Craig Ruttle/AP Photo
Manhattan district attorney candidate Alvin Bragg, joined by his family, speaks to supporters at an election gathering, June 22, 2021, in New York.
Alvin Bragg emerged from a crowded primary field of contenders vying to replace Cyrus Vance Jr., and recently won the Democratic primary to be the Manhattan district attorney. The campaign took place amid a broader national debate about the criminal justice system and its racial disparities, as well as an increase in violent crime in New York City that may pose a challenge for a reform-minded prosecutor.
Bragg would be the first Black person to hold the office. He is a longtime resident of the city, and as a teenager in the 1980s, he had his own experience with the aggressive policing tactics of the era. He also has experience working as a prosecutor in the federal system, the Southern District of New York, and the state system. He rose to a senior position in the New York state attorney general’s office, and I worked with him as an intern in 2005. Bragg ran on a platform that promised fewer prosecutions of low-level offenses, a presumption of non-incarceration for convictions for many other offenses, and a significant increase in prosecutions of white-collar crime.
In a recent conversation, Bragg discussed his personal history, how he’ll implement ambitious campaign promises, and the most prominent criminal case in the country—the recent indictment of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, and the office’s ongoing investigation into Donald Trump’s finances.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Ankush Khardori: A lot of your campaign had to do with your personal biography. What do you want people to know about you?
Alvin Bragg: I learned on the campaign the integration of the personal narrative and the professional, and the importance of talking about both. For me, the personal flowed into my career. I grew up in Harlem, deeply affected by the criminal justice system—most directly through three gunpoint stops by the NYPD during unconstitutional stops, and then also having had a gun pointed at me three times by people who weren’t police officers.
Those experiences really are why I went to law school and framed my professional experience working at the intersection of public safety and fairness—someone who’s done gun-trafficking cases and prosecuted law enforcement. [I reached] the conclusion that those are really opposite sides of the same coin, and you can’t really fully have public safety without trust that comes with the fairness, and that the first civil right is the right to be safe, so speaking about them in one breath has been a real focus of the campaign.
The campaign was overlaid with the politics of crime at the moment and larger national debates about defunding the police and the like, but what should people expect from you if you take office?
I always say, “Look at what I’ve done the last 20 years.” They can expect someone who’s prosecuted an FBI agent who lied, someone who led the attorney general’s work showing on stop-and-frisk the staggeringly low percentage of stops that led to convictions. They can expect someone who’s prosecuted landlords for harassing tenants, someone who’s done gun-trafficking cases.
That’s what they can expect if I had to encapsulate that. They should expect that I’ll be working to shrink the system. More than 80 percent of the city’s docket is misdemeanors—many of which have little to do with public safety. They can expect that I’ll be working to address the racial disparities that are documented [in the criminal justice system] at every step in Manhattan. And they should also expect that I’ll be pivoting and using that bandwidth from not doing those cases to address the urgent gun crisis we have.
I wonder if you could talk about the process of identifying experts and what sort of experts you consulted with for your platform and your Day One memo.
A lot of folks were folks who I had done some work with. Police accountability: conversations with a family member whose brother was killed in a case that I investigated at the attorney general’s office. Re-entry: my brother-in-law, he’s family, but also talking to other people who have done re-entry work. Sex crimes: Marissa Hoechstetter, the lead spokesperson for survivors who had Robert Hadden as their gynecologist, conversations with her, along with looking at her written work, along with talking to people who have done that kind of work, [including a] former prosecutor who had done a lot of sex crimes prosecution. Conviction review: talking to members of the Exonerated Five, also talking to [civil rights lawyer] Peter Neufeld.
Were there any current or former people from the DA’s office who you worked with?
Not current, because I didn’t really want to put people in the office in that position. But certainly former prosecutors who have done state practice, including input from people from that office specifically.
Shootings and murders have been rising in New York City. It’s been a big point of discussion throughout the campaign. How would you describe the rate of increase, and what do you think the drivers are?
There is, without question, an increase. I think there are a couple of parts of this.
There are people saying, “We’re going back to the ’80s.” I was here in the ’80s. We are not at those types of numbers, so I think that’s an important point to make.
The second point is also an important one, which is that if you’re in and around this [crime]—regardless of how high the number is—if it’s affecting you, that’s important. I had a friend who was just two days ago, down the block from me, shot in the direction of. He wasn’t the intended target. I had a day a week ago where there was a shooting a block north of me and one two blocks south of me within a 12-hour time period. This is urgent, and I think it presents challenges.
We need to address the urgency, but not with old tools. There is a push to say, “Let’s go back to stop-and-frisk. Let’s do some of these old 1980s tactics.” I think we need to be smart and use effective law enforcement. At the attorney general’s office—and I alluded to it earlier—I oversaw the stop-and-frisk report showing that for a four-year period, only 0.1 percent of the stops resulted in a conviction for a gun offense. That speaks to inefficacy.
“You can’t fully have public safety without trust that comes with the fairness … the first civil right is the right to be safe.”
We want to have smart prosecutions. My theory of prosecutions is you follow the money; it will take you to the most culpable person. On gun trafficking, there are people sitting far afield profiting off of guns coming into Manhattan.
We also have an all-of-the-above type of approach. We’ve got great Cure Violence groups. We need to invest in them—folks who are literally running to the fire when there’s an event to prevent a retaliation.
We also have to use traditional law enforcement as well. Someone’s discharging a gun—that’s something that’s got to be prosecuted.
We can talk about restorative justice and other processes as part of that discussion, but I really think we have to have an all-of-the-above approach to address what I think is urgent.
Let’s talk about the person discharging a gun, like the person who shot in the direction of your friend. I’m interested in the implications of your presumption of non-incarceration. As I read it, if someone shoots a weapon at someone and they miss, the presumption is going to be non-incarceration. Do I have that right?
No. We define it by—I don’t have it right in front of me—but we define it by offense levels. I think the distinction that people have asked me about the most is about [incarceration for gun] possession.
If you fire a weapon at someone, that is significant. While I generally think about incarceration as a last resort, we’ve got to think about incarceration for that. That’s significant and serious.
Among other things, the policy says that the presumption of non-incarceration applies to everything except homicide or crime that involves the death of a victim, or a violent felony “in which a deadly weapon causes serious physical injury.”
Yeah. I guess I think of discharge—maybe what we’re talking about, that would be an attempt. But to me a discharge is something that—well, I guess it doesn’t always have to end in physical harm—
Right. If you miss.
It’s something that is—if you talk to my friend [who was shot at], it’s not physical harm, but something that brings a lot of trauma.
So we’re going to be drilling down, and we went out on the campaign and talked about exceptions for extraordinary circumstances. I think shooting multiple times at someone and just [having] happened to have missed—that’s conduct that we’re going to have to really address.
The distinction that I particularly had in mind there is that some of the [gun] possession charges are not what they are made to be seen in the press sometimes.
Like a felon-in-possession type case, you mean.
Yeah. You can take a story if there’s a gun, and you can make it sound very, very scary. I don’t mean to minimize it, but we’ve got to really think about, “What is the public safety in each instance?”
One [example]: My father had an illegal gun in our home growing up. I think it was legal when he purchased it down South. He had it in our home because 1980s Harlem was the 1980s [crime] numbers. On occasion, I’d see him get it if he thought the home was going to be burglarized.
When I was an adult, I said, “Look, you know, you’re now an older person. The likelihood is that if someone comes here it’s going to be on a medical visit for you.” The last thing I want is my dad going to jail for gun possession for a gun that hasn’t been fired in 40 years, for someone who is, frankly at that point, close to infirm. He agreed with me and turned that gun in.
The point is that, under some policies, a mandatory prison case where, you know, the gun possession of a 65-year-old person—that’s just not wise public policy.
If someone’s friend leaves a weapon in their car trunk, and the owner of the car is a felon, technically that gun may be in possession of the felon even though it’s his friend’s gun.
My brother-in-law was incarcerated for more than a year. There was a schoolyard fight while he was in college, a fistfight involving a number of boys. They were all arrested for the fistfight. One of them had a gun on them.
They were all charged with possession of the gun. So he went to jail for more than a year for constructively possessing a gun that he was not aware of and never touched.
You have two halves to your policy. One is ramping down the prosecution and incarceration side in some areas, and the other is ramping up the white-collar prosecutions, which you say the DA’s office has not sufficiently addressed. You’ve said you anticipate far more prosecutions of white-collar and public-corruption crimes. What concrete steps do you anticipate taking to do that once you get into office?
I think the two speak to each other. Reducing in one place gives you the bandwidth to invest [in others]. Some of these cases take time and energy and resources. I think creating the room and the resources to invest in that area is the first step.
The second one is hiring and really making clear that it’s an office priority. I tried a case in the Southern District that would be framed as a white-collar case. It was a money laundering case. The owner of a $30 million business was laundering millions of dollars of drug money, but he was doing so for a violent cartel, so we prosecuted him and convicted him and we turned off that flow of money. We saw public-safety benefits.
I think it’s worth articulating that for the public—to say, long-term it could also be something that’s going to affect your public safety and your streets. That investigation [involved] more than a year and multiple wiretaps, but the impact of it when compared to the churn cases—arresting the same person or someone who’s replaced them on the corner for the last sale [of the gun]—is much more impactful and a much better use of resources.
And then of course, using tools, using wiretap tools, using undercovers in places, the kind of investigations where we may not necessarily think of them. I think that’s why my former office [the Southern District of New York] was very successful in a string of securities fraud cases, because they used wiretaps in cases that traditionally hadn’t been wiretap cases.
You were at the Southern District of New York during the financial crisis. Observers have been critical, frankly, of the Southern District’s work during that period and the apparent failure to prosecute people who may have been responsible for the financial crisis. Time and effort was put into insider trading cases, but people have noted the absence of prosecutions in other areas. What lessons have you taken away to do better this time around as the person at the head of the office?
I was there from 2009 to 2013. The last case that I tried was a mortgage fraud case, which was an older case but from the financial meltdown. So I think those cases were done. I would just sort of push back a little bit on the narrative. I think those cases are important, and yes, getting corporate liability and CEOs. The case I tried was a former prosecutor who was a lawyer in private practice who was having sham closings, and I think his accountability sent an important signal.
I think from a leadership perspective in the DA’s office, you know, I don’t know what the next bubble will be or things of that sort. So I think it’s thinking serially, thinking about corporate complicity, connecting the dots. I did a fair amount of that at Southern, taking something that may be an investigation of one thing and looking expansively. I also did a lot of that at the attorney general’s office. Our Harvey Weinstein investigation was broad. Our Trump Foundation case—I guess not broad in terms of going beyond one entity, but looking at various types of conduct. And so using that approach—which I think has less so been used at the local level—is something I bring with me from my experience.
I have to ask you about the Trump Organization indictment and the indictment of its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. Looking at the case from 10,000 feet, do you have any reactions that you can share?
I’ve looked at the indictment but am constrained from commenting on it. The only thing I would say is, whereas I contemplate personnel changes in other parts of the office and leadership teams, my experience with long-term complex cases—and knowing the members of this team by reputation—my strong default is to keep this team intact.
Also, I’ve heard a lot of pundits with various theories about what types of cases [there] should be and where [the investigation] can go, and I would counsel everyone to have some patience. I can’t opine at the moment, and one of the reasons I can’t opine is because I don’t know [the evidence]. There’s really a small handful of folks who know, which you know from your prior work, but I have heard a lot of the pundits criticizing, and I think some listeners [have to recognize that] we don’t know. We don’t know what the evidence is. We don’t know where this may go.
I’ve seen the charging instrument, and I read it as I would any other charging instrument. If it wasn’t a case before me, I might comment. But I think for all of us, we have to just see what will be presented in court before we speculate.
