NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban announced in a letter to the department Thursday that he is resigning, one week after federal authorities seized his phone in connection with a probe investigating his twin brother’s business as a nightlife consultant, Gothamist has learned.

Caban served just over one year on the job. He’s the second commissioner to resign during Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.

The IRS and federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating the commissioner and his twin brother, James, who ran a business consulting for nightclubs and music venues. The investigation reportedly centers on whether bars and restaurants paid James Caban for favorable treatment from police.

The probe comes in addition to investigations of other members of Adams’ inner circle, as well as Adams’ 2021 campaign.

In an email to the department on Thursday, Caban wrote that “news around recent developments has created a distraction for our department” and that he was unwilling to let his attention be on anything but the NYPD’s work.

“For the good of this city and this department – I have made the difficult decision to resign as Police Commissioner,” he wrote.

The news comes amid a sprawling federal investigation into Adams’ inner circle. The FBI raided Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks’ home last week, as well as the home shared by his brother, Schools Chancellor David Banks and David Banks’ partner, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright. The IRS investigation into Caban is not linked to the FBI raids, according to an IRS official interviewed by Gothamist.

Caban was the first Latino commissioner of the nation’s largest police department in its 178-year history. He has been with the department since 1991, working his way up the ranks from being a police officer in the South Bronx to becoming first deputy commissioner under former NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell. His father was also a veteran in the police department who served as president of the Transit Police Hispanic Society.

Caban was tasked with making the subway system safer, one of Adams’ key campaign promises. He oversaw the deployment of 1,000 additional police officers into the transit system each day, costing taxpayers an additional $151 million in police overtime, Gothamist previously reported. The influx of officers led to a huge increase in tickets and arrests for fare evasion, and a 2% drop in major crimes in the subway.

Civil rights advocates have criticized Caban for peeling back police accountability measures with Adams’ support.

One high-profile example: a disciplinary case against the city’s highest-ranking uniformed cop, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey. Maddrey ordered police to void the arrest of a former cop who chased a group of boys through Brooklyn with his gun. The city’s police oversight agency and the NYPD’s then-internal prosecutor, Amy Litwin, recommended that Maddrey be docked 10 vacation days for abusing his authority. The police commissioner at the time, Keechant Sewell, agreed to discipline Maddrey, despite Adams’ personal pleas. Sewell resigned two weeks later, and Caban later fired Litwin, the New York Post reported.

Caban has personally intervened in more than 50 disciplinary cases against cops who choked, beat and tased New Yorkers, ordering that those cases not go to administrative trial, the news outlet ProPublic reported. In contrast, Sewell intervened in eight cases.

He also dropped discipline against two NYPD officers in the high-profile fatal police shooting of Kawaski Trawick.

At the same time, New Yorkers are making more complaints of police misconduct. They filed 5,600 reports last year, a 51% increase from the prior year and the highest level in over a decade.

It’s not the first time that an NYPD commissioner has left after just a brief stint under Adams. Sewell resigned last year after 18 months on the job. She was the first Black woman to run the NYPD.

The mayor publicly praised Sewell’s emotional intelligence and her record curbing crime during more than two decades with the Nassau County Police Department. But in private, Sewell felt undermined by Adams and Phil Banks, the deputy mayor for public safety, experts and former officers previously told Gothamist. At a November 2022 event for women in law enforcement, she delivered a fierce speech directed at the hypothetical next female police commissioner.

“Understand that you will be second-guessed, told what you should say, told what you should write, by someone with half your experience,” Sewell told the audience, which applauded in agreement. “They don’t know any better.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.