Four decades before he made history as New York’s first indicted mayor, Eric Adams became an officer in what was then known as the “Oh” police force.

The New York City Transit Police received this nickname because of the reaction they often received when they piqued the interest of a new acquaintance by saying they were a police officer and then added that they patrolled the decidedly nondescript subway.

“Oh.”

Some traffic cops joked back when their radios often didn’t work underground that they should really be called “Oh s–t” police. That was because they were in danger of coming face to face with a hulking psychopath who had just spit in their faces on a moving train when any hope of assistance was half an hour away.

One result of such confrontations was that traffic officers, dismissed by city police as “cave cops,” learned a lesson about who they really were, deep down. Some took it as a challenge and became determined crime fighters. Instead, Adams became what some called a “house mouse,” managing to spend much of his time in the department’s underground headquarters.

“He was an employee,” a retired traffic cop who made more than 1,000 arrests told the Daily Beast on Thursday. “He was inside. He wasn’t really out there.”

“He wasn’t a real cop,” said another retired traffic officer, who was as real as it gets. “I think he got nine collars. And they would all be misdemeanors.”

When police officers arrested a robber or rapist, they would call him and Adams would demonstrate his organizational skills while filling out a report at the dispatch desk. When he was assigned to data processing, he proved he had a knack for using computers. He also prepared for promotion exams by studying the Patrol Leader, the Penal Code, and the Code of Criminal Procedure. Test results alone determined a police officer’s advancement to sergeant, then lieutenant, and finally captain.

At the same time, Adams achieved some distinction among cave cops as one of the senior members of two black police associations: The Guardians and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. This made him a viable candidate for the post of deputy commissioner of community affairs, as the former top Traffic cop Bill Bratton became chief of the NYPD in 1994. But then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani is said to have considered Adams too close to community activists in Brooklyn.

In 1995, the Transit Police merged with the NYPD, which began to achieve historic reductions in crime thanks to the strategic genius of a former cave cop, Assistant Commissioner of Operations Jack Maple. Adams was assigned for a time as a captain in a high-crime district of Brooklyn and then in the low-crime Greenwich Village. His disciplinary record has been clean throughout his years, except for a single department complaint in 2006 for speaking to television news without authorization.

That same year, Adams retired and successfully ran for state senator in Brooklyn as a black former police officer with a reputation for social justice. He was elected Brooklyn Borough President in 2014 and showed a sign of complacency when Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, a longtime chairman of the community planning board, refused to follow an order to fire a highly respected executive without cause.

“I’m the borough president and you do what I tell you,” Goldstein remembers Adams saying.

Adams had risen from the Oh Police to some notoriety on the outskirts. But he was faced with a typical problem for politicians: even though he could consider himself a great man, he didn’t have much money. He managed to get a table at a popular restaurant, but the question of the check remained.

To his obvious delight, he met many people who had a lot of money and were happy to pay. He discovered that there was even the government of an entire country, Turkey, willing to give him an upgrade to business class if he flew on the national airline. He even managed to get an upgrade by simply stopping in Turkey on the way to other destinations.

Of course, his Turkish friends only did this because they believed he could help them. And they showed themselves willing to give him some of what he knew he needed to keep that position.

“You win the race by raising money. Must raise money. “Anything else is a curse,” he texted a supporter, according to court documents.

When he decided to run for mayor in 2021, he needed significantly larger sums of money. Together with Turkish friends, he sought money from anyone who would be willing to step in. If they were willing to give more than the legal maximum, he allegedly invested it in other people’s names. Prosecutors say he also did this with money from Turks, who as foreigners were not allowed to contribute at all.

In this way, he allegedly raised enough illegal money to finance his election campaign as a law-and-order candidate. He won on the promise of making the city safe.

Adams could have hired the best of the best to run the city, but they might have noticed that the people who gave him campaign money occasionally wanted something in return. You may have wondered why he flew to Istanbul on his way to France, even though it’s not on the route. You might also have wondered why he was so anxious for the FDNY to put aside its security concerns about the new Turkish consulate tower in Manhattan. Someone may have noticed that the building was occupied just before the Turkish president arrived to open it with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Instead, Adams gathered a band of buddies who said nothing because they didn’t want anyone to ask questions about what they themselves were doing. Many of them were former police officers whom Adams knew from Transit or Brooklyn. They included Phil Banks, who resigned as NYPD department chief after federal prosecutors named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major corruption scandal in 2014. Adams appointed Banks as deputy mayor for public safety, with authority over the police commissioner and the rest of the NYPD. Banks and the rest of Adams’ cronies have been the subject of at least three federal investigations.

A fourth investigation focused on Adams himself and the result was an indictment that was dropped Thursday. He will be charged Friday morning with bribery, fraud and inciting a foreigner to make a political donation. Court records suggest that while Adams was good at studying the rules as a house mouse, he wasn’t very adept at breaking them as mayor.

A section of the indictment describes his apparent efforts to thwart the FBI after agents executed a search warrant for his electronic devices on November 6, 2023.

“Although Adams carried several electronic devices, including two cell phones, he did not have his personal cell phone with him, which he used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment. When Adams pulled out his personal cell phone the next day in response to a subpoena, it was “locked,” requiring a password to open the device.

“Adams claimed that after learning of the investigation into his conduct, he changed the password on November 5, 2024, increasing the complexity of his password from four to six digits. Adams did this, he claimed, to prevent employees from accidentally or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone because, according to Adams, he wanted to keep the contents of his phone because of the investigation.

“But, Adams further claimed, he had forgotten the password he had just set and therefore was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone.”

Oh.