“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.
Often Imitated. Never Duplicated. Button Guys of The New York Mafia...There's Only One!
