The federal charges of briberywin3799, fraud and conspiracy that Mayor Eric Adams faces are grave. But graver still is the damage the mayor has done to the city he claims to love and will continue to inflict if he remains in City Hall. If the mayor will not resign, Gov. Kathy Hochul should begin the process of removing him from office.

Mr. Adams has exacted a high price from New York, in reputation and morale, for what seem to be petty acts of greed and disregard for democratic principles. It raises questions of how America’s largest, wealthiest city, with its reservoir of talent in everything from the arts to finance, ended up with someone accused of being an incessant petty grifter as mayor.

The 57-page indictment that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, unsealed early Thursday demolishes Mr. Adams’s defense, laid out in a video on Wednesday night, that he became a target of the federal government because he has criticized the Biden administration’s response to the migrant crisis.

The federal charges are not frivolous allegations based on legal technicalities. They are a meticulously detailed chronicle of what Mr. Williams says was a yearslong campaign on the mayor’s part to solicit political and personal benefits that he knew to be illicit.

Mr. Adams isn’t accused of lapses in judgment. Rather, he’s accused of repeatedly soliciting and accepting gifts, including from the Turkish government and Turkish-controlled business interests, in a pattern that dates back to 2016, when he was the Brooklyn borough president.

The U.S. attorney charges that Mr. Adams took more than $100,000 in bribes in free or upgraded luxury travel, much of the money from foreign citizens prohibited from participating in U.S. elections.

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