On Easter Sunday, the choir at Calvary Baptist Church, in South Jamaica, Queens, was finishing warmups when Cara, Mariah, and Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo—the daughters of Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor—walked into the sanctuary. The three young women, dressed in white, nodded serenely at the congregants, exchanging good-mornings with Black men and women in their Easter best. A few minutes later, Cuomo himself appeared, looking smaller and grayer than he did when he was in office. He was quickly enveloped in a swarm of church hats. For the next half hour, the ex-Governor clapped, sang along to hymns, and swayed his shoulders, framed by a banner that proclaimed, “HE IS RISEN INDEED.”

The public hasn’t seen much of Cuomo since the summer of 2021, when a report from the state attorney general’s office revealed that nearly a dozen women had accused him of sexual harassment, and he resigned the governorship in disgrace. Cuomo had subjected New York’s political class to a decade of vicious bullying—he once screamed “I will destroy you!” on a phone call to an assemblyman who was drawing a bath for his daughters—and faced impeachment if he didn’t leave by choice. After his resignation, “it felt like a pall had been lifted from the capitol building,” one state senator recalled. Yet somehow, not four years later, Cuomo is the front-runner to be the next mayor of New York City.

At Calvary Baptist, the pastor, Victor Hall, revisited the high point of Cuomo’s career: the early weeks of the pandemic, when he became a national figure by holding daily press conferences that distinguished him as a stern, fatherly foil to the conspiracy-addled President. His lilting Queens accent and snug polo shirts inspired the term “Cuomosexual.” Less than a year before he was ousted, some Democrats called for Cuomo to replace Joe Biden on the Presidential ticket. “My family in Texas, during COVID, watched Andrew Cuomo every day,” Hall told the congregation. When Cuomo got up to speak, he offered a bit of fan service, beginning his remarks with an extended ribbing of his son-in-law, who was known as “the Boyfriend” during the pandemic pressers. “We got off to a little rocky start early on,” the former Governor said, to knowing laughter in the crowd.

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Eventually, Cuomo got to the day’s main theme, which was comeback stories. He read dutifully from Bible passages that evoked humanity’s need for salvation, the creases in his forehead scrunching like an accordion when he was especially animated. “They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated, they will renew the ruined cities,” he said, quoting briskly from the Book of Isaiah. New York City, in his telling, was itself a devastated place—too unaffordable, too crime-ridden, too prone to division. “To be honest, this city needs work,” Cuomo said. “Today, we celebrate the power of resurrection.” On those last two points, at least, everyone could say amen.

When Cuomo stepped down, he was technically homeless; in his third term, the governor’s mansion was his only permanent address. He crashed with his sister Maria at her estate in Westchester, and filled his days with extracurriculars that evinced a desire to return to public life: private legal work, a straight-talking political podcast, and the emphatically named nonprofit Never Again, NOW!, which was meant to combat antisemitism. Three decades ago, his father, Mario Cuomo, earned the nickname Hamlet on the Hudson for his tortured deliberations about whether to run for President. The younger Cuomo’s style has always been more Richard III.

Cuomo found his opening last September, when Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City, was indicted on federal corruption charges. To establish residency in the city, he commandeered a midtown apartment where his thirty-year-old daughter, Cara, had been living. (He may have cribbed the move from Adams, who, in the last election, was suspected of trying to pass off his son’s Brooklyn apartment as his own.) His old allies from Albany formed a super PAC and swiftly began collecting checks from New York’s élite. Cuomo made overtures to Black clergy, to the city’s most influential unions, to staunchly pro-Israel Jewish voters. Political figures such as Representative Ritchie Torres, of the Bronx, endorsed Cuomo before he officially announced that he was running, as if moved by the Spirit. “We need a Mr. Tough Guy,” Torres said.

For most of the campaign, Cuomo has scrupulously avoided his opponents, the press, and open-air public events, an approach that’s been described as a “Rose Garden” strategy. “He’s a terrible campaigner,” a former aide told me. “We saw this in the polling—when people saw Andrew, they didn’t like him.” Still, an aura of inevitability has hardened around Cuomo, whose opponents include Zohran Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old democratic-socialist state assemblyman; a handful of progressives mired in the single digits in polls; and Adams, who has lately courted the favor of Donald Trump to avoid possible jail time.

Perhaps the city’s current crises—crumbling public infrastructure, intractable civic strife, the President’s attempts to strangle his home town—have reminded New Yorkers of a different period of chaos, when Cuomo seemed a beacon of sanity. After being cheered off the stage at Calvary Baptist, the ex-Governor herded his daughters into the back seat of his black Dodge Charger. As he ducked behind the wheel, he cracked the smallest of smiles.

For every Fiorello La Guardia or Michael Bloomberg, there are dozens of forgettable and ignominious characters in New York’s mayoral lineage. Nicholas Bayard, the city’s sixteenth mayor, had ties to the slave trade and was an associate of the pirate Captain Kidd. David Mathews, who served from 1776 to 1783, was an anti-Revolutionary loyalist who was implicated in a plot to kidnap George Washington. Jimmy Walker, the charismatic, crooked “Night Mayor,” who took office in the Roaring Twenties, came closer than any before him to being removed from office by a governor, and evaded criminal corruption charges by taking a steamer to Europe. Rudy Giuliani, who was once considered a national hero for his leadership during 9/11, and who went down in a spray of legal and financial troubles after tying himself to Trump, arguably represents a third category, of mayors who are both ignoble and indelible. Eric Adams seems destined to join him there.

At the start of his tenure, Adams declared that he would be a mayor with “swagger.” He became a fixture of exclusive night clubs and doled out cushy positions to old friends from the N.Y.P.D. and the Brooklyn Democratic Party. “Mayors usually have one guy or two,” a former senior official in the Adams administration told me recently. “Adams had twelve guys. There were so many of them, they were bumping into each other.” When the federal corruption charges against him were unsealed, they seemed so inevitable as to be underwhelming. The case focussed on campaign donations, discounted air travel, and other freebies accepted from representatives of the Turkish government, allegedly in exchange for favors like fast-tracking the opening of a new Turkish consulate building—the kind of petty dealmaking that Tammany Hall bosses once approvingly called “honest graft.” But the indictment gave way to something much worse: the Mayor’s cozying up to Trump.

The courtship spilled into public view in October, at the Al Smith dinner, an annual white-tie fund-raiser for Catholic charities. During Trump’s remarks, he made an overture to Adams, a fellow criminal defendant: “I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.” An awkward flirtation ensued. Adams, who during Trump’s first term called the President an “idiot,” hired the celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro, who has represented Elon Musk, for his defense. After Trump won the Presidential election, the Mayor called to congratulate him; later, at a meeting, he told the city’s senior agency heads to refrain from criticizing the President-elect. (“Surreal,” one attendee said.) When Trump was asked if he would consider giving Adams a pardon, he appeared to consider the question for two seconds before saying, “Yeah, I would.”

In January, Frank Carone, an ex-marine and a longtime Brooklyn power broker who had served as Adams’s City Hall chief of staff, coördinated with Eric Trump, the President’s second son, to arrange a meeting between the Mayor and the soon to be reinstalled President. Over lunch at Trump International Golf Club, in West Palm Beach, the two men found what Carone, who joined them at the table, described to me as “pleasant surprises of commonality.” But Carone vigorously dispelled any notion of an arrangement between Adams and Trump. “I’ll give you the facts—reality,” he said. “There was no discussion with President Trump about his case, or about immigration, or any deal whatsoever.”

Maybe there didn’t need to be a discussion. Three days later, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Adams ditched local civil-rights commemorations to attend Trump’s Inauguration, in Washington. Just a few weeks after that, Emil Bove, a senior official in Trump’s Justice Department, asked the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan to put Adams’s case on hold, arguing that the charges were interfering with the Mayor’s ability to help enforce White House immigration policies.