Last year Mayor Eric Adams claimed that for decades he had been carrying a photo of his police officer friend who died in the line of duty, but a new New York Times report found the mayor’s office actually created the photo only after he began mentioning it in media interviews and that aides went so far as to distress the print-out so it would look old and worn.
Adams first mentioned carrying the photo of Officer Robert Venable, who died in 1987, last year while talking about the slaying of two New York City police officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance in Harlem.
“I still think about Robert,” Adams, a former police captain, said at a news conference last year. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet.”
One week later, Adams produced the wallet-sized photo at the request of the New York Times and posed for a portrait with it in his office.
He mentioned the photo again in two television interviews last spring after the deaths of officers Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera in Harlem.
“I understand the pain,” Adams said on News 12 at the time. “I carry around a picture of Robert Venable, my close friend, that was shot several years ago during my early days of police, and I always have Robert’s picture. The pain never dissipates.”
He also showed off the photo at a Medal Day ceremony at the Police Academy in June 2022, calling Venable “one of my closest friends.”
“Robert died when he was shot in the head when responding to a job,” the mayor said. “We were going away that week and going on vacation together.”
But the new report reveals that aides in the mayor’s office were instructed to create a photo of Venable days after Adams first mentioned carrying it, using a picture of the officer that was found on Google. The aides printed the photo in black-and-white and poured coffee on it to make it look worn, a source told the New York Times.
Two former City Hall aides reportedly confirmed the creation of the photo. A spokesman for the mayor did not deny that the photo Adams had shown reporters and at the police ceremony was created by a City Hall aide, but said that Adams had indeed carried a photo of the officer for decades.
Levy reportedly accused the outlet of undertaking a “campaign to paint the mayor as a liar.”
“The Times’s efforts to attack the mayor here would be laughable if it were not so utterly offensive,” he told the Times.
The Times spoke to several of Adams’s former transit police colleagues who confirmed he and Venable were friends. One officer, Cliff Hollingsworth, told the Times he recalled Adams “taking Robert’s death very personally.”
Venable’s niece, Meredith Venson, was a teenager when her uncle died and remembered Adams visiting with her family after her uncle’s death and that he was kind to her grandmother and had driven the family to events. She said she had not seen Adams in almost 30 years until this year.
Januari Venable, the officer’s daughter who was 8 at the time of her father’s death, told the Times she did not recall ever meeting Adams until this year.
The report notes the photo is not the first time Adams has been caught in a lie as mayor: he told a story in a 2019 commencement address about intimidating a neighbor and later acknowledged the story was true but had not happened to him. Adams also claimed to have sold his stake in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, though a financial disclosure form revealed he still retains ownership.
He provided a document to the Times during the 2021 mayoral race that purported to show that ownership of the apartment had been transferred to its other owner in 2007. The outlet obtained an email that the other owner, Sylvia Cowan, sent to the co-op board in May 2021 that said Adams had agreed to transfer ownership to her some 14 years after the campaign’s paperwork claimed. After the mayor listed the apartment on his financial disclosure forms that were released this year, a spokesperson said the process of transferring the property was still underway.
Adams also previously claimed to be vegan though it was later revealed he eats fish.