Doing Right

From the Manhattan District Attorney's Office to the front lines of public accountability, Jeff Schlanger's Doing Right is the story of one man's journey through crime, corruption, institutional failure, and the hard discipline of conscience. Jeff Schlanger entered the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in 1978, where he spent more than a decade as a senior trial and investigative attorney at the forefront of the office's organized crime work, including the investigation and prosecution of the Westies and John Gotti. Following his years as a prosecutor, Schlanger moved into the private sector, representing a journalist whose reporting on the TWA Flight 800 disaster led to federal criminal charges that raised fundamental questions about freedom of the press and the limits of federal authority. Beginning in 2001, Schlanger helped lead the federal monitorship overseeing the Los Angeles Police Department - the largest police consent decree in American history - a role that continued for nearly eight years. He also led the operation to recover millions of dollars of gold from the World Trade Center site, coordinating with the NYPD, the Port Authority Police Department, and the Bank of Nova Scotia. He later returned to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office as Chief of Staff to District Attorney Cyrus Vance, and subsequently served as Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD, where he founded and led the Risk Management Bureau. Doing Right is not simply a memoir of cases. It is an account of what it means to pursue justice inside institutions that are sometimes flawed, sometimes political, and sometimes resistant to the very accountability they are supposed to uphold. Across four decades, one question never left him: what does it actually mean to do right?