经济学人逝者||在任时间最长的纽约曼哈顿区检察官罗伯特·摩根索

The long arm of the law

法律捍卫者

英文部分选自经济学人20190803期Obituary版块

The long arm of the law

法律捍卫者

Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died on July 21st，aged 99

在任时间最长的纽约曼哈顿区检察官罗伯特·摩根索于7月21日去世，享年99岁

If you asked Robert Morgenthau which of his prosecutions he was proudest of, you might expect him to give a half-smile, pause to knock out his cigar in the brown glass ashtray, and in his usual soft growl—a strange blend of modest, clipped patrician and Noo York—reply that it was his pursuit of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He trailed this shady outfit, laundromat of choice for narcos, terrorists and dictators, for years, before nailing it for fraud in 1991 and forcing it to close. All its assets were forfeit, and it lost $15bn. It was the biggest bank-fraud prosecution in world financial history, spanning 76 countries, and if you wondered what a da from Manhattan was doing in it, his answer came with more than a half-smile: “The long arm of the law.”

如果要问罗伯特·摩根索，他对自己办过的哪一件诉讼最为满意。你会看到他面露一丝微笑，略作停顿将雪茄灰弹到棕色的玻璃烟灰缸里，然后听他用一贯温柔低沉的嗓音，操着既谦逊，又字正腔圆自带贵族气息和纽约腔的语调告诉你，是国际信贷商业银行那件案子。国际信贷商业银行长期以来一直是毒贩、恐怖分子和独裁者的洗钱机器。经过多年的调查追踪，罗伯特·摩根索终于在1991年让国际信贷商业银行的诈骗罪名成立，并迫使其关门。银行所有资产被没收，损失高达150亿美元。那是世界金融史上最大的银行诈骗诉讼案，涉及76个国家。你可能想问：一个来自曼哈顿的检察官能在这件案子里发挥什么作用呢。他会笑得更开心地回答：“天网恢恢疏而不漏。”

However, it was not the case he took most pride in. He was shyly proud of them all—3.5m prosecutions, he reckoned, over the 35 years he had presided over the da building at the edge of Chinatown, from his desk with the famous five Rolodexes. He had gone after rapists, extortioners, drug-dealers, “Teflon John” Gotti, John Lennon’s killer and the ceo of Tyco International, who had drained his company of $100m. These raps stood out in a docket crowded with the usual misdemeanours of a huge, close-packed city. But every crime mattered equally to him because it mattered equally to the victim, whether millionaire investor or some poor woman fretting that drugs were being sold on her street. Anyone joining his team of prosecutors knew that this was the Boss’s bottom line.

然而，这并不是他唯一得意的案子。对自己办理的所有案件，他都略带羞怯地深感自豪——35年间，在唐人街边上的检察署大楼里，在摆放着5个大名鼎鼎名片的罗拉代克斯盒的办公桌上，罗伯特-摩根索处理了大大小小350万件诉讼案。他对强奸犯、敲诈者、毒贩等不法分子穷追不舍，其中包括“不倒翁”约翰·高蒂、杀害约翰·列侬的凶手以及卷走公司1亿美元的泰科国际首席执行官。在纽约这个拥挤的大都市里，备审案件记录表上多的是各种各样的小案件。在这些小案子中，上述几宗大案虽显得格外突出。但是对罗伯特·摩根索而言，所有案件都同等重要，因为案件无论大小，对受害者——无论是身价百万的投资者还是为街坊毒品泛滥而揪心的贫穷妇女——都至关重要。他诉讼团队的每一个人都清楚，这是罗伯特-摩根索的职业素养。

And every malefactor needed to fear the interest of the da’s office. No one was too rich, middle-class or well connected to escape his hawkish eye. If he thought a case could be brought, he would bring it, no matter what the public or any power group thought. If a teenager could be prosecuted for breaking into a grocery store, you also had to prosecute those comfortable people who put their money offshore and paid no taxes.

所有犯罪分子都有理由惧怕引起检察官的注意。不管是普通中产还是权贵，没人能因为有钱有势而逃过他鹰一般的锐眼。如果他认为应该提起诉讼，不管公众和当权者怎么想，他都会义无反顾的这么做。如果青少年闯入杂货店可以被起诉，那么，那些将钱财转移海外以逃避缴纳税费，生活安逸的精英们也必须被起诉。

Yet this was not the situation when he arrived in the job in 1975. The da’s office was a mess, as the whole city was, near-bankrupt, filthy and battered by violent crime. He immediately took on more prosecutors, streamlined their jobs so that each of them handled a case from start to finish, hired minorities and women, expanded the homicide department and brought in as many new evidence-testing techniques as scientists could invent. He added 34 more units, including identity theft, consumer affairs, “cold” cases, Asian gangs and firearms trafficking. By the time he left, having seen out 16 police commissioners, his team had swelled to nearly 500 prosecutors with a budget of $75m—and murders in Manhattan had dropped from 642, when he started, to 58. Thanks to “Morgy”, as the tabloids liked to call him, the city felt safe, and New Yorkers rewarded him with landslides whenever his job came up.

回望1975年，当罗伯特·摩根索刚刚接手这份工作时，情况并非如此。当时的纽约几近破产，到处肮脏不堪，暴力犯罪猖獗。而地检署的情况跟纽约的境况差不多，也是一团糟。他立马聘用了更多检察官，实施线性化管理，让每个检察官都可以把一件案子从头跟到底。此外，他还聘用少数族裔和女性，扩展凶杀调查部，并尽可能地引进各种证据检测技术。他增设了34个部门，包括身份盗窃案调查部、消费者事务部、旧案悬案调查部、亚洲帮派调查部和武器走私调查部等。到他离开时，已经换过16名警务专员，他的检察官队伍也扩大到近500名，年预算为7500万美元。凶杀案数量从他刚来时的642下降到58。小报亲切地叫他“莫叔”，正是有了他，这座城市才让人有了安全感。只要是他做的案子，纽约市民都会全力支持他以表达对他工作的肯定。

He also brought in a rackets bureau, along with a crowd of accountants to track down financial crimes. In his previous job, as federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York (where he indicted no fewer than 150 mobsters, including Anthony (“Tony Ducks”) Corallo, whose very nickname boasted how slippery he was), he had set up a unit to investigate Wall Street. It was long overdue. As da he spent a third of his budget in pursuit of money-launderers and stock manipulators, not forgetting those clean-looking tax lawyers and corporate accountants. His team had to act like vacuum cleaners, sucking up every least scrap of evidence, and like bully boys, threatening small fry with certain jail-time to persuade them to co-operate, which might land even bigger fish.

他还成立了反诈骗部门，引进专业会计团体共同追查金融犯罪。在他担任纽约南区联邦检察官期间（在那里他起诉了150多名犯罪分子，包括安东尼·科拉洛（绰号为“托泥鳅”，从他浮夸的绰号也能看出来他有多狡猾），他还针对华尔街专设了一个部门进行调查。这种调查其实早就该展开了。他将三分之一的预算用于追缉洗钱者和股票操纵者，连那些把自己伪装得干干净净的税务律师和公司会计也无法逃脱。他的团队必须像吸尘器一样，不遗漏任何细小的证据；有时也得使点儿流氓手段，以牢狱之灾威胁犯罪团伙中的小喽啰从而钓出幕后大鱼。

注：Antonio "Tony Ducks" Corallo (February 12, 1913 – August 23, 2000) was a New York City mobster and boss of the Lucchese crime family. Corallo exercised a tremendous control over trucking and construction unions in New York. （from Wikipedia）

Some thought he was biased politically. He was a liberal Democrat, after all, a Kennedy appointee (as well as Kennedy friend, from the days when he and Jack, two wealthy young scions of east-coast political dynasties, had raced sailing boats off Cape Cod). As such he twice ran briefly for governor of New York, but felt too awkward to shine on the stump. He supported gun control, never sought the death penalty and spent much of his time, pro bono, helping immigrants avoid deportation: good Democratic causes. But people’s politics had no importance. Justice did.

有些人认为他在政治上存在偏见。他毕竟是自由派的民主党人，是肯尼迪亲自任命的（他也是肯尼迪的朋友，两人都是东海岸政治世家的富家子弟，儿时曾经一起在马萨诸塞州的科德角比赛划船）。因此，他曾两次参与竞选纽约州州长，但是要在政治演说中大放光芒却让他感到很不舒服。他支持枪支管制，从未请求恢复死刑，花大量时间无偿帮助移民，让他们免遭驱逐：这些都是向善的民主事业。话说回来，政治取向如何并不重要，是否追求公正才是重中之重。

注：John Fitzgerald Kennedy 通常被称作John F. Kennedy 或 Jack Kennedy (即文中的Jack)，美国第35任总统。

His success rate was impressive. Three-quarters of his cases ended in convictions. Some were controversial, such as his prosecution of a player for the Giants on a gun rap, which brought him death threats from fans; or of Bernhard Goetz, who had shot at four young blacks who threatened him in the subway, for no more than gun-possession. Some people claimed he was indifferent to blacks, but it wouldn’t fly: he not only hired plenty as prosecutors in the da’s office but, on war service in the navy, he had brought in four blacks as gunners on one of his ships and resolutely refused his captain’s orders to demote them. Pressure always made him even more stubborn than he naturally was.

摩根索的胜诉率特别高。他提起的诉讼中，四分之三的案例罪名成立。有些也引发了争议，比如他因枪击事件起诉巨人队的一名队员，招致了粉丝们对他发起的死亡威胁。而在伯恩哈德·戈茨（Bernhard Goetz）案件中，主人公在地铁上受到四名青年黑人的威胁后，向他们开了枪，而他仅仅以非法持枪起诉。有些人认为摩根索漠视黑人权利，这种说法根本站不住脚：他不仅雇用了很多黑人检察官，还在海军服役时，在自己的一艘船上引入了四名黑人炮手，并坚决拒绝执行船长要将他们降职的命令。他本性执拗，巨大的压力让他变得更加倔强。

注：

1.rap: a criminal conviction 罪责；罪名

2.fly: to be successful 成功

He liked to get convictions. Any da did. Yet he didn’t count them up like notches on a gun, because he cared about justice more. In 1990, for example, he secured the convictions of five teenagers, four black and one Latino, for the beating and rape of a young woman in Central Park. They went to prison, but 12 years later another man confessed to the crime. Immediately, as da, he ordered a new investigation with DNA testing, which had not been available before. The testing came back 100%, so the ball game was over. His prosecution had failed, but justice had been done, and this exoneration pleased him just as much as his successes.

每位检察官都希望提起诉讼的罪名能够成立，摩根索也毫不例外。然而他从不在乎到底有多少罪名被成功确立，不会像数枪上有多少划痕一样来证明自己的功劳，因为他更在乎公平正义。例如，1990年，他让五个少年（四个黑人和一个拉丁裔）因在中央公园殴打并强暴一名年轻女性而获罪被关进监狱。然而12年后，另一位男子承认了罪行。检察官摩根索立即组织调查，使用了之前办案时还无法使用的DNA测试。测试结果为“100%符合”，案件最终水落石出。摩根索的起诉失败了，但正义却得到了维护。5名嫌犯判决的撤销带给他的快乐和他成功起诉的案件带给他的快乐一样多。

注：背景资料

https://www.guancha.cn/america/2014_09_07_264834.shtml

It all fell under the head of doing something useful with his life, part of a plea bargain he had made with the Almighty when, in 1944, his ship USS Lansdale had been sunk under him by German torpedoes. Once spared, he became a lawyer, then such a prosecutor that he inspired the da hero of “Law and Order”, a hit TV series. But he might have been a farmer, for his not-so-secret other life was on his grandfather’s 270 acres of orchards upstate at East Fishkill. There he spent his summers as a boy, escaping the heat of the city, and there with the same purpose he worked later, in overalls, returning to Manhattan with eggs and hard cider to sell. The long arm of the law, which criminals dreaded, also reached to prune apple trees and pick a fruit or two. McIntosh were best.

1944年，他的军舰USSS兰斯代尔号因遭到德国鱼雷轰炸而沉没，在危难之际，摩根索向万能的上帝许愿，若能得以生还，定要尽余生做一个有用之人。退伍之后，他便成为了一名律师，后来又成为了一代著名检察官。他的事迹被拍成热播剧《法律与秩序》（Law and Order）。但是他也可能去当农夫的，因为他不那么隐秘的闲暇生活是在他祖父位于纽约东菲什基尔（East Fishkill）北部一个占地达270英亩的果园中度过的。还是孩子的摩根索每年夏天都会去农场避暑。也正是秉持着要成为有用之人这一目标，他后来常常回到农场，穿起工装服劳作，还将鸡蛋和苹果酒带回曼哈顿去卖。他那令罪犯胆寒的“护法长臂”也曾修剪过苹果树，摘下了一颗颗果实：最美味的当数麦金托什红苹果。

注：McIntosh: McIntosh Red, or colloquially the Mac, is an apple cultivar, the national apple of Canada and the northeastern United States. It also sells well in eastern Europe.苹果

附：What is the difference between a prosecutor, an attorney, and a lawyer? 

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/business-career/legal/lawyers-prosecutors-and-attorneys

翻译组：

Alex，不务正业的理工男

Lucia，英语专业学生，经济学人爱好者

Sheri，坚信可以forever young的老年人

校对组：

Lee，爱骑行的妇女之友+Timberland粉

Dave，实力校对，肌肉男大学教师，文学翻译+CATTI一笔二口

Rachel Zhang，学理工科，爱跳芭蕾，热爱文艺的非典型翻译