"About the Office" - D.A.N.Y. (archive)

Part One: The Mural

With Thomas E. Dewey’s appointment as special prosecutor in 1935, the next sixty-five years included Dewey officially taking the job in 1938 before moving on to the governor’s mansion and presidential politics. Frank S. Hogan followed in 1942 and registered thirty-two years before leaving in poor health in 1974. After an interim stint by Richard Kuh, Morgenthau took office in January 1975. Twenty-five years later, he was still prosecuting.[1]

A mural I’d seen twice at the 1 Hogan Place headquarters reinforced this history. Black-and-white photographs and grainy headlines covered a wall outside the executive offices. From floor to ceiling were the decades of Dewey, Hogan and Morgenthau. Typed alongside the courthouse candids, press conferences and mug shots were three words:

"Prosecution, not politics."

But for all of the mural’s Here be crime fighters! bent, what about before 1935? By then, the District Attorney’s Office was over a hundred years old. There were earlier D.A.s., of course; I just hadn’t heard of them.

With little to base it on, I assumed that those years and decades were intentionally forgotten, embarrassment tied to Tammany Hall. Any pre-1935 mural would have glorified that century-plus political machine, a paean to gorging politicians and toothless law enforcement. Absent in any D.A. mural of the Tammany Hall days would have been the increasingly disenfranchised – minorities, women and the poor.

?Politics. Not prosecution.

?Then I began researching it.

Thirty-seven men, I discovered, preceded Thomas Dewey, beginning with D.A. Richard Riker in 1801.[2] Rather than being elected, he and the initial D.A.s were selected by the New York Council of Appointment and then, in 1821, by the Court of General Sessions. Only in 1846, did the state’s constitution call for a popular vote, which went to D.A. John McKeon.[3]

These early D.A.s occupied the office for as brief as eight days[4] and as long as eleven years.[5] Five D.A.s, including Riker and McKeon, returned to office twice.[6] More than a few served less than a year, while handfuls completed full terms of three and, later, four years. The most volatile year, 1883, saw four men in the D.A.’s chair with three cycling in and out between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Their experiences were as predictable as they were eclectic. Many went to Columbia for college, law or both. Riker and D.A. Barent Gardenier[7] were wounded in duels (separately). A few were soldiers in the War of 1812. Of those who later served the Union, D.A. John Fellows[8] served time…but as a Confederate prisoner.

D.A. John Rodman translated and published France’s Commercial Code.[9] D.A.s N. Bowditch Blunt and his brother Joseph almost served consecutive terms.[10] D.A. Vernon Davis taught Greek, mathematics and logic.[11] D.A. A. Oakey Hall was a New Orleans journalist and the author of a hit Christmas song of his time, “Old Whitey’s Christmas Trot.”[12] After a storied, though colorful career, Hall suffered a nervous breakdown and retired to London.

D.A. William Jerome[13] was cousins with Winston Churchill.

Unsurprisingly, they came from local and state politics. They became U.S. congressmen and senators. Presidents nominated them for positions domestic and abroad.

Presidents James Monroe and Zachary Taylor appointed D.A.s Rodman and Hugh Maxwell Collectors of Ports in Florida and New York, respectively. President James K. Polk installed D.A. Lorenzo Shepard[14] as one of New York’s federal prosecutors. President Franklin Pierce did the same for McKeon, and for D.A. Samuel Garvin,[15] he made federal prosecutor for North Dakota.

President Millard Fillmore offered D.A. (Joseph) Blunt the role of Commissioner to China, but Blunt declined. President Grover Cleveland nominated D.A. Wheeler Peckham[16] to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Peckham was unsuccessful. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed D.A. Eugene Philbin[17] to investigate deteriorating conditions on Ellis Island.

Of the sensational cases, there were plenty. New York society was atwitter in the spring of 1836 when D.A. Thomas Phoenix[18] prosecuted Richard Robinson for killing Helen Jewett with a hatchet. Robinson was nineteen years old and of moderate privilege, Jewett a prostitute to the upper class.

Phoenix’s jury failed to sympathize with his victim and her choice of profession and sided with the defendant and his choice of attorney, former D.A. Ogden Hoffman[19]…Phoenix’s predecessor.

Six years later, another jury agreed with D.A. James Whiting[20] after his defendant, John Colt, took his own hatchet and killed a local printer. The New York press dutifully reported Colt’s penchant for gambling and women as well as his connections with brother Samuel of Colt Revolver fame. The pinnacle moment came not when the foreman read, “Guilty,” but after, when Colt plunged a knife into his chest on the day of his hanging, thus avoiding execution.

With the rise of the news rag there was, of course, the “Trial of the Century.” In 1907, D.A. William Jerome prosecuted playboy Harry Kendall Thaw for murdering architect Stanford White, renowned for many designs including New York’s Washington Square Arch.

The case had all the markings for Hollywood. Thaw was heir to an oil and rail fortune. He was also wildly jealous of White, who years earlier had bedded model and former “It Girl” Evelyn Nesbitt, Thaw’s new wife. Thaw shot White after a chance encounter on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, another of White’s creations.

After a three month trial, D.A. Jerome’s closing argument ended with a theatrical flourish:

“And since my learned opponent has seen fit to go to the Scriptures for words that might guide you [the jury], let me, too, call your attention to two things that stand written as of old –

?‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I shall repay.’

And the other that came from amid the thunders of Sinai and which has embodied in the code of every civilized race for thousands of years.

‘Thou shalt not kill.’”[21]

Yet, for D.A.s like Jerome, there were plenty who reinforced my presumption of a prosecutor’s office in lockstep with Tammany Hall. Three served as Grand Sachems, Tammany Hall’s highest honor: D.A.s Lorenzo Shepard, Nelson Waterbury[22] and Thomas Crain.[23] Other D.A.s were more notorious.

D.A. Oakey Hall “was bound for the highest stations of governor and even president,” his obituary noted on October 8, 1898, “but for a strange flaw in his character, which led him often to do the opposite to that which he had apparently so elaborately planned.” That flaw included associating with his first successor D.A. Peter B. Sweeny[24] and Tammany lord William “Boss” Tweed.

“$weeny,” as then-popular cartoonist Thomas Nast dubbed him in Harper’s Weekly, was considered the brains behind Tweed’s legendary plundering of New York City. [25] Sweeny would twice be indicted for stealing while parks commissioner.

But D.A.s like Hugh Maxwell and Benjamin Phelps[26] shattered the fa?ade that the early D.A.s were all like Sweeny and Hall.

A Columbia grad and Army JAG veteran, Maxwell pursued Tammany Hall during the 1820s, scoring convictions for the millions of dollars taken from banks, insurance companies and public at large. Unlike duelers Riker and Gardenier, Maxwell declined when challenged to a gun fight; unsurprisingly, it came from a Tammany man.

Fifty years later, D.A. Phelps added to this counterbalance, building an office worthy of the men who’d occupy it in the 20th Century. He surrounded himself with loyal staff who pursued criminals “with a vigor and determination that speedily made itself felt.” On the night Phelps died, his former law partner, Vice President-elect Chester A. Arthur, sat by his bedside.

Phelps’ 1880 obituary would have fit nicely alongside the mural of his next century successors:

A Bright Career Ended. Death of District Attorney Benjamin K. Phelps. A Leading Lawyer and a Successful Prosecutor.

…Mr. Phelps’s accession to office marked a new era in the history of that most important branch of the City Government.

Under the regime of his Tammany predecessors, star chamber proceedings were the order of the day. The District Attorney – unless the applicant were some politician who had a pull in his district – was inaccessible to ordinary visitors, and citizens in quest of information found their entrance to the sanctum of the prosecuting officer of the county barred by impassable partitions and surly attendants.

Mr. Phelps signaled his accession to office by removing half a dozen ante-rooms and throwing the doors of every office in his department open to the humblest applicant. He received every visitor, no matter how poor or uninfluential, with courtesy, and patiently investigated every case brought to his notice. Thus it was that he became so popular with all classes of citizens, irrespective of politics.

The New York Times

December 31, 1880

(Emphasis added.)

Maxwell and Phelps were hardly alone,[27] but criminal justice and good government did ebb and flow. At the turn of the 20th Century, D.A. Asa Bird Gardiner cried, “the hell with reform!” in December 1900 and refused to prosecute anyone associated with Tammany Hall. For this defiance, then-Governor Roosevelt removed Gardiner from office.[28]

Two weeks later, another D.A. summed up the city’s predicament and the magnitude of the remedy. At a dinner titled, “The Causes of Our Present Municipal Degradation,” Democrats and Republicans listened to social reformers like Mark Twain rail against corruption and “the lust for gain and dishonesty.” Presiding over the evening was one of shortest-tenured D.A.s who had become a well-respected lawyer of his time, Wheeler H. Peckham.

By that day, January 4, 1901, Peckham was unabashedly anti-Tammany Hall. As special prosecutor, he had pursued both Oakey Hall and Boss Tweed. Representing New York, he’d won a whopping six million dollar verdict against Tweed for fraud. A prominent constitutional lawyer and former Supreme Court nominee, when Peckham rose to deliver his introductory remarks, his audience must have leaned in.

Peckham placed blame squarely on the “bad, wholly and irredeemably bad” elected officials and recognized, as The New York Times recounted the next day:

“…that no man strong enough had yet come to the fore who could oust them and change matters. Men with the determination and morality to put out the wrongdoers and to put in others who would see that the misrule should cease had not yet shown themselves.”

Peckham continued:

“I tell you, my brothers, that it does not make a copper’s difference whom you put in or whom you put out. No one man can create a force loyal to duty unless behind that man or that Commissioner there is the pressing force of public opinion which makes him feel that his position would be intolerable unless he did what was right. Organization, coordination of forces, these are the things that are most needed, and it is along these lines that the victory must lie.”

Thirty-four years later, that pressing force of public opinion arrived. It came in the form a Manhattan grand jury and empowered the man on whom the Manhattan D.A.’s Office would later date its birth.

Part Two: Happy Birthday[29]

On a fall morning in 1935, Manhattan’s newly appointed special prosecutor should have been lying in a pool of blood in an Upper East Side pharmacy, his breakfast still warm on the counter. He wasn’t, for across the Hudson River in a Newark, New Jersey morgue, another body lay cold, twelve hours dead and the victim of a gangland murder.

The dead man, Arthur Flegenheimer, was better known as the gangster Dutch Schultz. He would never extort, bootleg or kill again. The special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, finished his meal and headed to his office downtown, unaware of his good fortune.

If the Manhattan D.A.’s Office calls 1935 the year of its modern-day birth, October 25th was the day…and former D.A. Peckham’s foretelling of the events leading up to it, unmistakable.

Prohibition, despite its repeal in 1933, had created a vacuum that a fledgling New York mafia moved into before infecting entire industries. They exploited construction, trucking, sanitation, restaurants, nightclubs, the garment business, jewelry, railways and waterfronts. They created black markets in alcohol, drugs, gambling, fenced goods and protection and succeeded so entirely because they paid off or killed those who could have stopped them.

But while corruption’s five-hundred million dollar wet blanket suffocated the city, by the spring of 1935, the Depression had mercifully bottomed out.[30] Recovery was underway, and New York’s emboldened spirit was palpable.[31]

William Copeland Dodge, the newly elected District Attorney, must have sensed the changes around him and a very real opportunity for his office. Being openly pro-Tammany Hall, however, and an outlier to the reform victories of new Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Dodge quickly fell back on the comfortable pursuits of minorities and the poor.

For weeks, D.A. Dodge’s grand jury voted out petty crime indictments. But on May 13, 1935, Peckham’s first prediction came true. Public opinion burst, and men with determination and morality put the wrongdoers out.

Manhattan’s grand jury, led by foreman Lee Thompson Smith, barred Dodge and a junior assistant from their hearing room. They had heard enough street lottery (“numbers”), prostitution and bail bonding cases and demanded that the chief judge appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the highest levels of vice, racketeering and corruption.

There was a problem, though. Despite a list of names, no one wanted the job. Not one but two former federal prosecutors declined the offer. So did a former president of the New York City Bar Association. The son of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice also passed.

On June 2, 1935, Smith and the “runaway” grand jury, as D.A. Dodge was calling it, made another unprecedented move. They voted to disband.

Failing to see immediate responses from either Mayor LaGuardia or Police Commissioner Valentine, Foreman Smith offered parting words that must have stirred Peckham’s ghost:

“It has become evident to us that the uncovering of organized crime is not a mere police routine but a major undertaking requiring a prosecutor of unusual vigor and ability to devote his entire energies and skill to combatting the apparently well organized and richly financed criminal forces.”

By July 1, 1935, the call for Dewey, New York’s former federal prosecutor had reached Albany, and Governor Herbert Lehman was (finally) for it. D.A. Dodge was not. Neither was Tammany Hall boss Jimmy Hines, not coincidentally. Despite their opposition, Lehman offered Dewey the job, and he accepted. In the words of one Dewey advisor, it was the “opportunity of a lifetime.” In the words of the mafia, they thought Dewey “hopelessly mismatched.”

Between July and October, Thomas Dewey, as if from Peckham’s playbook, executed a level of organization and coordination of forces that harnessed a potent brand of public opinion, “civic outrage.” He was likely unaware that it would also become his greatest protector.

Dewey began by severing all outside connections to avoid even the appearance of conflict. He transformed ten thousand square feet of space in the Woolworth Building, independent of Dodge’s own offices. He employed phone operators, stenographers and law clerks outside of civil service pools and hired nearly a dozen accountants and more than seventy investigators.[32]

Dewey’s legal team of twenty lawyers was a mix of those “young enough to have the vigor…[and] old enough to have the experience.” All were highly educated. Frank S. Hogan, his later successor, was one of them. Commitments, in a nod to future arrangements, would last a year or two at most.

Dewey worked the intangibles, as well. He shrouded his efforts in secrecy and used it to create an indomitable aura. An agreeable press corps assisted. Through it all, Dewey’s goal was clear: making “himself more frightening than the racketeers.”

On July 30, 1935, he took to the radio for his first of many broadcasts, educating the public and fanning their desire for change. He also issued a broadside against his adversaries.

“The enemy was organized gangs of low-grade outlaws who lacked either the courage or the intelligence to earn an honest living. They succeed only so long as they can prey upon the fears and weaknesses of disorganized or timid witnesses. They fail, and run to cover, when business and the public, awakened to their own strength, stand up and fight.”

Dewey asked for the public’s help and got it. Witnesses overloaded phone lines and deluged his office day and night. For the hundreds of leads, he empaneled one and then, by September 1935, another “extraordinary” grand jury. As he did, he aimed high and began taking out leaders of extortion and corrupt heads in labor and government.

He was, in all aspects, an efficient man for a sloppy city,[33] and while not officially, by that October, Manhattan’s top prosecutor had changed addresses.

Wheeler Peckham would have been proud.

***

Dewey’s intended assassination was formulaic as far as mob hits went. Word was out that Dutch Schultz was a top Dewey target that fall. The two also had a history, Schultz enjoying the advantage with an upstate acquittal from Dewey’s federal prosecutor days. When asked of Dewey’s new position, Schultz crowed, “If the feds couldn’t get me, I guess this fellow Dewey can’t do much.”

Schultz’s confidence was short lived. Dewey, in perception and reality, was everywhere by then.

“I hope your ears fall off!” Schultz soon began shouting into the telephone, convinced (and rightly so) that his phones were tapped.

The October hit, Schultz explained to Charles “Lucky” Luciano and the mafia’s governing Commission, would take advantage of Dewey’s morning routine, killing him in the phone booth of his local pharmacy as he called into work.

Few liked the idea, and the Commission unanimously voted Schultz down. Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the Commission’s co-chair thought it crazy and said as much.

“Bumping Dewey would be like setting fire to everything we have.”

Schultz, enraged, accused them of stealing his territory and “feeding [him] to the law.”

“Dewey’s gotta go!” he yelled. “He’s my nemesis. He’s gotta go! I’m hitting him myself and in forty-eight hours!”

Schultz then stormed out.

That was October 23, 1935.

Whatever his intention, Schultz, in error, refocused the Commission’s attention. They knew he’d begun to take out his own men out of fear of betrayal. After a six hour debate, they decided. By a vote of five to one, Schultz…not Dewey, would die.

At 10:00pm that night, Schultz, two body guards and his accountant were ambushed in the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz lived another twenty-two hours and then died at 8:00pm on October 24th. During that time, his remaining lieutenants were shot and killed in a Times Square barbershop and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The next morning, October 25, 1935, Dewey awoke to a new landscape.

The mafia had blinked.

Dewey’s early accomplishments, like Peckham’s speech, had their own foretelling. As Manhattan’s chief prosecutor, Thomas Dewey would succeed thoroughly, and both he and the press soon forgot their earlier gag order. In doing so, the city and nation came to call him many things:

“The egomaniac.”

“Sir Galahad of Owosso.” (Michigan, his hometown.)

“Hitler in Boy Scout clothes.” (LIFE magazine)

“That son of a bitch.” (FDR)

“The little man on the wedding cake.” (Alice Roosevelt Longworth)

But none stuck more than the one that emanated from the five foot, eight inch, mustachioed son of a newspaper man and grandson of an orator:

“The Gangbuster.”

The legend that started with Dewey inspired a radio show in 1939, Mr. District Attorney. It aired the year after he officially became Manhattan’s District Attorney and ran until 1952.

The program began with the “Voice of the Law,” the show’s opening feature and moral compass:

Voice of the Law: Mister District Attorney! Champion of the people! Defender of the truth! Guardian of our fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!

Orchestra:?[Theme, up full]

[Echo Chamber]:?…and it shall be my duty as district attorney not only to prosecute to the limit of the law all persons accused of crimes perpetrated within this county but to defend with equal vigor the rights and privileges of all its citizens.

?Forty years later, the voice reappeared for a television show, Law & Order:

?“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”[34]

This time, though, it wasn’t Dewey or Frank Hogan, D.A.N.Y.’s first patron saint. Serving as role model was the former lieutenant commander and federal prosecutor, Robert M. Morgenthau. Fifteen hundred lawyers wanted nothing more than to join his office each year.

[Excerpt, "Getting to D.A.N.Y.: Lessons from a N.Y. Job Hunt". Paul Caulfield, copyright 2022. All rights reserved.]

[1] Robert Morgenthau would remain in office for a record thirty-four years, retiring in December 2009 at the age of 90.

[2] Before 1801, the New York Attorney General prosecuted crimes in what is now New York County.

[3] D.A. years: 1846 – 1850 and 1882 – 1883.

[4] John Vincent in 1883.

[5] Richard Riker, D.A. years: 1801 – 1810 and 1811 – 1813.

[6] Riker; Hugh Maxwell, 1817 – 1818 and 1821 – 1829; McKeon; A. Oakey Hall, 1855 – 1857 and 1862 – 1868; and John R. Fellows, 1888 – 1890 and 1894 – 1896.

[7] D.A. years: 1813 – 1815.

[8] D.A. years: 1888 – 1890.

[9] D.A. years: 1815 – 1817.

[10] D.A. years: 1851 – 1854 and 1858, respectively.

[11] D.A. year: 1896.

[12] D.A. years: 1855 – 1857 and 1862 – 1868.

[13] D.A. years: 1902 – 1909.

[14] D.A. year: 1854.

[15] D.A. years: 1869 – 1872.

[16] D.A. year: 1883.

[17] D.A. years: 1900 – 1901.

[18] D.A. years: 1835 – 1838.

[19] D.A. years: 1829 – 1835.

[20] D.A. years: 1838 – 1844.

[21] The jury deadlocked. A year later, a second jury found Thaw not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced him to life in a state hospital. A third jury disagreed in 1915 and set him free. Thaw died of a heart attack in Miami, Florida in 1947. With that, Hollywood bit, and in 1955, twenty-two year old Joan Collins played the part of Nesbit in The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing. The film’s title came from the titillating eccentricity White hung inside his midtown apartment.

[22] D.A. years: 1859 – 1861.

[23] D.A. years: 1930 – 1934.

[24] D.A. year: 1858.

[25] The trio of “Sweed, Tweeny & Co.” enjoyed the full brunt of Nast’s skewering caricatures in the early 1870s. Accompanying captions like “Tweedledee and Sweedledum,” they found themselves reduced to pencil and ink, which succeeded in raising the nation’s consciousness and hastened their exit from politics.

[26] D.A. years: 1873 – 1880.

[27] Randolph Martine (D.A. years: 1885 – 1887), a former Tammany member, took on corruption and graft. William Jerome, aside from his trial of the century, fought political corruption and was twice elected D.A. for it. Charles Whitman (D.A. years: 1910 – 1914) established night court and tackled election fraud before becoming D.A. His near unanimous re-election in 1913 was credited to his zeal for fairness and transparency that would vault him to the governor’s chair the following year.

[28] In a separate act of defiance, Gardiner, a Medal of Honor winner during the American Civil War, refused to return it after it was rescinded for the lack of corroboration.

[29] “Happy Birthday” draws extensively (including direct quotations) from Richard Norton Smith’s fantastic biography, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (Simon & Schuster, 1982). Portions of independent research are woven throughout.

[30] Between 1932 and 1933, unemployment hit twenty-five percent, which accounted for thirteen million people out of work. Average household incomes dropped forty percent, and the federal government counted more than sixty percent of all Americans as poor. Eleven thousand banks, almost forty-five percent of all U.S. financial institutions, failed. The GDP and DJIA cratered, losing thirty and ninety percent, respectively. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President and his New Deal marked the turning point.

[31] See, Appendix, “Changing New York.”

[32] His most experienced man came from the staff of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., part of a growing contingent of influential supporters.

[33] Everything about Dewey tailor made him for district attorney at that time. His successes would catapult him to the governor’s office and later, twice, the Republican candidate for president. Ironically, the characteristics that made him such a success as a prosecutor and governor would undercut his presidential aspirations. His D.A. successor, Frank Hogan, would disagree. “The best man didn’t win,” Hogan would tell his staff the day after Dewey didn’t defeat Truman in 1948. “Anyone who disagrees, I will personally throw through that window.”

[34] As the voice of Law & Order, Steven Zirnkilton holds the distinction of being the only actor to be in every episode of the flagship show and its three spin offs.?In another bit of pop culture trivia, while it’s his voice that became known for opening the show, it was missing from the pilot episode. Zirnkilton still got credit though as an onscreen detective!