For former federal prosecutor Alan Vinegrad—called “the embodiment of a real law-enforcement officer” and “a cruel sonuvabitch” for his handling of one high-profile case—the best thing about the job was the opportunity to combine public service and “Perry Mason moments.”
By David Porter | Illustration by Anastasia Vasilakis
The federal civil-rights trial of Charles Price and Lemrick Nelson Jr. was winding to a close in early 1997, and lawyers for the two defendants in the highly charged Crown Heights murder case had just pulled a maneuver straight out of the O.J. Simpson trial. Parading Nelson in front of the jury, attorneys Christine Yaris and Trevor Headley had him try on the pair of blood-stained pants he was alleged to have worn on the night in 1991 when a rampaging band of youths killed Yankel Rosenbaum during rioting stemming from an auto accident earlier that day. In contrast to the famous bloody gloves that Simpson had made a show of barely squeezing onto his hands, Nelson stepped into the pants, pulled them up and then let go of the waistline, watching as they dropped below his knees. The startled looks on some of the faces in the jury box led many observers in the courtroom to make the logical assumption that the prosecution’s case against the two men had just been severely damaged, if not put on life-support.
At the prosecution table, Alan Vinegrad W’80 looked on impassively. One of the hallmarks of a good attorney is the ability to anticipate potential land mines and sidestep them; prosecutors in particular must preserve the integrity of their case against the attacks of defense attorneys who seek to confuse and confound a jury whose grasp of the law may be tenuous to begin with.
A prosecutor’s job, then, is not that much different from that of a movie director who maps out every tiny step in advance while preparing for all sorts of potential deviations. In the script for U.S. vs. Lemrick Nelson Jr. and Charles Price, Vinegrad, the Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, had anticipated just such a demonstration by the defense, and over the previous weekend had written his own Hollywood ending.
In a two-hour summation, Vinegrad called the defense’s ploy “theater of the absurd” and did his own show-and-tell by walking in front of the jury with news photographs of Nelson wearing the jeans on the night of Rosenbaum’s murder, the bloodstains clearly visible. He elicited chuckles from the courtroom by joking that “maybe that’s why the cops were able to catch him so fast, because he was holding onto those baggy pants.” Then, as the summation reached its climax, Vinegrad showed that he, too, could borrow from the Johnnie Cochran playbook.
“If the pants don’t fit, I don’t give a …” He paused for effect and then continued, “You fill out the rest.” The jury found Price and Nelson guilty of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights, and a year later the two men were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
Vinegrad describes this as a “Perry Mason moment,” harking back to the 1960s television series in which the actor Raymond Burr, as Mason, invariably turned the most intractable witnesses into quivering masses, extracting emotional confessions from the guilty against impossible odds. In truth, though, the Nelson summation was more than theater: It was the kind of moment prosecutors secretly dream about when they close their eyes at night, when the endless hours and obsessive preparation that precedes a major criminal trial pays off, the moment when they can turn around the defense’s own bombast and use it as a cudgel.
Yet however revelatory the moment was in showcasing Vinegrad’s knack for preparation and his flair for the dramatic, he considers it merely an affirmation of the prosecutor’s position in the legal cosmos: a crime was committed and someone must be punished, without regard to fashion or political correctness. There is really no other way to serve the public in a democracy, and it is that sense of public service, along with an abiding belief in the sanctity of the American judicial system, that has informed Vinegrad’s career in public office. It is what lured him back to the Brooklyn prosecutor’s office in 1999 after a detour to private practice, and it is what has earned him respect and plaudits from friends and foes, including Cochran, who praises him in his current book, A Lawyer’s Life, and Zachary Carter, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District from 1993-99, who says Vinegrad is “one of the brightest attorneys I’ve ever had the pleasure to practice with and observe.” He has been called a “hard-nosed, tough prosecutor” by legendary defense attorney Gerald Shargel, and counts among his admirers former Simpson Dream-Teamer Barry Scheck, who now devotes his energies to the Innocence Project, which uses new DNA-testing techniques to overturn unjust convictions. “I tell them my project is the ‘Guilt Project,’” Vinegrad says with a smile.
Not all of the reviews have been glowing. When exhibited by a prosecutor, the same zealousness that keeps defense attorneys in Armani and Fendi is often viewed as evidence of obsession or personal vendetta. It comes as no surprise, then, that Vinegrad, described by New York Times reporter William Glaberson as “the most controversial prosecutor New York has seen since Rudolph W. Giuliani was handcuffing Wall Street traders,” endured some of the most sustained and vituperative media attacks in recent years for his part in the prosecution of the police officers implicated in the August 1997 assault on Abner Louima, in which the Haitian immigrant was sodomized with a broom handle. Consequently, for many New Yorkers he will forever be remembered as the man who sent Officer Justin Volpe to prison and presided over the lengthy prosecution of Officer Charles Schwarz that ended in September with a controversial agreement in which Schwarz pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of conspiracy to commit perjury.
If the Louima case and the publicity it generated wind up as the defining moment of Vinegrad’s career in public service, it is not because he sought the spotlight. “He’s always been so humble. He has an aversion to braggadocio; he’s not one to toot his own horn,” said Joan Harrison C’81, a literary agent in Los Angeles who has known Vinegrad since high school on Long Island and dated him briefly at Penn. “He usually minimizes his own accomplishments. His success hasn’t gotten in his blood. The last time I saw him, he spent an hour showing me his two sons’ Beanie Baby collection.”
In addition to the Louima and Crown Heights cases, some of the more high-profile successes included busting the Vietnamese “Born To Kill” gang; prosecuting the kidnappers of 13-year-old Shai Fhima; and overseeing the bringing of extortion and obstruction of justice charges against legendary Genovese crime family boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. Vinegrad has also gained convictions in numerous other cases involving drug cartels, street gangs, organized crime, white-collar crime, and computer crime. By the time he left the Brooklyn office last fall for the private sector after more than 10 years in public service, he had been awarded the Henry L. Stimson Medal from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service. Earlier this year he joined the New York office of Covington & Burling, a prominent Washington, D.C.-based white-collar criminal-defense firm.
“I hope this was not the most perfect job I ever have, but it’s been an extraordinarily good job, and a fulfilling job,” Vinegrad said on his next-to-last day at work in Brooklyn. He had already vacated his spacious office and moved into a more modest space to make room for incoming U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, and was looking forward to, among other things, going to Disney World with sons Daniel, 12, and Joey, 9. “It’s had everything you could want as a lawyer—public-interest cases, where you can really make a difference and do the right thing. Especially now: You’re talking about eliminating the Mafia, the war on drugs, white-collar crime, terrorism. These are extraordinary times to be working as a federal prosecutor.”
Several weeks later, as he sat in the dining room of his tidy Colonial on a street of tidy Colonials (and the occasional Tudor) in a town where some residents’ property taxes run as high as $50,000—not his, he is quick to add—Vinegrad looked a bit like a man taking his first deep breaths after being submerged underwater for six months. The changes in his life had been by turns subtle and dramatic. The latter: He didn’t have to wake up and see his name and reputation torched daily in the tabloids. (Actually, he didn’t have to wake up at all, but he did, taking the train into New York and down to Washington, D.C., to start networking for his return to private practice.) The former: Friends with whom he had fallen out of touch were now slowly re-emerging. “People are talking to me about [the Louima case] for the first time,” he said. “A lot of conversations used to begin with, ‘I know you’re probably really busy, but … ’ I think people may have been avoiding me a little bit because I was so heavily involved and there was so much pressure and publicity. I think a lot of people just stepped back and gave me space, whether I needed it or not. Now, they’re coming out of the woodwork. I don’t think I really appreciated the pressure that must have been there during the case.”
It has been an eventful journey for the skinny kid from East Meadow, New York, who arrived in West Philadelphia in the fall of 1976 as a budding accountant with plans of one day going into tax law. Being only 16 years old—he took accelerated classes as a youngster and moved ahead a grade—only made the adjustment to college life more daunting, but Vinegrad gradually found his niche. Like college students everywhere, many of Vinegrad’s cherished Penn memories are of the types of extra-curricular activities that can make one cringe in hindsight. He and a few friends braved the cold to get fifth-row season tickets at the Palestra his junior year, which wound up being the year Penn’s basketball team made it all the way to the NCAA Final Four. (“We slept out for a day and a half to get them. You know, with sleeping bags, and controlled substances which I will not identify.”). He spent quality time at Smokey Joe’s and the old Doc Watson’s on 39th and Sansom Streets (“a ’70’s version of a mosh pit”), where, among other life skills, he learned how to chug beer with no hands. An accomplished violinist who played in the University Orchestra for three years, he was taught how to play the guitar by roommate Mark Rachesky C’81. After practicing diligently over Passover break his sophomore year, he found himself playing outside in the lower Quad and at the Quad coffeehouse.
As a senior he moved off-campus with four housemates to 4103 Locust Street and made it to Koch’s Deli “almost every Saturday.” (Upon returning 20 years later, Vinegrad remarked, “Bobby Koch remembered me for real, which was kind of scary. He wasn’t making it up.”)
After graduating magna cum laude from Wharton in 1980, Vinegrad took his accounting degree and worked for a year at Price Waterhouse in New York. A clue that perhaps he was cut out for the courtroom came the summer after graduation when he took the LSATs and surpassed his own expectations. Not wanting to waste the opportunity, he applied to Harvard, Penn, and New York University. Harvard wait-listed him (“As a matter of fact, I’m still waiting to see if I got in,” he says); Penn and NYU accepted him. He chose the latter over his alma mater, graduating magna cum laude in 1984.
While he was in law school his sister, Susan, introduced him to Betsy Schwarz, a Rochester native two years his senior who worked for a garment manufacturer in Midtown Manhattan. “I thought he was cute,” Betsy remembers, but they didn’t start dating for another two years, and it was two more years before things started to get serious. By the time they married in 1988, Vinegrad had spent a year clerking for Federal Judge Leonard Sand in Manhattan, during which time he worked on the massive Yonkers, New York, desegregation case. Then he moved into private practice as an associate with the small firm of Meister, Leventhal and Slade.
It was at Meister that Vinegrad’s future career path began to take shape. During a routine case involving the owners of a taxi-and-limousine company that wound up dragging on for three years, he gradually realized that not only was he more interested in criminal than civil work (“My vision of a lawyer was of trying cases, not sitting around writing contracts and reviewing documents,” he recalls), but that his sense of public duty dictated that he join the “Guilt Project” and become a prosecutor.
The private-to-public route, with its guarantee of lower pay for longer hours, was the opposite of the norm for most young lawyers, but for Vinegrad it made perfect sense. As he explains, it is not so much a question of temperament or personality that dictates which side of the aisle a lawyer ends up on—neither defense attorneys nor prosecutors have a monopoly on passion or zeal, or good judgment—but rather of philosophical orientation and where you see yourself in the overall picture. In 1990 Vinegrad became an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District, and within four years was named chief of the office’s Civil Rights litigation division.
His first criminal trial in Brooklyn, which also happened to be his first criminal trial anywhere, was a six-week insurance-fraud case in which one of the defendants was David Greenberg, a former cop nicknamed “Batman” who had been the subject of the 1970s movie The Super Cops. “I realized I just loved it, putting the pieces together, working with witnesses,” Vinegrad recalls. He also relished the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses, which he calls “the closest thing to what you see on television.”
One of Judge Raymond Dearie’s clerks on the Greenberg case was Lauren Resnick, who eventually became an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District and partnered with Vinegrad during the Louima case. “What’s unique about him is that he’s a truly dedicated public servant,” she says. “It gives me pride to think of that. He’s always eager to help, even now.” Resnick also discovered that the slightly built, outwardly mild-mannered Vinegrad could turn on the theatrics in court when necessary. “When he’s in court, it’s game-time,” she said. “He’s more assertive, and definitely in control. Very dramatic. He can change the tone of his voice, or his body language. He’s enthralling.”
Vinegrad’s Penn and high-school classmate Joan Harrison saw the early signs when she and Vinegrad participated in Model Congress in high school. “He was an ace debater,” she recalls. “Utterly convincing, deeply passionate, and thoroughly informed.”
The Eastern District of New York encompasses all of Long Island, though most of the action centers in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, home turf for the Italian, Russian, and Asian organized-crime empires. Vinegrad got a taste of what was in store for him less than two weeks after he joined the Brooklyn office in 1990 when colleague Kathy Palmer received a booby-trapped briefcase allegedly sent by an Asian gang member. When he ascended to the interim U.S. Attorney position in 2001, he did so with the knowledge that his predecessors had had their own baptisms by fire: In the first week of Zachary Carter’s tenure, the ship Golden Venture washed ashore carrying 310 Chinese political refugees, and Loretta Lynch assumed office not long before Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed after taking off from John F. Kennedy Airport. All Vinegrad had to confront in his first three months in office in 2001 was the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil and the most divisive police-brutality case in the city’s history.
“Some days went by quietly, but very few,” he says. “It made for a level of stress that you got used to. But I definitely looked forward to the challenge going in every day. You lived and breathed the job.”
Vinegrad’s first high-profile trial in Brooklyn came in 1992 and involved the “Born To Kill” gang, which was running a $13 million-a-year criminal enterprise in Chinatown. Betsy Vinegrad remembers her husband leaving the house at seven each morning and “once in a while” getting home in time to put one-year-old Daniel to bed by 8:30 at night. He took two days off in four months, but he gained the convictions—as well as a reputation for staying one step ahead of his adversaries. “He’s got an extraordinary strategic sense, and he’s compulsively detailed without being distracted by minutiae,” says Carter. “I’ve known people who fall in love with every fact, but then they can’t pare it down and make it understandable to a jury. He can. He’s the total package.”
When Abner Louima was assaulted in the bathroom of the 70th Police Precinct house in Brooklyn in August, 1997, Vinegrad was a few months away from taking a breather and returning to private practice (“We all have to leave and refuel financially, to take care of our families,” as Carter characterizes it). It took him a few months at his new job to realize that he missed his old one, and when Valerie Petroni, who had assisted Vinegrad in the Crown Heights trial, left as head of the Eastern District’s Criminal Division in the summer of 1998, Vinegrad retraced his steps from eight years earlier.
“I hadn’t been entirely satisfied with my experience at the time,” Vinegrad says, “and I was thinking what I wanted to do about it. I thought [Valerie’s job] was the best job in the office, and a great challenge. So I thought maybe I should just go back and do that.”
Within days of returning to the Brooklyn office, Carter asked Vinegrad to be part of the team that would prosecute the four police officers implicated in the attack on Louima. “It was the most important litigation that our office was involved in,” Carter says. “It was a delicate, important, high-profile investigation and I needed someone who I had extraordinary confidence in.”
The Louima case would consume Vinegrad’s life for the next four years, through four trials and yards of screaming headlines, most of them focusing on his pursuit of Officer Charles Schwarz, who was alleged to have held Louima down while Volpe assaulted him with a broomstick. Schwarz’s original 15-year conviction was overturned in June 2001. In July 2002 he was found guilty of one count of perjury, but the jury deadlocked—reports said it was 11-1 in favor of conviction—on two civil-rights charges. Vinegrad’s decision to retry Schwarz in September, which led to Schwarz’s plea on the eve of yet another trial, enraged the prosecutor’s detractors, who saw him as the epitome of the over-zealous prosecutor, a Travis Bickle in pinstripes. Vinegrad maintains he took no joy in prosecuting police officers, and points out that he agreed to a reduction in Schwarz’s final sentence. “When convictions get reversed, you retry the case, unless something has changed,” he says. “If I had my druthers, we would have tried the case, the verdict would have been upheld, and we would have moved on to something else.”
Prosecutors rarely win popularity contests unless they are busting child-porn rings, but Vinegrad nevertheless was dismayed at the level and personal nature of the attacks. Months after the fact, it is still a topic that causes him some degree of personal distress. “My skin got thicker,” he says with a slight ruefulness, “plus my hair got grayer and my stomach lining got thinner … It was extremely unpleasant prosecuting cops. I tried to do the best I could, and prosecute the case vigorously. For that, I was pilloried in some corners. The fact that it became personal really bothered me. That was unfortunate.”
Though Vinegrad eventually stopped reading most of the newspaper accounts of the Louima case, his friends and family—and the rest of the New York metropolitan region—were treated to his being compared to Javert of Les Miserables by the Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff and called a “viper” and “Vinegrad the Vicious” by New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy. Dunleavy also quoted a New York priest calling Vinegrad “a cruel sonuvabitch” who should be arrested.
The denouement of the Schwarz case in September brought a new round of criticism, this time from both sides: Supporters of Louima felt Schwarz had been let off too lightly, while police-department apologists steadfastly maintained he had been prosecuted unfairly from the outset. As frequently happens in high-profile cases that inflame public passions, the question of what Schwarz did or did not do inside the 70th Precinct bathroom that night almost became of secondary importance. Now, thanks to an unusual agreement that prohibits Schwarz, his lawyers, and family members from speaking publicly about Schwarz’s alleged involvement, the whole truth may never be known.
“Mr. Vinegrad did not win the core of this case, nor should he have,” Hentoff concluded in the Voice in an article titled “Schwarz Silenced—Vinegrad Caves.” The Post’s Dunleavy was predictably outraged. The Voice’s Wayne Barrett came to Vinegrad’s defense, however, noting that three juries had found Schwarz guilty of at least one felony, and that “with two young children to support [Vinegrad] gave up a far more lucrative position to come back to public service. Incredibly, this embodiment of a real law enforcement officer has been more sullied by the media mudslingers drawn to this high-profile case than the man nailed by 36 ordinary New Yorkers.”
As civil rights cases go, a strong argument could be made that the public interest was served in the Louima affair, particularly considering New York’s lamentable conviction rate in cases involving white cops and black victims. Vinegrad defends the terms of the agreement, saying that it came out of a mutual desire to end the long and rancorous public debate about the case. “Everyone else can still talk about it,” he says. “It wasn’t like something was done in secret, or rulings were made in secret. We had multiple trials about his alleged role. There was more disclosure than any case in recent history. Schwarz was never really the heart of the case. Volpe was,” he adds, “and he’s in jail for 30 years. Viewed as a package, it’s an excellent resolution.”
As Vinegrad embarks on the next stage of his career—and moves to the other side of the courtroom as a defense attorney—he sums up the case for the prosecution this way: “You can’t forget that the people you’re prosecuting are human. They’re people, and sometimes you empathize; but sometimes, when they’ve done vile things, empathy doesn’t enter into it. There’s room for compassion, but at the appropriate level. The jails are filled with people who can offer explanations for what they’ve done.”
David Porter C’82 writes for the Associated Press and is the author of Fixed: How Goodfellas Bought Boston College Basketball.
