In November 2021, shortly after President Biden appointed him to serve as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Damian Williams said one of his obligations in the new post was crystal clear: “To be fiercely independent of politics.”
Since then, Mr. Williams has led the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in major corruption prosecutions against politicians of both major parties, notably including Democrats like Robert Menendez, the former New Jersey senator who was convicted at trial in July; and former New York Lt. Gov. Brian A. Benjamin, who has pleaded not guilty to bribery charges.
Now, on Thursday, Mr. Williams is announcing 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’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 but not outspoken. 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 Speaker Sheldon Silver 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 Representative Chris Collins, a Republican, for insider trading.
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