A long driveway winding past ancient maple trees leads to the last remaining link to Thomas E. Dewey’s stellar team of 1930s Gotham Gangbusters, the 20 idealistic young lawyers who worked for peanuts during the Depression and took down gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Lepke Buchalter and the Tammany thugs.
At the top of that Dutchess County, N.Y., driveway in a spacious old country homestead cluttered with books and decorated with world maps sits Thurston Greene, nearly 98 years old, the sole surviving witness to a brief but extraordinary era of New York legal history. Greene was the first, and youngest, attorney enlisted by then Special Prosecutor Dewey on July 25, 1935.
