The Priest, the Power Broker and the Pop Star

Just a few days after Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on corruption charges, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter stood onstage at Madison Square Garden and said something startling into her glittery microphone: “Should we talk about how I got the mayor indicted?”

Ms. Carpenter’s quip was both tantalizing and quite obviously false: The singer played no role in the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Adams.

But her offhand remark in front of 20,000 fans in September did pull back the curtain, ever so slightly, on a bizarre side plot in the Adams affair — a story whose contours sound almost like the beginning of a joke: Did you hear the one about the pop star, the politician and the priest?

The priest is Msgr. Jamie J. Gigantiello, a pastor who has led three Brooklyn parishes over his 30-year career and has known Mr. Adams, the former Brooklyn borough president, for decades. The priest also is a pastor to, and close friend of, Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff.

Now the monsignor is at the center of an unholy brawl. The fight has reached the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the offices of federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, who have subpoenaed records from transactions worth nearly $2 million between the monsignor’s parish and businesses connected to Mr. Carone.

The nature of the federal investigation — or who its target might be — is not publicly known. Nobody has been charged with a crime, and it is unclear whether the priest or Mr. Carone did anything improper or illegal.