Robert Morgenthau, former Manhattan district attorney, dies
NEW YORK—Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, who spent more than three decades jailing criminals from mob kingpins and drug-dealing killers to a tax-dodging Harvard dean, died Sunday. He was 99, just 10 days short of his 100th birthday.
His successor and current District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. confirmed his death in a statement Monday. Morgenthau died at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness, his wife Lucinda Franks told The New York Times.
Morgenthau, who served as U.S. Attorney for New York’s southern district during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, returned to law enforcement as Manhattan’s top state prosecutor in 1975 and held the job for 35 years.
Morgenthau left office in 2009, telling The Associated Press at the time he was retiring because “I looked at my birth certificate, and I said, ‘It’s about time.’”
Under Morgenthau’s watch, Manhattan prosecutors handled many high-profile cases: political payoffs by mob boss Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, the shooting of four black youths by white subway gunman Bernhard Goetz, the weapons-possession arrest of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Combs was acquitted. Goetz was cleared of attempted murder charges but convicted of weapons possession in the 1984 wounding of the four black youths he said were trying to rob him on a subway train.
Over the years, Morgenthau’s office prosecuted mob boss John Gotti, acquitted on state charges of ordering a hit on a union official, and former Tyco CEO L. Dennis Kozlowski, convicted of fraud and larceny in a case seen as an emblem of corporate excess. The office also produced guilty pleas from “Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers Jr. and John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman.
Morgenthau was born into a wealthy, prominent New York family. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and his father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was secretary of the treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a family friend.
In 1960, Morgenthau campaigned in New York for his friend and fellow Democrat, John F. Kennedy. The next year, the new president named him to the prestigious post of U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the nation’s busiest such office.
Morgenthau resigned after 17 months to run for governor against incumbent Republican Nelson Rockefeller. After his defeat in a disastrous campaign in 1962, Morgenthau was reappointed federal prosecutor by Kennedy.
Morgenthau was forced out as federal prosecutor in January 1970 by President Richard M. Nixon. He briefly joined Mayor John Lindsay’s administration as a deputy mayor, then waged another losing gubernatorial race before leaving the public eye for the next four years, engaged in private law practice.
In 1974, Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan resigned due to health problems after 32 years on the job. Morgenthau then launched his first successful run for public office, assuming the post on Jan. 1, 1975.
In 2005, at age 86, Morgenthau was elected for the eighth and last time.
He was the model for the character of prosecutor Adam Schiff, played by actor Steven Hill on TV’s “Law & Order.”