Longtime Manhattan prosecutor dies at 99

Robert M. Morgenthau, New York’s longest-serving district attorney, who fought crime in executive suites and violence on city streets for 35 years, has died at the age of 99.

Morgenthau’s wife, Lucinda Franks, said he died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York on Sunday after a short illness, the New York Times reported.

First elected as Manhattan district attorney in 1974, Morgenthau won eight more four-year terms before retiring in 2009. He was known as a tireless prosecutor of white-collar crime, his targets ranging from Dennis Kozlowski, ex-chief executive of Tyco International Ltd., to money-laundering banks and mobsters in the garbage and garment industries.

“If you want people to have confidence in their government, you’ve got to show that people who have economic power or political power are not immune from prosecution,” Morgenthau said.

He began confronting corporate crime in the 1960s, when he was the U.S. attorney in New York. He brought high-profile federal cases for a decade against executives who had never faced public humiliation.

“He really is the father of white-collar criminal prosecutions,” said Gary Naftalis, a lawyer who worked under Morgenthau as an assistant U.S. attorney.

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born July 31, 1919, in New York to a wealthy family of German-jewish origin. He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1941, enlisting in the Navy in World War II and rising to lieutenant commander. In 1944, the Germans sank his ship, the USS Lansdale, and he floated for hours in the Mediterranean before being rescued.

“I made a deal with the Almighty,” he recalled on his 88th birthday in 2007. “If I got out alive, I’d devote my life to some form of public service. I’m still paying back.”