MORGY DIES AT 99
Legend was Manhattan district attorney 34 yrs.
Robert Morgenthau, a World War II Navy hero who became Manhattan’s legendary district attorney, died Sunday. He was 99.
He passed away at Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness, sources told The Post.
For four decades, Morgenthau’s patrician baritone, honed in his youth among his family friends — the Roosevelts and Kennedys — filled the halls of Manhattan courthouses.
In the 1960s as Manhattan US attorney, and then from 1975 until his retirement as DA in 2009 at age 90, he was The Boss to loyal underlings and Morgy to headline writers.
And there were many headlines for the man who became the model for “Law and Order’s” prosecutor Adam Schiff.
By his own count, Morgenthau oversaw some 3.5 million cases as DA, guided by his oft-repeated motto that justice be pursued “without fear or favor.”
Among his best known prosecutions were those of Preppy Killer Robert Chambers, mob boss John Gotti (assault and conspiracy), rapper Tupac Shakur (sex assault), hip-hop mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs (gun possession), actor Russell Crowe and model Naomi Campbell, both of whom took no-jail deals in separate phone-flinging incidents.
His prosecution of John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, made international news; that of subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz sparked a national conversation on gun rights and self-defense.
Morgenthau won notorious rape convictions of the Central Park Five in 1990 — but 12 years later reinvestigated the case and wrote the report recommending that the verdicts be overturned
Often, his reach extended well beyond Manhattan.
Morgenthau’s sprawling investigation into the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, in 1991 exposed a criminal enterprise spanning 76 countries that laundered loot for Saddam Hussein.
Morgenthau, born in New York City in 1919, famously cheated death in 1944, when his Navy ship was torpedoed and sunk by Nazi warplanes. Forty-seven of his crewmates perished.
His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., rose from poverty to become US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I. His father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., became President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary and a major architect of FDR’s New Deal.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the late John F. Kennedy Jr., and Govs. Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer are among the more notable of the thousands of prosecutors he personally interviewed and hired.
Morgenthau is survived by his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lucinda Franks, five children, six grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren.