Former Manhattan D.A. served as model for TV’s ‘Law & Order’
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. Mr. Morgenthau died at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness, his wife Lucinda Franks told The New York Times.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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.’”
For all his successes winning convictions, Mr. Morgenthau also became known for presiding over an injustice, and then correcting it.
Thirteen years after his prosecutors sent five black and Hispanic teenagers to prison for the rape of a female jogger in what was originally described as a gang “wilding” spree, Mr. Morgenthau asked a judge in 2002 to throw out the convictions after DNA evidence and another man’s confession put them into question.
The “Central Park 5” were later paid $41 million for the time they wrongfully spent behind bars.
In his position at the forefront of Manhattan’s legal and political scene, Mr. Morgenthau cultivated a dignified, above-the-fray presence and was widely acknowledged by allies and foes alike as effective, nonpartisan and incorruptible.
From that emerged a national reputation that extended beyond the courthouse. Tall and distinguished in appearance, he was the model for the avuncular character of prosecutor Adam Schiff, played by actor Steven Hill on the long-running television series “Law & Order.”
Show creator Dick Wolf called Mr. Morgenthau “the greatest district attorney in the history of New York.”
Vance noted that Mr. Morgenthau was a “hallowed” figure among the prosecutors who worked for him, who called him “The Boss” even long after he left the office.
Among prominent figures who served in the office were the late John F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Leslie Crocker Snyder, a popular former state judge who ran against Mr. Morgenthau in 2005 and lost.
Under Mr. 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 hiphop 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, Mr. Morgenthau’s office also 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.
Mr. Morgenthau, who had claimed a 97% conviction rate while U.S. attorney, lost the Combs case, but in the late 1990s, his state DA’s office was winning guilty verdicts in three of four cases.
Mr. 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.
His childhood reflected his lineage. Mr. Morgenthau had a lifelong friendship with members of the Kennedy clan; he once cooked hot dogs with Eleanor Roosevelt for Great Britain’s King George VI; on another occasion he prepared a mint julep for Winston Churchill.
He joined the U.S. Navy one day after graduating from Amherst College in 1941 and spent 4½ years in the service during World War II, earning the rank of lieutenant commander while seeing action aboard destroyers in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
After the war, Mr. Morgenthau earned a law degree from Yale.