Robert Morgenthau: New York prosecutor who battled the mafia
22 July 2019
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau speaks during an interview in his office in New YorkImage source, Reuters
By Joshua Cheetham
BBC News
When Robert Morgenthau passed away in New York, aged 99, he died where he had fought.
As one of America's longest-serving public prosecutors, he proved to be the scourge of mobsters, crooked politicians and white collar criminals.
The legendary lawyer oversaw some of the city's most sensational cases, from the murder of John Lennon to the jailing of the Central Park Five.
His career even inspired the writers of long-running American crime drama Law and Order.
By the time of his retirement at age 90, Morgenthau had become a New York institution.
Who were the Central Park Five?
But despite a life of wealth and privilege, he garnered a reputation for reform and upheaval in a city once mired by violent crime and corporate corruption.
"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," he told Bloomberg.
Short presentational grey line
Morgenthau was born in 1919 to a wealthy, prominent New York family of German-Jewish origin.
His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was a real estate tycoon and an ambassador under President Woodrow Wilson. Henry Jr., Robert's father, went on to serve as President Roosevelt's treasury secretary.
Growing up in Manhattan and on the family's apple orchard in upstate New York, Morgenthau enjoyed many of the privileges and connections afforded to the country's north-eastern elite.
He had a lifelong friendship with members of the Kennedy family, spent New Year's Eve with his father at the White House, and cooked hot dogs for Britain'sKing George VI and Queen Elizabethduring their stay at the home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
After graduating from Amherst College, he enlisted in the US Navy in 1941 and served until the end of World War Two.
In 1944 he was left floating in the Mediterranean, scrambling for his life, after his ship was sunk by German forces.
"I made a deal with the Almighty," he later recalled. "If I got out alive, I'd devote my life to some form of public service. I'm still paying back."
Short presentational grey line
At the end of the war, Morgenthau studied at Yale Law School and joined New York law firm Patterson, Belknap & Webb, where he worked for 12 years.
In 1960, he campaigned in the city for his childhood friend, John F. Kennedy. After Kennedy's election victory, he was appointed in 1961 as the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, with a remit across Manhattan, the Bronx and six counties in upstate New York.