They were members of the city’s press corps, and Mr. Liu treated them to a rolling, week-long, five-borough press conference—a dialogue that read as if it could be snatched from a piece of absurdist opera, key words and phrases thrown together and repeated ad nauseam. Mr. Liu himself starred as the antihero, trying to keep his timbre steady as he falls deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Scene: A Lunar New Year Celebration at a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown. Mr. Liu onstage “feeding” two Chinese dragons a piece of felt bait suspended from a pole while a three-piece percussion orchestra bangs out a song next to him. On his way out the door …

Press: Mr. Comptroller, have you been interviewed at all by the feds?

Mr. Liu: This was a wonderful event.

Press: Is there anything you feel like you have done wrong regarding your campaign fund-raising?

Mr. Liu: I feel very privileged to be in a position to serve New Yorkers and will continue to do so.

Press: Are you concerned that some members of your staff will be implicated in this growing fund-raising scandal?

Mr. Liu: I feel very privileged to serve. Thank you for coming here. This was a wonderful event.

It was a scene played out with only slight variation all around the city, like a traveling road show or a pop-up piece of performance art, the protagonist surrounded by his chorus.

The reason for the spike in interest around Mr. Liu stems, of course, from the sudden indictment last week of his 25-year-old campaign treasurer, Jia “Jenny” Hou, for participating in a scheme to circumvent the city’s strict campaign finance laws. According to the indictment, Ms. Hou helped arrange for donors to get around the legal limit of individual contributions to a campaign by setting up “straw donors”—i.e., bogus contributors whose names and identities were borrowed just for that purpose.

However, it seems unlikely that Ms. Hou, who faces 60 years in federal prison, was the architect of the alleged campaign finance improprieties—and none of the dozen or so elected officials, lobbyists, staffers, advocates and consultants whom The Observer spoke with over the past week could plausibly paint a scenario whereby the scheme begins and ends with her. After all, she is a lightly-paid 25-year-old surrounded by two veteran political operatives with a history of shady campaign dealings, Chung Seto and Mei-Hua Ru.

“They are his whole operation. He works 23 hours a day with them. They are like one big family,” said one politico close to Mr. Liu. “Mei-Hua and Chung are big texters and big emailers and I bet [U.S. Attorney] Preet Bharara is going through that stuff already. They really want John, and if they get to the other two, that will be it.”

While Mr. Liu is a trooper, with a history of weathering adverse political circumstances, it remains to be seen how far up this current scandal will go.

In his decade on the political scene, Mr. Liu has exuded self-confidence, even more than most politicians. “John really believes he is a man of destiny,” one of his political rivals told The Observer. However, at a press conference on the day Ms. Hou was arrested he looked thinner, his voice shaky. With George Arzt, a longtime Democratic campaign consultant and master of damage control by his side, Mr. Liu professed himself shocked by the allegations against his campaign and pledged to move forward.

To understand the current case against him, one that involves a campaign brazenly skirting the campaign finance system in the most ham-handed way imaginable, it is first necessary to know a little something about John Liu and his variegated career.

Capitalizing on his American-story ethos—the kid from Taiwan whose nose was kept to the grindstone as a student at Bronx Science, through his brief career as an actuary at Price Waterhouse and on to becoming the first Asian-American to bubble up out of the melting pot into elected city office—Mr. Liu won his seat in the City Council by knocking on more doors and shaking more hands than his competition, but also by getting the imprimatur of the powerful Queens County Democratic Party.

Mr. Liu was eyed as a potential and path-breaking mayoral candidate almost as soon as he landed on the City Council. His march to City Hall helped blaze a trail for a slew of young Asian political operatives, a tight-knit crew mostly from Flushing and other Asian neighborhoods in the city. They kept to themselves mostly, didn’t socialize with the other staffs and were recognized by their slavish devotion to the principal. Mr. Liu quickly made a name for himself by keeping a watchful eye on any anti-Asian bias in the news media or among his fellow elected officials, and by being wherever a camera and a pack of microphones were gathered.

“Few members of the City Council can mobilize news conferences as quickly and effectively as Mr. Liu, and few have shown his willingness to do so,” wrote The New York Times early on in Mr. Liu’s career. “In his five and a half years on the Council, that has become a hallmark of Mr. Liu and his seemingly tireless aides, who are known to send reporters as many as four news releases a day detailing Mr. Liu’s various undertakings.”

He relentlessly worked the phones, amassing a formidable war chest in anticipation of a 2009 run for public advocate, but midway through the campaign, he abruptly decided to run for city comptroller—and implausibly denied to the press that he was ever running for public advocate.

Later, his campaign came under fire for its television ads. In one, Mr. Liu claimed to have discovered, while head of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, that the M.T.A. was keeping “two sets of books.” In fact, the discovery was mostly the work of two other elected officials, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson and former State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, and turned out to be a rather exaggerated claim in any case. Then, Mr. Liu’s campaign ran an ad in which he reminisced about how at the age of 7 he joined his mother and worked after school at a Flushing sweatshop. It was central to the campaign’s narrative—Mr. Liu was an up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant who knew the value of a dollar. When a Daily News reporter was trailing Mr. Liu for a profile, and they visited his mother’s house, she not only denied that young John had worked in a sweatshop, she denied that even she had.

Campaign aides accused the reporter of bias, saying she didn’t realize how a former factory worker might be ashamed of her past. Mr. Liu plowed right on ahead, knocking on doors the very next day, and the ad remained on the air.

The race was notable not only for Mr. Liu’s ads, but also for its racial politics. Against an all-white field, Mr. Liu transformed himself from Asian candidate and symbol of the new New York, home to immigrants from all over the world, to standard-bearer of the old-school black and Hispanic political machines.

Considering the historic antagonism between the two groups, it was quite a nifty political trick, one partly attributable to luck—an even minimally qualified black or Hispanic candidate would have forced him to recalibrate—and partly to his skill and dogged determination. He became a regular visitor to black churches around the five boroughs, was frequently at the side of Al Sharpton, spoke out early on the Sean Bell shooting and was one of the few nonblack elected officials to come out in favor of naming a Brooklyn street after black nationalist Sonny Carson.

None of the daily newspapers endorsed Mr. Liu, but with the unions and the black and Latino power structure behind him, he cruised to victory.

In office, Mr. Liu continued to operate in a world apart. He spurned Mr. Bloomberg’s suggestion for a postelection fence-mending session. He issued reports praising public sector workers as budget saviors just as they were coming under attack around the country. In a Village Voice interview with longtime investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, he seemed unaware of some basic functions of his office. The tabloids mocked him relentlessly, enough that the joke around the comptroller’s office was that the Post had assigned one reporter to “Liu Duty,” to write a damaging story about him for every Sunday’s edition of the newspaper. Again, Mr. Liu plowed ahead.

A Quinnipiac poll from last May gave him the highest approval rating of any politician in the city.

But trouble loomed, and at least part of it could be attributed to an insular team around Mr. Liu that would occasionally stumble on the candidate’s message. Over the summer, when the prospective mayoral campaigns leaked their fund-raising totals to an eager press corps, Mr. Liu’s office refused, holding out hope that The Times would run a story on Mr. Liu’s numbers alone. The paper declined, and noted Mr. Liu’s offer in the next day’s story.

It was a telling gaffe, mainly because at the time at least it seemed like Mr. Liu had a good story to tell. They had limited donations to $800 a piece, eight being a lucky number in Taiwanese culture, but they still had outraised most of the competition.

“Jenny Hou, Mr. Liu’s [now-indicted] campaign treasurer, said if the comptroller hadn’t self-imposed a cap on his donations, he would have raised more than $2 million in the past six months,” The Wall Street Journal reported, noting that the haul would have topped a record for donations during the same time period. In retrospect, it was a fateful piece of information.

Little did anyone know then about straw donors, or about Oliver Pan, the Liu campaign bundler who approached an FBI agent in what appeared to be an effort to solicit donations in exchange for face time with Mr. Liu.

And so Mr. Liu keeps up the relentless pace of his five-borough tour. His handlers seemed determined to keep him in front of mostly friendly audiences. Last Wednesday, he hosted an African-American history event at Medger Evers College, where he pushed back against claims by the ever-waiting gaggle of reporters that he was hanging Ms. Hou out to dry, and where he received a standing ovation from the locals. He then attended two other events at two public union headquarters in Manhattan. The next day, reporters followed him on a walk from the Chinese Benevolent Association to his office, where he either recited boilerplate—“My campaign operations are no different than other campaign operations”—or said nothing. The next day he did three events in front of Asian community groups (at one of which an audience member pulled The Observer aside and pointed to Mr. Liu and said, “He is our Jeremy Lin.”) The day after that, he turned up at four Asian community-group events.

Once on the dais, he never acknowledges the massive three-count elephant in the room, not even noting that it is a trying time, or thanking those in attendance for their support. The outsize press presence at the usually sleepy events also goes unmentioned, as if ignoring the predicament long enough will make the problem go away.

Staffers say morale is low in the office, despite the efforts of Ms. Ru, who many suspect will be the next to fall, to buck them up. According to one attendee, the embattled adviser told a closed-door meeting of high-level staffers that the indictment was “bullshit.”

“It was really crazy,” said one staffer in the comptroller’s office. “They really shouldn’t be talking about this stuff to us at all.”

There remains a chance that Mr. Liu will be found innocent in all of this. Former campaign staffers say he was remarkably detached from the day-to-day business of a campaign, preferring to show up where he was told and leave the minutia to others.

And if he is able to survive until election season, he could survive even further. This was someone, after all, who got busted for inventing a key part of his biography whole cloth and still won citywide office. His advisers note that his strength was never among those who make a fetish of campaign finance, and that the more the tabloids and the media pile on, the more his support among his most favored backers grows.

So far, two city councilmembers have been eyeing a run for his seat—Domenic Recchia of Brooklyn and Daniel Garodnick of Manhattan—but neither may want to get into an ugly campaign against an incumbent, one that is surely to split along racial lines.

Privately, Mr. Liu has insisted that these allegations are just that, and hinted, if never quite saying so outright, that he will be cleared. And so onward he goes, every night a new spot in the city, ignoring the press and into the arms of those who have hoisted him up this far.

But how much further on the show can go remains to be seen.

“I don’t get questions from Chinese language media anymore about whether or not he can run for mayor,” said Michael Tobman, a political consultant active in Queens. “I get questions about whether or not he can stay in office. Once that community embraces the changed reality of his fortune and how much trouble he is really in, there is really nothing left.”

dfreedlander@observer.com

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