Robert Morgenthau's Lifelong Pursuit Against Organized Crime

"The secret to combating organized crime is elbow grease." - Robert Morgenthau, 1970

In 1944, during World War II, when Robert Morgenthau was a Lieutenant in the Navy, his ship the U.S.S. Lansdale was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers. The ship went down with many on board losing their life. But Morgenthau had safely jumped ship, swimming for nearly three hours in the dark waters of the Meditteranean Sea, helping save as many fellow seamen as he could until help arrived. As he was fighting for his life, waiting to be rescued, he made a deal with God.

"I was swimming around without a life jacket," he told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. "I made a number of promises to the Almighty at a time when I didn't have much bargaining power."

One of those promises was that if he survived, he would commit his life to public service.

And considering he almost lost his life two more times, - once in 1945 when a Japanese kamikaze plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on his ship, the U.S.S. Harry F. Bauer, and didn't explode, and another in 1952 when he stayed behind to write a brief instead of accompanying his law firm boss, Robert P. Patterson, on a doomed flight that ended up crashing and killing his boss - it was a promise he intended to keep.

Robert Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919. He came from a wealthy, prominent, and politically connected family. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a wealthy investor, was ambassador to Turkey under President Woodrow Wilson. His father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., a wealthy real estate tycoon, served as treasury secretary to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Robert Morgenthau

As a young man, Morgenthau hobnobbed with many others in the rich and famous set. He raced sailboats off Cape Cod with future president JFK, roasted hot dogs for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britain at the New York home of his friends, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and even served mint juleps to Winston Churchill and FDR at his family's farm in Dutchess County, New York while he was on a weekend pass from the Navy during World War II.

After working in corporate law for nearly 12 years, he joined JFK's campaign for president, and, in 1961, was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

He later teamed up with U.S. Attorney General, and later U.S. Senator, Robert F. Kennedy in the fight against organized crime

One of Morgenthau's very first organized crime prosecutions was against future Lucchese boss Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo in 1962. Corallo was indicted on charges of attempted bribery in order to influence a federal bankruptcy fraud case against one of his associates. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in state prison.

Later, in 1962, Morgenthau resigned from his office to run for governor of New York, but he lost to Nelson Rockefeller. However, JFK still saw him as a valuable asset and reappointed Morgenthau to his former post. He returned with a vengeance.

In 1963, he went after famed attorney Roy Cohn for perjury and witness tampering in a stock fraud probe but lost the case. In return, Cohn slapped Morgenthau with an 11-page "indictment" of his own, accusing Morgenthau of hiring an "international bounty hunter" to target and find "something" on Cohn, making deals with defendants in return for information against him, and promising gangsters immunity in exchange for information on him.

Cohn, by the way, had once been a government prosecutor and chief counsel to U.S. Senator and anti-communist crusader, Joseph McCarthy, before choosing a different path in life, representing the likes of Carmine Galante , Bill Bonanno, Tony Salerno, John Gotti, Mario Gigante , and others before he was disbarred in 1986.

Morgenthau was also an advocate of enacting a federal law permitting the use of wiretaps. During an interview in 1963, while vacationing in Binghamton, New York , he said wiretaps could be one of the "most important" weapons prosecutors would have in their battle against organized crime. At the time, while wiretapping was "legal," per se, authorities couldn't use the information culled from wiretaps in their prosecutions.

A Career-Long Pursuit

Battling organized crime became a career-long undertaking for Morgenthau, much to the chagrin of New York's mobsters and their associates. The Lucchese Family, in particular, became a favorite target of his (even in later years.) But the rest of the Five Families of New York weren't off his radar, either.

According to the 2022 book Morgenthau by Andrew Meier, back in 1963, Morgenthau sat down with Robert F. Kennedy and devised a plan to combat organized crime.

His strategy consisted of using a team of assistants to sort the names of various reputed organized crime members and assign each man to one of the Five Families. Then, "he would launch a series of grand jury investigations; every crime group would get its own probe. Once his assistants had mapped the names, they would subpoena them all, en masse - and apply pressure on the bosses as never before."

His plan soon came to fruition.

In February 1964, Morgenthau empaneled a grand jury to target the Lucchese family and investigate their stranglehold of the garment industry as well as Tammany Hall politics. For months, he subpoenaed Lucchese Family members, including Johnny Dio, Jimmy Doyle Plumeri , Sally the Blond LoProto , Carmine (Mr. Gribbs) Tramunti, and others, and paraded them before the grand jury. He granted them immunity, and when they still refused to talk, he held them in contempt and threw them in jail.

During these highly-publicized hearings, one judge claimed he found a dog's head on the porch of his house in New York while one prosecutor claimed that wiseguys or their associates were making veiled threats against him through his father. But none of these allegations could be substantiated.

And when boss, Tommy Lucchese finally made his way to Court two weeks into the hearings, Bobby Kennedy also made an appearance, upping the publicity ante.

Robert Morgenthau with RFK in 1964.

But despite the pressure, Morgenthau and his team couldn't break the Lucchese boss, or any of the other men who were subpoenaed, including the Genovese Family's Vincent (Jimmy Blue Eyes) Alo . He pleaded the Fifth 134 times, prompting one prosecutor to call it, “the performance of a lifetime."

Even when Tommy Lucchese was called back to appear before the grand jury in July 1965, he held his ground, conferring with his attorney 83 times, and still refused to answer questions. Although he had already subpoenaed more than two dozen Lucchese Family members, it was all to no avail. And when Tommy Lucchese died in 1966 of a brain tumor at 67 years old, it seemed Morgenthau had lost the battle.

In 1968, Morgenthau again went after Tony Ducks Corallo. This time, the case involved James Marcus a former New York City water commissioner who had fallen into loanshark debt. Corallo had then used the debt as leverage to bribe Marcus. He was convicted once again and sentenced to 3 years in federal prison.

In 1969, Morgenthau prosecuted and won a conviction against Carmine DeSapio, the infamous and corrupt former powerbroker of Tammany Hall.

And according to a profile of Morgenthau in the 1969 issue of Signature Magazine , during the six years he had held the position of U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York, Morgenthau had convicted more than 100 members of organized crime for a variety of charges including narcotics, bail jumping, theft, extortion, union corruption, interstate gambling, bribery, stock fraud, and counterfeiting.

Some of these convictions included Genovese members Joseph (Joe Cago) Valachi for narcotics in 1962 (a year later he became an informant); and Settimo (Big Sam) Accardi, who was sentenced in 1963 to 15 years for narcotics and bail jumping charges; Lucchese Family members Vincent Rao, who was sentenced to 6 years in prison for perjury (the grand jury hearings); John (Big John) Ormento, who was sentenced to 40 years for narcotics; and Johnny Dio, who was convicted to 5 years in prison for bankruptcy fraud.

Others slayed by Robert Morgenthau's sword included 38 additional members of the Genovese Family, 18 additional members of the Lucchese Family,18 members of the Gambino Family, 5 members of the Profaci (later Colombo) Family, 3 members of the Magaddino Family of Buffalo, and 2 members of the Patriarca Family of Providence, Rhode Island. This at least according to this 1969 profile.

Ousted by Nixon

But despite his successes, by the end of 1969, Morgenthau had been fired by President Richard Nixon (Morgenthau resigned under increasing pressure from Nixon) and returned to private life. He was replaced by Whitney North Seymour, Jr., who had promised Morgenthau he would continue the fight against organized crime. Seymour, Jr. had been part of the team that prosecuted Frank Costello for tax evasion back in 1952.

After the death of famed Manhattan D.A. Frank S. Hogan in 1974, who had himself served in that office for more than 30 years and was another major racket buster we'll be taking a look at in the future, Morgenthau was elected to take over the position in 1975. He maintained that office for the next 34 years until his retirement in 2009.

At one point before he was ousted by Nixon, Morgenthau claimed he had indicted over 400 mobsters and associates during his tenure as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Over his decades-long career, Morgenthau's office also brought cases against other high-profile defendants, including rappers Busta Rhymes and Lil Wayne; Joe Halderman, the 48 Hours TV producer who tried to blackmail David Letterman; Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a global enterprise founded by Middle Eastern investors who funneled money for drug cartels, terrorist groups, and dictatorships; subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; Robert Chambers, the "Preppy Killer" or "Central Park Strangler"; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

He was also the man in charge in the infamous, and later controversial, Central Park Five Case where five Black and Latino teenagers were sent to prison for the rape and assault of a White female jogger in Central Park in New York in 1989. In 2002, after an imprisoned serial rapist and murderer confessed to the crime, Morgenthau launched an investigation, which included DNA testing (a technology not available in 1989,) and requested a New York State Supreme Court vacate their conviction. The men were later exonerated and received a $41 million settlement for their wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

In later years, Morgenthau's office would prosecute Gambino boss John Gotti, investigate the mob's influence in the construction of the Javits Center, and team up with Rudy Guiliani to break the mob's control of the carting industry.

But perhaps it's his pursuit of Carlo Gambino's sons, Thomas and Joseph, that is most interesting.

Creating a Ruse

After determining the Gambino brothers' role in the garment trucking industry, Morgenthau had his team open a fictitious garment shop called Chrystie Fashions to get right into the mob's thick of things in the garment district. This ruse allowed him to successfully obtain a court order to install wiretaps in the Gambino brothers' trucking office , which led to them being indicted on extortion and racketeering charges in 1990. They ultimately worked out a plea deal twenty-two days into their trial.

In 2009, he again brought indictments against the Lucchese Family, this time against Joseph DiNapoli and Matthew Madonna for illegal gambling. They were both convicted and sentenced to prison.

That same year, Morgenthau opted not to seek another term as Manhattan's D.A., deciding instead to retire to his family's farm in Dutchess County, New York.

Back in 1970, after he had been ousted by Richard Nixon, he mused to a New York Times Magazine reporter about a "novel" idea he had regarding the fight against organized crime:

"Maybe we ought to declare a moratorium on the prosecution of organized crime for five to 10 years,” he said. “And let them become so rich that they will give up their predatory instincts, and they’ll be much more concerned about getting their children into college, law school, medical school, and so forth, and they’ll have lost their desire.”

A novel idea, indeed, but one that, obviously, never happened.

Robert Morgenthau died on July 20, 2019, 10 days before his 100th birthday.

Robert Morgenthau’s Lifelong Pursuit Against Organized Crime

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