The Southern

An unprecedented look inside the nation’s most influential prosecutorial office—the Southern District of New York—and how it has defined and defended the American justice system. Situated at the fulcrum of money and power in America’s financial capital, federal prosecutors in the SDNY have handled the nation’s most complex and consequential cases since its inception—nearly a century before the Department of Justice even existed. As Wall Street’s “Top Cop,” Southern has set the national standard for prosecuting white-collar crime. Dubbed the “killer elite,” its prosecutors have dismantled entire mafia families, broken terrorist cells—from the first World Trade Center bombing to today—and taken down arms dealers, narcotraffickers, violent gangs, cybercriminals, crypto barons, and corrupt politicians. No target has been too powerful, no case too complex for these best and brightest of lawyers to handle. Appointed by the President, Southern’s leaders and their staffs form an extraordinary—sometimes notorious—roster: a Nobel Prize winner; two future Supreme Court justices (Felix Frankfurter and John M. Harlan); a New York City mayor (Rudolph W. Giuliani); two Security and Exchange Commission Chairs (Mary Jo White and Jay Clayton); two FBI Directors (James Comey and Louis Freeh); Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; three New York City police commissioners; a U.S. Attorney General (Michael B. Mukasey); and a Secretary of War (Henry L. Stimson). Fallible, ambitious, principled, and bold, Southern’s leaders have spent two centuries building an institution grounded in a single idea: that democracy’s anchor is an impartial system of justice. In an era of open efforts to politicize the justice system—efforts that have shocked prosecutors of every political stripe—The Southern is the dramatic story of an institution that has operated as a citadel of independence for over two hundred years.