Mayor Eric Adams’s decision to suspend his re-election campaign was a new low point in what has seemed at times like a storybook political career.
Brought up largely by his mother, a house cleaner, in working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Adams struggled with dyslexia that hampered his achievement in school as a boy.
But he found a path and his voice in 1984 by becoming a police officer. Emerging as a vocal advocate for Black officers in the largely white-led department, he became a leader of two fraternal groups, cofounding one of them, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.
Mr. Adams, now 65, made his first foray into politics with a failed run for Congress in 1994 as a Democrat, and briefly became a Republican during the mayoralty of Rudolph W. Giuliani. He ultimately spent 22 years on the police force before making the jump to elected office.
Here are some key events in Mr. Adams’s political career:
January 2007: After winning election to the State Senate representing parts of Central Brooklyn, Mr. Adams began his first stint in Albany. Democrats soon claimed the Senate majority, and Mr. Adams was given a plum post as chairman of the Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, while becoming a prolific fund-raiser from gambling interests.
October 2010: Amid a scandal over the awarding of a video-lottery contract at Aqueduct Racetrack, the state’s inspector general found that Mr. Adams and other Senate Democrats had accepted contributions from contenders for the contract and had socialized with their lobbyists. Mr. Adams denied wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime.
January 2014: Mr. Adams returned to Brooklyn, where he had been elected borough president. Over two terms, he crisscrossed the borough, establishing relationships with its many ethnic and religious groups, bonds that would aid his plan to achieve his boyhood dream of becoming mayor. While borough president, he also made several trips under the banner of his office to Turkey, Senegal, China, Cuba and elsewhere.
By August 2014, the city’s inspector general had concluded that Mr. Adams and a nonprofit he had organized, One Brooklyn, appeared to have improperly solicited funds from groups that had or would soon have business before his office. Mr. Adams’s administration promised to comply with the law going forward.
November 2020: With New York in the throes of the Covid pandemic, Mr. Adams — who had been laying the groundwork for a mayoral run for at least two years — formally announced his candidacy in a video, describing how he had overcome a hardscrabble childhood, including poverty, housing insecurity, and a beating he said he and his brother received at the hands of the police as teenagers. He vowed to crack down on crime, improve government efficiency and support businesses. “We’re facing a crisis unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” he said.
January 2022: Mr. Adams was sworn in as the city’s 110th mayor, becoming only the second Black man ever to hold the position. He did it by narrowly edging out Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, in the Democratic primary and then defeating his Republican opponent, the Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, in the general election. At a festive ceremony in Times Square after the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, he clutched a large portrait of his late mother, declaring, “New York is back.”
There were already indications that Mr. Adams would be an unorthodox leader: a penchant for telling dramatic stories about himself with details exaggerated and sometimes fabricated; declarations that his ascendance had been divinely ordained; and a fondness for nightlife, fine clothes and foreign travel. Mr. Adams had jetted off to Africa just before taking office said he was bringing “swagger” back to the city.
“This should be a very interesting experience for us, having him as mayor,” said Mr. Adams’s friend David Paterson, the former governor of New York.
September 2023: With New York City struggling to care for an influx of 110,000 asylum seekers, Mr. Adams declared that “this issue will destroy New York City.” He had already been criticizing President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to help the city with the crisis and pleaded for additional funding. He would later attribute a federal criminal investigation into his campaign fund-raising to his criticism of Mr. Biden, though there was no evidence to support that claim.
November 2023: The F.B.I. executed search warrants against Mr. Adams and several close associates, including his top fund-raiser, as part of an investigation into his ties to the Turkish government and whether he or his campaign conspired to receive illegal foreign contributions. Mr. Adams’s devices were seized by agents after an evening event in Greenwich Village. The inquiry would examine, among other things, whether Mr. Adams expedited a fire-safety approval of a high-rise Turkish consulate in Manhattan in exchange for campaign contributions and free or highly discounted upgrades from Turkish Airlines on trips to an array of foreign destinations.
September 2024: Federal prosecutors unveiled a five-count indictment charging Mr. Adams with bribery conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions related to what they said was a conspiracy involving Turkish officials and businesspeople from Turkey and other countries. The indictment also accused him of improperly accepting public matching funds by concealing the sources of donations through the use of “straw donors,” whose names were listed as contributors on public records but who did not actually supply the funds.
Mr. Adams, defiant, professed his innocence. Soon after, a raft of his aides had their phones seized in separate federal and state investigations, leading to a wave of high-level resignations that plunged City Hall further into crisis.
December 2024: Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who had been Mr. Adams’s chief adviser and a longtime aide throughout his political career, was charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with taking bribes in exchange for intervening with city regulators. (The following August, the prosecutor’s office unsealed four new indictments against Ms. Lewis-Martin, who has pleaded not guilty, and others.)
Weeks earlier, the City Council approved an ambitious plan by the Adams administration to address the city’s housing crisis. One of the mayor’s top priorities, the plan, called “City of Yes,” could lead to the creation of 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years.
January 2025: As his case progressed toward trial, Mr. Adams met with Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, and his son Donald Trump Jr. in Florida. Mr. Adams had expressed interest in a pardon but said the men didn’t discuss his case. Soon after, Mr. Adams canceled plans to go to a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Brooklyn and instead attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Within two weeks, Mr. Adams’s defense team and federal prosecutors from Manhattan traveled to Washington to discuss the case with a senior Justice Department official appointed by Mr. Trump.
The same month, the mayor announced a reduction in the city’s overall crime rate, trumpeting a drop in homicides, burglaries, robberies, car thefts and larcenies.
February 2025: The Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, instructed Manhattan federal prosecutors to drop the case against Mr. Adams, claiming it would hinder the mayor’s ability to cooperate with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. The order prompted resignations by prosecutors both in New York and Washington, and Mr. Bove ultimately submitted the motion himself to drop the case.
April 2025: Judge Dale E. Ho, who had overseen Mr. Adams’s case, dismissed the charges against Mr. Adams as requested, but sharply criticized the government, writing that the move by the Trump administration “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.” Mr. Adams was clear of the criminal case, but the prosecution all but ruined his chance at re-election. He announced a day later that he would skip the Democratic primary and run as an independent.
September 2025: Mr. Adams, polling in the single digits in a race led by Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, abandoned his re-election campaign in a video message, largely blaming the media and acknowledging he could not win. Discussions in the Trump administration about giving him an ambassadorship had not panned out, and his future was unclear.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.
Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities.
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