Renowned federal judge dies after contracting virus
GREENWICH — Retired U.S. District Judge Kevin Duffy, who tried and sentenced the terrorists behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, organized crime figures and bank robbers, died Wednesday
after contracting the coronavirus , according to family members.
Duffy, 87, had been at the Nathaniel Witherell Home, recovering from a short-term illness in the rehabilitation section, before he tested positive and was then moved to Greenwich Hospital.
Duffy had been a Greenwich resident for the past several years and had continued to practice law in Greenwich at the firm of
Duffy and Staab LLC alongside his son, Kevin Duffy Jr., one of the firm’s managing members. Kevin Duffy Jr. confirmed his father’s death on Wednesday afternoon.
Judge Duffy retired from the federal bench in 2016 after 44 years as a district judge in the Southern District of New York. He presided over the trial in the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center, as well as the radicals who took part in a murder and armed robbery of a Brinks truck in Nanuet, N.Y. in 1983.
He also oversaw a famous case involving $98 billion in gold from the Iranian government that was held by the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the hostage crisis. Duffy also presided over a halfdozen cases against members of the Mafia, including the trial of Paul Castellano, the reputed head of the Gambino organized crime family who gunned down outside a New York steakhouse in 1985 after the trial began.
Duffy’s death was one of seven on Wednesday connected to the coronavirus in Greenwich. The fatalities — of three town residents and four out-of-town patients at Greenwich Hospital — were the first reported in town in the pandemic.
Duffy is the uncle of
Edward Krumeich II, a former member of the town’s Board of Estimate and Taxation and a current Superior Court judge in Connecticut.
“When I was interviewed to be a judge I was asked if I had a legal hero and I most definitely did in my Uncle Kevin,” Krumeich said, recalling how his uncle had to be placed under 24/7 guard during and after the World Trade Center bombing case and other terrorism cases that came through his courtroom.
When he was first sworn in by President Richard Nixon in 1972, Duffy was the youngest member of the federal judiciary. He was mistaken for a clerk and admonished for riding in an elevator reserved for judges the day after he was sworn in, he later recalled.
Duffy’s long career on the bench put him in almost constant contact with “thorny issues and dangerous defendants” in the words of a profile of the judge in The Catholic Lawyer in 2004.
Kevin Thomas Duffy was born in New York City in 1933, and he graduated from Fordham University and its law school in 1958. He once described himself as “a poor Irish kid from the Bronx.” His first entry into the legal world as a young man was as a court bailiff.
Duffy clerked for Judge Edward Lumbard in the U.S. Court of Appeals Second
District as a law student. Early in his career, Duffy appeared before Judge Learned Hand, one of the most distinguished judges in modern legal history.
From 1958 to 1961, he was a criminal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. In the 1960s, he worked for private law firms, before returning to public service, as the head of the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was appointed to the federal bench at the age of 39.
Judge Duffy was erudite and widely read, and it was not uncommon for him to cite writers such as Charles Dickens in his written opinions. When he sentenced Ramzi Ahmed Yousef for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Duffy read passages from the Quran. Duffy had also read major texts from various world religions as part of his interest in theology, and into his 80s, he was still reading works by Plato and Eastern metaphysicians.
Duffy also had a memorable sense of humor. After he delivered a 100-yearprison sentence to a murderer with a long history of killings, the defense lawyer told Duffy that he would never live that long, according to a Newsday profile in 1993. “Well, tell him to do the best he can,” the judge replied.