Eric L. Adams, a retired police captain who was elected as New York City’s 110th mayor nearly three years ago on a promise to rein in crime, has been indicted following a federal corruption investigation, people with knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.
The indictment remained sealed on Wednesday night, and it was unclear what charge or charges Mr. Adams will face. But when they are made public, he will become the first New York City mayor to be criminally charged while in office.
The indictment promised to reverberate across the nation’s largest city and beyond, plunging Mr. Adams’s embattled administration further into chaos just months before he is set to face challengers in a hotly contested mayoral primary.
Representatives of Mr. Adams and his campaign said they had no immediate comment.
Brendan R. McGuire and Boyd M. Johnson III, partners at WilmerHale who represent the mayor, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Representatives of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the F.B.I. and the city Department of Investigation declined to comment.
The charges represented an extraordinary turnabout for Mr. Adams, 64, a former state senator and Brooklyn borough president who took office as the city was rebounding from the pandemic and confronting a massive influx of migrants from the southern border.
Until federal investigations closed in on him, Mr. Adams’s life had seemed a classic New York success story.
Raised by a working-class mother in Brooklyn and Queens, he overcame dyslexia and run-ins with the police, and then joined the Police Department himself. He worked initially as a transit officer, and sought to make changes from within. During a two-decade career there, he rose to the rank of captain and served as a vocal, and sometimes contentious, advocate for Black officers.
Retiring to pursue a life in politics, Mr. Adams dreamed for years of becoming New York’s mayor, an ambition he realized by embracing diverse constituencies across the city, and an accomplishment he has said was divinely ordained.
As mayor, Mr. Adams vowed to return “swagger” to a city still emerging from the pandemic, and he surrounded himself in City Hall with friends and associates whose loyalty to him sometimes exceeded their policy expertise. Several had troubled pasts.
And some of his closest aides and advisers would themselves come under federal investigation as prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan began examining his inner circle.
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