If New York’s City Hall is indeed selling favors, as a growing pile of corruption and bribery indictments say, the prices have fallen to bargain-basement, clearance levels.

The allegations feature a boat party with a D.J. A karaoke nightclub in Queens. Crab cakes. Seafood salad. A guy calling himself “Suave Luciano” whose real name is Glenn.

The four indictments unsealed on Thursday, with their mundane details of petty criminality, target a former top adviser to the mayor, her son and several members of the business community.

They follow a slew of other corruption charges that together form a dispiriting whole. An 8.5 million-person metropolis built on muscle, willpower and can-do innovation finds itself sidetracked with investigations into grifts, gifts and side hustles with pointedly low returns.

The latest indictments center on one of Mayor Eric Adams’s top aides and his former chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who is charged with accepting more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for her influence over city agencies.

Bribery charges are, of course, nothing new in New York City. In Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a headstone marked “Tweed” stands over the resting place of the city’s notorious 19th-century political boss, William M. Tweed.

Boss Tweed, who ruled the city from Tammany Hall in Union Square, a building that became shorthand for municipal graft, embezzled millions of dollars — 1800s dollars, the equivalent of billions today — in a manner that according to one biographer achieved “a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure.”

He is said to have demanded around $60,000 in kickbacks to his cronies before signing off on construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The cash, as the story goes, was delivered in a carpetbag.

The times, stakes and bags have changed. Mr. Adams’s former director of Asian affairs, Winnie Greco, now a campaign volunteer, was suspended on Wednesday after she handed more than $100 in cash — stuffed not in a carpetbag, but a Herr’s potato-chip bag — to a reporter covering the election. The chips were sour cream and onion.

For workaday New Yorkers, the accusations of valuable political favors given in exchange for bribes best suited for gift cards are doubly unwelcome. They are disappointing abuses of power, to be sure, but also — really?

“It just goes with the cheapness of everything,” said Paul Goss, 63, sitting in Domino Park in Brooklyn on Thursday as he painted Manhattan’s soaring skyline. “Everybody wants the same thing, these stupid status symbols.”

It was less than a year ago that an indictment targeting Mr. Adams charged him with, essentially, granting political favors in exchange for business-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines.

President Trump’s Justice Department dismissed those charges earlier this year, but their stain clings to the mayor in his long-shot bid for re-election. Not even a president can dismiss the “Saturday Night Live” song-and-dance lampooning the mayor’s love of the airline: “Make way for the prince of Turkey / Is he worse than Giuliani?”

In the quartet of indictments unsealed Thursday, similar pay-to-play schemes — all of them denied by the defendants — are described in detail, minus the air travel.

In 2024, Ms. Lewis-Martin, whose outsize presence in the mayor’s orbit earned her the unofficial title “lioness of City Hall,” was dealing with a caterer, unidentified in the indictment, who wanted waivers for home renovations fast-tracked through the relevant city agencies.

During these conversations, Ms. Lewis-Martin asked the caterer to supply food for a coming event at the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion. The caterer sent over $2,000 worth of food at no charge, the indictment states. The event was a hit, and Ms. Lewis-Martin was thrilled.

“You outdid yourself,” she told the caterer in a phone call, according to the indictment. “It was delicious. They had it sent up beautifully. I’m eating one of your crab cakes as I speak to you.”

Then: the Brooklyn Bridge. Now: crab cakes.

One imagines the proverbial spinning of a certain Tweed under the whispering grasses of Green-Wood Cemetery.

Sitting on park chairs along the East River in Brooklyn on Thursday, two 20-somethings who had been friends long enough to finish one another’s sentences paused to examine the current events in the bright summer light, and found them wanting.

“Come on,” Paula Schicchi said. “At least try —”

“— to do it classy,” Ella Murray finished for her.

City scholars might consider the long game, going back to Boss Tweed and the political machine embodied by Tammany Hall.

“It was everywhere — people then probably had a somewhat more loose and tolerant conception of corruption than we do now,” said Daniel DiSalvo, a former professor at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City University of New York.

“There’s all kinds of kickbacks and greasing the wheels and getting your cousin a job in sanitation,” he said. “Some of it was reasonably tolerated as making the city go.”

The recent indictments and investigations are different, he said.

“This kind of corruption is petty,” Mr. DiSalvo said. “With Adams, it’s small. He likes luxuries, he likes favors — box seats, first-class airline tickets.”

Thursday’s indictments describe a litany of tiny needs and complaints and headaches. Traffic issues, signoffs on renovation jobs — these are the favors that Ms. Lewis-Martin is accused of performing in exchange for very specific payback.

Broadway Stages, a film and television production company with studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, attracts big stars and builds sets for shows like “Blue Bloods” and “Godfather of Harlem.” But in 2022, its owners, Tony and Gina Argento, were upset about plans to install a new bicycle lane on McGuinness Boulevard near the studios and reduce vehicle traffic from four lanes to two. They turned to Ms. Lewis-Martin.

In exchange for her promised intervention in the bike-lane plan, Ms. Lewis-Martin was given a brief speaking role on “Godfather of Harlem,” filmed at Broadway Stages, the indictment states.

“It was everything,” Ms. Lewis-Martin said afterward in a text to the Argentos, according to the indictment. “One thing off my bucket list.”

The episode with her cameo aired on Jan. 29, 2023. She later received a check for $806.31 from ABC Studios New York for her appearance, the indictment states.

She continued her attempts to undermine the bike-lane plan, the indictment states — “Just make sure we shut their asses down on McGuinness,” she told a City Hall employee in 2024.

A parallel indictment spanning the same period accuses her of improperly helping a major political player in New York City’s Chinese American community, Tian Ji Li, with an array of building issues.

Mr. Li was quick to offer his services, telling Ms. Lewis-Martin, who was planning an event, that he had “hired a D.J. for the boat,” according to the indictment. But he needed help with a fire alarm application for a Queens venue called V Club, a bottle-service nightclub that boasted a main hall and 26 private karaoke rooms.

In exchange, the indictment states, Mr. Li paid $50,000 to Ms. Lewis-Martin’s son, Glenn D. Martin II — himself a D.J. known as Suave Luciano.

The application process took more than a year, but the permit was issued, according to the indictment.

“Keep a bottle of champagne cold for your sister,” Ms. Lewis-Martin texted.

The indictments describe many telephone calls and text exchanges spanning years. But a glimpse at Ms. Lewis-Martin during this contentious period is immortalized in that blink-and-you-miss-it appearance on “Godfather of Harlem.”

Her hair swept up and wearing a period-piece evening gown, Ms. Lewis-Martin leans on a bar in a crowded club and smiles as the character Bumpy Johnson, played by Forest Whitaker, approaches.

“Hi, Bumpy,” she purrs.

“How’s it going, Ingrid?” Mr. Whitaker’s character asks.

“It’s going good,” she replies.

Dodai Stewart, Nate Schweber and Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.