The charges against Mr. Adams include bribery conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He is also accused of fraudulently accepting public matching funds for his campaign by improperly certifying contributions made via “straw donors.”

In a five-count indictment unsealed on Thursday, federal prosecutors detailed years of graft that involved Mr. Adams accepting free or heavily discounted international flights and plush overseas accommodations, starting when he was Brooklyn borough president and continuing after he became mayor in 2022.

“I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense,” Mr. Adams said. He vowed to stay in office and to fight the charges.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove the mayor, said in a statement Thursday evening that she had carefully reviewed the indictment and urged Mr. Adams to consider whether he was still able to effectively serve New Yorkers.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who brought the charges, said on Thursday that Mr. Adams had been “showered” with gifts that he knew were illegal and tried to conceal.

In return for the gifts, prosecutors said, Mr. Adams helped Turkish officials with issues they faced in New York City. Most notably, Mr. Adams in 2021 pressured officials at the Fire Department to permit a new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan, despite safety problems, the indictment said.

If Mr. Adams is convicted of all five counts in the indictment, the maximum penalty under law would be 45 years in prison. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, he would most likely receive far less.

Here’s what else to know:

The prosecutor: Mr. Williams, 44, already had a compelling biography, but the first-ever indictment of a New York City mayor has added an astonishing new chapter to his life’s story.

Potential next steps: If Mr. Adams were to resign or be removed from office, New York City’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, would become mayor. He has been preparing behind the scenes for the possibility.

The indictment: Strange, amusing and troubling vignettes abound in Mr. Adams’s indictment. Read 10 of the allegations against him.

The Turkevi Center: At the center of the charges is an ornate, 35-story building in Midtown Manhattan that Turkey opened to great fanfare in 2021 to showcase its international ambitions.

An array of inquiries: Four federal investigations have engulfed the Adams administration and high-ranking officials.

The indictment against Mr. Adams marked the first time in New York City’s modern history that a sitting mayor was charged with a crime. Prosecutors said Mr. Adams had for years — tracing back to his days as Brooklyn borough president — used his status to seek out “improper valuable benefits.”

Mr. Adams has refused to step down, even as other city leaders have called for his resignation. “I ask New Yorkers to wait and hear our defense,” he said in a defiant news conference on Thursday.

That defense, if Mr. Adams goes to trial, will be argued before Judge Ho.

Before joining the federal bench in Manhattan, Judge Ho supervised the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights litigation. He worked at the organization for about a decade and has argued in front of the Supreme Court twice, according to a biography on the organization’s website.

He was born in San Jose, Calif., in 1977 and graduated from Yale Law School in 2005. He clerked in the Southern District of New York, where he now presides himself, and at the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. Judge Ho has also worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

President Biden submitted Judge Ho’s nomination to the Senate in 2021. It was nearly two years before he was confirmed, a time during which his work on voting rights and his public statements became points of contention between Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In a December 2021 response to a question from Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the panel, Judge Ho said, “I recognize and regret that I have engaged in overheated rhetoric on social media.” He pledged to “maintain high standards of professional courtesy and respect in both formal and informal communications, in both public and private,” if he was confirmed.

He was confirmed largely along party lines, with Joe Manchin of West Virginia, an independent who was then a Democrat, opposing his confirmation, and Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, not voting.

In a statement after Judge Ho’s confirmation, Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, called him “one of the foremost election law, civil rights and voting rights experts in the country.”

“I am confident Dale Ho will follow the facts and administer justice fairly,” Mr. Schumer said. “I am proud to have recommended Mr. Ho, and to have championed his nomination.”

Mr. Cuomo, an exceedingly careful political tactician, gave no immediate hints. As other prominent New York leaders pushed out statements and calls for Mr. Adams to resign, the former Democratic governor remained conspicuously mum.

“He’s previously said he has no plans to make plans, and that hasn’t changed,” Rich Azzopardi, his longtime spokesman, said when asked about the governor’s intentions.

But behind the scenes, allies and fellow Democrats who have spoken to him say Mr. Cuomo has spent months closely monitoring the investigations, gaming out a potential comeback after a yearslong public campaign to aggressively fight the harassment accusations against him.

His team has tested his strength in polls. He hosted donors at a members-only Manhattan club last December. And he has given a series of speeches to Jewish groups and Black churches — one as recently as Sunday — lamenting the state of the city.

“It very much feels like Andrew Cuomo is gearing up to run for mayor,” said Chris Coffey, a Democratic political strategist who has spoken to him recently. “But it’s not going to be a walk for anybody.”

If he follows through, Mr. Cuomo’s boosters believe he could offer a compelling pitch to a city straining under the weight of political scandal and a continuing migrant crisis. Despite being run out of office in 2021 by a scathing report accusing him of sexual harassment, Mr. Cuomo, 66, remains one of the best-known figures in New York. He could deploy millions of dollars left over in his old campaign account to help present himself as a tested leader ready to stabilize the city.

In a speech Sunday at a Black congregation in Brooklyn, Mr. Cuomo sounded a lot like Mr. Adams, as he bemoaned crime “seemingly everywhere” hurting Black and brown New Yorkers, and an influx of migrants that had gotten “out of control.”

He called himself a “get-it-done, make-a-difference progressive” and blamed policies pushed by the left for New York’s woes.

Political strategists say Mr. Cuomo would probably prefer that Mr. Adams resign or be removed from office. A special election to replace him would be nonpartisan and would take place on an accelerated timeline.

A poll taken last December showed Mr. Cuomo leading a hypothetical special election against the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, and Kathryn Garcia, Mr. Adams’s runner-up in the 2021 Democratic primary. Mr. Williams would step in as acting mayor if Mr. Adams leaves office.

“He’d have a big advantage over some of his opponents if he were to jump in,” said former Gov. David A. Paterson. “He has the name recognition, the war chest and 11 years of pretty solid public service.”

It is murkier how Mr. Cuomo would proceed if Mr. Adams holds out and follows through with a re-election campaign next year. In a Democratic primary, Mr. Cuomo would face not only Mr. Adams but also Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Mr. Lander’s predecessor, Scott M. Stringer; and State Senators Jessica Ramos and Zellnor Myrie. Other candidates may yet join the race.

When the investigation into Mr. Adams first became public late last year, Charlie King, one of Mr. Cuomo’s confidants, said he was “not going to run against the mayor.” Asked on Thursday if the statement was still true, Mr. King did not respond.

A spokesman for Mr. Adams declined to comment.

It is not the first time Mr. Cuomo has toyed with a comeback. He thought about running for governor as a Democrat or independent in 2022, at a time when few supporters were willing to be seen with him. He was briefly mentioned as a possible challenger to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in this year’s Democratic primary.

Longtime allies, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the mercurial former governor, said Mr. Cuomo has historically been wary of entering races unless he is convinced he can win, and that he would most likely take his time deciding how to proceed. Several questioned whether he really wanted to be mayor, a position he spent his career denigrating, and said he would prefer to win back his old job in 2026 and avenge the abrupt end of his decade-long governorship.

But there would also be more serious challenges to his candidacy.

His party’s left flank still loathes him. Ana María Archila, co-director of the New York Working Families Party, said that the only thing worse than Mr. Adams staying in power would be Mr. Cuomo returning to elected office.

A campaign would almost certainly open Mr. Cuomo to renewed scrutiny of his personal conduct. He has already spent three years and millions of taxpayer dollars defending himself and his aides in court in civil complaints, criminal investigations and inquiries related to accusations of sexual harassment. His opponents would be likely to resurface the most serious of them.

“Andrew Cuomo is an unrepentant serial sexual harasser and has no business ever serving in public office again,” said Mariann Meier Wang, the lawyer for Brittany Commisso, a former aide who accused Mr. Cuomo of groping her in late 2020.

Ms. Commisso’s suit came after a criminal complaint was filed against Mr. Cuomo, which Albany County prosecutors investigated but later dropped. Mr. Cuomo denied the allegations.

Republicans in Congress are still investigating the Cuomo administration’s pandemic response. In a hearing this month, they tried to pin the blame for large numbers of deaths in nursing homes on him and his administration, and they have recently subpoenaed Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office for hundreds of emails from Mr. Cuomo’s time in office.

Mr. Cuomo is facing another significant electoral dilemma. His political success has long rested on the same working- and middle-class Black communities that launched Mr. Adams to the mayoralty.

Advisers to both men know that Mr. Cuomo would struggle to win without their support. And so any suggestion that he is shoving Mr. Adams off the stage prematurely could backfire, particularly after the former governor asked Black voters and pastoral leaders to withhold judgment of him during his own scandal.

It was no coincidence that in the moments before the indictment was unsealed, Mr. Adams physically surrounded himself Thursday morning with Black clergy and other leaders at a news conference. In interviews afterward, several of them sent Mr. Cuomo a clear message.

“Of course he could look at it. But if he does, I’m going to look again at the charges,” said Charles B. Rangel, the longtime dean of Harlem politics. “Because I may have missed something that would cause an intelligent guy to think the charges are an impediment to a successful campaign.”

Hazel N. Dukes, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. New York State Conference, said “people would not look kindly” on Mr. Cuomo entering the race before Mr. Adams has a chance to properly defend himself.

She was once one of Mr. Cuomo’s closest allies during his time in Albany and embodied his deep bond to the city’s Black residents. When he was battling to stay in office in 2021, she even referred to him as her son, saying of the Italian American politician, “he ain’t white.”

“I stayed with Andrew until they made a decision. I said let him have his day in court. He knows that,” she said. “I hope he does the same thing. Show respect.”

It was a clear example of how Ms. Hochul — an accidental governor first elevated after the resignation of her predecessor amid another scandal — is treading carefully and deliberately as she reckons with the fraught options for how to deal with Mr. Adams, a political ally.

Ms. Hochul has worked closely with Mr. Adams, whose law-and-order approach and business-friendly policies complement her own.

But as investigations and raids of Adams officials accumulated this month, the governor began to moderate her praise of the mayor. That trend continued on Thursday, after prosecutors indicted Mr. Adams on five criminal counts including bribery conspiracy and wire fraud. He has insisted that he is innocent and has said he intends to remain in office while he fights the charges.

Now Ms. Hochul finds herself in an unusual position: Under New York City’s charter, the governor holds the power to remove a mayor.

The decision offers Ms. Hochul, who has been criticized for her leadership and whose approval ratings have plummeted in recent polls, a chance to shatter any perception of weakness and distance herself from a mayor under federal indictment.

But it also carries legal and political risks: The removal process is untested and could alienate Mr. Adams’s political base, particularly Black voters, without whom Ms. Hochul’s re-election chances would be diminished, especially if a high-profile Democrat challenges her in a primary.

In a statement on Thursday night, Ms. Hochul kept her options open, declining to call on her ally to step aside while at the same time characterizing the indictment as “the latest in a disturbing pattern of events that has, understandably, contributed to a sense of unease among many New Yorkers.”

She said she would be assessing what to do next and put the onus on Mr. Adams to do the same.

“I expect the mayor to take the next few days to review the situation and find an appropriate path forward to ensure the people of New York City are being well-served by their leaders,” she said. “We must give New Yorkers confidence that there is steady, responsible leadership at every level of government.”

Ms. Hochul has a reputation for being profoundly loyal. Indeed, she has built something of a reputation for her steadfast commitment to allies facing headwinds — including President Biden, whom she stumped for even after his disastrous debate performance, and her former lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, whom she defended in the wake of another federal corruption investigation. (The case against Mr. Benjamin was dismissed by an appellate court last year, but subsequently revived. Its status is uncertain).

But Ms. Hochul’s commitment to Mr. Adams stands apart for the frequency with which it has been tested.

In 2021, with concerns about crime rising in the city, Mr. Adams staked out an iconoclastic position by calling for changes to one of the signature achievements of the newly minted Democratic majority in Albany: criminal justice reforms aimed at making bail laws fairer.

Mr. Adams’s advocacy for changes to the law forced Ms. Hochul, in her first months as governor in 2022, to choose between the Legislature and the mayor. She chose Mr. Adams, putting all of her might behind a push for more judicial discretion on setting bail — enraging some of the very lawmakers she had pledged to collaborate with.

Ms. Hochul emerged that year with a compromise that would increase the number of crimes for which judges could set bail, but Mr. Adams said it did not go far enough. The next year Ms. Hochul took up the charge once again, winning even stricter measures in the next budget.

And when the crisis at the southern border arrived on New York’s doorstep, Ms. Hochul answered Mr. Adams’s call with billions of dollars for migrant services.

Ms. Hochul has been eager to stress the benefits of the partnership between herself and the mayor — a marked contrast with the animosity that characterized the relationship between former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio.

But that partnership now puts Ms. Hochul in an awkward position.

In the past week, the city government has been rocked by high-profile resignations, leading some to speculate that if Ms. Hochul does not act to remove Mr. Adams, New Yorkers could come to blame her for the dysfunction.

“People will see the growing chaos of the city government and the problems caused by it, and in understanding that she could have done something about it, will hold her accountable,” said State Senator Liz Krueger, who represents the Upper East Side and leads the Senate Finance Committee.

Evan A. Davis, former counsel to former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, said he had sent Ms. Hochul’s counsel an email Thursday imploring her to immediately begin removal proceedings against Mr. Adams. The question, he said, is whether the mayor has a plausible defense, and hearings should be held to establish that fact.

“The process should begin immediately,” he said. “This is an unsettling moment that puts the city at significant risk.”

But political risks loom. If Mr. Adams were to be removed, his immediate replacement — the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams — and most of the candidates who might run in a special election fall to Ms. Hochul’s ideological left, and might not be as pliable as governing partners.

And then there is Mr. Cuomo, who is rumored to be interested in the job, despite public avowals to the contrary.

Ms. Hochul first arrived in Albany as Mr. Cuomo’s lieutenant governor, rising to power after he resigned in the face of a torrent of sexual harassment allegations that he vehemently denies. But since she succeeded Mr. Cuomo, Ms. Hochul’s popularity has plummeted, with a recent Siena College poll finding that just 34 percent of likely voters approved of Ms. Hochul’s performance.

Bradley Tusk, a New York political strategist and venture capitalist, said that Ms. Hochul’s unpopularity could make her unlikely to cross Mr. Adams, particularly given the mayor’s casting of the charges against him as a racially motivated attack.

“We have seen politicians in other cities get indicted on similar charges and still survive them or least not have to resign,” Mr. Tusk said, adding, “She is in a tenuous position.”

Others saw in that uncertainty an opportunity for Ms. Hochul to once again try to rebuild the vastly depleted public trust.

Ana María Archila, a leader of the progressive Working Families Party, believes that Ms. Hochul ought to remove Mr. Adams.

“When people see their leaders act with moral clarity, that feeds the trust that is necessary for the relationship between government and people,” she said.

And while legal experts agree that the City Charter grants Ms. Hochul the power to remove a mayor, there is little precedent for what that process could look like.

A mayor of New York City has never been removed by the governor. The closest precedent occurred in 1931, when Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed to remove Mayor Jimmy Walker.

The matter was never formally tested, however: Fourteen days of hearings were held, but Mr. Walker eventually resigned and moved to Europe.

The part that has been unspoken, at least by him: He is being targeted because he is Black. His decision to address reporters on Thursday while surrounded by Black clergy and community leaders underscored this.

After news of his indictment broke Wednesday night, Mr. Adams, in a video message, was explicit in tying the charges to his criticism of the government.

“Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics,” said Mr. Adams, who is a Democrat.

It represented a sharpening of his take on the subject on a radio show earlier this month, when former Gov. David Paterson hinted that investigations into Mr. Adams might be driven by his criticism.

“I will hope that none of what’s taking place is attributed to me fighting on behalf of the city,” Mr. Adams said on the show. “That’s what I was elected to do.”

Mr. Adams has offered no proof of his theory — and on Thursday the White House denied it — but that hasn’t stopped his supporters and others from propagating the idea.

On X, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund financier, said that Mr. Adams deserved to be presumed innocent and then theorized about the “weaponization of our country’s prosecutorial resources” in reference to the mayor.

“I do know that Eric loudly spoke the truth on the migrant problem in NYC and what the consequences would be for New Yorkers and the country,” Mr. Ackman wrote. “Doing so required bravery, as sharing these views publicly as a Democratic mayor did not win him any friends in the Party or with the Biden/Harris administration.”

In response to a question from a reporter on Thursday, former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday also said he believed Mr. Adams had been indicted because he spoke out about the migrant crisis.

But Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor, said at City Hall on Thursday that the mayor’s comments “stoke distrust” in government and were an “utterly preposterous” claim. He said there was “no chance” the White House influenced the indictment and he did not even want to repeat the idea.

On Thursday, after the indictment had been unsealed, the mayor stood with a group of Black supporters during a news conference outside of Gracie Mansion. Before the event, they prayed for the mayor. During the news conference, they proclaimed that he would be found innocent.

“The same justice that we want for ourselves,” Bishop Chantel R. Wright said, “we want for our mayor.”

The mayor has said that there was an attempt to get his base of Black voters to abandon him. He has compared himself to the city’s first Black mayor, David N. Dinkins, even calling himself “Dinkins 2.” Mr. Dinkins lost his bid for re-election in 1993 after his mishandling of racial riots in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“It’s mind-blowing what we’ve delivered for Black and brown people in the city,” Mr. Adams said on a hip-hop program on SiriusXM in July. “Just as they did with David Dinkins, turning their base against him as he was delivering for us, this is the same script.”

Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, an assemblywoman from Brooklyn who is one of the mayor’s strongest allies and chairwoman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, said members of her community have pointed out to her that “most of the people who have been targeted that are connected to Mayor Adams have been Black.”

Federal authorities have seized the phones of several Black members of the mayor’s inner circle, including his schools chancellor, first deputy mayor, deputy mayor for public safety and a senior adviser. Several people of other races are also linked to investigations related to the mayor.

1. Suspiciously cheap tickets — and an upgrade

On the June day in 2021 when Mr. Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor and all but assured his ascension to City Hall, his thoughts strayed.

An Adams aide messaged the general manager of Turkish Airlines in New York, Cenk Öcal, to book flights for Mr. Adams to Istanbul. The staff member fits the description of Rana Abbasova, then Mr. Adams’s liaison to Turkey.

Mr. Öcal said he would charge the mayor $50, a price so low as to appear preposterous. And appearances mattered.

“No, dear. $50? What? Quote a proper price,” Ms. Abbasova responded. “His every step is being watched right now. $1,000 or so. Let it be somewhat real. We don’t want them to say he is flying for free. At the moment, the media’s attention is on Eric.”

Mr. Adams ended up paying about $2,200 for tickets for himself and his romantic partner, tickets that were promptly upgraded to business class and would have otherwise cost more than $15,000.

When Ms. Abbasova asked Mr. Öcal where he would recommend that Mr. Adams stay in Istanbul, the manager suggested the Four Seasons.

When Ms. Abbasova argued that the hotel was too expensive, Mr. Öcal responded, “Why does he care? He is not going to pay. His name will not be on anything either.”

“Super,” Ms. Abbasova responded.

Days later, Mr. Adams canceled the trip.

Since 2016, prosecutors say, Mr. Adams has received more than $100,000 in travel benefits from Turkish interests that he did not disclose as required by law. Prosecutors say that he repaid his benefactors with official acts as Brooklyn borough president, mayor-elect and mayor.

2. A New York election win was greeted with glee in Turkey

“I’m going to go and talk to our elders in Ankara about how we can turn this into an advantage for our country’s lobby,” Arda Sayiner, a businessman and self-described brand adviser, told another businessman the day after Mr. Adams was elected mayor in November 2021.

The Turkish foreign minister was “personally paying attention to him” and Mr. Adams “should not bother with” his other Turkish contacts, Reyhan Özgür, then the Turkish consul general, told Ms. Abbasova around the same time.

3. A ‘spiritual journey’ to Ghana, with a layover in Istanbul

Before Mr. Adams took office in 2022, he and his partner traveled to Ghana on what he described as a “spiritual journey.” A spokesman for Mr. Adams said at the time that the mayor-elect had paid for the trip itself, but that as a matter of policy, they would not disclose the receipts.

In fact, Turkish Airlines footed most of the $14,000 bill for the business-class tickets, according to the indictment. During a nine-hour layover in Istanbul, Mr. Özgür arranged for a driver in a BMW to take Mr. Adams and his partner to a high-end restaurant.

Mr. Özgür promised Ms. Abbasova that he would keep the layover confidential.

4. Ignoring defects in a tower’s fire safety system

In September 2021, Mr. Özgür asked Mr. Adams to get Fire Department approval for a new high-rise Turkish Consulate in Midtown Manhattan, despite the fact that it had “serious” fire safety defects, according to the department.

Time was of the essence. Mr. Özgür wanted the consulate to open in time for a visit by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tied to the United Nations General Assembly.

In a phone call, Mr. Özgür told Ms. Abbasova that it was now Mr. Adams’s “turn” to help Turkey. She related the message to Mr. Adams, who responded, “I know.”

“Adams did as instructed,” according to prosecutors, and repeatedly messaged the fire commissioner, who was trying to keep his job under Mr. Adams.

A Fire Department official who oversaw safety inspections was told that he would lose his job if he did not facilitate the building’s opening, even though a department employee had deemed the building “not safe to occupy.” The official did as he was told.

“You are a true friend of Turkey,” Mr. Özgür messaged Mr. Adams on Sept. 10.

Mr. Erdogan attended the skyscraper’s ribbon cutting 10 days later.

5. A surprising endorsement of illegal donations

As Mr. Adams was raising money for his 2021 mayoral campaign, Mr. Sayiner, the brand adviser, suggested to Ms. Abbasova via text message that he raise illegal foreign donations for the candidate.

Ms. Abbasova suspected that Mr. Adams “wouldn’t get involved in such games,” since “they might cause a big stink later on.”

She promised to “ask anyways.”

To her surprise, Mr. Adams signed on.

Last November, the F.B.I. searched Ms. Abbasova’s home and a short while later she turned against the mayor and began cooperating with prosecutors.

6. A policy of hiding communications

Mr. Adams made sure to cover his tracks, the indictment says.

During a 2019 text exchange concerning another possible trip to Turkey, with the arrangements to be made by Mr. Öcal, Ms. Abbasova reminded Mr. Adams to “please delete all messages you send me.”

“Always do,” Mr. Adams responded.

7. A restaurant meeting and a quest for money

Less than two weeks after he took office, Mr. Adams met Ms. Abbasova and Mr. Sayiner in a private room at a high-end restaurant in New York City to discuss the collection of foreign donations.

At the meeting, prosecutors say, Mr. Sayiner talked about previous efforts to collect campaign money for Mr. Adams in Turkey. He noted that he could collect more foreign contributions in the future. And he said that he could raise still more for the mayor’s 2025 campaign if Mr. Adams visited Turkey and met with businesspeople there.

“Adams welcomed the offer of foreign contributions,” the indictment said.

8. Happy birthday, Mr. Sayiner

In September 2023, Mr. Adams met a group of foreign donors at a dinner in New York City purportedly hosted by “international sustainability leaders.”

The price was $5,000 a head. Beforehand, Mr. Sayiner collected payments from the attendees, many of them foreign nationals, according to the indictment, and then used some of the money to make straw donations to the campaign.

Mr. Sayiner appears to have written about the event for Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. He was given a birthday cake.

“As a birthday gift from Adams, with whom I cut my cake, I got a promise to visit Turkey again before the end of the year,” Mr. Sayiner wrote.

9. Staying silent on Armenia’s national trauma

In April 2022, as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching, Mr. Özgür repeatedly asked Ms. Abbasova for assurances that Mr. Adams would not speak about the event, which is a highly sensitive subject for the Turkish government.

Ms. Abbasova “confirmed that Adams would not make a statement” and he “did not make such a statement,” according to prosecutors.

In 2021, President Biden recognized the mass killings more than a century ago as a genocide, despite efforts by President Erdogan to prevent the announcement. Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly denied that the slaughter amounted to genocide.

10. A forgotten phone password

After F.B.I. agents seized Mr. Adams’s personal phone in November 2023, he claimed he was unable to remember the password because he had recently changed it. He had changed it, he said, to prevent staff members from inadvertently or intentionally deleting anything because of the investigation.

“As the federal investigation into the criminal conduct of Eric Adams, the defendant, continued, so did efforts to frustrate that investigation,” the indictment reads.

And even a routine news conference outside Gracie Mansion, if anything could be considered routine given the circumstances, was turned upside down on Thursday when Mr. Adams’s words of defense were sometimes drowned out by shouts of “you are a disgrace.”

A more significant warning sign soon followed, when the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the mayor’s closest supporters, expressed concern on Thursday that Mr. Adams’s aggressive self-defense could hurt Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats electorally, and said that he would be convening a meeting with Black leaders to chart a path forward.

Mr. Adams has vowed to continue on as mayor, fighting to keep a job he loves and one that he has said was ordained by God.

Mr. Adams acknowledged that it was a “painful day” and called for a speedy trial.

“I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense,” he said.

The next few days could determine whether Mr. Adams can stay put and whether his administration will continue to descend into chaos. Another test may arrive quickly: Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Mr. Adams, asked that the mayor’s first appearance in court take place on Friday or Monday, according to a court filing. Mr. Spiro told the federal judge in the case that prosecutors do not object.

The stunning 57-page indictment accusing the mayor of bribery and of accepting $100,000 in travel benefits led to a wave of new calls for Mr. Adams to resign or to be ousted.

Two elected officials could be critical: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a political ally who has the power to remove him, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader. Both are deeply focused on the November election, and both declined, for now, to pressure Mr. Adams to step aside.

Mr. Jeffries called the indictment a “serious and sober moment for New York City” and said that Mr. Adams was entitled to the presumption of innocence.

“A jury of the mayor’s peers will now evaluate the charges in the indictment and ultimately render a determination,” he said. “In the meantime, I pray for the well-being of our great city.”

Addressing reporters today, Ms. Hochul kept her thinking on the matter to herself, saying only that she would be thoughtful and deliberative about her next step. Even so, she appeared to recognize the responsibility — and opportunity — in the choice before her.

“I have a unique responsibility here to make sure I do right by all people in this great state,” she said, taking note of the city’s residents: “I also represent 8.3 million New Yorkers.”

There is another way to force Mr. Adams out, relying on a five-member “committee on mayoral inability” that has never been deployed.

But a growing number of the mayor’s rivals pressed him to resign for the good of the city.

While the mayor was sequestered for much of Thursday at Gracie Mansion, his home in Manhattan, Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor, held a well-attended news conference in the rotunda of City Hall to assert that the management of the city would suffer under Mr. Adams.

The mayor, he said, cannot possibly handle the plethora of problems facing the city, such as the housing crisis and the influx of migrants, while fighting the criminal case against him and the increasing number of vacancies in his administration.

Quality candidates for important leadership roles are not going to feel comfortable working for someone who is under federal indictment, Mr. Lander said.

“He can’t provide the leadership that the mayoralty demands,” he said. “The charges are really serious and they are going to take serious work, not just from his lawyer, but from him.”

Political consultants and former New York officials doubted that Mr. Adams would step aside, given his combative stance and personality.

Chris Coffey, a Democratic political strategist who ran Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign against Mr. Adams in 2021, said that it was extremely unlikely that Mr. Adams would resign and that his fate would most likely be decided by a deal with prosecutors or at the ballot box next June in the Democratic primary.

“He’s not going to resign because of media or political pressure,” he said.

Former Gov. David A. Paterson said that it was difficult to face pressure to resign — something that happened to him in 2010 when he ended his campaign for governor. But he said he had known “spiritually that I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It’s a very hard thing to do, and most times when you’ve seen an elected official resign, it’s because there is condemning evidence against them,” he said.

Indeed, during a defiant news conference in front of Gracie Mansion with a group of Black clergy and community leaders, the mayor somewhat mockingly referred to the charges as a “story,” much in the way that he had routinely referred to the federal investigation that resulted in his indictment as a “review.”

“The story will come from the federal prosecutors,” the mayor said.

He also pledged to continue running the city, saying, “my day to day will not change,” and promised that there would be no decline in the city’s quality of life or services.

“It’s an insult to the hard-working people of this city that anyone will say that they won’t do their jobs while this case proceeds in the background,” Mr. Adams said.

Mr. Adams has tried to make the case that he is being targeted because he is Black, even going so far as to compare himself to the city’s first Black mayor, David N. Dinkins, calling himself “Dinkins 2.”

But protesters at Gracie Mansion were not moved. They compared his rhetoric to that of former President Donald J. Trump and said he had brought shame to Mr. Dinkins’s legacy.

“Resign, resign, resign,” the crowd chanted as Mr. Adams ended the news conference.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Fandos , Olivia Bensimon , Grace Ashford and Benjamin Oreskes .

Investigators examined whether Mr. Adams broke a rule against associating with people involved with crimes, including the boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted of rape, and Omowale Clay, an activist convicted of federal firearms violations. Mr. Adams and other members of 100 Blacks were investigated over another Black officer’s claim that they had harassed him.

Investigators did not prove that Mr. Adams had violated department rules in those matters.

“You do an analysis of my Internal Affairs Bureau investigations, you’ll see they all come out with the same thing,” Mr. Adams said in a 2021 interview with The New York Times. “Eric did nothing wrong.”

But he was found guilty in 2006 by a Police Department tribunal of speaking for the agency without authorization after making critical comments to the news media the previous year about its handling of a terrorist threat. (He was cleared of charges of divulging official police business and misinforming the public.)

Mr. Adams was docked 15 days of vacation pay. He retired soon after and ran successfully in 2006 for a State Senate seat in Brooklyn.

In that position, Mr. Adams was caught up in a scandal in 2009 after the Senate’s Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, which he headed, helped choose a purveyor of video-lottery machines for Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. New York’s inspector general found in a report the following year that Mr. Adams and other Senate Democrats had fraternized with lobbyists and accepted campaign contributions from people affiliated with the contenders.

The Times reported that Mr. Adams hosted several of the bidders for that project at a campaign fund-raiser he held to celebrate his birthday in September 2009. The inspector general found that he and other senators had used “exceedingly poor judgment,” including by attending a celebratory dinner at the home of the lobbyist for the winning bidder.

The contract was rescinded, and federal prosecutors investigated but did not bring charges. For his part, Mr. Adams disavowed any responsibility for the bidding process.

In his next job, as Brooklyn borough president, Mr. Adams again attracted investigators’ attention soon after taking office in 2014. That February, members of his staff invited local businesses, schools and hospitals to an event at Borough Hall to discuss donating money and sponsoring events through a new nonprofit he was starting that would promote Brooklyn — and himself.

The city’s Department of Investigation concluded that Mr. Adams and his nonprofit, One Brooklyn, had appeared to violate conflict of interest laws. At least three of the entities that sent people to the event were seeking capital grants from Mr. Adams’s office, investigators found.

No formal action was taken, however, and Mr. Adams and his staff members promised to comply with the law going forward.

On Thursday, Mr. Williams announced charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, also a Democrat, after a lengthy corruption investigation into whether he and his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign donations.

Mr. Williams, at a news conference, said the conduct charged in the indictment — the foreign money, the corporate money, the bribery, the years of concealment — was a “grave breach of the public’s trust.”

“Public office is a privilege,” Mr. Williams said. “We allege that Mayor Adams abused that privilege and broke the law, laws that are designed to ensure that officials like him serve the people — not the highest bidder, not a foreign bidder, and certainly not a foreign power.”

Mr. Williams’s ascent to the Southern District’s top post followed years of tumult in the office, which has long guarded its independence from Washington, earning it the nickname the Sovereign District.

Mr. Williams, 44, already had a compelling biography, with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge and Yale, and his appointment made him the first Black person to lead the storied 234-year-old federal prosecutor’s office.

With the first indictment of a New York City mayor, Mr. Williams has added a new chapter to his career that is likely to overshadow anything that has come before.

Friends and former colleagues have described Mr. Williams as thoughtful and levelheaded. As he started the job three years ago, Lisa Zornberg, who had run the prosecutor’s office’s criminal division — and who recently resigned as Mr. Adams’s chief counsel — called Mr. Williams “such a good listener.”

“He reads people, he reads rooms, he takes it all in,” Ms. Zornberg said in an October 2021 interview with The New York Times.

Mr. Williams assumed his post following a period of turmoil for the office in which President Donald J. Trump had fired two of its previous three occupants. One was Preet Bharara, who had served as the U.S. attorney under President Barack Obama and who hired Mr. Williams.

On his watch, the office has also secured the conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, for fraud, and this month, Mr. Williams announced sex-trafficking and racketeering charges against the music mogul Sean Combs, who is known as Diddy. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Williams was born in Brooklyn and raised in Atlanta. His parents, now divorced, were immigrants from Jamaica who met at Howard University while both were studying for careers in health care. He is married to Jennifer Wynn, a business consultant and professor.

Mr. Williams’s trajectory pointed upward in high school in the Atlanta area, when he served as student body president. He majored in economics as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where one of his friends was the actress Natalie Portman. She said in an interview in 2021 that “there was always a sense that he wanted to go into public service.” He then earned a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge and a law degree from Yale University.

After law school, Mr. Williams clerked for Merrick Garland, now the attorney general and then a federal judge, and for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Mr. Williams then went to work as an associate litigator with a prominent law firm, Paul, Weiss, before becoming a federal prosecutor under Mr. Bharara in 2012.

As an assistant U.S. attorney, Mr. Williams helped to secure a conviction of Sheldon Silver the once powerful speaker of the State Assembly, a Democrat, for bribery and other crimes after an earlier conviction was reversed. Mr. Williams was promoted in 2018 to chief of the office’s securities unit, prosecuting white-collar crimes and obtaining a guilty plea the following year from former Representative Chris Collins, a Republican, for insider trading.

Mr. Williams, at the news conference on Thursday, emphasized that his office remained committed “to rooting out corruption without fear or favor and without regard to partisan politics.”

“We are not focused on the right or the left,” he said. “We are focused only on right and wrong.”

The indictment accuses Mr. Adams of crimes dating back a decade, since he took office as Brooklyn borough president in 2014. It says he improperly accepted benefits that included luxury international travel from wealthy business people and at least one Turkish government official.

As he ran for mayor in 2021, prosecutors say, Mr. Adams sought illegal foreign contributions and other things of value, and his benefactors then sought to cash in on their investments.

Early Thursday morning, F.B.I. agents searched Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence on the Upper East Side. The warrant sought the mayor’s electronic devices and authorized the agents to search the house for them, but nothing else.

Agents seized several of the mayor’s devices, including at least one phone and one iPad, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

After the indictment was unsealed, an attorney for Mr. Adams, Alex Spiro, accused prosecutors of improper leaks, and said in a statement that they had informed the mayor’s lawyers of the charges by email. He accused them of creating “the spectacle of a bogus raid” and criticized their news conference as a “dog and pony show.”

Mr. Spiro said the prosecutors were driven by publicity.

“Federal judges call them out all the time for spinning in front of the cameras and tainting jurors,” he said. “But they keep doing it because they can’t help themselves, the spotlight is just too exciting. We will see them in court.”

The charges immediately called into question the viability of Mr. Adams’s mayoralty.

They also represented a remarkable reversal for Mr. Adams, 64, a retired police captain, state senator and Brooklyn borough president who won office while vowing to combat crime. He is the first New York City mayor to face criminal indictment while in office in modern history.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney, announced the charges at a news conference in Lower Manhattan with the head of the New York F.B.I. office and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation.

The mayor again and again crossed “bright red lines,” Mr. Williams said. “This investigation continues,” he added, promising to hold more people accountable.

James E. Dennehy, the head of the New York F.B.I. office, said the charges send a powerful message — “that public service is a profound responsibility.”

“The indictment of a sitting mayor is not just another headline. It is a stinging reminder that no one is above the law or beyond reproach,” Mr. Dennehy said, “and it serves as a sobering moment for all of us to place our trust in elected officials.”

The person with knowledge of the matter said a date for Mr. Adams to surrender has not been set, but will probably be next week.

Late Wednesday night, in a video, Mr. Adams said any charges would be “based on lies."

“Make no mistake: You elected me to lead this city — and lead it I will,” Mr. Adams said.

Mr. Adams is accused of illegally soliciting foreign donations for his 2021 mayoral campaign and taking luxury travel as bribes. The indictment charges him with doling out favors in return.

Federal prosecutors say that, shortly before his election as mayor, he pressured Fire Department officials to approve a new high-rise Turkish consulate in time for a visit by the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the United Nations General Assembly.

Federal law prohibits U.S. candidates from soliciting or receiving foreign donations. According to prosecutors, Turkish money was funneled into Mr. Adams’s campaign with his knowledge.

Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.