Robert Morgenthau — Manhattan’s former DA and US attorney — is a busy man.
A lawyer and philanthropist, his schedule is tight with luncheons, meetings with associates, fundraising galas and historical presentations.
Oh, and he also keeps tabs on Fishkill Farms, his family’s 270-acre upstate fruit and vegetable outfit.
“The best fertilizer,” he likes to quip, “is the owner’s footprint.”
Not bad for 99 years old.
“Too many things, he’s involved with,” Ida Van Lindt, his secretary of half a century, complained with an eye-roll on a recent afternoon in her boss’ cluttered law office.
“You know what they say,” Morgenthau answered back. “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
He’s walking with a walker these days, and a carton of Ensure sits on his desk among the stacks of paperwork where once, for many years, a cigar in a brown glass ashtray held pride of place.
“Once in a blue moon,” he winked of smoking stogies now.
But despite his difficulties getting around, Morgenthau still emeritus-chairs two boards — at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Police Athletic League.
“That was just last year,” he deadpanned of a black and white photo he keeps in his office. It shows him skipping rope, at age 62, with PAL kids in Harlem.
And he continues to go to work most weekdays at the Midtown offices of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he has remained of counsel since shortly after his 2009 retirement, after 34 years, as Manhattan’s legendary district attorney.
“I deal with the young lawyers on the firm,” he said of his current time at the office. “Try to be useful.”
That’s putting it a bit lightly.
Morgenthau is most widely remembered for his high-profile, greatest-hits prosecutions, many involving A-listers.
He has gone after more allegedly lawbreaking rappers than you could shake a mic at — Jay-Z, Foxy Brown, Lil Wayne, Ja Rule and Ol’ Dirty Bastard among them.
He put away John Lennon killer Mark David Chapman, subway vigilante Bernie Goetz, and Preppy Killer Robert Chambers — twice.
But these days he’s toiling in a less glamorous field — advising on hundreds of immigrant-deportation cases through Wachtell, Lipton and a law fellowship program, the Immigrant Justice Corps, which he helped found four years ago.
It’s a newly urgent, pro bono issue close to his heart.
“We represent as many undocumented immigrants as we can,” he said.
“If you’re not represented by counsel, you get clobbered in court,” he noted of the 750,000 pending immigration cases nationwide.
“If you plead guilty to being ticketed on a federally supported highway, that’s a deportable defense.”
But his most urgent case is his oldest, that of William E. Kuenzel.
“I have a death-penalty case in Alabama which I’ve been working on eight or nine years,” Morgenthau said of Kuenzel, who is awaiting execution in the 1988 shooting murder of a clerk during a botched convenience-store robbery.
“This guy’s been on death row some 30 years, and he’s absolutely innocent,” Morgenthau says.
As he ticks off the case’s many trial errors and witness inconsistencies, he sounds every bit the defense attorney.
“He was framed,” Morgenthau insisted.
Wachtell, Lipton specializes in white-collar cases, defending the same kinds of crooks that Morgenthau, throughout his 46-year law-enforcement career, specialized in prosecuting.
In particular, Morgenthau’s 1991 prosecution, as DA, of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International remains, in his words at the time, “the biggest bank-fraud prosecution in world financial history.”
Asked recently if it feels strange to have switched sides — and whether, after by his count overseeing more than 3.5 million prosecutions, he missed going after bad guys — he rumbled, “Not at all.” In fact, one of his biggest points of pride from his days as prosecutor remains an exoneration, that of the Central Park Five.
Based in large part on their confessions, five young teenagers had been convicted of the brutal 1990 rape and beating of a jogger.
“The Innocence Project didn’t respond to his mail,” Morgenthau said of Matias Reyes, an inmate who tried and failed repeatedly to confess to the horrific crime before getting the DA’s attention.
“It came back 100 percent,” Morgenthau said of giving Reyes a DNA test that linked him to the rape.
“And the ball game was over. We spent the next five, six months making sure everything he said was true.
“It made a lot of people unhappy,” Morgenthau remembered, smiling slightly.
Another thing he doesn’t miss from his days as DA — the death threats.
The case that generated the most threats? That was in 2008, a year before he retired, when then-Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself in the thigh at a Midtown club, and Morgenthau jailed him on a gun rap.
“I got more threatening letters for that one than anything else,” he said, sitting in his Midtown law office, where the walls are lined with black and white photographs.
Three in a row, from left to right, show him with LBJ, MLK and JFK.
A good portion of the wall facing his desk is covered with photos of the naval destroyers he navigated as a lieutenant commander in World War II.
One, the USS Lansdale, was torpedoed and sunk out from under him by German aircraft. Another, the USS Harry Bauer, was hit by a kamakaze’s 550-pound bomb that failed to explode, sparing the lives of him and his crew.
Given all he’s seen and survived, it seemed easy for him to brush off a few threatening letters from some irate Giants fans.
“Actually, the people who threaten you [openly] are less likely to be dangerous than the people who come after you in secret,” he noted.
Morgenthau was addressing a small gathering at the Center for Jewish History last month, and he told this story.
“Mysteriously, one morning, a couple of months ago, I looked at the end of my desk . . . and there was the diary” of his great-grandfather Lazarus Morgenthau.
“And I had no idea how it got there.”
He paused for the punchline.
“But I didn’t throw it away.”
Morgenthau was there to donate the 1842 diary — a tale of privation and perseverance, written in German — to the center’s Leo Baeck Institute on West 16th Street.
The diary had last been seen at the Fifth Avenue home of Morgenthau’s grandfather, Henry, who was US ambassador to Turkey during World War I.
Henry Jr., Morgenthau’s father, would become President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s treasury secretary.
Lazarus and his sons, Henry Sr. among them, had immigrated to the United States in the 1860s to escape the harsh treatment of Jews in Germany.
“There weren’t signs saying, ‘Welcome, Morgenthaus,’ but the doors were open,” Morgenthau told the small gathering at the center, which included his wife, journalist Lucinda Franks Morgenthau, and actor Tony Danza, a fellow PAL devotee.
“We, the country, treated immigrants so much better than we do now,” he told those in the room, urging them, given their shared immigrant beginnings, to go forward and help today’s newcomers.
“It’s payback time,” he said.