74 The EconomistAugust 3rd 2019
I
f you askedRobert Morgenthau which of his prosecutions he
was proudest of, you might expect him to give a half-smile,
pause to knock out his cigar in the brown glass ashtray, and in his
usual soft growl—a strange blend of modest, clipped patrician and
Noo York—reply that it was his pursuit of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International. He trailed this shady outfit, laundromat
of choice for narcos, terrorists and dictators, for years, before nail-
ing it for fraud in 1991 and forcing it to close. All its assets were for-
feit, and it lost $15bn. It was the biggest bank-fraud prosecution in
world financial history, spanning 76 countries, and if you won-
dered what a dafrom Manhattan was doing in it, his answer came
with more than a half-smile: “The long arm of the law.”
However, it was not the case he took most pride in. He was shyly
proud of them all—3.5m prosecutions, he reckoned, over the 35
years he had presided over the dabuilding at the edge of China-
town, from his desk with the famous five Rolodexes. He had gone
after rapists, extortioners, drug-dealers, “Teflon John” Gotti, John
Lennon’s killer and the ceoof Tyco International, who had drained
his company of $100m. These raps stood out in a docket crowded
with the usual misdemeanours of a huge, close-packed city. But
every crime mattered equally to him because it mattered equally to
the victim, whether millionaire investor or some poor woman
fretting that drugs were being sold on her street. Anyone joining
his team of prosecutors knew that this was the Boss’s bottom line.
And every malefactor needed to fear the interest of the da’s of-
fice. No one was too rich, middle-class or well connected to escape
his hawkish eye. If he thought a case could be brought, he would
bring it, no matter what the public or any power group thought. If a
teenager could be prosecuted for breaking into a grocery store, you
also had to prosecute those comfortable people who put their
money offshore and paid no taxes.
Yet this was not the situation when he arrived in the job in 1975.Theda’s office was a mess, as the whole city was, near-bankrupt,
filthy and battered by violent crime. He immediately took on more
prosecutors, streamlined their jobs so that each of them handled a
case from start to finish, hired minorities and women, expanded
the homicide department and brought in as many new evidence-
testing techniques as scientists could invent. He added 34 more
units, including identity theft, consumer affairs, “cold” cases,
Asian gangs and firearms trafficking. By the time he left, having
seen out 16 police commissioners, his team had swelled to nearly
500 prosecutors with a budget of $75m—and murders in Manhat-
tan had dropped from 642, when he started, to 58. Thanks to
“Morgy”, as the tabloids liked to call him, the city felt safe, and New
Yorkers rewarded him with landslides whenever his job came up.
He also brought in a rackets bureau, along with a crowd of ac-
countants to track down financial crimes. In his previous job, as
federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York (where he
indicted no fewer than 150 mobsters, including Anthony (“Tony
Ducks”) Corallo, whose very nickname boasted how slippery he
was), he had set up a unit to investigate Wall Street. It was long
overdue. As dahe spent a third of his budget in pursuit of money-
launderers and stock manipulators, not forgetting those clean-
looking tax lawyers and corporate accountants. His team had to act
like vacuum cleaners, sucking up every least scrap of evidence, and
like bully boys, threatening small fry with certain jail-time to per-
suade them to co-operate, which might land even bigger fish.
Some thought he was biased politically. He was a liberal Demo-
crat, after all, a Kennedy appointee (as well as a Kennedy friend,
from the days when he and Jack, two wealthy young scions of east-
coast political dynasties, had raced sailing boats off Cape Cod). As
such he twice ran briefly for governor of New York, but felt too awk-
ward to shine on the stump. He supported gun control, never
sought the death penalty and spent much of his time, pro bono,
helping immigrants avoid deportation: good Democratic causes.
But people’s politics had no importance. Justice did.
His success rate was impressive. Three-quarters of his cases
ended in convictions. Some were controversial, such as his prose-
cution of a player for the Giants on a gun rap, which brought him
death threats from fans; or of Bernhard Goetz, who had shot at four
young blacks who threatened him in the subway, for no more than
gun-possession. Some people claimed he was indifferent to
blacks, but it wouldn’t fly: he not only hired plenty as prosecutors
in the da’s office but, on war service in the navy, he had brought in
four blacks as gunners on one of his ships and resolutely refused
his captain’s orders to demote them. Pressure always made him
even more stubborn than he naturally was.
He liked to get convictions. Any da did. Yet he didn’t count
them up like notches on a gun, because he cared about justice
more. In 1990, for example, he secured the convictions of five teen-
agers, four black and one Latino, for the beating and rape of a young
woman in Central Park. They went to prison, but 12 years later an-
other man confessed to the crime. Immediately, as da, he ordered a
new investigation with dnatesting, which had not been available
before. The testing came back 100%, so the ball game was over. His
prosecution had failed, but justice had been done, and this exoner-
ation pleased him just as much as his successes.
It all fell under the head of doing something useful with his life,
part of a plea bargain he had made with the Almighty when, in
1944, his ship USS Lansdalehad been sunk under him by German
torpedoes. Once spared, he became a lawyer, then such a prosecu-
tor that he inspired the dahero of “Law and Order”, a hit tvseries.
But he might have been a farmer, for his not-so-secret other life
was on his grandfather’s 270 acres of orchards upstate at East Fish-
kill. There he spent his summers as a boy, escaping the heat of the
city, and there with the same purpose he worked later, in overalls,
returning to Manhattan with eggs and hard cider to sell. The long
arm of the law, which criminals dreaded, also reached to prune ap-
ple trees and pick a fruit or two. McIntosh were best. 7Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan’s longest-serving district
attorney, died on July 21st, aged 99The long arm of the law
Obituary Robert Morgenthau