Nancy Ryan is said to be under lobbying siege now from police and prosecutors, former and current, who believe her report will call for the rape verdicts to be vacated. With their reputations at stake, they're trying to talk her into a less drastic decision. Fairstein is reported to be lobbying Morgenthau. If it all weren't so real, it would be a soap opera.
Robert Morgenthau, it is fair to say, is a haloed icon in the New York establishment. At 83, he has probably spent more years in public service here than any other active government official. For the past 28 years (he began his eighth consecutive term in January), he has been the Manhattan D.A. Some admirers call him "America's D.A." He has been an advocate for good government and has lent his name and time to many worthy causes. That said, he is, like all the other players in this story, a mortal being, not a deity. Like any D.A., he has in his time covered up lots of his office's mistakes. Like other big-city D.A.'s, he has also swept under a large carpet the misdeeds of myriad well-known personages. They owe him. Not long ago, his office buried an investigation into Charles Gargano, the state's economic czar, who has a recurring habit of giving big state contracts to people who make big campaign contributions to his friend Governor George Pataki. Some Morgenthau watchers think that he may have been too long with power and that with age, he may have lost his touch.
illustration: Yuan Lee
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People sometimes use the phrase "the game" to describe how big systems like government and multinational corporations often get manipulated not for the common good but for the good of the people who run them. It's not a description of evil, but rather of human nature. It explains what happens when individuals have been doing things a certain way for a long time and come to believe this is always the right way. One symptom is when a player begins to focus only on winning, on trouncing the opposing side. Another is when people become so habit-formed and sure of themselves that they stop asking the question: "Could I possibly be wrong about this?"
The story of the Central Park jogger case may be in large part a story about people in the justice system playing the gamewhen they should have been doing the right thing.
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Sydney H. Schanberg, an internationally known journalist, has written extensively on foreign affairsparticularly Asiaand on domestic issues such as ethics, racial problems, government secrecy, corporate excesses and the weaknesses of the national media. Most of his 40 years in journalism have been spent on newspapers, but his award-winning work has also appeared widely in other publications and media. The movie, The Killing Fields, which won several Academy Awards, was based on his book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran - a memoir of his experiences covering the war in Cambodia for The New York Times and of his relationship with his Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran. For his reporting on the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting "at great risk." He is also the recipient of many other journalism awards - including two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism. Schanberg's first journalism job came after college and a two-year stint in the army. The New York Times hired him in 1959 as a copy boy and he spent the next 26 years there. After rising through the clerical ranks to the reporting staff and doing local and national news for eight years, he was posted overseas - first to New Delhi, where his reporting included the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. In 1973 he moved on to Singapore, from which he covered all of Southeast Asia, but Cambodia and Vietnam in particular. In 1975, he was one of a handful of Western correspondents to witness the collapse of Cambodia. In the final days, he filed dozens of stories from Phnom Penh about the advancing communist army and the rising anxiety in the capital, where food was short and the few hospitals overflowed with the wounded. When the Westerners were allowed to leave Cambodia after two weeks of detention, he wrote a lengthy account of the barbaric takeover. Soon after, Schanberg returned to The Times' home office to become the Metropolitan Editor, and, later, a columnist on the opinion page. In 1986, he left The Times to write his column for New York Newsday, which had decided to expand into New York City. There, he wrote on a range of subjects, from police corruption and real estate scandals to the press's invasions of privacy and the fate of American POW's still missing in Vietnam. After a decade at New York Newsday, Schanberg departed to work on his own projects. He lectures extensively, usually on the press, and writes for magazines, including a Life piece on child labor in the third world that led to reforms by Nike and other multinationals in their overseas factories. To better understand the world of the Internet, he spent a year (1999-2000) as investigations editor for APBNews.com, a website that won several press awards for aggressive pursuit of government records and other in-depth reporting. APB also developed radio and television capabilities before it went into bankruptcy in August 2000 in a wave of dot.com financial failures. Schanberg's articles have been reprinted in many anthologies and journalism textbooks. Last year, he taught journalism at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York, as the first fellow appointed to the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professorship. Schanberg was born on January 17, 1934 in Clinton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard College, graduating with a B.A. in government in 1955. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jane Freiman, a writer and editor. He has two daughters by a previous marriage - Jessica and Rebecca.
