Obituary
Robert Morgenthau, 99, iconic D.A.
BY MARY REINHOLZ
When retired Manhattan District
Attorney Robert Morgenthau
died July 21 at Lenox
Hill Hospital, expiring after a brief
illness 10 days shy of his 100th birthday,
he was remembered with accolades
usually reserved for heads of state.
Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered
all fl ags on state buildings lowered to
half-staff until Morgenthau’s interment.
Newspaper writers of varied
stripes pronounced the white-haired
patrician ex-prosecutor a unique public
servant who had saved Gotham from
massive crime in the streets and the
corporate suites.
Robert Morgenthau’s saga as the
longest serving D.A. in the city began
in 1974, when he defeated in a special
election Richard Kuh, an appointee
succeeding long-term D.A. Frank Hogan,
who had retired and died soon
after. Morgenthau presided at the
Criminal Courts Building in Lower
Manhattan for 35 years, usually winning
landslides in the general elections
while running unopposed. He said his
offi ce prosecuted 3.5 million cases.
“We simply wouldn’t be the safest
big city in America today if not for
Morgenthau’s decades of dedicated service,”
said Mayor Bill de Blasio, who
later attended his funeral at Temple
Emanu-El. Also at the service were former
Congressmember Charles Rangel,
former Mayor David Dinkins and U.S.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia
Sotomayor, who started working for the
nine-term D.A. right out of Yale Law
School. She was one of numerous lawyers
hired and nurtured by Morgenthau
who became prominent public fi gures.
Others included the aforementioned
Governor Cuomo, former Governor
Eliot Spitzer, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and
Leslie Crocker Snyder, a former state
judge who unsuccessfully ran against
her old boss in 2005. She cited his age
PHOTO BY JEFFERSON SIEGEL
Former Manhattan District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau in July
2010.
then (86) and longevity as issues.
Soon after Morgenthau’s passing,
New York Police Department
Commissioner James O’Neill tweeted
that Morgenthau’s “vigorous prosecutions”
helped push the murder rate
down 90 percent during his tenure
— from 1975 to 2009.
Morgenthau had previously served
nine years as a U.S. attorney in the
Southern District of New York (with
time out to run two failed campaigns
for governor against Republican incumbent
Nelson Rockefeller).
Morgenthau developed a team of 500
prosecutors who went after muggers,
drug dealers, murderers, rapists, mob
kingpins and white collar criminals like
L. Dennis Kozlowski, chief executive
of Tyco who was convicted in 2005 of
looting his company of $600 million.
Morgenthau’s crew racked up a slew
of convictions in sensational cases
against miscreants such as Mark David
Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin
(1981); “Preppy Killer” Robert Chambers,
who pleaded guilty to manslaughter
in the strangulation of teenager Jennifer
Levin in Central Park (1988); Joel
Steinberg in the beating death of his adopted
6-year-old daughter Lisa (1989);
and the bizarre mother-son grifter team
of Sante and Kenneth Kimes, Jr., for
murdering and robbing 82-year-old socialite
Irene Silverman (2002).
According to The New York
Times, Morgenthau was vilifi ed for
conducting what his critics described
as a “waffl ing prosecution” of Bernie
Goetz. The “Subway Gunman” shot
four black youths on a subway train,
claiming they had surrounded him and
demanded money in 1984, leaving one
paralyzed and partially brain damaged.
Goetz — a hero to some, a vigilante to
his detractors — was charged with illegal
weapons possession, and next with
attempted murder. The most serious
charges were dismissed and he served
six months for weapons possession.
Along the way, Morgenthau won
plaudits when his labor racketeering
unit investigated the city’s garment and
carting industries. He also became the
model for late-night television’s incorruptible
big city D.A. Adam Schiff,
played by actor Steven Hill, in the longrunning
series “Law & Order.”
Morgenthau’s reputation for unimpeachable
rectitude took hits recently
in a Netfl ix series that recounted how
his offi ce got it terribly wrong in the
notorious case of the Central Park Five
— fi ve teenage black and Latino youths
from Harlem who served from seven
and one half years to 13 years for the
near fatal 1989 rape and beating of a
female jogger. (After the attack on the
jogger, Donald Trump called for reinstating
the state’s death penalty.)
Criminal defense lawyer Ron Kuby
blames Morgenthau for “cramming
New York state prisons with black and
brown inmates” that his offi ce prosecuted
under the draconian Rockefeller
drug laws, which began in 1973 and
were mostly dismantled by 2009 under
Governor David Paterson.
However, Kuby, in a Facebook exchange,
praised Morgenthau’s service
to the country in World War II, when
he was an executive offi cer in the U.S.
Navy in the Pacifi c and Mediterranean,
decorated for bravery under fi re. Kuby
also lauded “Morgy” for his longtime
opposition to capital punishment.
Morgenthau’s civic activities included
chairing the Police Athletic League
57 years and helping found the Museum
of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial
to the Holocaust, in Lower Manhattan,
which he chaired until 2013.
He was born into privilege on July
31, 1919, growing up in New York City
and on his family’s Hudson Valley farm
in East Fishkill. He had deep Jewish liberal
roots. His father, Henry Morgenthau,
Jr., was Treasury secretary under
Franklin D. Roosevelt and reputed to
be a major architect of the New Deal.
His grandfather was an ambassador in
Turkey under Woodrow Wilson.
Young Robert Morgenthau enlisted
in the Navy one day after he graduated
from Amherst College in 1941. He
served more than four years, then enrolled
at Yale Law School, from which
he graduated, and joined a New York
law fi rm headed by former U.S. Secretary
of War Robert P. Patterson.
Morgenthau was a friend of John F.
Kennedy and supported his campaign
for president in 1960 as head of the
Bronx Democrats. J.F.K. tapped him as
U.S. attorney for the Southern District
of New York twice. After his retirement,
Morgenthau did pro bono legal
work and wrote editorials for immigration
reform, among other issues.
His survivors include fi ve children
from his fi rst marriage to Martha Partridge,
who died of cancer in 1972, and
two children from his second marriage
in 1977 to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Lucinda Franks, 30 years his junior,
plus six grandchildren and three
great-great grandchildren.
Jefferson Market Library partially reopens
BY GABE HERMAN
The Jefferson Market Library reopened
Sun., July 28, after being
closed for renovation work since
April 1, though with limited access as
work continues in some areas.
The branch, at 425 Sixth Ave., between
W. Ninth and 10th Sts., was
closed in the spring to begin a $10 million
renovation project. The fi rst sections
to reopen will be the lower level
and fi rst fl oor starting July 28. These
areas include the fi rst-fl oor children’s
area and the lower level for adults,
which includes books, computers and
programming, according to a notice
from Dawn Chance, associate director
for the Lower Manhattan Neighborhood
Library Network.
The library will reopen, but with a
revised schedule due to ongoing construction,
and may change further as
the work continues. The current library
hours are 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday
through Thursday; 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on
Friday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday;
and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday.
The nearby Hudson Park branch —
which had extended hours after the Jefferson
Market renovations began — has
now returned to its normal schedule.
The renovation project at Jefferson
Market Library includes reconfi guring
the entrance; installing new and upgraded
elevators to service all fl oors;
upgrading restrooms to make them
handicap-accessible; improving IT wiring
and increasing public space. A ramp
for accessibility will also be added at
the building’s rear, along W. 10th St.
between Sixth and Greenwich Aves.
When the library was set to close
temporarily this past spring, the entire
renovation project was scheduled to be
fi nished by summer 2020, according to
the N.Y.P.L., but the completion date is
now expected to be spring 2021.
8 August 1, 2019 TVG Schneps Media