His workload over a 35-year career as Manhattan district attorney is staggering – more than 3 million prosecutions, including everyone from mob boss John Gotti to rap impresario P. Diddy to “Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers.
A-list phone-hurlers Russell Crowe and Naomi Campbell came and went in a swirl of international media attention. Then there was Boy George, drugging, and Quentin Tarantino, slugging.
Robert Morgenthau has rushed to the aid of celebrity stalking victims Uma Thurman (winning the case) Sheryl Crow (losing the case) and George Stephanopoulos (getting help for the clearly deranged female perpetrator).
His legendary five Rolodexes are bulging with the biggest names in law, government and philanthropy, many of whom passed through his office and still fondly call him “The Boss.”
“He has essentially trained four or five generations of law enforcement,” all the while innovating nationwide how states prosecute crime, noted Dan Castleman, Morgy’s Number 2 in the DA’s Office and a succession hopeful.
To say that Morgenthau’s retirement announcement yesterday, on the brink of his 90th birthday, marks the end of an era seems insufficient.
For four decades, his patrician baritone – honed among the Kennedys and Roosevelts who were his childhood companions – has rumbled through the marbled halls of lower Manhattan, where he started his career as a US attorney in 1961.
Morgenthau was born in 1919 to family of wealth and prominence. His grandfather was the US ambassador to Turkey during World War I and his father was FDR’s secretary of the treasury.
He has grilled hot dogs with Eleanor Roosevelt for Great Britain’s King George VI, and Winston Churchill himself once complained the young Morgenthau’s mint juleps were a bit too strong.
Still, the former World War II Navy lieutenant never forgot how to curse like a sailor – recently using a profane term for a male body part during a press conference to describe a suspect accused of swindling crippled children.
His list of high-profile cases seems endless. In a stubborn stand against vigilantism, Morgenthau prosecuted subway gunman Bernhard Goetz in 1987 for shooting four youths who he believed were trying to rob him.
And he won convictions against innumerable violent villains. Daughter-slayer Joel Steinberg went down in 1989. The mother-son grifter team of Sante and Kenneth Kimes were convicted despite the disappearance of their victim’s corpse.
Morgenthau got two shots at some big name perpetrators – including infamous “Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers, who was sent upstate first for the rough-sex strangling in Central Park of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin, and then again last year for selling cocaine.
But he has spoken with the most pride about his white-collar and mob prosecutions, including crippling attacks on racketeering in the carting and construction businesses and an ongoing investigation into some dozen banks suspected of helping billions in Iranian dollars pass through New York under the radar of regulators.