A Letter to Indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams from Joey, King of the Rats

“Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a former police captain who ran on a law-and-order platform but whose tenure has been consumed by accusations of corruption, spent years accepting free airline tickets, lavish overseas accommodations and illegal campaign donations from Turkey, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.” — New York Times, 9/26/24

Dear Soon-to-Be-Former Mayor Adams,

It was with great glee that I heard the charges leveled against you in human court yesterday. Glee, and not a little pride—because finally, the hard work of our community has paid off.

We workshopped many, many ideas and methods by which we might bring about your downfall, Mr. Mayor. We considered chewing through your brake lines. We discussed birthing pups in your drains. We even floated the idea of simply storming City Hall like a rodentia Bastille Day. But in the end, it was all so miraculously simple—all we had to do was nudge a few circumstances into place and then watch while you fumbled the bag in your own apocalyptically dumb way.

We knew, of course, that your astronomical level of self-interest paired with your complete lack of impulse control would be your downfall (truly, we have seen our cousins in cages conduct themselves with more dignity around unlimited reward pellets). Having ascertained from our communities overseas that foreign governments were more than willing to play footsie, we took the liberty of drafting a few exploratory emails from your office just to nose around—to explore what kind of cheese might be available for the trap, as it were. The rest of that piece really took care of itself (teşekkür ederim kardeşlerim!).

The humans in your own city, as ever, helped us, leaving their greed and cravenness for us to exploit as easily as we gobble up their food waste. A chancellor here, a chief counsel there—let’s not pretend you were surrounding yourself with, shall we say, competent and dedicated public servants. And former police commissioner Caban, well, he’s one of ours, obviously; I’ll let your voters divine just how many of the boys in blue are actually columns of rats stuffed into a city-issued uniform. A couple of well-placed phone calls—yes, we have phones; it’s 2024—and whoosh, there goes your whole Gracie Mansion of cards.

“Why me,” I can hear you whine in that droning, nasal honk of yours. “Why go after me, and not that sequoia Bill de Blasio, or that little money-squirrel Bloomberg?” Because those mayors stuck to human affairs, Mr. Adams. Those men stayed out of our business. Those men did not appoint a Rat Czar.

How many signups did you get for Rat Squad, Mr. Mayor? How many T-shirts did you give out to your “elite rat-fighting squad”? How many students have matriculated from Rat Academy? And of those, how many are familiar with the term “fuck around and find out"?

Here’s the thing, Eric. We rats have been here for a long, long time. From the time our forebears first scuttled off the colonizer ships, to the early days of New Amsterdam, through Tammany Hall (that was us, too, FYI), right up to the present day. And one thing is clear: You don’t run this city. We do.

EX RATTUS AD RATTIBUM,
King Joey the 143rd

P.S. That’s “King of the Rats,” not “Rat King,” which is a completely different thing that we really don’t like to talk about.