Feature

White Power

As a young prosecutor, White could be merciless in spite of her affable front, according to Lefcourt. He recalls a case in which a client of his, a lawyer, was being tried for hitting a federal marshal. The lawyer's career hung in the balance, and he was sobbing when a guilty verdict was read out. But then the jury foreman announced to the judge that a mistake had been made and that actually they had found the man innocent. White, who was not even involved in the case but was in the audience to show support for the marshal, immediately stood up and objected. The judge overruled her, but White appealed the case because the jury had initially used the word guilty. She lost.

Jim Goodale, a First Amendment lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton, lured White away from the prosecutor's office in 1983. There she tried cases for clients like the New York Times. "She was a super-super-superstar," Goodale says. White defended, among others, Times columnist Sydney Schanberg in a libel case, and she was one of the first women to make partner at Debevoise.

White spent seven years in private practice but was clearly hankering to return to public service. She casually courted local power brokers of both parties who could help her get her dream job: U.S. Attorney. She could often be found in the company of former New York Law Journal owner Jerry Finkelstein, an old-style backroom operator who takes pride in making connections between lawyers and pols. "She would sit there and drink beer with Finkelstein," says one of White's former partners. "The average large-firm lawyer would never hang out with him, but Mary Jo can."

In 1990, Gary Naftalis recommended White to Eastern District U.S. Attorney Andy Maloney (a Bush I appointee), who immediately hired her as his chief assistant. "I have been accused of being the original male chauvinist," says Maloney. "I was looking for a chief assistant. She was making a half-million a year at the time. I met her at the University Club and she ordered a beer instead of a white wine like you ladies usually like. The rest is history. She became the first female chief assistant in the New York City area. The police commissioners love her. The FBI loves her."

FBI agents and police commissioners do indeed heap praise on her. "To me, Mary Jo is a prosecutor with a capital p," says FBI assistant director Barry Mawn, head of the New York office. "She's tough because she's thorough. She looks at every aspect of the investigation, and if anything is there, she will pursue it until she is satisfied."

"I think she genuinely loves being U.S. Attorney. She wants to be where the action is. She's not timid and she's not counting the days before her term ends."

White may love cops, but she is no Giuliani. "She doesn't use the office the way Rudy did," Lefcourt says. "There is none of that politicking." Her record on pursuing cases against the NYPD isn't notably aggressive, but White is not a knee-jerk supporter of the police; her office is currently handling a racial-profiling case against the NYPD. Yet like Giuliani, White can get mean when cornered. In one widely reported incident, she impressed Bratton and many others by standing up to Morgenthau in the perennial turf battle over big cases between the district attorney's office and the federal prosecutor in Manhattan. Morgenthau was working a major securities-fraud case in 1997 when White swooped in and indicted one of Morgenthau's informants in order to get the case back into her jurisdiction. "She stood up to Morgenthau in a strong fashion," says former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. "And people are aware of that."

Finkelstein introduced her to Jonathan Bush, the former president's brother, and they became tennis buddies. The Republicans at that time saw her as one of their own. The original plan was for White to be nominated to Brooklyn's Eastern District office by Senator Al D'Amato when Bush I was still in the White House. To ease the way for her, Maloney resigned a few months before his term was out so that White could take over as interim U.S. Attorney in 1992. But when Clinton was elected, the more prestigious Southern District position in Manhattan opened up, and since Clinton was looking for a black or female appointee, White's name came up. Once again, White's friends in high places -- this time, Democrats like Bernie Nussbaum, Clinton's first White House counsel, and Senator Daniel Moynihan -- put her over the top. Predictably, there were no objections from Republican senator Al D'Amato, who could have vetoed her appointment.

White still meets regularly with the old boys' crowd at the University Club. Finkelstein says he and his buddies choose more exclusive seating when she's expected, because they don't want her to have to meet someone she might rather not know. "We worry that someone might walk up to the table who is under investigation," he says. Although they all think of her as "a regular guy," Finkelstein says the men usually peel the Cohiba labels off their cigars before she arrives.

White is said to be proudest of the indictment and convictions of more than 24 people involved in global terrorism during her term. The convictions a few weeks ago of four men in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa that killed 224 and injured over 4,000 were only the latest in an ongoing probe that dates back to the World Trade Center bombing. White and her team of prosecutors, led by assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, successfully prosecuted the blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman for his role in the World Trade Center bombing; and they have charged Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, with masterminding several bombing plots. The World Trade Center investigation led White's office to Bin Laden, and White had a sealed indictment just months before the African-embassy bombings. The office is also currently investigating yet another terrorist act thousands of miles away, last year's bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen.

Passage of federal anti-terrorism laws during the nineties legally extended the reach of the New York FBI and prosecutors, and White has been aggressive in getting and keeping the investigations in the Southern District. "The laws address the protection of U.S. citizens overseas, and we now have the capacity to investigate overseas," says the FBI's Mawn. "In the eighties, we just looked at New York City. Now we look at what happens in the world. The FBI has the jurisdiction to do it, and Mary Jo is very aggressive in those types of investigations and prosecutions. That has led to her office being in the forefront of conducting these extraterritorial investigations."

The other big innovation at the Southern District during White's tenure is the new intensity with which corporate white-collar crimes are prosecuted. Defense attorneys who handle such cases complain that White has pursued a tough policy of driving a wedge between corporate entities and individual employees to win convictions and settlements. The new hard line was initiated after stiff new corporate-sentencing guidelines went into effect.

White's hardball position has resulted in corporations' routinely turning over internal investigations and refusing to pay legal fees for individual employees under federal investigation, or even firing employees who plead the Fifth Amendment. For example, in the early nineties, when Prudential Securities was under investigation for allegedly defrauding investors, Prudential wouldn't advance money to current or former employees to cover legal bills if they pleaded the Fifth or otherwise failed to cooperate with the government. Prudential eventually avoided indictment and paid a $330 million settlement, a sum that White personally negotiated. She also oversaw Operation Uptick, a federal investigation into the mob's Wall Street connections, charged billionaire investor Martin Armstrong with a securities-fraud scheme involving half a billion dollars, and successfully sued Con Edison for concealing evidence of asbestos contamination in a Gramercy Park explosion.

Fred Haefetz, a white-collar defense attorney, says the Southern District is not the only federal jurisdiction taking a tougher stance in corporate cases, but that White's office led the way. "With respect to corporations under investigation or whose officers are under investigation, they insist upon a waiver of privileges and rights, and in my opinion it's too aggressive. The Southern District has utilized all the leverage it has." Says another attorney familiar with these cases: "Corporate employees still have a constitutional right against self-incrimination, but apparently they don't have a right to employment."

The big question now is how long the Bush administration will keep White on the job. Nobody thinks the new president will appoint her for another full term, although she probably would accept such an offer. She will most likely be leaving before the end of the year, once the Clinton-pardon investigation has been completed.

White's next move could depend on her standing within the new administration. She'd like to remain in public service, and was even rumored to be interested in the FBI directorship. Another intriguing scenario has her running for Manhattan district attorney if Robert Morgenthau, who will be 82 next month, decides not to run for another term in the Fall. (This would not be unprecedented -- Morgenthau himself was Southern District U.S. Attorney from 1961 to 1970.) She could always go back into private practice and further enlarge the White-family bank accounts. But friends say she'd find private practice dull and predict she'll be back in public service when the right opportunity comes along, no matter who's in charge. If the Democrats get back in power, she could still be attorney general after all. Though it all might depend on what she does with one particular case this summer.