Shirah Neiman, Pathbreaking New York City Prosecutor, Dies at 81
Shirah Neiman, a bookish Brooklynite who in 1970 cracked open the boys’ club that was the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, becoming the first woman in decades to be hired into its criminal division, died on Jan. 4 in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was 81.
Her sister and only immediate survivor, Dassi Gurfein, said the cause of her death, at a nursing facility, had not yet been determined, but that she had recently been diagnosed with multiple tumors.
The daughter of an intellectually minded Orthodox Jewish couple — her father taught Hebrew literature, her mother was a concert pianist — Ms. Neiman first applied for a job with the Southern District in 1969. Of the 50 lawyers in the criminal division at the time, not one was a woman.
“I was advised by Peter Fleming, the administrative assistant then, that I probably wouldn’t be hired, but that I ought to try to force the issue,” she told The New York Times in 1970.
During the interview process, she faced a barrage of sexist questions, like whether juries would listen to a female prosecutor or how she would manage to work with male F.B.I. agents. “I began to get so discouraged that I withdrew,” she said.
She was about to take a job with a private law firm when the new U.S. attorney for the district, a liberal Republican named Whitney North Seymour Jr., called and asked her to reapply. This time, she was hired almost immediately.
Despite grumblings from some retrograde corners, she thrived in her new job, eventually climbing to the deputy position under Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney from 1993 to 2002. The Southern District of New York encompasses part of New York City and six nearby counties.
Ms. Neiman became the office’s expert on criminal tax law, taking the lead on several high-profile white-collar cases. In 1979 she led the successful prosecution of Anthony Salerno, an underboss of the Genovese crime family, squaring off against the pit-bull lawyer Roy Cohn, the former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy and then fixer for the New York elite, including Donald J. Trump.
And she mentored a long list of young lawyers, many of whom went on to high-profile careers in government and private practice.
“She had it all, in terms of being a great teacher and a terrific trial lawyer,” Ms. White said in an interview.
Shirah Neiman was born on Dec. 19, 1943, in Brooklyn. Her father, Morris, taught Hebrew literature at Brooklyn College and the Modern Orthodox Ramaz School. Her mother, Dorothy (Wagner) Neiman, was a Julliard-trained concert pianist.
Shirah attended Ramaz, where she fell in love with the logic and rhetoric of the Torah. But the school split girls and boys in the 11th grade; boys continued Torah study, while girls were sent to learn typing and cooking.
“I went to the principal with a classmate to protest such rank discrimination,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1970. “But we didn’t win.”
She graduated from Barnard in 1965 and from Columbia Law School in 1968, after which she spent two years clerking for Milton Pollack, a federal judge for the Southern District of New York.
Among the cases he assigned her was the prosecution of Sam Melville, an antiwar activist charged with planting bombs around New York City. He was convicted and sent to the Attica Correctional Facility, where he was killed during the 1971 prison riot.
Work on that case, and others, persuaded her to apply for a job with the U.S. attorney’s criminal division. Though it was a hot spot for young legal talent, only a handful of women had ever worked there, and none since 1952, when Florence P. Shientag resigned.
“There was effectively a blockade,” Lisa Zornberg, a former lawyer in the division who is writing a history of women in the Southern District, said in an interview. “Women were not allowed to serve in the criminal division.”
Ms. Neiman was undeterred. When she was told it wasn’t worth applying, she told The Daily News, “My answer was, wait and see.”
The world was changing rapidly, with women marching in the streets and the Equal Rights Amendment under consideration in Congress. What had been a closed door to women under Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney in 1969, was flung open by his successor, Mr. Seymour, in 1970.
Ms. Neiman was the first of several women to join the office under Mr. Seymour; a few months later, Barbara Ann Rowan became the first Black woman hired as a prosecutor in the Southern District.
Ms. Neiman stayed at the Southern District for over 40 years, except for a brief absence in 1975 when she worked for the Department of Justice task force investigating the Watergate break-in. Ms. White made her deputy U.S. attorney in 1993. After Ms. White left in 2002, Ms. Neiman became chief counsel, one of the senior leaders of the division, to Ms. White’s successor, James Comey, the future director of the F.B.I. She retired in 2011.
In 2012 the Department of Financial Services, New York’s top banking regulator, appointed Ms. Neiman to monitor BNP Paribas, a French bank, which the Department of Justice had accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Sudan and other countries.
