A Low-Profile Prosecutor
Loretta Lynch, Based in Brooklyn, Has Become an Insider at the Highest Levels of Law-Enforcement
By
Sean Gardiner
July 4, 2014 10:20 p.m. ET
U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch in her office in Brooklyn in May Kevin Hagen for The Wall Street Journal
For years, the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn has taken on cases involving political corruption, organized crime and terrorism—usually while flying under the radar.
Loretta Lynch is the only person to hold the title of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York twice, under two U.S. presidents. But she doesn't typically receive the publicity of her counterpart across the Brooklyn Bridge, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney based in Manhattan.
Ms. Lynch doesn't have one of the world's financial capitals in her jurisdiction. Notorious international terrorists mostly don't appear in her courtroom. And what happens in Manhattan usually gets more media attention than the other boroughs.
But that doesn't mean Ms. Lynch and her team haven't had cases with national implications.
In 2014, Ms. Lynch's office accused U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm of Staten Island of charges of tax evasion, and he has pleaded not guilty.
There have been arrests tied to the long-unsolved Lufthansa airline cargo heist that was part of the plot of the movie "Goodfellas." And there have been other political corruption cases, most notably the bribery conviction of New York state Assemblyman William Boyland Jr.
"A low-key, measured kind of personality is the way I would describe her," said Alan Vinegrad, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District "She's really smart, has a winning personality and she's very charming. But she can be very tough when she needs to be, especially in the courtroom."
In an interview, Ms. Lynch, 55 years old, described her life from her precocious, bookish and, "nerdy" childhood through a career in which she has become an insider at the highest levels of American law enforcement.
For the past four years, Ms. Lynch has served on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's 20-member advisory committee, which provides counsel to Mr. Holder on policy. In January 2013, Mr. Holder, whom Ms. Lynch said she counts as a friend, appointed her as chairwoman.
Ms. Lynch grew up in Durham, N.C, the middle child of three.
Her mother, Lorine Lynch, was a school librarian and filled their home with literature.
Her father, Lorenzo Lynch, was a fourth-generation Baptist minister. His sermons tended toward the thought-provoking but he could go "fire and brimstone" when necessary, she said.
Mr. Lynch also ran many times for public office but was always defeated, she said. Still, those campaigns gave her an early introduction to politics.
Her parents lived through the South's civil rights battles. As Ms. Lynch came of age in the 1970s, she recalls Durham as having put those integration struggles "pretty much behind us."
The racism that Ms. Lynch experienced was more subtle.
She attended an elementary school with mostly white students, and recalled scoring high on a standardized test. Administrators demanded the young Ms. Lynch retake it, she said.
Ms. Lynch's mother fought back, saying the score wouldn't have been questioned if her daughter was white. Ultimately, Ms. Lynch took the test again and, to her mother's "great delight," scored even higher, she said.
Ms. Lynch also should have been her high school's first African-American valedictorian, she said. But after much hand-wringing, school administrators decided she had to share the honor with two other top-scoring students—one black, the other white.
"We were all friends," she said, "and we all thought this is really dumb. But it became a huge deal."
She graduated from Harvard University, where her idea of "great fun" as an English major was reading Chaucer in Old English, she said. She went to Harvard Law School.
After graduation, she worked in corporate law in Manhattan. In 1990, she took a 75% pay cut to join the Eastern District. Big money was trumped by the chance "to do something that felt very meaningful," said Ms. Lynch, who now earns $157,100 each year. In 1998, after a series of promotions, she was named chief assistant to Zachary Carter, then the head of the office.
In July 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Ms. Lynch to succeed Mr. Carter. At the time, there were media reports that Ms. Lynch would appoint an independent monitor for the New York Police Department, related to an ongoing federal investigation into police brutality. No monitor was appointed, and she declined to comment on the police brutality investigation.
Before Ms. Lynch was named to the top job, she was tapped to join a career-making or -breaking prosecution: the Abner Louima police-brutality case.
In August 1997, Mr. Louima was sodomized with a stick in the bathroom of a Brooklyn precinct, according to testimony at the trial.
Mr. Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was in the precinct because he had been charged with assaulting an officer.
Officer Justin Volpe pleaded guilty to the attack on Mr. Louima midway through the trial and received a 30-year prison sentence. Other officers were convicted of lesser charges and still others were acquitted.
Although all the officers arrested were white, Ms. Lynch said the government didn't want to turn the trial into "a referendum on race."
But during closing arguments, a defense lawyer told jurors that his client was dating a black woman. Ms. Lynch accused the officer of "trying to hide behind the color of his girlfriend's skin."
She said the comment angered the officer's family. But, she added, "a trial is a battle and I still feel that it was an appropriate rebuttal."
Write to Sean Gardiner at
sean.gardiner@wsj.com
Hmm, but the Republican led majority Senate has to approve of that selection
Lets see breh 
