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      Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels and a Courtroom Time Capsule From 2018

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      In what may be the last chapter in their unlikely story, Mr. Avenatti cross-examined Ms. Daniels for several hours during his trial on Friday.In the hallowed halls of Manhattan’s two federal courthouses, where some of the nation’s most prominent and historic trials have been held, defense lawyers and prosecutors regularly deliver soaring oratory and witnesses testify with deep emotion.Then there is the trial of Michael Avenatti.Not so long ago, Mr. Avenatti was a high-flying lawyer representing the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in litigation against then-President Donald J. Trump. But a lot can change in four years, and on Friday, the unlikely pair who had once teamed up to try to take down the president were instead trying to take down each other.Mr. Avenatti, who is representing himself in the trial, on charges that he stole nearly $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, had a lot of questions for his former client, a prosecution witness. Some of them were about ghosts.“How do you speak with the dead?” Mr. Avenatti asked at one point on Friday.“I don’t know,” Ms. Daniels replied. “It just happens sometimes.”“Do the dead speak back to you?” Mr. Avenatti asked.“Yes,” she responded.The bizarre spectacle — a disgraced lawyer who once thought he could be president grilling a pornographic film actress about her belief in the occult — was in some sense a fitting and perhaps final chapter in a deeply unlikely story.Pugnacious and direct in his bid to make Ms. Daniels seem like a crackpot, Mr. Avenatti asked whether she believed in a “haunted” doll that could talk and calls her “Mommy, Mommy.”Yes, she said.He asked whether she had said, in graphic and explicit terms, that she looked forward to Mr. Avenatti’s being raped in prison.She responded affirmatively.As she answered Mr. Avenatti’s questions, Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, spoke clearly, directly and without seeming defensive.Rounding out the courtroom time capsule of a peculiar moment in American politics, Michael D. Cohen — who, as Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about her claim that she had an affair with Mr. Trump — watched from the spectator gallery. (Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Daniels’s claim.)If Mr. Avenatti seemed less combative and energetic than he did when he was a regular on the cable news circuit several years ago, it could be because his next stop — regardless of the trial’s outcome — is prison.Last July, he was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars after being convicted in February 2020 on charges of trying to extort more than $20 million from the apparel giant Nike. He is to surrender to the authorities on Feb. 28.The voluble Mr. Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence in 2018 representing Ms. Daniels in her litigation against Mr. Trump. Ubiquitous on cable news shows, Mr. Avenatti missed no opportunity to torment the president and even flirted with the idea of running for president himself, galvanizing some Democrats who saw him as an able adversary to the president.“I’m strongly considering it,” Mr. Avenatti said in August 2018. “Democrats need to nominate somebody who can actually beat this guy.”At the time, Ms. Daniels fawned over her pitbull lawyer.“I’ll put it this way,” she told The New York Times that summer. “Every time I watch him work, I think, This is what it must have been like to see the Sistine Chapel being painted. But instead of paint, Michael uses the tears of his enemies.”But almost as rapidly, Mr. Avenatti crashed: He was arrested the following March in the Nike case; two months later, he was indicted again in the case involving Ms. Daniels. That same year, he was arrested in a fraud case in California.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Igor Fruman, Former Giuliani Associate, Is Sentenced to One Year in Prison

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      Mr. Fruman was at the center of a campaign to damage then-President Donald J. Trump’s rivals, but was brought down by campaign finance charges.Well before the 2020 presidential election, when he was an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Igor Fruman was on the front lines of a shadowy diplomacy campaign to advance then-President Donald J. Trump’s interests and damage his political adversaries.But an unrelated and much more mundane matter brought down Mr. Fruman: federal campaign-finance laws.Last year, Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty to soliciting foreign campaign contributions by asking a Russian tycoon for $1 million for American political candidates. And on Friday a judge in Federal District Court in Manhattan fined Mr. Fruman $10,000 and sentenced him to one year and one day in prison, in addition to the more than two years Mr. Fruman has spent in home confinement since his arrest.Addressing Judge J. Paul Oetken, Mr. Fruman said he had spent the time since his arrest reflecting on his actions.“It’s a shame that will live with me forever,” he said. “But I can assure you, my family, and the government that I will never appear before yourself or another courtroom again.”The sentencing closed a chapter for Mr. Fruman, who was arrested in 2019 at Dulles International Airport, along with a business partner, Lev Parnas, as they were about to leave the country.The two Soviet-born businessmen had worked their way into Republican circles in 2018, donating money and posing for selfies with candidates. They had dinner with Mr. Trump at his hotel in Washington, D.C., and became friendly with Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.Eventually, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were connected to investigations and an impeachment, assisting Mr. Giuliani as he attempted to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr., who ended up defeating Mr. Trump in 2020.Mr. Giuliani credited Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas with arranging a meeting with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s former top prosecutor and a key figure in Republican attacks on Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.And Mr. Fruman’s connections helped lead to a meeting between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangements. Mr. Lutsenko, who was helping Mr. Giuliani unearth damaging information about the Bidens, also wanted Marie L. Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, to be removed from her post. She was recalled in 2019.Efforts to oust Ms. Yovanovitch became a focus of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial and led to a federal criminal investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He has denied wrongdoing.But before serving as foot soldiers in Mr. Giuliani’s campaign, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were entrepreneurs who decided to create a company that would import natural gas to Ukraine.Prosecutors said they wanted to bolster the company’s profile and began donating to Republican candidates and groups. Soon Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were fixtures at rallies and donor gatherings in places like Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida club. They were a memorable pair. Mr. Fruman, who was born in Belarus, spoke a mix of Russian and choppy English. The Ukrainian-born Mr. Parnas exuded sincerity.A donation of $325,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action, was reported as coming from the company formed by Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, called Global Energy Producers. That broke campaign finance law, prosecutors said, because the money did not come from the company but from a loan Mr. Fruman took out.Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were also accused of soliciting the Russian tycoon Andrey Muraviev to send one million dollars to them so they could make campaign donations. The goal, prosecutors said, was to influence candidates who would help a fledgling cannabis business the three had discussed.Communications obtained by prosecutors show that Mr. Fruman repeatedly pressed for that money, providing a bank account and routing number for a company controlled by his brother. Records assembled by prosecutors show that two companies owned by Mr. Muraviev wired $500,000 apiece to the company controlled by Mr. Fruman’s brother.Mr. Fruman also sent exuberant messages to Mr. Muraviev and others, at one point including a picture of himself with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who was then a candidate for the office, and writing: “Today Florida becomes ours forever!!!!” A week later Mr. Fruman wrote: “Everything is great!! We are taking over the country!!!!”According to prosecutors, more than $150,000 of Mr. Muraviev’s money went to Republican candidates in the 2018 election cycle, including Adam Laxalt, who was running for governor of Nevada and later supported an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there.Mr. Laxalt, who did not become governor, said he was suspicious of the donation and sent a check in that amount to the U.S. Treasury.After Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were arrested in 2019, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not know the two men.Aggrieved, Mr. Parnas broke publicly with Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, turning over material to House impeachment investigators. In October a jury in Manhattan convicted Mr. Parnas of several campaign finance charges including conspiracy to make contributions by a foreign national and falsifying records.A month before that trial began, Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty to a single count of soliciting a contribution by a foreign national.In a memorandum to the court, Mr. Fruman’s lawyers asked for lenience, arguing that their client should be sentenced to time served instead of prison.Because of the notoriety accompanying his offense, Mr. Fruman’s business had faltered, they wrote, adding that he had resorted to spending savings and selling assets and could ill-afford the fine of $15,000 to $150,000 that prosecutors said federal guidelines called for.The lawyers wrote that Mr. Fruman had no previous criminal record and would never again appear in court “in a criminal setting.” They also said that the financial hardship Mr. Fruman experienced, “irreparable reputational damage,” and the 27 months he has spent confined to his home since shortly after his arrest “serve as adequate deterrence.”“Mr. Fruman is a good, decent, and honorable man who puts his faith, family and country first,” his lawyers told the court, adding, “This is not a case where Mr. Fruman embarked on an effort to influence the outcome of American elections using foreign money.”Prosecutors countered that Mr. Fruman’s submission exhibited “a blatant contempt for the law,” writing: “He views this case as an inconvenience to evade, and not an opportunity for reformation.”Mr. Fruman, the prosecutors said, had been “trying to corrupt U.S. elections to advance his own financial interests.” More

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      Conflict Quickly Emerges Between Top Prosecutor and Police Commissioner

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      A memo by New York City’s new police leader sharply questioned Manhattan’s new district attorney over his strategy for prosecuting crime.New York City’s new police commissioner has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the policies of the new Manhattan district attorney, sending an email to all officers late on Friday that suggests a potential rupture between City Hall and the prosecutor over their approaches to public safety.The email from Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said she was deeply troubled by policies outlined by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, in a 10-page memo that Mr. Bragg sent to his staff on Monday. The memo instructed prosecutors to avoid seeking jail or prison time for all but the most serious crimes, and to cease charging a number of lower-level crimes.Commissioner Sewell, who, like Mr. Bragg, was just a week into her job, said in her email to about 36,000 members of the department that she had studied the policies and come away “very concerned about the implications to your safety as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for the victims.”The email, which was first reported by WNBC-TV, suggests a looming conflict not just between them, but also between the new district attorney and the commissioner’s boss, Mayor Eric Adams.The collision course between the mayor and the district attorney was sketched out during the Democratic primary in the spring of 2021. Mr. Adams made a crackdown on crime one of the main themes of his campaign; Mr. Bragg, following in the path carved by a handful of prosecutors in cities around the country, pledged to help reshape the legal system, to avoid disproportionate punishment for first-time offenders or those struggling with mental health issues or poverty.In a statement on Saturday, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office said: “We share Commissioner Sewell’s call for frank and productive discussions to reach common ground on our shared mission to deliver safety and justice for all and look forward to the opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings.”“For our office, safety is paramount,” the statement said. It added that contrary to the way that Commissioner Sewell and others had interpreted parts of the memo, the office intended to charge anyone who used guns to rob stores or who assaulted police officers with felonies. “All must be held accountable for their actions,” it said.To some degree, the emerging tensions between the commissioner and Mr. Bragg reflect a broader political argument between centrist Democrats across the nation looking to soothe voters worried about crime and a movement of progressive prosecutors that has pushed for more lenient policies to make the justice system more fair and less biased.Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has expressed serious concerns about Mr. Bragg’s policies.Hiram Durán for The New York TimesSome of those tensions are likely to play out in Albany this year in a debate over whether to scale back changes in a state bail law that went into effect two years ago, and that provoked strong reactions almost immediately.There is always an ingrained tension between the police and prosecutors that often centers on what charges to bring and, at times, whether there is sufficient evidence to make an arrest. For the police, in some measure, the job ends with handcuffs, while prosecutors are left with proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt or finding some other resolution. But such arguments do not often became public at all, let alone so early in a new administration.Mr. Adams has been complimentary about Mr. Bragg when asked about him in recent interviews, calling him a “great prosecutor” and declining to criticize the memo. Asked about the commissioner’s email, the mayor’s office responded with a statement from Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser: “The mayor has deep respect for the district attorney and looks forward to working with him and the police commissioner to make sure the streets are safe, and to discussing any concerns directly.”A police spokesman said the email “speaks for itself.”Mr. Bragg and Mr. Adams, both Democrats, have significant histories in law enforcement, and both have pledged some measure of reform. Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, stood out in a competitive primary vowing to balance safety with justice. Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has spoken out against police brutality and, while serving, pushed for changes within the department.Mr. Bragg is the first Black person to lead the district attorney’s office, Mr. Adams is the second Black mayor in the city’s history, and Commissioner Sewell is the first woman and third Black person to lead the Police Department.In his memo, Mr. Bragg instructed his prosecutors that unless they were required by law to do otherwise, they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for those who had committed serious offenses, including murder, sexual assault and major economic crimes. Others, he has said, would be directed to programs better equipped to deal with the issues that had led them to commit the crimes.The new district attorney also instructed his prosecutors not to charge a number of misdemeanors. Many of the crimes on his list already were not being prosecuted by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. But Mr. Bragg directed his staff to avoid charging several misdemeanors which previously had been charged, including resisting arrest.“These policy changes not only will, in and of themselves, make us safer; they also will free up prosecutorial resources to focus on violent crime,” Mr. Bragg said in his memo.The directive on resisting arrest was among those that Commissioner Sewell expressed most concern about. She said that it would send a message to police officers and others that there was “an unwillingness to protect those who are carrying out their duties.”“I strongly believe that this policy injects debate into decisions that would otherwise be uncontroversial, will invite violence against police officers and will have deleterious effects on our relationship with the communities we protect,” she wrote.Incoming N.Y.C. Mayor Eric Adams’s New AdministrationCard 1 of 7Schools Chancellor: David Banks. More

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      With Trump Investigation Unresolved, Cyrus Vance's Legacy Is Incomplete

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      Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s third and final term as Manhattan district attorney is ending, but his investigation into former President Donald J. Trump goes on.Much of the furniture had been hauled away. The walls were stripped bare. And the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., sat on a brown leather couch in his eighth-floor office earlier this month, considering the last big question before him as his term neared its end: Would he decide whether to charge Donald J. Trump with a crime?“I am committed to moving the case as far along in the decision-making as I can while I’m here,” he said.As Mr. Vance, 67, leaves office at the end of this week, that inquiry is still unresolved. He will hand the investigation over to his successor, Alvin Bragg.A Democrat who was only the fourth district attorney to hold the office in nearly 80 years, Mr. Vance chose not to seek re-election this year. He said he had promised his family he would not run again. “Twelve years is a long time to hold an office this volatile,” he said, adding, “It was time for me to write a new chapter in my life.”The fate of the Trump inquiry, which could result in the first indictment of an American president in history, will help shape the public understanding of Mr. Vance’s tenure.Asked how he might deal with criticism if the case is not resolved to people’s liking, Mr. Vance, who otherwise maintained a low-key congeniality during two recent interviews, grew animated.“Look, I’ve been criticized for a lot,” he said. “Do I like it? No. But do I have to put it all in perspective? Yeah. And if you don’t put it in perspective, you’ll shoot yourself. Because people are passionate and they’re angry, and people have only gotten more divided and more angry in the last five or six years than they ever were before.”Before he took office in 2010, Mr. Vance had worked as a prosecutor for his predecessor, Robert M. Morgenthau, a titan of New York City law enforcement. Mr. Morgenthau, who died in 2019, made his reputation as a crime-fighter when prosecutors were still venerated figures.Mr. Vance was handed a more complex task: to help reimagine the prosecutor’s role as crime dropped to record lows and the inequities of the justice system loomed larger than ever before.“I was inheriting an office that was very much a 20th-century operation in terms of its systems and its practices and its policies,” he said. “It was, ‘How many trials did you have?’ It was, ‘How aggressive can you be?’”Mr. Vance instituted a less sweeping, more precise approach to addressing gang and gun violence. He stopped prosecuting certain low-level misdemeanors, including marijuana possession, fare evasion and, earlier this year, prostitution.He moved his office into the digital age, using data to inform decisions. He started a cybercrime unit and used hundreds of millions of dollars from settlements with big banks to fund programs that he argued would make the city safer.Mr. Vance’s close advisers say he sowed the seeds of a more progressive method of prosecution.“Law enforcement was just starting to change, and Vance came in as that was happening and really was a leader in shaping that conversation,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former deputy to Mr. Vance.While some of Mr. Vance’s ideas seemed cutting-edge in 2010, he was overtaken in his appetite for change by his peers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and nearby in Brooklyn, where elected prosecutors enacted more lenient policies, and in some cases spoke more forcefully about the harms of harsh prosecution.“As we progressed in how we think about the best ways to keep communities safe and how to rethink the way prosecution works, he and his office simply could not keep up,” said Janos Marton, who fought to reduce incarceration in New York and briefly competed in the race to succeed Mr. Vance. “That’s really the story of his tenure.”Alvin Bragg, who won the race to succeed Mr. Vance, will take over the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesMr. Vance’s successor, Mr. Bragg, is a former federal prosecutor. The plans Mr. Bragg has committed to, which include lengthening the list of low-level crimes that will not be prosecuted and placing a renewed focus on accountability for law enforcement, put him in line with other newly elected prosecutors.Mr. Vance said he is hopeful about Mr. Bragg’s policies but is not convinced that they will be effective in reducing crime, particularly in the face of a sharp rise in murders and shootings that began last summer.“Alvin Bragg is a smart, experienced former prosecutor who I believe cares about public safety as much as anybody,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether going leaps and bounds further than we have gone in our time will result in continued lower crime rates.”Mr. Vance’s conviction integrity unit, his critics say, exemplifies his strengths and failings. Set up in 2010, it was one of the first such units in the country. It helped the office assess new cases, leading to dozens of post-arrest dismissals. And in November, its work led to the exoneration of two men who had spent 20 years in prison for the 1965 murder of Malcolm X.But the unit has been criticized for having done far less than it could have. Mr. Bragg, while campaigning in the Democratic primary, said it appeared to exist “in name only” and vowed to start a new one explicitly devoted to freeing the wrongfully convicted.Mr. Bragg will be the first Black Manhattan district attorney, and critics of the office hope he will address the harms they say it does to Black people, who continue to be prosecuted disproportionately. Public defenders who faced Mr. Vance’s prosecutors and assistant district attorneys who worked for him said in interviews that his office still treated defendants harshly.Jarvis Idowu, a three-year veteran of the office who helped draft its policy to stop prosecuting fare evasion, said that the leadership there “talked a lot about how important diversity was.”But, he said, all the talk did not result in changes to the office’s policies that were informed by those diverse perspectives. Mr. Idowu, who is Black, said he left the office in 2018 after being asked to seek a yearslong prison sentence for a man in his 20s who had used forged credit cards to buy food, and to charge a homeless man stealing salmon from a grocery store with a felony. Both men were Black.Mr. Vance noted that he had invited the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, to examine his office’s record on racial disparities in prosecution soon after taking office. The institute found race was a major factor at nearly every stage of Manhattan’s criminal process.“I don’t pretend that I’m the most progressive prosecutor on race issues, but it is something that we never ignored,” Mr. Vance said. “Could we have done better? I think we could have done better.”Much discussion of Mr. Vance has focused on his most high-profile cases. Some decisions drew criticism early in his tenure. A 2011 sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was dropped after Mr. Vance’s prosecutors questioned the victim’s story.He did not charge two of Mr. Trump’s children in 2012, or Harvey Weinstein in 2015, and was criticized for dealing leniently with the disgraced gynecologist Robert Hadden, who was accused of sexually abusing nearly 20 women, but avoided any prison time.Mr. Vance later found success in high-stakes cases. He won a conviction of Mr. Weinstein in 2020, which Mr. Weinstein is appealing. He also convicted the murderer of Etan Patz, a boy who disappeared on his way to school in 1979. His office is again investigating Mr. Hadden, who has also been charged with federal crimes.Mr. Vance said he kept a promise to his family in choosing not to seek another four-year term.John Minchillo/Associated PressMr. Vance, like Mr. Morgenthau before him, has close familial ties to the highest echelons of American government. His father, Cyrus R. Vance Sr., was a U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. Early in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Vance expressed concern that the president was undercutting the rule of law, and his yearslong investigation into Mr. Trump — as well as inquiries into associates who were pardoned by the president in Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office — reflects that concern.In 2019, Mr. Trump’s lawyers fought a subpoena demanding eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax returns, beginning an extended legal battle between the president and the district attorney and delaying the investigation for more than a year.Ultimately, Mr. Vance won the battle. The Supreme Court decided in his favor, twice, most recently in February, victories he called a “high-water mark” in the office’s work. This summer, he indicted Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, in connection with what prosecutors said was a yearslong tax-avoidance scheme in which executives were compensated with off-the-books benefits like free cars and apartments.Mr. Trump has consistently derided the investigation as a politically-motivated “witch hunt.” Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers have said he will fight the charges in court.In his final weeks in office, Mr. Vance continued to push the Trump investigation forward. But the calendar was uncooperative, and the inquiry will not be resolved this year.Mr. Vance said that, whatever his critics might think of the Trump case — or any of his other actions — his conscience was clear.“I know what we did, I know why we did it and at the end of the day, that’s what I have to live with,” he said. More

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      A Candidate Drops Out, Turning the Race for Governor Upside Down

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      Letitia James’s surprise decision seemed to solidify the front-runner status of Gov. Kathy Hochul.It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at the surprise announcement from Letitia James, who said she was dropping out of the race for governor to run for another term as state attorney general. We’ll also take a look at a new bookstore in Chinatown.Anna Watts for The New York Times“I have come to the conclusion that I must continue my work as attorney general.”It was the opening line of a message on Twitter that left out the most important part: Letitia James was dropping out of the race for governor. She said she would run for a second term as attorney general of New York.My colleagues Katie Glueck and Nicholas Fandos write that there is now no question that Gov. Kathy Hochul will enter 2022 as the most formidable candidate in the race.James had been treated as a top contender in the six weeks since she declared her candidacy, following her office’s blockbuster report on sexual harassment claims against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo that prompted his resignation. James, a Democrat from Brooklyn, hoped to assemble a coalition of Black and Latino voters and become the first Black female governor in the nation.But recent polls had indicated that James was trailing Hochul, who replaced Cuomo, by double digits among Democratic primary voters. She was also thought to lag in fund-raising and in the competition for high-profile endorsements, while Hochul has been rolling out a steady stream. One state senator said colleagues in Albany had been reluctant to risk alienating Hochul by endorsing James.[Letitia James Drops Out of N.Y. Governor’s Race]James said in her Twitter message that she wanted to “finish the job” on several “important investigations and cases.” She did not go in details. But her announcement came on the same day that it became known that her office intended to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify next month in a civil fraud investigation. If James finds evidence of wrongdoing, she could file a lawsuit against Trump.Ronald Fischetti, a lawyer for Trump, said he would move to have the subpoena quashed. Trump’s lawyers could argue that compelling him to testify would violate the constitutional protection against self-incrimination because the testimony could be unfairly used against him in a criminal investigation being overseen by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr.Both James and Vance have tried to determine whether Trump listed pumped-up valuations on his properties to obtain financing. Because the two investigations overlap, Fischetti said Trump — who has repeatedly called the investigations politically motivated witch hunts — could refuse to give a deposition once James formally subpoenaed him.James is also litigating a closely watched case against the National Rifle Association, as well as lawsuits involving Facebook, Google, Amazon and the New York Police Department.As for withdrawing from the governor’s race, she made the decision on Wednesday and her campaign notified allies early on Thursday, according to people with direct knowledge of her conversations with advisers and supporters she called. One person who was contacted on Thursday said no explanation was given for the course change. Another said she emphasized her work in her current role.WeatherLook for a partly sunny start to the weekend, with temps in the high 40s. At night, it will be mostly cloudy. Expect a chance of showers in the wee hours of the morning and temps in the mid-40s.alternate-side parkingIn effect until Dec. 24 (Christmas Eve).The latest New York newsLaborWorkers at one Buffalo-area Starbucks have voted to form a union.Student workers on strike at Columbia University formed picket lines after an email from the university said that students who remained on strike were not guaranteed jobs next term.Other Big StoriesThe chancellor of the State University of New York, Jim Malatras, will resign. Pressure had been building for him to step down over text messages that showed he had belittled a woman who later accused Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment.New legislation will require hosts of short-term rentals to register with the city.Over a week since Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial on federal sex-trafficking charges began, she and her defense team are now presented with a choice: Will she take the stand?Allergan agreed to pay $200 million in a settlement reached just before closing arguments began in a monthslong opioid trial.Yu and Me, for one and allJames Estrin/The New York TimesMy colleague Ashley Wong got an advance look at a bookstore that is opening tomorrow at 44 Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It’s called Yu and Me, a play on the name of the owner, Lucy Yu, who is 27 and committed to selling a diverse range of authors historically underrepresented in book publishing.Yu will join only a handful of female Asian American booksellers in the city and will probably be the first to operate in Manhattan’s Chinatown, according to Vic Lee, co-founder of Welcome to Chinatown, a group created during the pandemic to promote businesses there.Yu, who grew up in Southern California, was trained as a chemical engineer and has never been in the book business. But she said she had spent her life seeking out literature that made her feel seen — books by and about immigrants, exploring complicated mother-daughter relationships. Stocking her shelves with such works is a tribute to her own mother, who is from China and used to take her to Chinatown in Los Angeles on weekends, where they found a common language over errands, art classes and snacks like you tiao and soy milk.“I never saw representation for myself in the books I read growing up,” she said. “Seeing the need for diverse representation and stories outside of our own, it really pushed me to continue on this path.” She said she would also offer books from authors across the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora, a personal quest that intensified after watching anti-Asian hate crimes rise over the past year.Her arrival is being welcomed as Chinatown tries to rebound from the pandemic. She is “coming into a market that is highly in need,” said Wellington Chen, the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership, which works on community projects with the Chinatown Business Improvement District.He said that foot traffic in Chinatown was lagging, at least on weekdays, because potential customers have not returned to offices in Lower Manhattan. He said bookstores drew shoppers who linger and who he hopes will check out other businesses in the area. Yu said she decided to open a bookstore after one of her closest friends, James MacDonald, died last year in an accident. She and MacDonald had been in a book club together, she said, and his death prompted her to re-evaluate what she really wanted to do with her life. A section of the store is dedicated to him, filled with books he loved.For the first month, Yu plans to juggle bookselling with her full-time job as a chemical engineer. The store will be open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, sandwiched between hours spent at her chemical engineering job. Starting next year, she’ll also serve espresso, wine, locally brewed beer and pastries from Fay Da Bakery on Mott Street.A Guide to the New York Governor’s RaceCard 1 of 6A crowded field. More

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      Alvin Bragg Wins, Becoming First Black D.A. in Manhattan

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      A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Bragg will take over an office that has brought charges against the family business of former president Donald J. Trump.Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday and will become the first Black person to lead the influential office, which handles tens of thousands of cases a year and is conducting a high-profile investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, a former federal prosecutor who campaigned on a pledge to balance public safety with fairness for all defendants, beat out seven other Democrats for the nomination earlier this year and will succeed Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat who did not seek re-election. Mr. Bragg had been heavily favored to prevail over his Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, given that Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in the borough.He will take over an office that continues to disproportionately prosecute Black defendants, and Mr. Bragg throughout his campaign has drawn on his personal experiences growing up in New York to illustrate the types of changes he wishes to make. Mr. Bragg has said he would show leniency to defendants who commit low-level crimes and has emphasized the importance of accountability for the police and the office’s prosecutors.Mr. Bragg will be working in close partnership with a police department run by Eric Adams, who won the race for mayor on Tuesday night. Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg have some policy disagreements — Mr. Adams, a former police officer, has called for the restoration of the department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which Mr. Bragg opposes.In an interview earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Bragg pointed toward experiences that he said would inform his work and set him apart from his predecessors.“Having been stopped by the police,” he said. “Having a homicide victim on my doorstep. Having had a loved one return from incarceration and live with me.”Mr. Bragg’s election follows that of like-minded prosecutors around the country. His experience in law enforcement separates him from some of his peers in what has come to be known as the progressive prosecutor movement, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. But Mr. Bragg’s policy positions are largely in line with others who have won office over the past decade, including Rachael Rollins in Boston and Kim Foxx in Chicago.His victory comes as Democrats are seeking to balance sweeping changes to the criminal justice system with some voters’ concern about rising gun crime. In 2020, millions of people around the country took to the streets to protest the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and called for change. But after rises in homicides and shootings in New York and other cities, voters have expressed fears about public safety.Those fears may have influenced two prosecutorial races in Long Island, the results of which were far less decisive on Tuesday night. In Nassau County, with about 13 percent of the vote counted, the Republican candidate, Anne Donnelly, was leading her opponent Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator, 51 to 49 percent. In Suffolk County, the Republican challenger, Ray Tierney, was leading the incumbent district attorney, Timothy Sini, 54 percent to 46 percent with about 31 percent of the vote accounted for.But Mr. Bragg won handily, and The Associated Press called the race for him just before 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Mr. Bragg held a commanding 68-point lead late Tuesday night with more than half of precincts reporting.At an election night party at Harlem Tavern, a crowd roared its approval when he arrived several minutes after the race was called. “We have been given a profound trust tonight,” Mr. Bragg said. “The fundamental role of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety.”He said that under his administration the racial disparities in the criminal justice system would be “shut down”; the trauma of sexual assault survivors would be a central focus; and those suffering from mental health issues would not be prosecuted.“The Day 1 job is guns,” Mr. Bragg said, mentioning shootings that had occurred nearby in the last several weeks. He said he planned to address the problem with “new tools,” not with the tools of the past.Mr. Bragg said getting people out of jail was another urgent priority, making tacit reference to what he called “a humanitarian crisis” on Rikers Island.On Twitter on Tuesday night, Mr. Kenniff congratulated Mr. Bragg. “While we may have competing visions on the role of D.A.,” Mr. Kenniff wrote, “we are aligned in our commitment to public safety and a fair criminal justice system.”Thomas Kenniff, who spent election night at the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side, congratulated Mr. Bragg on Twitter.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesBy far the most high-profile case confronting Mr. Bragg is the investigation into Mr. Trump and his family business. Over the summer, the business and one of its top executives were charged with running a yearslong tax scheme that helped executives evade taxes while compensating them with off-the-books benefits.Mr. Vance’s investigation into Mr. Trump and his business is ongoing; Mr. Bragg has faced questions about it throughout his campaign and will continue to do so. Though he cited his experience of having sued the former president over 100 times while at the state attorney general’s office, Mr. Bragg has said he will follow the facts when it comes to the current inquiry.A lifelong resident of Harlem, Mr. Bragg began running for district attorney more than two years ago and slowly accumulated support from local political clubs and unions, and from figures including Representative Jerrold L. Nadler and Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District who hired Mr. Bragg as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.In the primary he was flanked on his left by three candidates who argued against electing anyone with prosecutorial experience. Still, he was able to win important endorsements from progressives like Zephyr Teachout after releasing detailed plans about his vision for a new sex crimes unit and an expansion of the bureaus that oversee economic crimes. He beat out another former federal prosecutor, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, for the nomination, in a close race that came to focus more on public safety as gun crime rose.A sign of Mr. Bragg’s success at unifying Democrats came on Saturday when two other Democrats who ran in the primary, Eliza Orlins and Liz Crotty, showed up at a campaign stop in Union Square to lend him their support.Ms. Orlins was among the candidates who had argued that no one with prosecutorial experience should hold the job, while Ms. Crotty emphasized the need for public safety from the start of the race and won endorsements from several police unions.In interviews, both said that while they disagreed with Mr. Bragg on certain points, they trusted him to do the right thing.“He’s had experience of seeing loved ones incarcerated and their lives destroyed by the criminal legal system,” Ms. Orlins said. “He understands those things fundamentally.”Ms. Crotty said it was important for Mr. Bragg to have a holistic vision of public safety for every neighborhood.“I think that that’s a responsibility he’s always taken seriously,” she said.On Tuesday, a number of voters in Harlem who said they had chosen Mr. Bragg described being impressed by what they perceived as his fundamental decency. Mimsie Robinson, 58, said that he heard Mr. Bragg speak at his church and had been struck by his integrity.“For me, a lot of times that’s what I’m looking at,” Mr. Robinson said. “Is this person sincerely committed to helping this community, this city, move forward?”Mr. Bragg, a graduate of Harvard Law School, began considering a career as a prosecutor while working for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he saw how influential those in the role could be. He worked for several years as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer before being hired by the New York attorney general’s office, where he investigated public corruption and white-collar crime.After a stretch working for Mr. Bharara in Manhattan, he returned to the attorney general’s office, where he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He spent the final week before his election in a virtual courtroom, questioning members of the Police Department in a judicial inquiry into the circumstances that led to the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. More

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      Alvin Bragg, Manhattan's Likely Next D.A., Questions NYPD Over Eric Garner

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      Days before the election, Alvin Bragg, who is heavily favored to win office, is participating in an inquiry into Eric Garner’s killing by the N.Y.P.D.It was the week before Election Day, but Alvin Bragg was not glad-handing or fund-raising, not out on the campaign trail or meeting with veterans of the office he hopes to run.Instead, he was in a virtual courtroom, questioning a member of the New York Police Department about the events of July 19, 2014, the day that Eric Garner told a police officer who held him in a chokehold that he could not breathe.Mr. Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney who is heavily favored to win the office in the general election on Tuesday, has, for the last several years, represented the family of Mr. Garner as they have continued to seek details about the lead-up to his killing that day, an event that brought urgent attention to the way that Black men are policed in New York City and around the country.This week, that fight culminated in a judicial inquiry during which Mr. Bragg and others closely questioned members of the police department, shedding more light not only on Mr. Garner’s death but the departmental focus on fighting low-level crimes that led the police to pursue him in the first place.While Mr. Bragg could not have planned for the election and the judicial inquiry into Mr. Garner’s death to coincide so closely, the case drives home some of the key messages of his campaign: He has said that he will cease to pursue a number of low-level crimes, and has spoken frequently about police accountability.The district attorney works hand-in-hand with the New York Police Department and Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry — which highlights anew a shameful episode from the department’s recent past — indicates that his relationship with the department will be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.“I think that there are risks involved for him, because he is going to need to work with the police department as district attorney,” said Jessica Roth, a director of the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law at Cardozo University.But, she added, Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry was consistent with priorities he had articulated throughout his campaign.“The inquiry is to try to find out what happened, and whether people acted consistently with their duty,” Ms. Roth said. “Bragg has worked in law enforcement for most of his career and worked productively with police. Holding people accountable and thinking about issues systemically does not necessarily put one at odds with the police department.”Gwen Carr, center, the mother of Eric Garner, said she was grateful that Alvin Bragg, left, has stayed with the case. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Bragg, 48, is a former federal prosecutor who also worked at the New York State attorney general’s office, where he rose to become chief deputy attorney general. He is running to lead an office that handles the cases of tens of thousands of defendants each year, the majority of them built on arrests made by the New York police.Though the office can decline to charge defendants arrested by the police, it does not do so often: In 2019, under the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the office declined to prosecute 9 percent of all the arrests it evaluated.That number is low in part because the Police Department responds to policy decisions made by the district attorney. When prosecutors in the office stopped charging defendants with fare evasion, for example, arrests on that charge dropped.While that responsiveness is likely to continue if Mr. Bragg assumes the office, any disagreement between him and the department — or the likely next mayor, Eric Adams, who plans to restore the police’s anti-crime unit — may lead to public friction of the type that has become more common between prosecutors and police representatives, particularly in cities like Philadelphia where the police union has actively campaigned against the sitting district attorney, Larry Krasner.Mr. Bragg’s Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, has also called for the restoration of the anti-crime unit, and for a renewed focus on low-level crimes.Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former police officer, said in an interview that both prosecutors and the police had become more politicized in recent years, a dynamic that can stoke tensions, but that the police would respect a judicious approach from Mr. Bragg.“He has to be an honest broker,” Mr. O’Donnell said of Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg has made his own fraught encounters with the police a foundational part of his campaign narrative, and police accountability is at the heart of his résumé.During his second stint at the New York attorney general’s office, he led a unit charged with investigating the police killings of unarmed civilians, which was created in part as a response to Mr. Garner’s death. (Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, was present when Mr. Cuomo signed the order that led to the creation of that unit.)Upon taking office as district attorney, Mr. Bragg plans to establish a Police Integrity Unit that will report directly to him, siloed off from the rest of the office to avoid any conflict with other bureaus.Mr. Bragg has a long history of working with law enforcement agents. He is not widely seen as a bomb-thrower, but instead, a coalition-builder with an ability to make varied parties feel as if their concerns have been heard.“I say what I don’t want officers to do, but I think it’s important in the next breath to say what I want them to do: to be our partners in fighting against gun trafficking and sexual assaults,” Mr. Bragg said, adding that he had always been “profoundly aware” that he stays at his desk while law enforcement agents are in the field.“The police officers I work with are the ones who will then go do the arrest or do the search warrant and that’s challenging, profoundly important and can be dangerous,” Mr. Bragg said.Mr. Bragg did not grandstand or otherwise draw attention to himself during the judicial inquiry this week, as he questioned Lt. Christopher Bannon, the police commander who, after being told of Mr. Garner’s death via text message, said that it was “not a big deal.”Still, Mr. Bragg fought to nail down every last detail, asking a number of questions about a meeting at which the police department discussed cracking down on the illegal sale of cigarettes and the protocol of filling out a memo book. The judge, Erika Edwards, who has referred to the inquiry as a “trailblazing” effort at transparency, was occasionally compelled to hasten him along.Mr. Bragg mentioned his representation of Mr. Garner’s family with pride throughout the campaign and Ms. Carr has, in return, expressed her gratitude toward him, particularly for his presence in the courtroom over the course of this past week.“I am truly pleased he chose to represent me in this inquiry when he could be out campaigning,” she said. “He said he would see this inquiry through to the end. My family and I are grateful for that.”Troy Closson More

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      Thomas Kenniff, Manhattan D.A. Candidate, Sees a City on the Brink

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      Thomas Kenniff, who is facing Alvin Bragg in the Nov. 2 election, has focused his campaign on a recent increase in some types of crime.Thomas Kenniff believes that New York City is teetering on a precipice.Mr. Kenniff, the Republican candidate for Manhattan district attorney, is not referring to Covid-19 or climate-related disasters, like the flooding that killed 13 people in the city last month.No, it is crime that worries Mr. Kenniff — crime, and progressive policies that he believes have contributed to its rise, particularly the bail reform law that went into effect in January 2020, which stopped criminal courts from setting cash bail on most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.Though legal experts who have studied the matter say there is no clear connection between that law and the rise in some categories of violent crime, including murders and shootings, Mr. Kenniff, 46, is convinced that a link exists.“As a result of misguided criminal justice policies that embrace criminals at the expense of victims, we are seeing an increase in violent crime and a decrease in quality of life like nothing we have experienced in years,” he said in a recent debate with his Democratic opponent, Alvin Bragg. The election, on Nov. 2, will determine the leader of an office that handles tens of thousands of cases a year and conducts many high-profile investigations, including an ongoing inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, has an overwhelming advantage. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Manhattan by nearly eight to one, and residents of the borough — which Mr. Kenniff left for Long Island about four years ago — have not elected a Republican as their district attorney since 1937.Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney, supported the bail reform law that Mr. Kenniff has criticized.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut Mr. Kenniff, a major in the Army National Guard and veteran of the Iraq War, says he expects to compete with Mr. Bragg given the number of Manhattanites he hears from who are concerned about crime.“I do think there is something fermenting in response to what is happening on the street level that Alvin Bragg has not condemned in any meaningful way,” Mr. Kenniff said.Asked to respond, a spokesman for Mr. Bragg, Richard Fife, said that Mr. Kenniff had spent the campaign “making ridiculous attacks playing on people’s fears.”“Alvin Bragg understands from personal experience the safety concerns families face and the inequities embedded into our system,” Mr. Fife said.Mr. Kenniff has consistently asserted — as have other law enforcement figures, most prominently Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department — that the bail overhaul is partly behind the spike in certain categories of gun crime, which began in the summer of 2020.Experts disagree, and point toward similar spikes in murders and shootings in cities around the country, regardless of their bail laws.“There is no evidence linking the bail reforms to the uptick in shootings and homicides,” said Michael Rempel, the director of jail reform at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with the mayor’s office, the state courts and other institutional players in the criminal justice system.Mr. Kenniff, who now works primarily as a defense lawyer, said that he sees a correlation and rejects arguments like Mr. Rempel’s.“I reject it based on what I’ve seen in my own practice and the people I’ve represented,” he said. “I reject it based on what I see on the streets.”From Long Island to IraqMr. Kenniff was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and grew up in Massapequa, in a waterfront house on the South Shore of Long Island. He attended the University of Rochester, where he majored in history. And he began to consider the possibility of being a lawyer, in part because of the unlikely influence of the actor Tom Cruise.“Whatever part he was playing, you wanted to do that,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I saw ‘Days of Thunder,’ I wanted to be a racecar driver. I saw ‘Cocktail,’ I wanted to become a bartender.”The movie that really influenced Mr. Kenniff was “A Few Good Men,” in which Mr. Cruise plays a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, military lawyers who prosecute and defend members of the armed services.After graduating from Hofstra’s law school, and spending several years at a law firm and the Westchester district attorney’s office, Mr. Kenniff began the commissioning process. In early 2005, he was deployed to a military base right outside of Tikrit, Iraq.While abroad, he defended soldiers who were charged with violations of military law and provided counsel to soldiers and civilians. He also sweated out a number of rocket attacks, said his roommate, Major Robert Kincaid, who added that Mr. Kenniff soon got used to the strikes.“We heard the alarms go off and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go to the shelter,’” Mr. Kincaid recalled. “And he looks at me and goes, ‘Are you going to do that? I think it’s safer in here.’”Mr. Kenniff returned to the United States toward the end of 2005 and after about six more months as a prosecutor in Westchester, he left the office to start a law firm with another veteran, Steven M. Raiser, where over the past 15 years he has done defense work for a wide range of clients.Mr. Kenniff spent long stretches of the pandemic housed at a hotel in Manhattan, like other service members, and on active duty at the Javits Center, which was transformed into a field hospital. During that time, Mr. Kenniff began following the nascent Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney and grew alarmed at what he was hearing.A Return to ‘Broken Windows’Eight candidates ran as Democrats to become Manhattan district attorney, including three without any prosecutorial experience.But as murders and shootings continued to rise in the early months of 2021, voters leaned toward more experienced contenders like Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Bragg won a close primary, leaving him poised to become the first Black Manhattan district attorney.Mr. Kenniff said he is concerned that Mr. Bragg — who supported the bail law and has pledged to dedicate new units in the office to hold the police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions — will implement lenient policies that will encourage crime.Asked about his own priorities, Mr. Kenniff said that he wanted to focus on reducing gun crime, which he believes means also cracking down on misdemeanors, including fare evasion and graffiti-related crimes.He said he believes in the merits of “broken windows” policing, the idea that actively policing and prosecuting petty crimes will have a healthy effect on the overall crime rate. The theory has been called into question by a number of criminologists and others, who say it naturally leads to discriminatory overpolicing.“I’m not trying to upend the whole concept of a prosecutor’s office,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I don’t need 20-page manifestoes about how I’m going to do this, this and that.”Mr. Kenniff has reserved much of his energy for criticizing the bail law, which was passed in an effort to ensure that poor people were not disproportionately penalized because they could not afford bail. The law effectively eliminated money bail and pretrial detention for almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but allowed for bail to be set on virtually all violent felonies.It was met with immediate resistance from opponents, who argued that it would lead to the release of dangerous criminals. In April 2020, the law was amended to allow judges more discretion to jail defendants. (It remains illegal in New York for judges to consider a defendant’s threat to public safety in setting bail, as it has been for the last 50 years.)The law remains a target of conservatives, including Mr. Kenniff, who says that along with the disbandment of the police’s anti-crime units and local politicians’ lack of support for the police, the law was key to rises in gun crime. He argues that the pretrial release of those charged with crimes like gun possession and misdemeanor assault has endangered communities.As of yet, there is no evidence of that. The mayor’s office of criminal justice has found that the bail law had no discernible effect on the rate of rearrest. And studies conducted in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Jersey, which made similar changes, found that their rates of recidivism had not gone up.None of that carries weight with Mr. Kenniff.“The notion that these policies haven’t contributed to what is going on on the street is just utterly counterintuitive,” he said. “So would I be skeptical, am I skeptical, of studies and statistics that say otherwise? Sure.” More