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Storied Name Faces Feisty Rival In N.Y.'s District Attorney Race

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  • Storied Name Faces Feisty Rival In N.Y.'s District Attorney Race

    STORIED NAME FACES FEISTY RIVAL IN N.Y.'S DISTRICT ATTORNEY RACE
    By E.J. KESSLER

    Forward
    Sept 1 2005

    A surprise endorsement has injected a sudden dose of suspense into
    a feisty campaign that could spell the end of one of New York City's
    most storied political careers.

    The race pits challenger Leslie Crocker Snyder, 63, a tough-on-crime
    former state judge and prosecutor, against incumbent Robert Morgenthau,
    86, Manhattan's longtime district attorney and heir to a Jewish
    political dynasty that stretches to the beginning of the 20th century.

    Until this week, political insiders were predicting that Morgenthau,
    despite his advanced age, would coast to victory against Snyder in
    the September 13 Democratic primary. Then, on Tuesday, The New York
    Times - which can make or break a candidate in Manhattan - endorsed
    Snyder, blowing the race wide open.

    "Now, she's got a real shot," said New York political consultant
    Jerry Skurnik. "I would still bet on him, but now it's a real race."

    Running for his ninth term, Morgenthau surely qualifies as the
    "institution" and "icon" he often is dubbed in the press. The district
    attorney, an intimate of President Kennedy, hasn't faced a challenger
    since 1985. He has held his position since 1974 and successfully
    prosecuted some of the highest-profile crimes in the nation.

    Snyder is a bigfoot in her own right. She was the first woman to
    work in the district attorney's office on murders and sex crimes.
    Appointed to the bench by then-Mayor Ed Koch in 1983, she made her
    reputation as a tough-as-nails jurist who threw the book at the
    mayhem creators of notorious drug gangs such as the Young Talented
    Children and the Natural Born Killers. She was so identified with
    stiff sentences that one gang named a brand of heroin - "25 to Life"
    - after her and adorned its packages with her likeness. (She proudly
    appropriated the moniker for the title of her 2002 memoir.) Her
    dangerous work took a toll on her family life: For many years, her
    children needed police protection.

    In Jewish terms, the Morgenthau-Snyder rivalry represents something
    of a battle for ethnic succession, even if it is one taking place at
    a time when such considerations have lost much of their significance.

    A scion of an august German-Jewish New York family, Morgenthau ranks
    as American Jewish royalty. His father, Henry Jr., was President
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt's treasury secretary, the only secretary to
    serve through all four of FDR's terms and only the second Jew ever
    to serve in a presidential Cabinet. He was a pivotal figure in the
    Holocaust rescue debate, the man who pressured Roosevelt to set up the
    War Refugee Board and the Nuremberg Tribunals. He served as national
    chairman of the United Jewish Appeal during the critical postwar years,
    when concentration camp survivors needed to be cared for and Zionists
    in Palestine were fighting to establish a Jewish state.

    Morgenthau's grandfather, Henry Sr., was a founder of the American
    Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the American Jewish
    Committee. He served as President Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to
    Turkey during World War I, and he played a pivotal role in rescuing
    the Zionist settlements from destruction when the Turks decided in
    1915 to eliminate their non-Muslim minorities in Armenia and Palestine.

    Morgenthau himself has played a role in Jewish philanthropy locally,
    spearheading, along with longtime pal and political ally Koch, the
    creation of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan's Battery
    Park. The prosecutor can point to long friendships with such Israeli
    figures as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the late Peter Malkin,
    the Mossad agent who kidnapped Adolph Eichmann. In an interview
    last week, prompted by the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, he waxed
    on about a trip in the late 1970s to Yamit in the Sinai ?- before it
    was returned to Egypt.

    Snyder's family, by contrast, came from Eastern Europe; her father
    grew up on Manhattan's West End Avenue and changed his name from
    Krakower, according to New York magazine. He was a professor of French
    Enlightenment philosophy and literature, schooling ?is daughter in
    European manners and the good life. She freely acknowledges she has
    almost no Jewish background or involvement.

    A media-savvy talking head who cuts a glamorous figure, Snyder advises
    the television show "Law & Order," and has provided on-air analysis of
    the O.J. Simpson and Scott Peterson murder trials, among others. She
    appeared for an interview at her lower Manhattan campaign office on
    a muggy day last week looking impeccably crisp.

    Snyder painted Morgenthau as too old, saying that his office has
    grown "stale" and "out of touch" with the latest prosecutorial
    methodologies. The eight-term incumbent, she said, "is the opposite
    of a reformer."

    Snyder faulted Morgenthau for what she described as a lack of focus
    on domestic violence cases, hogging white-collar criminal cases that
    could be prosecuted better by federal authorities and a paucity of
    minority attorneys in top positions in his office - all criticisms
    he parries with an array of arguments and statistics.

    In her interview with the Forward, Snyder added a new twist that
    seems designed to appeal to Jewish voters - who can constitute up
    to a quarter of the Democratic electorate in Manhattan. She said
    that Morgenthau "has blown several opportunities to do a lot more
    about terrorism."

    For example, she criticized the way Morgenthau's office handled
    the prosecution of El-Sayyid Nosair for allegedly assassinating
    former Jewish Defense League leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. Nossair was
    acquitted of murder in 1991 but remains in prison on terrorism and
    weapons charges.

    "Morgenthau decided that he, alone, deserved jurisdiction of the
    case, seized the 16 boxes of evidence, never bothered to have them
    translated, prosecuted the case as a straight murder instead of a
    conspiracy," Snyder said. "When those boxes were translated... three
    years later, they contained all sorts of exhortations to topple tall
    buildings, maps of the World Trade Center, how to build bombs."

    ěhile Snyder said that "in retrospect, it'd be too easy to say
    that maybe the [first World Trade Center] bombing could have been
    prevented," she blasted Morgenthau for what she said was his lack of
    cooperation with federal prosecutors.

    She continued, stating that four years after the September 11, 2001,
    attacks, "Morgenthau still has not instituted an anti-terrorism
    bureau. I would do that immediately."

    Morgenthau vigorously defended his record on terrorism prosecutions,
    and his decision to prosecute some cases that might have come under
    the jurisdiction of federal authorities.

    "The federal government often will not prosecute cases for political
    reasons," he said. "We don't have that problem."

    He described two cases involving unlicensed money transmitters and
    legitimate New York banks that were laundering money for Middle Eastern
    terrorists, including some who were operating out of the South American
    Tri-Border Area. "Those are things the federal government I don't think
    was aware of and certainly wasn't going to do anything about," he said.

    "I don't aspire to prosecute Bin Laden and his top henchmen, but
    terrorism requires money," he said. "What we're doing is trying to
    cut off the money supply.... We're not taking [these prosecutions]
    away from the federal government. We're doing it because it needs to
    be done."

    Morgenthau, who sat for an hour-and-a-half interview last week with
    the Forward in his office in the grungy Art Deco pile that is the New
    York County Criminal Court, looks his age. He's hard of hearing, and
    his trim physique and birdlike features display the depredations of
    gravity. But as most reports - and the Times editorial that boosted
    his challenger - have noted, he's as sharp and energetic as ever,
    still able to show off the encyclopedic command of facts and figures
    that impressed the presidents and dignitaries whose photos line his
    office's walls.

    In the interview with the Forward, he brushed off the age question.
    "I'm working as hard now as when I came, and I'm a lot smarter,"
    he said.

    He took aim at Snyder for her support of the death penalty - a
    liability in liberal Manhattan. Morgenthau staunchly opposes capital
    punishment as a "feel-good statute" that does nothing to reduce
    crime. Noting that in her memoir, Snyder wrote that she personally
    wanted to give the lethal injection in one case, he said, "Is that
    the kind of D.A. with good judgment?"

    Snyder allowed that the remark was "intemperate," but said she
    was merely responding "as a mother, a citizen and a judge" to the
    heinousness of the crime in question: a rape and murder.

    While backed by some leading lights, such as former United States
    Attorney for the Southern District Mary Jo White, Snyder seemingly had
    gained little traction. She provoked the ire of at least one newspaper
    editorial board recently when it became public that starting in the
    1990s, she steered $1.1 million in court fees for outside legal work
    to the law firm she subsequently joined, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres &
    Friedman. While she claimed that the fees were appropriate, critics
    said the awarding of the fees showed favoritism.

    On the other side, Morgenthau has been endorsed by a host of officials,
    including New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who called him
    the gold standard of prosecutors. The 500 attorneys in Morgenthau's
    office constitute a veritable machine, and a good part of the New
    York legal establishment either has worked for him or does not want to
    cross him. For all these reasons, one defense attorney, who declined
    to speak on the record, called Morgenthau "the most powerful man in
    New York State."

    Not to mention, crime in Manhattan has dropped precipitously during
    his tenure.

    Observers said that Morgenthau, who hitherto has avoided debating
    Snyder, would likely have to do so and "go negative" against his
    opponent, following the decision by the Times to endorse her.

    "We believe that there is a limit to how long any manager can stay
    at one job and continue to administer with vigor and openness to new
    ideas," the Times declared in its endorsement of Snyder. "Three decades
    is more than enough time for any executive to accomplish his or her
    mission.... With due respect for the incumbent's legendary tenure,
    it is time for a change."

    The endorsement surprised many political observers following the race.

    "Ten years ago, the idea that Robert Morgenthau wouldn't get The Times
    endorsement would be ridiculous," said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran
    Democratic political consultant. "The outcome [of the election]
    will be an indication of the cultural shifts in this city."

    --Boundary_(ID_wyIh8MsH/jhRNqTprm7UpA)--
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