He seemed almost like he was out of Central Casting — tall and patrician, with a cultivated above-the-fray presence. Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau actually inspired some television casting of his own, as the model for the avuncular character of prosecutor Adam Schiff, played by actor Steven Hill on the long-running television series, Law and Order.
Law & Order creator Dick Wolf called Morgenthau “the greatest district attorney in the history of New York.”
Morgenthau, who died on Sunday at 99, just 10 days before turning 100, spent nearly half of his life jailing criminals from mob kingpins and drug-dealing killers to a tax-dodging Harvard dean.
Photo: Reuters
He served as US attorney for New York’s southern district during the administrations of then-US presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, returned to law enforcement as Manhattan’s top state prosecutor in 1974 and did not leave for 35 years, with his office handling about 100,000 criminal cases yearly.
In 2005, at 86, Morgenthau was elected for the eighth and last time. He was 90 when he stepped down from office in 2009.
“I looked at my birth certificate, and I said: ‘It’s about time,’” he told reporters at the time.
In his position at the forefront of Manhattan’s legal and political scene, Morgenthau was widely acknowledged by allies and foes alike as effective, nonpartisan and incorruptible.
Under Morgenthau’s watch, New York County prosecutors took on many high-profile cases: political payoffs by mob boss Anthony Corallo, the shooting of four black youths by white subway gunman Bernhard Goetz and the weapons-possession arrest of hip-hop mogul Sean Combs.
Over the years, Morgenthau’s office also prosecuted mob boss John Gotti, acquitted on state charges of ordering a hit on a union official, and produced a guilty plea from John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman.
Morgenthau was born into a wealthy New York family. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr, was US ambassador to Turkey during World War I, and his father, Henry Morgenthau Jr, was US secretary of the treasury under then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, a family friend.
His childhood reflected his lineage. Morgenthau had a lifelong friendship with members of the Kennedy clan and he once cooked hot dogs with Eleanor Roosevelt for King George VI.
He joined the US Navy one day after graduating Amherst College in 1941 and spent four years in the service during World War II.
After the war, Morgenthau earned a law degree from Yale and began his career at a law firm headed by former US secretary of war Robert P. Patterson.
Morgenthau is survived by his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lucinda Franks, and seven children. His first wife, Martha Pattridge Morgenthau, died of cancer in 1972.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS