After Ugly Campaign, Finding Little Grace in Brooklyn District Attorney's Exit
By Michael Powell
Sam Kellner, a voluble whistle-blower against child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, received a much-dreamed-of phone call last week. Two prosecutors with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office promised to drop all charges against Mr. Kellner. An already-weak extortion case had utterly disintegrated, with evidence falling away. You’ll soon be free of the shadow of prosecution, Mr. Kellner’s lawyers told him. That was last Wednesday. Two days later, District Attorney Charles J. Hynes and his rackets chief and longtime friend Michael F. Vecchione reversed that decision and again vowed to prosecute Mr. Kellner. They promptly demoted the two veteran prosecutors, Joseph Alexis and Nicholas J. Batsidis, who had handled the case against Mr. Kellner. Mr. Hynes was not finished. That same day, he fired Barbara Burke, a prosecutor and former nun who had had the temerity to complain that the office had not passed along — as required — all records to a lawyer trying a wrongful conviction case against Mr. Hynes and Mr. Vecchione. His Friday afternoon massacre complete, Mr. Hynes turned his attention to his vacation in Bermuda. Electoral defeats offer wonderful character studies. Some handle defeat with grace; others take to bed, pull up the sheets and turn off the lights. Then there’s Mr. Hynes, 78, who ran an ugly and cantankerous howl of a final campaign and lost convincingly twice in two months, first in the Democratic primary and then, as the candidate of the Republican and Conservative Parties, in the general election. Hurling accusations, stirring communal fears, he ended a once proud career in a manner akin to crashing a car into a brick wall. No grace attended. Asked about last week’s three punishments, two of which were first reported in Jewish Week and The New York Post, Mr. Hynes’s longtime press man went mum. “I cannot discuss personnel matters,” Jerry Schmetterer told me via email. As for Ms. Burke, she “was fired for cause,” he said. Ms. Burke, as it happens, retained the services of Mark A. Bederow, a former prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “For months they attempted to humiliate an honest and sincere public servant interested in seeing that justice was served,” he said. Mr. Bederow said it was not at all unusual for prosecutors to have to seek a senior attorney’s signoff before dropping prosecutions. But it is deeply unusual to overrule them. And it is unheard-of to demote senior attorneys for what amounts to a difference of legal opinion. “The senior attorney on the case had 20 years in the office,” Mr. Bederow said. “You’d expect him to get a lot of rope, judgment-wise.” The case against Mr. Kellner offers its own theater of the bizarre. After a prominent Hasidic cantor, Baruch Lebovits, was accused of groping his son, Mr. Kellner helped investigators with the district attorney’s office to find other young victims. He found himself denounced on the street and barred from shul. His business suffered; he pawned his silverware last year. Still he persisted, and slowly picked up allies. Members of a prominent rabbinical court told me earlier this year that they had given Mr. Kellner, whom they viewed as a brave pioneer, permission to seek out victims of Mr. Lebovits, whose predatory reputation was broadly known. In 2011, Mr. Hynes’s office convicted Mr. Lebovits of sexual abuse. It was, for Mr. Hynes, a rare successful prosecution of a prominent Hasidic figure, and it angered many in that politically influential community. Then his office turned around and indicted Mr. Kellner, based on a secret tape and the grand jury testimony of Moshe Friedman, a prominent Satmar supporter of Mr. Lebovits. The district attorney alleged that Mr. Kellner had tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sexually corrupt cantor. (Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers used Mr. Kellner’s indictment, along with technicalities, to convince a state appeals court to overturn the Lebovits conviction. The district attorney has said he intends to retry Mr. Lebovits.) That case descended into parody. A tape went missing. Evidence changed. This past July, the case hit a nadir, as prosecutors handed over evidence that a witness against Mr. Kellner had contradicted himself repeatedly. This witness was himself fleeing abuse allegations. “This case has something to haunt everyone’s conscience,” noted Niall MacGiollabhui, Mr. Kellner’s lawyer. “Last week, it became bizarre beyond belief.” Mr. Kellner’s charm is his insistence on not presenting himself as a saint. His search for justice for his son came to enfold the pain of many victims. “They make me out to be the monster,” he said Monday, pacing. “I say, this is for real, you are all in cahoots? You don’t care about your children?” So a lonely man has justice grabbed away. And a broken-down horse of a politician comes up lame. Contact: powellm@nytimes.com
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