Loretta Lynch, a Nominee for Attorney General, Is Praised for Substance, Not Flash

When Kenneth P. Thompson was a young federal prosecutor in Brooklyn in the late 1990s, he was assigned to one of the biggest cases the office had ever handled, that of the police officers accused of beating and sodomizing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant.

The officers were white, Mr. Louima black, and the harrowing episode rekindled racial tensions and anger at the police in New York City in 1997.

So Mr. Thompson was taken aback when Loretta E. Lynch and another senior prosecutor in the case, which went to trial in 1999, told him he would be delivering the much anticipated opening statement. “That tells you a lot about Loretta,” Mr. Thompson, now the Brooklyn district attorney, said of Ms. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who was nominated by President Obama on Saturday to be the nation’s next attorney general.

The Louima trial is perhaps the clearest gauge of Ms. Lynch, 55, as a prosecutor, associates say: a calm, under-the-radar lawyer who could also fight hard when it helped her cause. During that case, she was willing to work in the background when needed, and she relied on a keen sense of courtroom tactics rather than rhetoric. Though race was a bitter undercurrent of the entire case, she rarely focused on it — until the defense tried to. Then she and her team took the potentially explosive issue head on.

“She really is the soul of grace under pressure,” said Zachary W. Carter, who was the United States attorney for the Eastern District during the Louima trial.

Mr. Louima’s was hardly the only high-profile case in Ms. Lynch’s career.

At the United States attorney’s office, she has overseen the prosecutions of public officials, including Pedro Espada Jr., a former Democratic New York state senator from the Bronx, and William F. Boyland Jr., a Democratic assemblyman from Brooklyn. Her office also prosecuted terrorism, gang and Mafia cases, among others.

In a city full of larger-than-life characters who conduct their careers like political campaigns, Ms. Lynch is mild, unflappable and somewhat unknowable. Even people who worked with her for years paused and then grasped for examples when asked about her interests: She watches TV sometimes, reads books, goes to the gym.

Ms. Lynch is married to Stephen Hargrove — who is a master control operator at Showtime — has two stepchildren and, according to a profile published in 2008, plays tennis to “de-stress.”

She has also worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which prosecuted high-profile suspects accused of committing genocide there in 1994.

Ms. Lynch has developed a reputation as a hard worker who is happy to remain outside the limelight, advising Justice Department officials and her staff on strategies. At news conferences, she often steps to the side to let others answer questions.

That apparent lack of political posturing now has her poised to be the most powerful prosecutor in the nation.

With no personal ties to President Obama, and two successful Senate confirmations in her pocket, she has drawn muted support from Republicans. If confirmed, she would be the first black woman to hold the attorney general post.

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At a ceremony at the White House announcing her nomination, Mr. Obama said Ms. Lynch “might be the only lawyer in America who battles mobsters and drug lords and terrorists, and still has a reputation for being a charming people person.” He added, she “doesn’t look to make headlines, she looks to make a difference.” And the Louima case, he said, was “one of her proudest achievements.”

In Washington, officials said Ms. Lynch is expected to stay in her current job during the confirmation process. If she is confirmed, the president will appoint a successor.

On the few occasions Ms. Lynch, who was born in Greensboro, N.C., has publicly discussed her background, the tales have been moving. In a 2012 speech, she discussed her great-great-grandfather, a free black man in North Carolina, who fell in love with her great-great-grandmother, a slave. “Unable to purchase her, in order to marry her he had to stay on and re-enter bondage,” she said.

Her grandfather was a sharecropper and a pastor who helped black people who had been falsely accused escape the Jim Crow South. And her father, also a pastor, held civil-rights meetings in his church. She remembered quizzing her mother about why she had picked cotton in high school. “And she looked at me and said, ‘So that you never have to,’ ” Ms. Lynch said.

Zachary W. Carter, left, the United States attorney in 1999, and his team, from left, Kenneth P. Thompson, Loretta E. Lynch and Alan Vinegrad, after the guilty verdict in the Abner Louima case. Credit Ruby Washington/The New York Times 

 

 

She has touched on the biases she has faced: Arriving at depositions after graduating from Harvard Law School, Ms. Lynch has said, she was often mistaken for the court reporter.

Personal admissions like those are rare. Ms. Lynch’s focus has always been her work.

Ms. Lynch, who before rejoining the Eastern District in 2010 was a partner in the New York office of Hogan & Hartson, has also made the office known for its terrorism prosecutions, particularly of individuals extradited to the United States. In 2012, her office prosecuted Queens men who had conspired to set off bombs in the subways, a plot federal officials called one of the most dangerous the city had faced; a man whom prosecutors called a key conspirator received life in prison.

But friends and associates say the Louima case best encapsulates her restrained yet adroit style.

The trial opened on May 4, 1999. Five police officers were charged in the case. Prosecutors said the officers had arrested Mr. Louima after a scuffle outside a Brooklyn club and beaten him in a car en route to the precinct, with the assault culminating in the precinct bathroom. There, one officer, Justin A. Volpe, forced an end of a broomstick into Mr. Louima’s rectum.

Mr. Carter had assigned Ms. Lynch, his No. 2, to the trial team, along with Alan Vinegrad, the other senior prosecutor, and Mr. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson gave the opening statement in a packed and tense courtroom, arguing that the police had escalated the violence as time went on.

Ms. Lynch “was very comfortable because it was exactly the right thing to do, to have Ken take the lead in opening and basically be the proxy for Abner Louima as the first communicator — direct communicator — to the jury,” Mr. Carter said.

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She was also skilled in handling the witnesses, who included police officers, clubgoers and medical experts. “She’s got top-flight education credentials, but she can talk like a real person to real people,” Mr. Vinegrad said.

Ms. Lynch was savvy about dealing with the defense, too.

Prosecutors had two police witnesses who could testify about how Mr. Volpe had bragged about the attack. The assumption, up until then, was that police officers would not testify against other officers. They were damning pieces of testimony, yet Ms. Lynch suggested refraining from mentioning them in opening statements or telling the defense about them until just before the officers were called to the stand.

Not knowing about the surprise witnesses, Mr. Volpe’s lawyer, in his opening statement, committed to a defense that Mr. Louima’s injuries were from homosexual sex. That defense fell apart after the officers’ testimony; Mr. Volpe pleaded guilty.

In early June, Mr. Vinegrad gave the closing argument, followed by the defense lawyers, who singled out Mr. Volpe as the lone torturer.

It was then the prosecution’s last chance, its rebuttal. Ms. Lynch had to dismantle the various defense lawyers’ arguments. Mr. Vinegrad remembers exactly where he sat as he watched Ms. Lynch, who was smooth and persistent despite the weeks of trial and strain.

Mr. Carter said of her approach, “She just disposed of them in very workmanlike fashion and in a way that was extremely effective.”

Mr. Volpe received a 30-year sentence. Another officer, Charles Schwarz, was convicted of assault and civil rights violations. The three other defendants were acquitted.

Some defendants, jurors and onlookers cried as the verdict was read. The prosecutors filed out of the courtroom and Mr. Thompson remembers some observers shouting slurs. “Loretta had her head held up high, with dignity,” he said. “She was just outstanding from beginning to end.”

Correction: November 8, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a contributing reporter. He is Matt Apuzzo, not Matt Appuzzo.