It was the fall of 1984. I was a 29-year-old assistant district attorney in the storied Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. And my docket included an undercover investigation of a low-level public official—let us call him “Richard Roe”—who had been soliciting and receiving petty bribes. As I stepped off the elevator and into the eighth floor lobby of 100 Center St. one morning, I was immediately buttonholed by my bureau chief. “What’s happening with the Richard Roe case?” he demanded. “Who wants to know?” I asked. “The Boss,” he replied, using the moniker by which all of his employees referred to the legendary Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
I was immediately ushered into the Boss’s private office where he and all of his top lieutenants were seated around a large conference table. After drawing deeply on a large Cuban cigar, as was his wont, the Boss spoke. He had just come from an early morning breakfast with a top city official who had it on good authority that the very Richard Roe whom I had been investigating was involved in a major financial fraud with one John Zaccaro, a Manhattan Realtor who was married to Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be the nominated by a major political party to be vice president of the United States and the running mate of Walter Mondale whose electoral bid sought to deny Ronald Reagan a second term in office.
