Over the years, Jeffrey B. Maddrey toiled as a beat cop in half a dozen Brooklyn precincts. He nurtured hundreds of officers he oversaw as an inspector. He quelled violent crime in a dangerous part of Brownsville.

But not until he shepherded officers through the pain and anger of seeing one of their own shot dead in 2011 did he attain the high profile that would later undo him.

After the officer, Peter Figoski, was killed while trying to stop a robbery, Mr. Maddrey became the face of law enforcement in the 75th Precinct. He spoke to reporters about the murder and led a weeklong search for the fatal bullet. At the funeral on Long Island, he handed the Figoski family a folded American flag.

Mr. Maddrey “has certainly been in our sights for a while as someone deserving of recognition,” said then-Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a ceremony in which he posthumously promoted Officer Figoski to detective and elevated Mr. Maddrey to deputy chief.

The base of support Mr. Maddrey built in those years with Brooklyn pastors, rabbis, anti-violence groups and politicians — including, crucially, Eric Adams, a former police captain who would become mayor — vaulted him to the highest uniformed rank of the nation’s largest police department. It insulated him during a string of scandals — until the one that ended his career.

In December, a lieutenant and former subordinate, Quathisha Epps, accused Mr. Maddrey of demanding sex in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime. Mr. Maddrey, who was chief of department, resigned. Federal agents have searched his home, and the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau has launched its own investigation.

Mr. Adams, who is facing federal corruption charges, has defended how he had pushed Mr. Maddrey to the upper echelons of the Police Department.

In an interview last week with Corey Pegues, a retired deputy inspector and host of a YouTube channel, Mr. Adams said Mr. Maddrey “was beloved in Brooklyn North,” Mr. Adams said, referring to the territory that Mr. Maddrey once oversaw.

Mr. Pegues said Mr. Maddrey had weathered repeated scandals with few repercussions. “You gave him that second or third chance,” Mr. Pegues said. “How many chances do you give him?” Mr. Adams said, “People gave me 10 chances.”

“I needed someone with that police experience and great interaction” with the public, Mr. Adams said. “He went beyond the call of duty.”

The mayor’s relationship with Mr. Maddrey dates back at least two decades.

In 2006, the year Mr. Maddrey was promoted to deputy inspector, Mr. Adams was elected to represent a Brooklyn district in the New York State Senate. Both Mr. Maddrey and Mr. Adams spoke at community board meetings, and they were invited to talk with students in Bedford-Stuyvesant about policing.

In 2015, a year after Mr. Adams became Brooklyn borough president, Mr. Maddrey was chosen to lead the 10 precincts that compose Patrol Borough Brooklyn North, another major career leap. The two went to an awards banquet for the Mo Better Jaguars youth football team; a school gymnasium where students played double Dutch; and an event in Bushwick to improve police relations.

By then, Mr. Maddrey had long been a large presence in the borough, said the Rev. Robert Waterman, a pastor at Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn who has known Mr. Maddrey for more than two decades.

Mr. Waterman said they met when Mr. Maddrey, then an inspector in the 81st Precinct, had invited him to talk with veteran officers and recruits about concerns over neighborhood policing. He said Mr. Maddrey took children to special events and suited up as Santa Claus for Christmas.

“I had never known him to be anything but an officer who had not only walked the beat, but was part of the beat of the neighborhood,” he said.

Mr. Maddrey first became fodder for the city’s tabloids in 1993. Then a rookie, he was leaving a woman’s apartment building in Staten Island when two men approached him, including the woman’s suitor. The suitor’s friend fired several shots, striking Mr. Maddrey in the left wrist.

But his real troubles began in 2016, a year after he had been promoted to assistant chief and the head of Brooklyn North. They arrived in the form of a lawsuit: A subordinate with whom he was having an affair accused him of beating her, prompting her to pull out a gun, according to court filings. Mr. Maddrey, she said, tore it away. The suits were tossed out, but James O’Neill, then commissioner, docked Mr. Maddrey 45 vacation days.

Nonetheless, in 2020 Mr. Maddrey was made head of the Community Affairs Bureau, which educates New Yorkers about policing and crime prevention. The appointment set the stage for his push to the top after Mr. Adams was elected the next year.

The new mayor, who continued to identify himself closely with the department and took a strong hand in its affairs, supported a quick succession of high-level promotions for Mr. Maddrey. He became chief of housing, then chief of patrol and, by the end of 2022, chief of department — the person who oversees operations, crime-fighting strategies, quality of life initiatives and all of the agency’s 33,500 officers.

Even after that, problems emerged. Mr. Maddrey faced disciplinary charges from an oversight board in 2023 for voiding the arrest of a retired officer accused of brandishing a gun at three boys in Brooklyn.

Keechant Sewell, then the police commissioner, agreed with the board. But that June, she resigned after months of talk that allies of Mr. Adams had been undermining her.

Her Adams-appointed successor, Edward A. Caban, dismissed the case against Mr. Maddrey. In the interview with Mr. Pegues, Mr. Adams denied exerting pressure on Ms. Sewell or Mr. Caban.

Then there were the lawsuits. Cases filed in the past two years claim that Mr. Maddrey had an officer in the traffic unit transferred after he issued Mr. Maddrey’s female friend a ticket; that he protected a former officer and senior adviser to Mr. Adams who was accused of sexual harassment; and that he defamed an anti-violence activist.

Christopher Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired Police Department lieutenant, said none of the disciplinary or legal accusations were enough to hinder Mr. Maddrey’s career.

“He’s friendly. He shakes everyone’s hand. He comes in the room and fills the room,” said Mr. Mercado, who has attended events with Mr. Maddrey. “He came up at a time when there were few African American executives at the department, and the community adored him.”

And, Mr. Mercado said, even as Mr. Maddrey’s personal problems intensified, he tackled policing problems aggressively, impressing executives.

“They’ll say: ‘Oh, they grinded it out. They handed that shooting well. They were there at that riot. They protected their cops,’” Mr. Mercado said.

“If you’re a guy like Maddrey, and you’re willing to do all of that, even if you have had issues in the past, people at the top might look the other way,” he added.

Looking away became impossible last month.

Lieutenant Epps, a single mother of three children, told the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Mr. Maddrey had humiliated her during unwanted sexual encounters, many at his office at police headquarters in Manhattan. In an interview with the New York Post, she said that, on one occasion, she pleaded with him to stop, crying out, “You’re hurting me.”

During the 2024 fiscal year, Lieutenant Epps had made $204,453.48 in overtime, roughly doubling her salary while working under Mr. Maddrey — the most of any department employee.

She and Mr. Maddrey were both suspended amid the federal investigation.

Mr. Maddrey’s lawyer, Lambros Lambrou, did not respond to requests to interview the former officer. But in an interview last month on NBC New York, Mr. Maddrey denied demanding sex in exchange for overtime pay. He said his relationship with Lieutenant Epps was a consensual “office fling.”

Mr. Maddrey then recited the high points of his career, talking about his relationships with people in Brooklyn and how crime overall fell while he was chief of department.

“I’ve given so much to the city — so much — and I’ve never asked anyone for anything in return,” he said. “Countless people can never repay me for what I’ve done for them.”

Mr. Adams is no longer in a position to repay him: Mr. Caban, who is being investigated by the F.B.I., resigned in September, and two weeks later, Mr. Adams was federally indicted on corruption charges. Last month, he appointed Jessica Tisch as commissioner. She has already reassigned many officers and several top police officials, including at least one allied with the mayor.

Mr. Adams has distanced himself from Mr. Maddrey. “I’ve never defended any accusation of any inappropriate behavior,” the mayor said in an interview last month with Fox 5 New York.

“He has had an exceptional police record,” he added. “Those are the knowns. I cannot defend or speak on the unknowns.”

In October, Mr. Maddrey spoke at Linwood Street and Sutter Avenue, a corner the city had renamed in honor of the officer who was shot there.

“What Pete Figoski did for this community should always be recognized,” Mr. Maddrey said, tapping the lectern for emphasis and pointing to a new street sign bearing Detective Figoski’s name.

Mr. Maddrey was met with a round of applause. Two months later, he resigned.

Seymour P. Lachman, a former New York State senator who was so fed up with the political shenanigans in Albany that he quit the Legislature and wrote two books that helped spur reforms, died on Jan. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

His wife, Susan Lachman, confirmed the death.

Mr. Lachman (pronounced LACK-man), a college professor who had also briefly served as president of the New York City Board of Education in the 1970s, was first elected to the State Senate in 1996 to fill a vacancy in a Brooklyn district that originally included the Bensonhurst and Borough Park sections and later also included part of Staten Island.

A Democrat, he often described himself as a traditionalist. But he would have been the first to acknowledge that the tell-some book he wrote about secretive power-brokering in Albany probably had more impact than his party-line votes as a legislator.

The title of the book — written with Robert A. Polner, a Newsday reporter — was a giveaway: “Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse” (2006).

Its thrust was that anything of consequence that occurred in the state capital was predetermined by the governor, the Senate majority leader and the Assembly speaker and reflected “a subservience by lawmakers that has no peer in the United States Congress nor in many American statehouses.”

The book told of the corrupting power of money, the outsize influence of lobbyists, and public authorities’ lack of accountability.

“The reward for lawmakers’ compliance includes party assistance and taxpayer-financed pork-barrel morsels for community organizations in election years,” Mr. Lachman and Mr. Polner wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in early 2007.

They added: “Those who play by the rules of the leadership also benefit by having their names appended from time to time to bills of importance. They receive committee assignments that can earn them as much as $40,000 on top of their $79,000 yearly salary, and their district lines are rigged in their favor for lifetime job security. Is it any wonder that while Democrats won big across the country this November, in Albany just one Republican seat in the State Senate went Democratic?”

“Three Men in a Room” vividly described Albany’s backstage machinations and argued for change, some of which Gov. Eliot Spitzer and later Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said they favored.

The two authors also wrote “Failed State: Dysfunction and Corruption in an American Statehouse” (2017), in which they lobbied for revisions in New York’s bloated and anachronistic Constitution.

At his death, Mr. Lachman was director emeritus of the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform, which he founded in 2008 at Wagner College on Staten Island.

“His books added fuel to the fire,” Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said in an interview. “His bird’s-eye insights coupled with the research produced by the Carey Institute bolstered the need for reforms. The work contributed to an atmosphere that resulted in some changes — flawed, but changes — to redistricting, campaign finance and ethics.”

Those changes were nudged along by embarrassing indictments of leaders in the Senate and Assembly, who had largely opposed major reforms.

As a member of the Board of Education from 1969 to 1974 and its president from 1974 to 1975, when he resigned to spend more time teaching, Mr. Lachman proposed the appointment of an educational ombudsman, worked to alleviate religious and racial tensions in the schools, and was the principal architect of a resolution on the rights and responsibilities of senior high school students and on the workings of peer group programs that provided drug education and draft counseling during the Vietnam War.

After leaving the board, he was appointed to a joint professorship in the history and politics of education, teaching at both the City University’s Graduate Center and Bernard M. Baruch College, where he was later named university dean for community development. He also taught at Adelphi University, on Long Island.

Seymour P. Lachman (the middle initial did not stand for a name, his family said) was born on Dec. 12, 1933, in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. After losing his candy store during the Depression, his father, Louis, worked as a steam presser in the garment industry and as a ditch digger. His mother, Sarah (Koniarsky) Lachman, looked after the household. The family moved to Brooklyn when Seymour was an infant.

After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, Mr. Lachman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Brooklyn College, in 1955 and 1958, and a doctorate in history from New York University in 1963.

He taught in Brooklyn public high schools until 1963, when he was hired as a professor of history at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, part of the City University system. Two years later he was appointed dean of its mid-Brooklyn campus.

Early in his career, Mr. Lachman was director of the foreign affairs department of the American Jewish Committee. From 1980 to 1983, he headed the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.

His other books include “One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society” (1993, with Barry Kosmin), based on the 1989-90 National Survey of Religious Identification conducted by the Graduate Center; “The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975” (2010), with Mr. Polner; and “Mr. New York: Lew Rudin and His Love for the City” (2014), about the real estate developer who was a behind-the-scenes force during the city’s fiscal crises in the 1970s and early ’90s.

Mr. Lachman married Susan Altman in 1961. In addition to her, he is survived by their children, Rabbi Eliezer Lachman and Sharon Lachman Chesir; 11 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

It’s too soon to know whether New York City’s new congestion pricing plan has succeeded in reducing traffic in Manhattan. And it will be a while before we know if the new fees will raise the billions of dollars proponents have promised. But even before the hard data arrives, New Yorkers (and those who commute to New York) have had lot to say.

Some public transit commuters report buses miraculously arriving on time or (gasp) early. Drivers are either steaming mad — or agog at traffic-free bridges. Many pedestrians say they are suddenly less anxious about crossing the street. And some former congestion pricing haters are startled to find themselves reconsidering.

The first-in-the-nation plan took effect this week after years of contentious debate. Most drivers now pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Money collected from the toll is supposed to be used to improve public transportation.

Congestion pricing arrived at the same time as a stretch of brutally cold weather in New York, so it’s still unclear what has been keeping people out of their cars and off the streets.

But Ilena Robbins, 37, believes congestion pricing has already been transformative.

It is not hyperbole to say that crossing Canal Street, a notoriously clogged east-west thoroughfare with four — and in some places six — lanes, used to make her fear for her life.

Ms. Robbins, who grew up in Manhattan but now lives in Queens, compared navigating the intersection where she works, at Canal and Lafayette Streets, to a game of Frogger — at least in the old days.

“It would stress me out just getting lunch,” she said. Thursday was her first day there post-congestion pricing. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was able to cross safely, and cars weren’t honking. It was like a whole other world.”

Asad Dandia owns and operates a walking tour company, New York Narratives, and conducted his first post-congestion pricing walking tour at noon on Thursday, leading 20 students through Lower Manhattan.

“It was much easier to cross the street,” said Mr. Dandia, a 32-year-old native of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. “Definitely quieter. Definitely calmer.”

Mr. Dandia, who also teaches a New York City history course at CUNY Guttman Community College, added that he saw great potential in congestion pricing. “I think it could lead to a renaissance — a street renaissance.”

Even people who don’t study the streets for a living were swept up in the excitement.

Annie Kaur usually posts videos about fashion on her TikTok account. But from her apartment on the 32nd floor of a building that overlooks Third Avenue, Ms. Kaur, a 27-year-old management consultant, noticed how few cars were on the road during rush hour on Tuesday.

At 5:04 p.m., she filmed a video from her window and posted the clip with the caption, “There’s usually so much traffic during this time of the day!”

By Friday, the video had over three million views — more than any of her other posts.

“It definitely did surprise me,” she said. “This is not my usual content.”

There were also over 3,000 comments, some cranky: “If u have this view u can afford the tolls,” one viewer wrote.

Ms. Kaur said congestion pricing doesn’t really affect her much, except if she takes a cab or Uber at night, when that feels safer than riding the subway.

But her perch gives her an interesting perspective. “I’ve seen a lot of traffic,” she said. “I’ve seen gridlock — just, crazy, stopped.”

On the day that she filmed, she said, the traffic seemed about 25 percent lighter. But, she hedged: “It could just be because it was after the holidays. And it was less than 20 degrees. It was freezing, you know?”

Regardless, down on the streets, some people were ecstatic.

Ramit Sethi, an author and entrepreneur, posted in all caps on social media that his ride on Thursday was “the fastest trip I’ve ever taken to the airport from NYC!!! Thank you congestion pricing!!!”

In an email, Mr. Sethi, 42, reported that his Lyft driver got him from downtown Manhattan to Newark Liberty International Airport in just 23 minutes. “No honking, zero congestion around the Holland Tunnel, no need to leave an extra half-hour early to account for traffic,” he said.

And some drivers admitted they have been forced to change their tune.

On Tuesday, a social media user named Ali Lyles posted a video on TikTok in which he compared being charged a toll as he crossed a bridge to “being robbed without a gun.”

Just a short time later, he posted another video, acknowledging that he had saved half an hour from his commute. “There wasn’t no traffic, bruh,” he said. “I might actually like congestion pricing!”

Marc Jacoby, 64, had a similar experience. He drives from the West Village to the Bronx or Westchester four to five times a week to teach music to people with special needs. He drives instead of taking public transportation because, he said, he carries so much equipment: “Guitars. Puppets. Percussion instruments. Flutes. Whistles. Sometimes toys.”

Before now, Mr. Jacoby had only negative impressions of congestion pricing.

“If someone asked me, two weeks ago, I would say this is going to be a disaster,” he said. “But I was wrong about that. And I’m happy to admit that I was wrong.”

At 42nd Street and the West Side Highway on Thursday at 1 p.m., the consistently clogged streets near the Intrepid Museum and Circle Line Cruises were clear. Mr. Jacoby described the scene as “actually unbelievable.”

There are discounts for low-income vehicle owners, but Mr. Jacoby believes the fee should be set on a sliding scale.

“When Big Brother scans your license plate, they should tie it to your state tax return,” he said. A driver making a half-million dollars a year, he suggested, should pay $50. “And when they see me, maybe I should pay $5 or $9.”

Some people don’t want to pay at all.

On Wednesday, Scott LoBaido, a Staten Island-based artist and activist, posted a video to social media showing himself using duct tape to cover up his license plate and suggesting others do the same, as a way to avoid the toll.

Later in the day, Mr. LoBaido, whose work includes paintings of Donald Trump hugging the Empire State Building in front of an American flag, was arrested after he staged a one-man protest near Columbus Circle.

Still, there was so much congestion pricing buzz — positive, negative or neutral — that even brands and people in other cities were chiming in.

Shake Shack announced a temporary “Congestion Pricing Combo” starting Jan. 13: a burger and fries for $9 — “toll not included.”

And Lauren Walker, a resident of Washington, D.C., wondered if cities should go even further: “My opinion on congestion pricing,” she joked on the social media site Bluesky, “is that it should cost 10,000 dollars to honk your car horn.”