How Mayor Eric Adams Lost New York City

Pearson retained his privileged position even after October 2023, when he sparked a physical altercation with security guards at a migrant shelter by refusing to show his ID, in accordance with shelter rules, and had the guards arrested under false pretenses.

“Tim,” Adams explained in December 2023, “is one of my Knights of the Round Table.”

Within a year, that table would be lonely. Nearly all of Adams’s most trusted advisers, including Pearson, made their exits amid an endless loop of scandal, phone seizures and subpoenas. More than a dozen aides and confidants — Adams’s chief adviser, his first deputy mayor, his schools chancellor, his police commissioner, his interim police commissioner — either attracted law-enforcement attention, resigned under duress or were arrested (and sometimes all three) in several unrelated investigations. “Too many friends with too many problems in too many high places,” Bill Bratton, who served as police commissioner under de Blasio and Rudy Giuliani, told us. “That’s the shame of it.”

Even Adams’s longtime romantic partner, Tracey Collins, left a more-than-$250,000-a-year role in the city’s Department of Education amid allegations that Adams had installed her in what was effectively a no-show job.

And on Sept. 26, 10 months after F.B.I. agents approached him outside New York University, directed his security detail to step aside and took his phones, prosecutors announced an indictment of the mayor on five federal corruption counts. “OFFICER DOWN,” read a collection of stickers, with a grinning Adams, pressed to the scaffolding outside N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts.

The indictment was unsparing. It depicted Adams, as borough president, mayor-elect and then new mayor, leveraging his public power for private gain, indulging in free and heavily discounted travel arrangements courtesy of the Turkish government and its national airline. In 2017, Adams, a close relative and an aide traveled business class on Turkish Airlines to France, Turkey and China. They paid nothing. The airfare and a discounted stay at a luxury hotel were worth more than $41,000. The next year, he traveled with his partner, Collins, to Hungary on heavily discounted Turkish Airlines tickets that saved them more than $12,000.