Manhattan DA for 35 years oversaw high-profile cases
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.
For all his successes winning convictions, 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, 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.
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 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.
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. 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.
Morgenthau was forced out as federal prosecutor in January 1970 by President Richard M. Nixon after months of resisting political pressure to resign.
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.
Over the next quartercentury, Morgenthau was elected another seven times.
In 2005, at age 86, Morgenthau was elected for the eighth and last time.
Morgenthau was survived by his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lucinda Franks, and seven children. His first wife, the former Martha Pattridge, died of cancer in 1972.