adams: You know, during the trial, the hardest thing for me was, you know, I am a straight up fighter. That's all I know in my life, I fought. I fought when I had a learning disability and I was undiagnosed. I fought during the civil rights movement. I fought when I started 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement. I fought.

And the 15 months that I had to remain silent because anyone who goes through something like this, you better listen to your attorney. And my attorney said, Eric, you ought to remain silent. That was the hardest 15 months of my life because I couldn't defend myself. And when you look at the entire case, no one read the indictment. People don't even realize. They heard the term bribery and they said, okay, he must be corrupt.

I was charged with calling the Fire Department and telling the Fire Department, can you do an inspection on the building that the president of Turkey was coming to the opening? And I said, if you can't, let me know and I'll manage their expectation. They said for ten years throughout independent travel, you got upgrades. And so we're saying because of those upgrades and you call the Fire Department, you committed bribery. Even a judge questioned that case.

And so when the president was on his campaign trail, I never knew the president, never met him in the city at all until he was running for office on the campaign trail. He says, what they're doing to that mayor in New York is wrong. This is what I went through in my life. He spoke about it. And then he told the Justice Department to do an analysis of the case or the Justice Department made the determination to do an analysis of the case. Out of that, they said, well, there's a quid pro quo. Eric promised one thing and did another.

But go back and look at my words pre-election. Pre-election, I talked about the migrants and asylum seekers, those who are dangerous gang members. I talked about it post-election as well. I've been so consistent throughout my life. And so there's no evidence of a quid pro quo. There was nothing the president ever promised me. They did an analysis. They looked at some of the tweets and text messages that came from the prosecutors, and they continue to see the inappropriateness of the case. And the prosecutor who was a U.S. attorney prosecutor, after he left, he immediately opened a website that looked like he was running for office.

Brian Benjamin, another African-American, they charged him, destroyed his career. He was the highest ranking state elected in the state, destroyed his career, dropped the charges. Eric Adams, you look at this pattern of politicizing that office. You know what the most interesting thing that came out of that office that really shocked me that people want to talk about? They considered themselves to be sovereign. That's what they said. They said, we're sovereign. There's no entity in this country that's sovereign. There's no constitutional amendment that said that you're sovereign. Absolute power abuses absolute power all the time.

So the system that allowed my case to be dropped was the same system that allowed other cases to be dropped. And it was the same system that allowed President Biden to pardon his son. And when he pardoned his son, you know what he said? He said, the Justice Department is politicized. So the same concern people have of what was happening to what the president felt is what I felt. Brother, I was facing 33 years in prison, 33 years in prison for that. I watched my name destroyed. I watched the financial impact on it and what took place. And Biden talked about it when he pardoned his son. He said, this can hurt your name. This can hurt you financially. This is going to destroy you.

I had a record that young people looked up to. Here you had a Black man that overcame learning disabilities, overcame poverty, went on to become a captain, state senator, first Black borough president, second Black mayor. And out of nowhere, all of that disappeared in 15 months. And I got to rebuild my name because of that. It was wrong what they did to me and my family. But I'm not going to say woe is me. I got up every day and I did my job. And I said, why not me?

When you look at the lawfare that I had to experience from prosecutors and investigators, it was traumatizing. No matter what you do, the title is mayor, but I'm still a man. I'm still a human being. And I've gone through a lot throughout my life. This was the hardest 15 months of my entire life. To every day, know that you were just doing your job and you were defending this city. And I believe because of that defense of this city, that it was a decision to come at me.

But I got up every day and I knew what I stood for. And I knew how I could deliver the city. And I also knew and lived on the fact that what I was going through and the pain I was going through, there were mothers who were figuring out how to protect their children and keep a roof over their head. They got up. There were people who were dealing with serious medical issues. They got up.

I was inspired by everyday New Yorkers. No matter what they were going through, I got up. So who am I to say that because I'm going through personal challenges that I'm not going to get up? Got up every day and I delivered for the city. And the result speaks for itself. I think the greatest test of your resiliency is when you're going through something personally or you're going to walk away from your obligation and commitment.

I committed to this city. I was going to serve them the way I did as a police officer. And I'm going to do it as a mayor. And I did. And history is going to be kind to me when they look back over what I went through, but I still delivered for the people of this city.

Hughes: Alright. So let's get back to some policy issues. So one of Zohran Mamdani's policy proposals is to freeze rent on rent stabilized units in New York, which is something like 40, 50 percent of rental units. That's his plan for the affordability crisis. What if anything is wrong with that plan? And what's your plan?

Mayor Adams: I love that. First of all, mayors don't have absolute power to freeze rents. There's something called the Independent Rent Guideline Board. They determine based on analysis of data how much prices go up. They make a determination on that. That is their job. If the city charter wanted the mayor to have that, they would have just given it to the mayor. The mayor didn't make the determination. No. There's a separate board that they would do an analysis to determine increases of rent. You could make recommendations. You could lobby for lower. But there's a separate board that does that.

But let's take his analysis of no rent. Don't ever increase rent. You should never increase rent. You got Ms. Jones came from Jamaica, and she has a 14-unit building. All of her wealth is in that because Black and brown and immigrant people, your wealth is in your property. All of my wealth is in my brownstone that I was able to pay my son's college tuition.

So now Ms. Jones has the building. He was part of the same group of people that was during COVID saying no rent. No one should be... There should be a rent freeze. No one should be paying rent. Now he's saying, don't even give her a 1 percent or 2 percent increase. Con Edison is going up. Insurance is going up. Taxes on her property is going up. She has tenants in her building who's not paying all the time. So now we have this family of overwhelmingly immigrants, overwhelmingly Black and brown, overwhelmingly working class people. Now we have this family who can't keep up with the cost of their building.

The number of families who have lost their properties because the rent roll is not equal in the cost of running a building. I have a tenant in my building who almost six months has not paid rent. I'm fortunate enough that I can still hold on to it. But imagine that mother, that Jamaican mother, that Trinidadian mother, that Mexican family, that person from Ireland or whatever. All your wealth is being tied up and you're being told, I don't care what goes up around you. I don't care that that roof repair has to be done, that you have to maintain the quality of life in that apartment. You cannot raise rent. That just doesn't make sense.

It's going to go back to the 70s. In the 70s, the same thing happened. Landlords' rent rolls did not equal the cost of repair and they walked away from the buildings, and Black and brown communities were devastated because of that, because people were not keeping up with the repairs. You saw rodent issues. You saw drug uses in the buildings. You saw the quality of life go down and communities of color because of that. So it sounds good. This academic elitist exercise of no one should ever increase the rent, that sounds good, but that is not a practical way of running a city.

Hughes: Yeah. I mean, your answer kind of had two parts there. The first part was taking the point of view of landlords, which is valid, but I think a lot of people emotionally, they just don't care about landlords. So they're like the world's smallest violin for that.

But then the second part of your answer, I think is the more important part, which is that, and if you've taken an economics class in high school or college, you'll remember this. It's like you put a price ceiling on apartments, the landlord isn't just going to roll over and act the same way. What they're going to do is they're going to stop maintaining your apartment. They're going to stop repairing your apartment.

And not only that, in the half of the rental market that is not rent stabilized, all of those rents are going to go up somewhat because you're artificially tampering with the prices in the other half of the market. So like my rent's going to go up.

Mayor Adams: And go back to, because some of you said it's very important. You're right. You know, small violin for landlords, because we have mystifying landlords. We use the large landlords, two, three thousand apartments. That is his definition of a landlord. His definition of landlord is not who I have met.

The people who have come here to this country and just bought into the American dream and they struggled, they worked hard, and they have these, you know, 14 unit buildings, 17 unit buildings. And that's their life. You know, all of their pride in that. So when he thinks of landlords, he thinks of the multi-billion landlords. He's not thinking of the landlords who are just eking out a living. And they're scared.

You know, and I'll never forget this woman coming into my office when I was borough president. She was in tears because of the trauma. She was losing her home because Albany and others were saying no rent. No one was telling mortgage companies no mortgage. You know, we're hurting middle class, working class people.

Hughes: Okay so, I'm going to tell you a story I saw on the subway two weeks ago, and I want you to tell me as mayor what you're going to do about cases like this. So I'm on 33rd Street, the 6 train below Grand Central. This guy is sleeping under the bench on the platform. He gets up and he starts urinating in a cup. The cup overflows. So now it's getting everywhere. Then he just hangs out for a couple of minutes to the point where now new people have gotten on the subway that don't know it's urine in that cup because it could be anything.

Mayor Adams: Right.

Hughes: And he turns to a guy next to him and just throws it all over him. There were police on the platform right before this happened, but they went to another station or they went to another assignment. You know, this is the kind of thing every New Yorker has a story like this almost every few weeks or every few months. What has your record, what can you say about your record as mayor and what you're going to do about these kinds of things on the subway?

Mayor Adams: A great question. So one of the hardest things of being mayor is everyone knows your name and no matter what happens, you know, go get that darn mayor. That's the life of a mayor, you know. And there's so much that controls what a mayor can do. We're creatures of Albany. We're creatures of, you know, the City Council, who passes laws. And we're creatures of the federal government.

And the mayor must take all that happens in these sterilized environments of legislative chambers and say, okay, these are laws and restrictions you dropped in my lap, but I still got to govern the city. That's the bottom line because no one elected me to define the problem. They elected me to fix the problem.

We want this thing called involuntary removal. That gentleman that you just described is dealing with severe mental health illness. I should say you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of your danger to others. I should be able to remove you off the street involuntarily and give you the care that you deserve. That's humane. Albany must give us the law to do that. They were reluctant to give us the full scope of doing that. So I had to work with what we have.

We put in place something called our PATH program and our SCOUT program. I have mental health professionals team up with police officers and they're in the subway taking people off the system. We removed over 8,000 off the system. The challenge of keeping them in care involuntarily is the challenge we're having with Albany. If they give me the power to do the involuntary removal, we won't have those incidents at all.

But in spite of what they're not giving me, we're still out taking them off the system. I'm in the system a lot. Let me tell you, brother, you are trying to talk to someone who has severe mental health issues, how to talk to them and get them off the system, it's a real challenge, a real challenge. Then the City Council passed a law and said people have the right to sleep on the streets.

When I came into office, we had people in encampments in our subway system, encampments on the side of the highways, encampments everywhere you look. I drive around the city at 1, 2 a.m. in the morning. When I first got elected, they were everywhere. Now I have to try hard to find them. But I'll call my commissioners in a minute and say, come meet me at this location and tell me why this encampment is here. We've cleaned up the encampments in the city.

Go look at Chicago. Go look at San Francisco. Go look at Los Angeles. Go look at Portland, Oregon. It's not happening here. We have a city where we have a zero tolerance for encampments. Elected officials protested us. They called us names.

January and February of 2022 when I got elected, I went to the encampments. I crawled in and sat and talked to people who were in the encampments. You know what I saw? Stale food, human waste, drug paraphernalia, schizophrenic behavior, bipolar. And I went back to my team and said this is not happening in this city. And people said don't do it, Eric. It's a suicidal mission. We were able to do it and we cleaned up this city. There's more to do, but we are moving every day to get it done.

Hughes: Yeah, so one of the bright spots in your mayoral term has been that murders are down 29 percent between 2021 and ‘24. And in the first six months of this year, we're having the lowest year for murders almost in the city's history, which is fantastic. I think it's very important for the city and you don't get enough credit for it. At the same time, felony assaults are up 29 percent in the past few years. So what is going on with the assault numbers there and how do you plan on addressing that?

Mayor Adams: And it's a combination. It's a combination of assaults on police officers. It's a combination of domestic violence assaults, internal strife. We have a real mental health issue in our city. I don't know if it came after COVID, but there's a lot of stress and anxiety in our city. And people are seeing how they express that anger in a violent way. And we know we want to zero in on that.

We're very pleased with what we've done with guns, 22,000 illegal guns off our streets. As you were just indicating, homicide and shooting is the lowest in recorded history. This weekend, 4th of July weekend is normally you'll think you're in Beirut for all the shootings you see. We had the lowest number of shootings this weekend. You look at someplace like Chicago, they have over 50 shootings that took place. In New York, we have one shooting on 4th of July. One too many, but the lowest in all of the major cities.

So we want to zero in on those seven major crimes. Assault is one of them. It is imperative to be proactive in doing it. That's some of the stuff we're doing. It's particularly around our young people. This is why we have them doing meditation, breathing exercises, having them doing mindfulness in the schools. We have to start knowing how to manage our stress better. And it can't be about violence, as you're seeing many people are doing.

That has overshadowed my success in the city. Many of these cases, severe mental health illness, then you have random acts of violence, and repeated offenders. Those three, they have been the monster that overshadowed our success. Because when someone shoves you to the subway track, it just takes away your feeling of being safe. Or someone assaults you when you're walking down the street, it takes away your feeling of being safe. But when you look at this city totally, we're the safest big city in America. Safest big city in America, based on the Uniform Crime Report by the FBI. Our numbers are impressive.

We want to get safer. But when you look at someone like the candidate for mayor, wants to empty out Rikers Island, wants to defund police departments, the desire of believing that we should not go after those who are repeated offenders and shoplifting, that is going to take us back. We have moved in a direction that we should move, and we need to continue to move in that direction.

Hughes: So since October 7th, one of the big worries in the Jewish community in New York has been antisemitic violence and antisemitic hate crimes. What has your record been on that issue, and what do you plan to do to fix that issue going forward?

Mayor Adams: Well, hate has no place in our city, in general, and specifically hate crimes. When you have the small population of Jewish residents, got 51 percent of the hate crimes in the city, that's problematic. So we started an office in antisemitism. We signed the IHRA agreement, which standardized what antisemitism is. We've been building on our Breaking Bread, Building Bonds, dinners, where we have had 19,000 people participate with these dinners, where we all sit around the table and learn from each other, because we have to be proactive and reactive.

We beefed up our hate crime unit, not to try to dismiss cases, but to go after them and prosecute, turn them over to the district attorney and make arrests when needed. And much of what we have done, we're witnessing for the last six months, a 17 percent decrease in hate crimes and antisemitism, and also a decrease in Islamophobia.

So we're seeing the work that we're doing, it is actually successful, and we're bringing down those numbers. We want to get to a vision of zero hate crimes. We want to send a strong message that hate has no place in our city, and we're going to continue to lead from the front on this topic.

Hughes: Okay, so I want to ask you about another pet peeve of mine as I walk around the city. I mean, some neighborhoods are lovely and clean, and there's no litter on the street, but other neighborhoods are just– the more I get older, the more I'm like, do I have to live like this, right?

And so I saw on the internet, there's Oxi Fresh, which I'm sure is not the highest bar of science, but they did a study where they looked at the top 35 [cleanest] cities and ranked them. They looked at rats and cockroaches and litter and vandalism, and guess where New York ranked? All the way down at the bottom. Okay, so as New Yorkers, do we have to live with all the litter and all the vandalism, or is there a way to clean up this city?

Mayor Adams: Without a doubt, and I'm surprised we're all the way down on the bottom because you may not have learned or heard, but I hate rats. I got a real hate for Mickey and his crew. And I have made it a mission. I hired a rat czar, and our rat complaints are down. In our rat mitigation zones also, our rat complaints are down.

When I came into office, cleanliness is important to me, we said that we would never be clean if we don't deal with the garbage in plastic bags. This is a relic from the 60s during the sanitation strike. We went to these black plastic bags, a real horror. I told my commissioner back in 2022, we need to containerize our garbage. She said, Eric, it's going to take us five years. I said, no, it's not. Within two and a half years, three and a half years, or really three years, we contain around 70 percent of our garbage. 70 percent of our garbage is now in containers, like other European cities.

When I go to other European cities, they say, what is this plastic bag? So you have— to get the cleanliness we want, we got to get garbage in containers with lids on top of them. And we're moving in that direction. And I moved throughout the city. If I see an area that's dirty or filthy, I'm on the phone. I'm calling my sanitation commissioner, I'm taking pictures. I'm saying someone has to get here and clean it up.

Do we have to deal with the habits of New Yorkers and tell them, listen, put it in the garbage pail. Don't drop it on the streets. We have to change the mindset. But we've come a long way from what I saw when we first came into office. I want our city to be cleaner. It's imperative that it's safe. And that is what we're focusing on.

Hughes: All right. Just a few more questions here. So another one of my pet peeves is just turning into my own personal pet peeve session, is the e-bikes on the sidewalks has become a habit with a lot of bikers that will just whiz past you at 20 miles an hour when you're walking on the sidewalk, as if that's not a massive safety hazard for pedestrians.

At the same time, I'm pro e-bikes. I think it's good for the economy. I think it's good for delivery, food delivery and all that. How do we get these folks off the sidewalk?

Mayor Adams: Love it, love it, love it. You and I must have the same pet peeve list, man, because that was— I hate that man is driving down the wrong way, speeding, driving on the sidewalks. Every town hall meeting I go to or a hall, that question comes up.

So we took off our streets 100,000 illegal vehicles, ghost vehicles, dirt bikes, four wheelers, scooters, 100,000. Many of them are crushed never to be used again. What we just did, we lowered the speed limit for those e-bikes to 15 miles an hour so they can't just do whatever they want. We upgraded our enforcement and we're putting a unit in place that specifically is going to go after those who are on the sidewalk, going down one-way streets, doing whatever they want. We're drilling into those.

What happened after COVID, everyone's that were, they were operating from home or working from home, they were ordering so much food online. It had a booming business, Grubhub and all the rest of them. And now people are ordering over and over again. We're going to put the accountability on these online delivery services. They have an obligation and responsibility.

They were having many of the delivery workers have a five minute window to deliver food. So it was incentivizing bad behavior. We want to look at all of that. We want to license the bikes so that people, you know, you're licensed, you know, if you're a victim of a crash, that you know who it is, they should have insurance.

So we had to shift to this new universe we're in, because this was a totally different universe. Pre-COVID, it wasn't like this. COVID changed the entire game and we had to catch up in government with that. And I'm the same way. You know, my elders tell me about it. Older adults tell me that, Eric, you know, we don't know where they're coming from and it's dangerous. So we have to now adjust to this new norm and make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Hughes: Okay so, shifting to a kind of a foreign policy question, you know, the great contest of the 20th century was United States versus Russia. In the 21st century, it's United States versus China. And we know that China has been trying to influence, especially Chinese nationals abroad, Chinese dissidents that live in New York. You know, they even had an outpost for the Chinese police in Chinatown.

And so this came up because one of your top advisors reportedly had ties to the CCP. And so there were questions around whether you could really crack down on this credibly. What do you think your record has been and what do you plan to do to limit the influence of the Chinese Communist Party and their operations on Chinese dissidents in New York?

Mayor Adams: Well, the volunteer and later staffer, she didn't have association with them. And there was never any legal charges that she did anything wrong. Of that particular group that had that Chinese outpost, no one knew about it. In fact, if you're good at your, what do you call it, spy mission, you're not going to be known. There's not a sign outside that says, “Hey, we're an outpost for China.” So they feed into normal interactions. They do normal things in the community.

And I think that what she did and many people in that area did, they thought it was a legitimate business. Then it was discovered who they were and ties were immediately cut from that. And we will never participate in any espionage behavior. And I'm sure I can say that on behalf of her as well. This was an entity that operated as a normal business in the Chinatown area and a normal, even volunteer entity. And so no one knew.

The government did their deep dive and they discovered who they were and they brought it to the attention of all who were connected with them. Not only she was connected, many people were connected with them and the appropriate separation from them followed.

Hughes: So last question. Do you think you have a good chance to beat Mamdani? Because let's say someone is a supporter of yours. They like your policy and they want you to win. But what they see right now is they see Mamdani has a bunch of energy behind him and they see that the anti-Mamdani, the non-Mamdani vote, let's say, is going to be split between Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Silva, who a lot of folks like to laugh at him, but that dude got 28 percent of the vote last time, right? So how are they going to be able to unite around any one of those three?

Mayor Adams: Yeah. And think about this for a moment because this is such a good question. I was talking to somebody earlier about this. The voting pool is going to grow. You're going to see a great deal of new voters because voters are motivated now. You're going to see the 2.5 million Democrats that didn't vote and the million independents that didn't vote and the 800,000 Republicans that didn't vote.

So you're going to see a good energy and it's going to be an exciting campaign. I said this six, seven months ago. I told everyone this is going to be one of the most exciting races in the history of our city because I saw what was happening.

So look at what Andrew did. Andrew joined, when I did the independent line, everybody said, you know, “What are you doing? You know, this is a fluke. You'll never win.” What they didn't tell you is that people who run on independent lines are normally just crackpots. They just join. But sitting mayors have won on independent lines. Both Lindsay and Michael Bloomberg, they have won on independent lines. It's a different scenario when you're sitting mayor.

So when I went on the independent line, we knew that there was another independent line called Working Families Party, and they were giving that to Mamdani. Andrew understood that whomever was going to win was going to be running against Mamdani. When he threw his name in the independent line, he created this scenario. He created a scenario out of his own selfishness that Mamdani, Eric, and now him are going to be the three people that's created. This was his doing.

And as I shared with him, the reason we end this mess is because you step down as governor instead of standing up. When I went through my personal crisis, I served the city. I didn't step down. And so let's say, well, okay, well, why would he do that? Let's look at his history. Carmichael runs for governor. He joins and goes on one of the independent lines. I think it was the liberal line. He goes on. He doesn't campaign, but he keeps his name on. Carmichael loses as governor.

Charlie King runs for attorney general, raised $5 million, one of the leading candidates. He jumps in the race and runs Charlie King out of the race. Keith Wright runs to be the first African-American to be the speaker of the assembly. He endorses an upstate white candidate, knocks him out of the race. David Paterson, governor, he forces David Paterson out of the governor's race, and he runs for governor when he was AG. Now he's trying it with Eric Adams.

The problem he has is that the others, he was able to get them to run out of the race. I keep telling him, I'm from Brownsville, never run, never will. And I'm going to win this race.

Hughes: Are you going to ask him to endorse you and tell his voters to vote Eric Adams?

Mayor Adams: He should do that. That's the right thing to do for the City of New York. He should get out of the race. He lost after spending $25 million. They heard his message. He was up 32 percent on points in the poll. He lost by 12 points. New Yorkers heard him. I'm just starting my campaign. I have an excellent record to run on. He was running away from his record.

He did the bail reform that put repeated offenders in our community. He did the cannabis law that saw an over proliferation of cannabis, I had to close 14 illegal shops. He closed the psychiatric beds. See the people you talk about on the subway system? This was his baby. He took and dismantled the Advantage program that was subsidizing housing for people that caused the spike in housing that we're seeing. He killed 15,000 people in nursing homes based on his policies that are still— people are heartbroken over their loved ones.

He had to step down for a reason. And so when you do an analysis of all that he has done, I had to fix the city he hurt. And we've done a darn good job in doing so. So he should say, “Let me do what's best for New York. And let me step aside and have those who would support me, put their support behind Eric, who did not lose to Zohran.”

Hughes: Alright, Mayor Adams, good luck. And thank you for the interview.

Mayor Adams: Thank you very much.

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