Robert Morgenthau is an old man.

He has a hearing aid in one ear, a slow shuffle of a walk, and on mornings when his neck is particularly stiff he wears a heating pad under his collar.

But even at 88, after 35 years in office, he is still ready to fight. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (Unaff.) proposed cuts to the budgets of the city’s five district attorneys, which Morgenthau warns could soon reverse the city’s historically low crime rate, have left him with no choice.

People always credit the police for the drop in crime. Morgenthau acknowledges their involvement, but says he and the other district attorneys are crucial to the effort as well.

In 1974, Morgenthau’s first year in office, there were nearly 650 homicides in Manhattan. Last year, there were 69. Even the enterprising casts of Law & Order cannot keep up: there were 83 murders combined in the last full seasons of the three shows. Fictional Manhattan, despite having Ice-T and Vincent D’Onofrio on patrol, and Fred Thompson and then Sam Waterston as district attorney, is a more dangerous place to live.

Discussing his work, Morgenthau is careful to stay on message. He immediately starts conversations about his time in office by quoting statistics about the drops in crime, and Manhattan’s move from having the highest murder rate of all the boroughs to the fourth-highest, despite the size of its population and the number of people constantly passing through its neighborhoods. In every election cycle, he has reminded voters of the shifts, though he admits that he would have trouble proving a direct causal link between anything he or his prosecutors have done and the drops in crime.

“What I’m saying is, we’re down more than anybody else. Is that a coincidence? Could be,” he said.

He believes his prosecutors’ success in getting convictions years ago is still keeping potential repeat offenders behind bars instead of on the streets.

“Police were in all the boroughs, and yet we went from number one to number four,” he said. “And, of course, there were some other things that factored in.”

A booming economy, centered in the borough, was likely one of these. Ensuing gentrification creeping into previously untouched corners, from Alphabet City to East Harlem, was undoubtedly another. An overall citywide campaign to clean up some of the most prominent seedy spots, Times Square prime among them, also helped.

The net result is that Morgenthau’s office has had many fewer violent crimes to occupy the time of his staff of about 500 assistant district attorneys, leaving time and resources to start more than a dozen new bureaus and units dealing with everything from identity theft to DNA in cold cases.

Most of all, with the extra time and leftover budget, Morgenthau has been able to oversee a massive expansion of white collar crime prosecutions, both in terms of their number and their scope.

Over the years, these have toppled celebrity offenders, like Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, as well as many lesser-known ones. He believes this has improved the economy and overall well-being of Manhattan, as well as the city and state which his borough’s financial sector helps support.

The city’s impending budget cuts to his and the other district attorneys’ offices may be about to change that.

Each year, Bloomberg has sent the city’s five district attorneys letters asking them to detail how they would handle a 5-percent budget cut, if one came. Each year, the threatened money was eventually restored going into the final budget.

This year, with Bloomberg warning of extreme budget cuts across the board, the district attorneys are skeptical they will get that 5 percent back. A second letter, which went out last month, indicating that they might have to incorporate an additional 3-percent cut, has them even more concerned.

Though a vigorous opponent of the proposed cuts, Morgenthau stopped short of saying that this will definitively lead to a new crime wave. Always a politician and a lawyer, he chose his words carefully.  

“I think there’s a danger that you’re going to see an increase in crime, because the fact is that when people are convicted and are in jail, they’re not committing crimes,” he said. “That’s a fact of life. And also, arrest, prosecution and jail is a deterrent—not a complete deterrent, but it has a deterrent effect.”

Crime could go up, he fears, which might drive people to move out of Manhattan, taking the money from their property and sales taxes with them. That will cost the city dearly, he says.

Meanwhile, his office will have no choice but to use its sparser resources to handle a violent crime caseload which may climb as the economy dips. Though he doubts numbers will return to the levels of the ’70s and ’80s, he says slicing his budget will force him to return to the mentality of those days, when his office was almost wholly consumed with tackling street crime. That will mean pulling back his prosecutors and investigators from more complex and time-consuming cases.

Investigations done well will prevent future crimes, he says, pointing to the success his Firearms Trafficking Unit and Homicide Investigation Unit have had in tracking guns and gun crimes, especially in connection with drugs and gangs.

Bloomberg has led a nationwide Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign, Morgenthau says, but is now trying to force budget cuts which could hamper efforts to fight illegal guns in Manhattan. Morgenthau smiles at the irony, and says he has not found the mayor’s staff to have any sympathy for the situation.

The cuts in funding and investigations will create problems in many cases, with so many prosecutions resting on ever more complex uses of evidence, from DNA to cellular phone triangulation.

That will drive his conviction rate down, he said, and, in turn, potentially drive Manhattan’s and the city’s crime rate up to higher levels than they have been at for years.

“If you don’t have the people to investigate cases, you’re not going to get as many convictions. You’re going to have more people out on the street. And I think it’s a particular problem in white collar crime,” he said.  

Fewer white collar crime convictions, he warns, will mean less money coming into the city in recovered revenues. In fiscal years 2004-2007, they brought in $89 million to the state and an additional $93 million to the city in recovered taxes, fines from settlements and other payments—many times more than the $5.7 million he is seeking to keep in the budget for his office.

Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr. (D-Queens), chair of the Public Safety Committee, says most of his colleagues in government do not see Morgenthau’s argument.
“There are a few Council members who are on board, but most people in City Hall don’t truly understand the importance of the district attorneys’ offices and their need for additional funding,” he said.

Most make the mistake of believing that fighting crime is contingent only on police funding, according to Vallone.

“You’d think that after watching so much Law & Order, people would understand that there are two co-existent branches of law enforcement,” he said, with a grim chuckle. “But apparently, they don’t.”

Nor has Morgenthau’s insistence that his office could probably easily generate the revenues to pay for their budgets convinced many people, though Vallone said it should have.

“He’s claiming that he can go after trillions of dollars that are allegedly hidden from New York State,” Vallone said. “I have no reason to disbelieve it. I don’t know him to subject to whimsy often.”


After his many decades of experience in government, Morgenthau seems to see where this situation is headed. He expects the cuts to come.

So he has been pushing harder than ever for changes to the formulas which determine how much of the money recovered by cases his office prosecutes is directed back to his office to fund future operations. The office gets a portion—enough to make up for the amount lost since the 2003 budget cuts—but especially for recovered taxes, Morgenthau would like to see sizable increases in how much comes back. Under a revenue program negotiated as part of each year’s budget, the office is only eligible to receive 25 percent of the recovered money, up to $2.7 million, even with major settlements like the $40 million recovered in the Tyco case. The city’s four other district attorneys also receive portions of the recovered money. However, with so many of the people, companies and institutions that are subject to these decisions centered in Manhattan, the overwhelming bulk of the investigations are brought in by Morgenthau’s office.

Morgenthau does not want a higher percentage of recovered funds. But the ceiling, he said, should be eliminated.

“We think it’s in the interests of the city to do that. It isn’t as if we’d put the money in our pocket. We’d use it to make more cases,” he said.

That could lessen the impact of the impending budget cuts, he believes, and perhaps give him the resources to increase his office’s activity on new fronts, like tracking terrorist finances, investigating companies involved with sub-prime mortgages, pursuing negligence at construction sites and assisting immigrants.

And there may yet be other ideas, either for new laws or prosecutorial techniques—like his groundbreaking “John Doe” indictments, first used in 2000 to charge the DNA profile of an unknown man in a rape case. This innovation prevented rape cases with significant evidence from becoming ineligible for prosecution if the perpetrators could not be found within what was then a five-year statute of limitations on rape cases.

He admits that keeping up with all the technological advances in how crimes are committed and prosecuted is impossible, but says he feels comfortable relying on his staff to help him through those cases and methods which are beyond his grasp.

“I’d be kidding you if I said I understood all of them,” he said. “I don’t. The important thing is to have people around you who do understand them.”

Whatever he does, according to Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan (R), will have significance for all prosecutors. Himself a former assistant district attorney under Morgenthau, Donovan noted that Morgenthau’s vertical, rather than horizontal, management structure was already standard by the time he arrived on the job in early 2004. But Donovan instituted other innovations after the model of his old boss, including being the first to indict a John Doe DNA profile on Staten Island, three days before the statute of limitations would have ended. The rapist was caught one month later.

Inevitably, the Manhattan district attorney draws major media attention, Donovan said, and Morgenthau has used that to influence prosecutors around the city and across the country.

“A lot of the things Mr. Morgenthau does, they’re publicized for the rest of us to find out,” he said. “Mr. Morgenthau doesn’t call us to say ‘Hey, you should try this,’ but the coverage allows us to know what he’s doing.”

Morgenthau does not have a clear statistical yardstick by which he measures his success over his nine terms and 34 years in office. There is no one piece of data he tracks, nor any cumulative figures which he compares year to year.

Instead, he said, “it’s a sense that we’re making progress” that gives him confidence in the job he is continuing to do. And it is a job he wants to continue to do: despite recent rumors and speculation of his impending resignation or retirement, Morgenthau says he is planning to run again next year.

The last time he was up for re-election, in 2005, people assumed he was waging his last campaign, a swan-song ninth term for an 86-year-old man who had become a legend of local politics. He had had no opposition at the polls for 20 years, and appeared on the Democratic and Republican lines every four years.

Then Leslie Crocker Snyder, a former prosecutor in his office and criminal court judge, leapt into the race. He had been around too long, she said, accusing him of a prosecutorial approach that had grown musty and outdated. She defied all the conventional wisdom, the whispered assurances that she need only wait until 2009, when he would not run again.

The story made national headlines. Outside of the handful of gray lions in the United States Senate, politicians over 80 are generally punch lines or stunt candidates, when they exist at all. Morgenthau, though, waged an aggressive campaign against Snyder and, though he declined repeated requests to debate, showcased everything from the constantly declining crime statistics in Manhattan to photographs of him meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy from four-and-a-half decades earlier. He stumped at subway stops. He ran a commercial with the camera circling in on him, standing on the steps of the courthouse, his arms crossed and jaw locked.

Few expected that Snyder would actually beat Morgenthau, even with the New York Times editorializing that she should. In the end, the institutional and financial support he received made sure she did not: he won the Democratic primary with 59 percent of the vote, and went into the general election with no opponent.
Back then, a few reports noted with some incredulity that Morgenthau would not commit to calling 2005 his last campaign. And sure enough, he has been raising money to run for a 10th term, possibly to promote a very straightforward slogan, “90 in ’09."

The real plan, say those close to him, is to die in office. But to do that, he will need to keep winning, which most expect he will be able to do, even with Snyder planning to take him on again in 2009. And she will not be alone: Richard Davis, a private attorney with experience in the Treasury Department and United States Attorney’s office, is planning to run and resigned as chair of Citizens Union to do so. Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, is rumored to be planning a run as well. And there may be more, though most expect several interested and potentially heavy hitters, like State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx) and Cyrus Vance, Jr. to sit out any race which includes Morgenthau, lest they upset the Democratic establishment they will have to court to win the nomination when he is no longer running.

He may be an old man. He may be a legend. But he is also a politician, which means he plans to win.

Nor will next year’s race necessarily be his last, he said. Whether Manhattanites will be treated to a “94 in ’13” slogan, he does not know.

“My crystal ball’s not that good,” he said.

Though he clearly has no love for Snyder, he denied the speculation in the political world that he is staying in office in part to keep her from having an open seat to run for in 2009, as vengeance for running against him in 2005. If he wins but does not complete his term, the governor would be able to appoint a successor, who would then be an incumbent going into the next race. Morgenthau said there is no orchestrated effort to block Snyder.

“Nah,” he said. “That’s an exaggeration.”

Though he clearly seems inclined to have Snyder kept out of the office, Morgenthau said he has not put much thought into who, or even what kind of person, he might want to see succeed him as one of the nation’s busiest and highest-profile district attorneys.

After all, that would mean thinking of a race when he is not running himself.

“That,” he said, “is a long way down the road.”