Robert Morgenthau, Longtime Manhattan District Attorney, Dies at 99

In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, 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 U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney.

From Jan. 1, 1975, when he took over from an interim successor to the legendary district attorney Frank S. Hogan, to Dec. 31, 2009, when he finally gave up his office in the old Criminal Courts Building on the edge of Chinatown, Morgenthau was the face of justice in Manhattan, a liberal Democrat elected nine times in succession, usually by landslides and with the endorsement of virtually all the political parties.

He presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget and a torrent of cases every year that fixed the fates of accused stock manipulators, extortionists, murderers, muggers, wife-beaters and sexual predators, and in turn helped to shape the quality of life for millions in a city of vast riches and untold hardships.

While he rarely went to court himself, Morgenthau, by his own count, supervised a total of 3.5 million cases over the years. Many of them were run-of-the-mill drug busts, but there were also highly publicized trials, like those of subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

By 2009, when he decided not to run for another term, Morgenthau was a virtual institution, despised by the enemies a prosecutor inevitably acquires but widely admired by New Yorkers and revered by generations of assistants he had hired and mentored, many of whom had gone on to judgeships and careers in politics and the law — extensions of his influence who regarded him as an embodiment of integrity.

His former protégés included Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court; Gov. Andrew Cuomo; former Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division; and Cyrus Vance Jr., who succeeded him as the district attorney.

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919. His grandfather, the real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau Sr., was President Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in World War I and a prominent voice against Armenian genocide. Robert’s father, Henry Jr., was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary from 1934-45, and his mother, Elinor (Fatman) Morgenthau, was a niece of Herbert H. Lehman, the New York Democratic governor and U.S. senator.

Robert grew up with his brother, Henry III, and his sister, Joan, in New York City, on the family’s farm in upstate East Fishkill, New York, and in a privileged world of estates, private schools and social connections, notably with the Kennedys of Boston and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, New York. He attended the Lincoln School in Manhattan and graduated from the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1937 and from Amherst College in 1941 with high honors and a political science degree.

Besides his wife, he is survived by the children of his first marriage, Jenny Morgenthau, Anne Morgenthau Grand, Elinor Morgenthau, Robert P. Morgenthau and Barbara Morgenthau Lee; the children of his second marriage, Joshua Franks Morgenthau and Amy Elinor Morgenthau; and by six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.