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Famed Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau Dies at 99

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By: Spencer Truworth

Robert M. Morgenthau, the respected chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, is dead. He was 99.

“In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors, who came and went while he stayed on — for nearly nine years in the 1960s as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney,” lamented the New York Times in summing up Morgenthau’s career.

Morgenthau was born in 1919 in New York City into a prominent Ashkenazi Jewish family that had emigrated from Baden in 1866. He was the son of Elinor (née Fatman) and Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as the Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman from 1934 until 1945, according to Wikipedia. His maternal great-grandfather was Mayer Lehman, a co-founder of Lehman Brothers. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Before going into diplomatic service, Henry Morgenthau Sr. had made a fortune in real estate, and became a strong financial backer of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Morgenthau’s paternal grandmother was born in Montgomery, Alabama.

From the boy’s earliest days, the Morgenthau family was well-connected politically. The family home was near Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Springwood Estate at Hyde Park, New York, and he grew up knowing Roosevelt.

Morgenthau took office in 1975 and ran the district attorney’s office for 35 years until the age of 90, making him New York City’s longest serving district attorney.

“In that time, he navigated the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the crime boom of the ’80s and ’90s and the post 9/11 era in the 2000s, all the while racking up high-profile prosecutions of celebrities, mobsters, terrorists, money launderers and Wall Street fraudsters,” CNN recounted. “Morgenthau created 34 bureaus and units within the DA’s office specializing in labor racketeering, identity theft, firearms trafficking, Asian gangs and cold cases, among others. The sex crimes unit, in its infancy when Morgenthau took office, grew into the prototype for similar units across the country, CNN wrote in 2010.”

“He seemed almost out of central casting — tall and patrician, with a cultivated above-the-fray presence,” opined AP. “And in fact, former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau inspired some television casting of his own, as the model for the avuncular character of prosecutor Adam Schiff, played by actor Steven Hill on the long-running television series, “Law and Order.” “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf called Morgenthau “the greatest district attorney in the history of New York.”

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