Loretta E. Lynch was appointed by President Barack Obama and on May 03, 2010, took the oath of office as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. In that capacity, she is responsible for overseeing all federal investigations and cases in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, as well as Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island. She supervises approximately 320 attorneys and support personnel.
For years, the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn has taken on cases involving political corruption, organized crime and terrorism—usually while flying under the radar. 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. 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.
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. The racism that Ms. Lynch experienced was 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.
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.
As an Assistant U.S Attorney, 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.
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.”