With just over a dozen weeks left as mayor, Eric Adams has apparently decided to cross one more country off his bucket list of places to visit while still in office: Albania.
Mr. Adams flew to the Balkan country on Sunday for what an aide said were talks on business and tourism. He was also set to meet with the nation’s prime minister, Edi Rama, who featured prominently in the successful 2023 corruption prosecution of a former top F.B.I. spycatcher.
The trip to the tourism hot spot, which came just a week after Mr. Adams announced he would stop campaigning for re-election amid dismally low poll numbers, raised eyebrows among lawmakers who expected him to be spending his waning days in office cementing his legacy.
His visit, news of which was reported on Sunday by WNBC, will last through Thursday, according to his spokeswoman, Kayla Mamelak Altus. Mr. Adams did not disclose the international travel on his public schedule until Monday, after he left New York.
Ms. Mamelak Altus said the Albanian government would cover the cost of the mayor’s lodging and ground transportation, with New York City taxpayers covering the rest of the trip, including air travel for the mayor and his traveling companion, Gladys Miranda, a longtime aide, and costs related to the mayor’s security detail.
She said the mayor’s hotel room costs about $200 per day, and his ground transportation costs $90 per day.
Ms. Mamelak Altus said Mr. Adams was traveling at the invitation of Mr. Rama, who was referred to more than a dozen times in a federal corruption indictment handed up in Washington against Charles F. McGonigal, who had been the F.B.I.’s leading counterterrorism official in New York. (The indictment does not accuse Mr. Rama of any wrongdoing.)
A spokeswoman for Mr. Rama did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Adams’s trip.
In addition to meeting with the prime minister and his cabinet, Mr. Adams planned to connect with “business and tech leaders, tour factories, and discuss new opportunities to boost economic activity and tourism to New York City,” Ms. Mamelak Altus added.
Mr. Adams’s decision to leave New York City in the final weeks of his mayoralty raised concerns that he is more focused on his well-documented wanderlust than the nitty-gritty of New York City governance.
When she first heard about the mayor’s travels, Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and the former Manhattan borough president, said, “I thought it was a joke.”
But then, she said, she recalled Mr. Adams’s love of travel.
“He’s got a few months left, and I’d think he would be making sure your legacy — your education, your housing, every last little bit is done,” Ms. Brewer said. “I thought that’s what he’d be doing.”
Mr. Adams’s ties to Albania run relatively deep for a country that does only limited business with the United States and whose population in New York City is small — around 40,000 of New York City’s 8.8 million residents identified as Albanian, according to the 2020 U.S. census. In the first seven months of this year, the U.S. imported $50 million worth of goods from Albania, and exported $82.2 million.
Mr. Adams’s son, Jordan Coleman, competed on the country’s equivalent of “American Idol” in 2022, Mr. Adams’s first year in office. The mayor, who delights in holding flag-raising ceremonies in Lower Manhattan for countries as varied as Suriname and Kazakhstan, has held three such ceremonies for Albania.
In June, Mr. Adams hosted a celebration of Albanian culture at Gracie Mansion, his official residence. In August, the Albanian ambassador to the United States, Ervin Bushati, posted a photo to social media of himself with the mayor at an undisclosed location.
And in a video posted online less than two weeks ago, during the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Adams told a prominent Albanian television presenter that he yearned to visit the country.
“I’ve accomplished so many things, but what I have not accomplished — and I am jealous of my son — he went to Albania and he performed there.”
“This is the Albania of America right here,” he continued, deploying one of his signature catchphrases, and adding that New York City was home to the world’s largest Albanian expatriate population.
“After your son, you simply must visit Albania,” the T.V. host, Alketa Vejsiu, responded on Instagram. “We await you with open arms.”
Mr. Coleman, Mr. Adams’s son, is not traveling with him, according to Ms. Mamelak Altus, and he had no involvement in planning the trip.
The mayor flew on Lufthansa to Albania, with a stopover in Frankfurt. He did not leave the airport during the layover, Ms. Mamelak Altus said.
Mr. Rama, the prime minister, was a key figure in one of two federal corruption indictments against Mr. McGonigal that prosecutors obtained in January 2023, one in New York and the other in Washington, D.C. The Washington indictment did not name Mr. Rama, but it refers to the prime minister of Albania 13 times in 16 pages.
While Mr. McGonigal was still at the F.B.I., according to Washington prosecutors, he developed a relationship with Mr. Rama and used it to help a company connected to an associate — a former Albanian intelligence officer who gave him $225,000 — win an oil-drilling license. Mr. McGonigal also requested that the F.B.I. open an investigation into a lobbyist for Mr. Rama’s main political rival and the agency did so, the prosecutors said.
He pleaded guilty in both federal cases, making him one of the highest ranking F.B.I. officials ever to be convicted of a crime. He is now serving a six-and-half-year prison sentence.
Mr. Adams’s past travel abroad figured prominently in his indictment on federal corruption charges, which were abandoned under highly unusual circumstances by President Trump’s Justice Department.
In something of a strange twist, two of the assistant United States attorneys who brought the case against Mr. Adams, including the lead prosecutor, also worked on the case against Mr. McGonigal.
Ben Casselman and Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting.