Morgenthau: The long, long, long arm of the law
By Sydney H. Schanberg
Village Voice, August 16th, 2005
Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, is a mortal man, but the press has awarded him sainthood. Look at the coverage of his campaign this year for re-election to a ninth consecutive four-year term. Nary a critical word. Virtually every story brings up his age, 85, and then — correctly — brushed it aside with a litany about his mental acuity and his tennis game.
Age isn’t the issue. Holding the same powerful office for 32 years is. Like other government officials who have stayed for many decades, he has built an unseen empire. With it, he has done many laudable things — supporting worthy civic causes, playing a leadership role in charitable activities such as the Police Athletic League, and carrying out major prosecutions like the BCCI International banking scandal. In a case that affected my family, he stepped in to help arrange a much reduced sentence for activist Abbie Hoffman, my cousin, when Abbie, after six years as a fugitive from federal cocaine-dealing charges, came in from the cold in 1980 and gave himself up.
At the same time, Morgenthau has looked after the New York City establishment, the political and moneyed ruling classes, who are centered in Manhattan, his election district. He is, after all, a charter member. When other members get in trouble, he often helps them out. Where lesser beings would face automatic indictments, powerful people of old and new money — people he wants in his corner to keep his empire together — are sometimes spared embarrassment. Through a spokeswoman, Morgenthau declined comment on this article.
He has courted the press, which all successful politicians do, and it has paid off for both sides. In the 1980s, his office investigated a mob-linked corruption enterprise involving bogus circulation figures that led to higher advertising rates at the New York Post, then owned by real estate baron Peter Kalikow. A few employees at the bottom of the Post food chain were sent to jail. Morgenthau allowed two of the paper’s executives, one of them very close to Kalikow, to plead nolo contendere to misdemeanors and then walk. Kalikow, who is now the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said he had no knowledge of the wrongdoing. The executive close to Kalikow who walked, Richard Nasti, is still Kalikow’s chief aide — at his real estate company.
Here are some other random examples of the media’s relationships with Mr. Morgenthau. In 1996, as Random House was about to bring out a biography of David Durk, a whistle-blower against police and government corruption, the publisher sent a copy of the galleys to Morgenthau to insure his approval of the contents. Some passages of the book — Crusader, by James Lardner — recounted episodes in which Morgenthau was reluctant to go hard against police corruption. Morgenthau edited out the unfavorable material. Random House made no objection and published it as edited. Why would any publisher give a public official veto power over passages in any book? Normally, a book is merely given to the publisher’s own attorneys to be vetted to avoid exposure to a libel suit. But Random House’s behavior is a measure of Morgenthau’s connections and power and reach.
In the 1970s, Governor Hugh Carey appointed a special state prosecutor to examine corruption in the judiciary. Some bad-apple judges, as we know, take bribes to fix cases. Others kowtow to D.A.’s and assign cases (as requested privately by the D.A.’s) to judges with known legal predispositions. The state’s 62 district attorneys, led by Mr. Morgenthau, lobbied against this appointment and protested loudly. He insisted that the existing prosecutors were doing the job properly and needed no new special investigator. The man Carey appointed was Maurice Nadjari. From the start, the D.A.’s tried to undermine him. Morgenthau managed to place a “mole” in Nadjari’s office to keep him informed. One tactic the mole used was to leak Nadjari’s indictments of judges to the press in advance to make it appear that Nadjari was doing the leaking and therefore was guilty of misconduct. Appeals judges began overruling Nadjari’s indictments. Eventually the office was shut down. It was the last time any governor or mayor has tried to create an aggressive investigation of the state’s or city’s judiciary.
A few years ago, Morgenthau’s office buried an investigation into New York State’s economic-development chief Charles Gargano, the fundraiser for Governor George Pataki and former U.S. senator Alfonso D’Amato. The allegations were that Gargano was doling out state contracts as rewards to major campaign contributors.
In 1991, when the toothless Senate Ethics Committee let off the ethically challenged D’Amato with a wrist slap on multiple charges of abuse of office, Morgenthau immediately sent the senator a personal congratulatory message by fax, saying that he knew all along that the senator would emerge unscathed. I doubt if many of you ever read about this incident. To my knowledge, it appeared in only two places — first in Cindy Adams’s column in the New York Post,where I saw it, and then my column in Newsday after the district attorney confirmed it for me by phone. Somehow D’Amato and Morgenthau became buddies — a career crooked politician and a crime fighter who has cultivated a squeaky-clean image. But that’s what makes life — and journalism — interesting. Shouldn’t that pique the interest of the press?
Morgenthau’s influence seems to be wall-to-wall. Rarely will you hear any lawyer — even defense lawyers who have suffered from his judge-picking — find any fault with him in public. His halo can burn them. The city’s four other district attorneys, upon whose territory he occasionally poaches, are equally careful with their comments.
Morgenthau — whose opponent in the coming election is a former state judge, Leslie Crocker Snyder — has been Manhattan district attorney since the early 1970s, and for seven years, it’s hard to recall any truly comprehensive and balanced coverage of his work by the city’s mainstream press. The only newspaper to have taken a clear looks at some of his negatives has been Newsday. I worked there for a decade after 26 years at The New York Times. It’s the only mainstream paper in this city that doesn’t have an addiction to sacred cows.
His latest re-election campaign would seem a perfect opportunity for the press to come out of its shell. But this doesn’t seem to be happening. In fact, early this year, the Daily News provided an example of the opposite. Its investigative team had come across a string of parking violations by writer Lucinda Franks, Morgenthau’s wife. They staked out her car, a 2002 Toyota, and found it illegally parked at expired meters and bus stops. An “official police business” placard was placed in the windshield. Only on-duty law enforcement officers are allowed to use these placards. The news team took photos of all this.
But when it came time to run the story, on February 7, the photos were cast aside, and the story was softened in the editing process and cut back to a meager 326 words. I learned about the episode from a source outside the News. Both Martin Dunn, editorial director of the News, and Bill Boyle, the senior managing editor, who shepherded the piece into the paper, declined to comment. “Just for the record,” Dunn replied in an e-mail response to my questions, “I make it a policy never to talk to the tabloid press, especially free newspapers.”
Maybe someone on an un-free paper can look into this. And maybe while they’re at it, they can give us a full look at Morgenthau’s record.
