Clerking for U.S. district judge William Herlands piqued Morvillo’s interest in working as a prosecutor. “This little tubby guy came in, and he was terrific,” Steve Hammerman says. “And loud. You didn’t have to be in his courtroom to hear his summation.” Hammerman joined the U.S. Attorney’s office right before Morvillo arrived in 1964. He’s now the NYPD’s top legal official, but the friendship began when they were both young prosecutors and deepened during the twenty years Hammerman was an executive at Merrill Lynch, where he frequently hired Morvillo as the financial giant’s outside counsel on regulatory issues.

The first case Morvillo handled as a lead prosecutor involved an allegedly false statement, on an application to become a merchant seaman. “I also tried a case where a guy stole $8 worth of slacks,” Morvillo says. “They had those kinds of cases to cut your teeth on. If you screwed it up, nobody cared and you went on to your next case.” Not that he screwed it up. “Yeah,” Morvillo says of his virgin trial, “I did win.” Within three years, he was prosecuting the first major scandal of the Lindsay administration, against a water commissioner accused of taking payoffs from construction companies.

As his four sons were born (two are now federal prosecutors in New York, one is a defense lawyer, and the other is a rock musician), Morvillo attempted to give himself a raise, working in private practice at Reavis & McGrath for two years. But he was soon bored—“none of the firm’s other lawyers had enough confidence to go and try a case”—and jumped back to the civil-service payroll, this time working for U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour Jr. (Karen Seymour’s uncle-in-law) as chief of the Southern District’s criminal division. “I got a real dose of securities-fraud work,” Morvillo says. “It was interesting. I also thought it was gonna be the crime of the future.”

In 1973, Morvillo teamed with John Martin and Otto Obermaier to open a firm specializing in high-end alleged wrongdoing. “There were no white-collar firms at that time,” Morvillo says. “But we saw the fact that more federal manpower was being deployed to white-collar crime.” Executive misbehavior has been very, very good to him: The firm, now called Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason & Silberberg, has grown from 3 lawyers to its current 36.

“Stewart’s need for control is much mocked. now she’s been forced to surrender command to a man who’s nearly as anonymous as she is famous. ‘He’s the boss,’ she says.”

Morvillo and his founding partners pragmatically exploited a business opening, but he says they also set up the firm with a moral posture. “No organized crime, no drugs,” Morvillo says. “Without those kinds of clients, we could walk into the U.S. Attorney’s office representing a defendant and not have somebody turn around and say, ‘Here come those sleazebags again.’”

Within the legal community, Morvillo is renowned for his discretion, keeping his corporate clients out of the headlines. He’s also fielded the odd high-profile case, where his signature talents are more visible: the deftness to map out complex strategies months in advance, and the dexterity to tear up those plans at a moment’s notice. In 1987, he was minutes away from cross-examining the key prosecution witness in the bribery case against John Zaccaro. Then Morvillo learned two crucial new pieces of information about the witness’s state of mind. He dropped his plans for a lengthy, antagonistic cross-examination and instead focused on two simple questions. The answers obliterated the government’s case, and Zaccaro was acquitted.

On the downside, Morvillo is also known for his temper. Michele Hirshman, now chief deputy to New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, opposed Morvillo in 1989 and beat him in a bribery case against Bronx congressman Robert Garcia (Morvillo won on appeal). “If Bob doesn’t think something is fair, you see it on his face,” Hirshman says. “Lawyers get mad all the time in trials when things get tense, but when Bob is angry, you know it. And judges don’t like to see faces in the courtroom; they think it sends a bad message to a jury.”

Hirshman, who praises Morvillo’s legal acuity, saw his bulldog tenacity again last year when he and lawyers from Skadden, Arps fought for Merrill against Spitzer. Morvillo favored toughing it out in negotiations even after analyst Henry Blodget’s internal e-mails about puffing up “piece of shit” stock offerings hit the newspapers. Though Merrill was forced to pay a $100 million fine, apologize to investors, and swallow most of Spitzer’s reforms, Morvillo remains defiant, blaming the attorney general for Merrill’s public-relations nightmare and blasting Spitzer as “unprofessional.”

“He went behind our backs,” Morvillo says. "What Spitzer did surprised us all, by putting the e-mails into the public arena while we were in the process of negotiating. The story is far more complicated than whether we decided to string it out or not string it out. But if it had been completely up to me, I woulda held out even longer.”

So is Morvillo right for Martha? His knowledge of federal-court tactics and securities law is unmatched, and his down-to-earth manner softens Stewart’s stony image. Yet Morvillo hasn’t grappled with anything like the Stewart media circus, and Miriam Cedarbaum, the judge presiding over the Stewart case, already appears impatient with Morvillo’s moods.