Mayor Eric 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 variously declared literally 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 critters gnawed at him for years before the pesky federal investigations currently rattling his administration.
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 Adams said of Mickey.
‘We grew up with all kinds of rodents’
Eric Adams 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 Adams said Wednesday.
He recalled rats even jumping out of their bread box.
“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 Adams recounted to The Post how his siblings adopted one rat, kept it in a box and called it Mickey, after Mickey Mouse.
The pet rat 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 Adams 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 Adams 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.
Adams’ lifelong rat tale doesn’t stop there.
‘Public enemy number one’
Rats are more than a personal enemy for Adams: they’ve been a go-to issue, often while he’s in crisis.
The creepy-crawly saga stretched into his political career, such as the revolting 2019 spectacle when the then-Brooklyn-borough-president spilled out a boozy slurry of liquefied rodent carcasses in front of a shrieking crowd.
“Not only am I the BP, I’m the pied piper,” trumpeted Adams at the alcohol-filled rat trap demonstration.
As mayor, Adams had the embarrassing repeated vermin violations at his Bed-Stuy townhouse.
He also appointed New York City’s first “rat czar.”
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” that’s more-or-less just a $50 garbage can.
The rat summit — which was announced in May — had fortunate timing for Adams.
Deputy Mayor of Communications Fabien Levy called around to city agencies last weekend looking for “big ideas” as part of a public relations push after high-profile resignations of NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban and Chief Counsel Lisa Zornberg — and ahead of expected federal indictments against two retired FDNY chiefs, sources said.
So when Adams spoke from a Pier 57 stage during the summit, he assumed a favored role: New York City’s number one avowed rat hater.
“I don’t think there’s been a mayor in history that says how much he hates rats,” he said.
“Let’s figure out how we unify against what I consider to be public enemy number one: Mickey and his crew.”