A MAN OF HIS WORD RUNS FOR DA IN QNS.

Ex-judge Lasak: I’ll focus on sex crimes & violence

Flushing the tuition was like $250. My old man said it was too expensive. But I wanted to play halfback on the football team. I had a newspaper route delivering The Long Island Press and Long Island Evening Press, so I told my dad if he let me go to Cross I’d pay my own tuition. He said, ‘You have a deal.’ We shook on it.”

When the Holy Cross football coach said Lasak would have to practice every day after school, Lasak realized it would conflict with his paper route.

“So I explained it to my father. He said, ‘We made a deal.’ He was right. So I gave up football. I did my newspaper route, paid my own way through Holy Cross. I learned two life lessons that defined my life: Have a tireless work ethic and be a man of your word. Nothing is more important than those two things on the streets of Queens.”

Then Lasak attended Queens College and New York Law School.

“After I passed the bar I took a job with the Queens DA’s office at 24,” he says. “I loved it because it was a job where after reading about a local horror story in the morning paper you could actually do something about it.”

Unlike many young lawyers who use the Queens DA office to launch private practices, Lasak decided early on a life of public service.

“If you want to be a man of the people, work for the people,” he says.

He rocketed through the ranks, heading the Homicide Division at 30 during the ferocious crack epidemic of the late 1980s when annual citywide homicides topped 2,000.

“We went to war on the crack gangs, especially after the murders of Police officer Brian Rooney and Eddie Byrne,” says Lasak, who became executive director of the Queens DA office.

“Prosecuting violent criminals was the priority. No one in Queens should ever live in fear.”

Current Queens DA Richard Brown, 85, has until the spring to decide if he wants to try and keep the seat he’s held for nearly 30 years.

Lasak says if he is elected the new Queens DA, violent criminals would remain a priority.

“Non-violent crimes need a completely new bail system,” he says. “As a judge I wouldn’t remand any defendant in a case that all sides knew was not going to end in incarceration. Just because you’re poor or working class doesn’t mean you should sit in Rikers Island while a rich kid’s parents pay his way out.

“I don’t care what your race, religion, ethnicity, salary or sexual orientation is. Every resident of Queens deserves the same fair shake in the criminal justice system.”

I first met Lasak when he was in the Queens DA’s office after a lawyer named Phil Smallman pitched me a Daily News column idea about Gerald Harris, a Golden Gloves boxer from St. Albans whom he insisted was jailed for seven to 21 years for an armed robbery that his own brother had admitted he did.

No one would believe the brother. So I called the Queens DA’s office. Lasak was openminded enough to dispatch DA investigators to Georgia to interview the brother. Another lawyer named William Hellerstein joined the defense team.

Presented with new evidence, Lasak discovered that they had the wrong guy in a cell. “I wanted him out,” says Lasak. Ten days before Christmas of 2000 I watched Gerald Harris exit the courthouse and kiss the sidewalk of Queens Blvd. as a free man.

“I couldn’t sleep knowing an innocent guy was doing time,” he says. “Harris wasn’t the only one we reinvestigated. One poor guy named Lee Long, who had run out of appeals on a sentence of eight-to-25 when his case was brought to my attention by Seymour James, head of the Legal Aid Society, who asked me to give this man from Alabama one more look. I did. And it turned out we had the wrong guy. It was a bad identification. He was freed. In many ways those cases are more rewarding than convictions of really bad guys.”

Lasak says as DA he would also not prosecute small marijuana possession cases.

“The country is heading toward legalization,” he says. “I’m never gonna ruin some kid’s life for a joint or bag of weed.”

When asked about Councilman Rory Lancman, who has already announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Queens DA in 2019, Lasak shrugs.

“Lancman is a career politician,” he says. “He’s never tried a criminal case. I spent 25 years as a Queens prosecutor and 14 years as a Queens’s judge. I will...run the Queens DA’s office the way I think it needs to be run in the 21st century.” How’s that?

“First, I’d hire a crack team of ADAs that reflect modern Queens,” he says.

“I wanted to specifically protect women being abused,” he says. “I told my staff to treat every domestic violence case like it was a potential homicide, because unchecked it often will end in murder.”

So what’s the campaign strategy?

“I’m gonna run as what I am,” Lasak says. “I’m not a slick politician. No one can ever accuse me of forgetting where I come from because I never left.

“I say that knowing what being a man of your word means on the streets of Queens.”