“Hey, man,” a sanitation worker called out to Michael Cohen on Sunday, as Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and his wife walked north on the Upper East Side, passing by the annual Greek Independence Day Parade. “Hang in there, man. We’re with you.”

The remark came nearly two weeks after a dozen federal agents knocked on Cohen’s hotel-room door at the Regency, on Park Avenue, where he and his family have been living after a water leak last year in their apartment. The damage is, in some ways, a metaphor for Cohen’s life, which has since become a flood of paparazzi, cable-news scrawl, and court hearings. A search warrant, executed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office but referred to the Southern District of New York by Robert Mueller’s probe, allowed the F.B.I. to seize his business records, documents, and data from two cell phones, a tablet, a laptop, and a safe deposit box. The haul is reported to include materials related to payoffs made to women alleging sexual relationships with Trump during his presidential campaign, including the $130,000 Cohen says he paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. (Trump has denied the affairs.)

In the days immediately afterward, Cohen made a conspicuous effort to go about life as usual. Paparazzi trailed him from the Regency to dinner at La Goulue and back again, and waited outside as he had lunch at Fred’s. While his lawyers argued that the government should not be allowed to comb through his documents without his ability to denote privileged information, Cohen chomped on a cigar outside the Regency with a group of friends in plain view of the cameras. The spectacle continued last Monday, as hundreds of cameras waited to catch a glimpse of him and Daniels outside a hearing at the federal courthouse downtown.