Mayor Adams likes to tell a good story. It could even be true.

If there’s one thing Mayor Eric Adams showed when he took office in New York City, it’s that he knows the value of telling a good story.

There was the one about Mickey, the family’s pet rat, and the one about the gang fight, when he was hit on the head with a bat with a spike in it.

And last week, Mr. Adams recalled a new detail from the oft-told story of his teenage arrest: Shortly after he was taken into custody, he said, police discovered he was carrying counterfeit gold chains.

“I used to go and sell them on Canal Street to tourists,” he said at a community event. “Listen, the statute of limitations is over.”

Two days later, Mr. Adams mentioned in passing that he had been a skateboarder and “knew how to do a few tricks.” Sufficient evidenceincluding his very brief attempt at enter carefully a skateboard last year suggests it might be rusty.

You could look it up, as Casey Stengel, legendary New York Yankees manager, liked to say decades ago. But in the case of the mayor, that is often not possible.

Since beginning his 2021 run for mayor, Mr. Adams has made an art of telling stories about himself that are nearly impossible to verify, often adding new details to common anecdotes.

Many of his stories seem intended for dramatic effect to help him connect with voters, rather than mislead them, as Representative George Santos did by misrepresenting his education, work history and background. But when Mr. Adams’ penchant for exaggeration wanders into policy, there are more serious implications.

In early May, the mayor twice alleged that schoolchildren in New York City “start their day by going to the corner bodega to buy cannabis and fentanyl,” despite being told little evidence of the trend.

The mayor recently told reporters that nearly half of New York City’s hotel rooms were occupied by migrants, suggesting that the influx of asylum seekers hurt the tourism industry and was taking rooms away from vacationers.

City Hall officials later backtracked on Mr Adams’ claim, explaining that the mayor had wanted to say migrants had taken up 40 percent of the occupancy in the city’s medium-sized hotels. Hotel industry leaders said migrants had not harmed tourism and more than 20,000 rooms remained vacant.

Mr Adams has also tried to pressure federal officials to help pay for what his government estimates will be $4.3 billion in migrant-related costs by next summer – although the Independent Budget Office has said the price tag is actually between $2 .7 should be. billion and $3.7 billion.

“At a time when the city is facing real crises, how can New Yorkers know if the mayor is telling the truth if he continues to mislead them?” said Monica Klein, a Democratic political strategist and deputy press secretary to former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Part of the mayor’s campaign strategy included emphasizing his working-class upbringing, emphasizing the challenges he says he faced growing up in Queens, and his understanding of the struggles many New Yorkers face.

By the time he was 17, he said, he was a so-called squeegee man, a gang member and a victim of police brutality.

Mr Adams’ press secretary, Fabien Levy, questioned the fairness of the suggestion that “memories of the mayor’s childhood and young adult life never happened without something to substantiate these suggestions”.

“In his 62 years on this planet, the mayor has lived through more than 32 million moments, the vast majority of which have gone undocumented by even the most diligent members of the New York City press corps,” said Mr. Levy, apparently suggesting that Mr. Adams has had a moment every minute of his life on average.

Even the mayor’s basic story – his arrest and subsequent beating by two police officers – has been revised.

He had long said that he and his older brother went into a prostitute’s house to take money she owed them for running errands. In late 2021, in an interview with The Times, Mr Adams had changed the woman’s profession to “a go-go dancer we helped who broke her leg”.

Kenneth Sherrill, a professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College in Manhattan, said some of the mayor’s exaggerations or dramatic anecdotes seem to stem from his eagerness to connect with New Yorkers.

“Maybe I’m being too generous, but it’s very possible that this is his way of saying, ‘Listen, I understand where you’re coming from – I’ve been through this sort of thing too,'” he said. “And then comes the fable that somehow rests on truth.”

Indeed, in recent weeks, Mr. Adams has been telling worshipers that he had received a divine message telling him to “talk about God, Eric.” He spoke of the fake gold chains a block or so away from the former Spofford Juvenile Center in the Bronx, where Mr. Adams said he was being held after his arrest.

And his window-washing story came in the late stages of the 2021 mayoral race, then Mr. Adams was asked about the nuisance of floor wipers in Midtown Manhattan. He said he understood their plight because when he was 17 he also washed car windows on street corners.

“I had a dirty rag with some Windex that I watered down, and I was always on the corner of Jamaica Avenue washing windows so I could save enough money to give my mom the money so we could eat a meal,” Mr. Adams told reporters.

I. Daneek Miller, a former member of the Queens City Council and a political ally of the mayor, said part of Mr. Adams’s allure was his ability to connect with ordinary New Yorkers, in part through shared experiences .

“You can’t rule from an ivory tower and send out memos saying, ‘I want everyone to do this,’ without them knowing why,” said Mr. Miller. “You have to get buy-in.”

On the rare occasion when the mayor is presented with proof of a lie, he has clung to the “perfectly imperfect” defense.

When Mr. Adams, a vegan evangelist who wrote a book about his diet, was confronted by reporters last year with testimonials that he ate fish, he first tried to refute the questions, while his senior aide denied the allegations. He finally acknowledged, “I am completely imperfect and have occasionally eaten fish.”

He used that phrase again last week when asked about his story of selling gold chains.

“When I go through my diaries that I’ve kept for a long time, I’m looking at a lot of things that haven’t been told,” he said. “All I can tell you is you’re looking at a perfectly imperfect mayor who’s been through a lot, and I’m qualified to help people who are going through a lot.”

Other concessions have been made. Mr. Adams said he graduated from Bayside High School in 1978, but graduated in January 1979, according to a copy of his high school transcript. When asked about the discrepancy, Mr. Adams that he graduated late.

During a kick-off speech in 2019, Mr Adams told a story about harassing a neighbor whose dog soiled his garden. He acknowledged to The Times in 2021 that the story had been taken from another source. It wasn’t that it didn’t happen, he said; it just didn’t happen to him.

There were also campaign questions about where Mr Adams lived – a subject that was still somewhat unresolved. After concerns were raised about whether Mr. Adams actually lived in Fort Lee, NJ, he invited the news media to a property he owns in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, hoping to prove he lived there. But questions remained: The Brooklyn apartment contained non-vegan food and sneakers that appeared to belong to his son.

As for being an accomplished skateboarder, Mr. Adams stands by his story.

On Tuesday, the mayor’s office released a statement saying that Mr. Adams had skated as a child nearly half a century ago and claimed to have made his own skateboard with metal wheels and a piece of plywood.

There were no skate parks back then, nor a World Skateboarding Federation, Mr. Levy, the mayor’s press secretary. So Mr. Adams made simple ramps with cinder blocks and plywood. “It was called skating, trial and error,” Mr. Levy said.

Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.