NYC Mayor Eric Adams's staffers splashed coffee on a photo of a slain police officer to make it look older than it actually was, report says

• NYC Mayor Eric Adams carries around a photo of a slain police officer in his wallet.
• Adams has suggested that he's been carrying the photo for decades.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams may have doctored a recently-printed and Googled image of a police officer to make it look much older than it actually was.

"I still think about Robert," Adams said at a news conference during his first months in office. "I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet."

According to the New York Times, Adams' wallet-sized photo of Officer Robert Venable, a friend of the mayor who died in the line of duty in 1987, was only recently created.

The Times reported that just days after Adams first mentioned the photo, he directed staff to recreate a weathered-looking image of the officer. An aide reportedly found the photo on Google, printed it out in black and white, and then spilled coffee on the image to make it appear old.

Adams later posed for a portrait with the photo of Venable for a New York Times article published in February 2022.

Reached for comment by the Times, Adams spokesman Fabian Levy didn't dispute that the photo that Adams showed during the photoshoot was recently created — but he insisted that Adams had been carrying a photo of Venable for decades.

"The Times's efforts to attack the mayor here would be laughable if it were not so utterly offensive," Levy said in a statement to the paper, characterizing the report as a "campaign to paint the mayor as a liar."

During his time in office, Adams has told a number of stories that have been difficult to verify.