‘Safety Is a Civil Right’: A Q&A With Manhattan’s Federal Prosecutor
A rare and candid interview with Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Damian Williams, the first Black person to lead the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, was nominated in 2021 by President Joe Biden.
Seng for The New York Times
By Benjamin Weiser
April 13, 2023
When Damian Williams, Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, announced charges in December against Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, he made it clear that the authorities had wasted no time investigating what he called one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.
Mr. Williams authorized the charges on a Wednesday, a grand jury issued an indictment on Friday, and Mr. Bankman-Fried was arrested three days later in the Bahamas.
“This is very, very fast,” Mr. Williams said, adding, “We’re not done.”
Indeed, three of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s former top associates have pleaded guilty and are assisting in the investigation. And Mr. Bankman-Fried’s charges were recently expanded to include orchestrating a $40 million bribe to at least one Chinese government official to unfreeze certain trading accounts. Mr. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
A year and a half ago, Mr. Williams, 42, was sworn in to lead the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which handles some of America’s most complex and high-profile cases. His appointment by President Biden also made history: He is the first Black person to lead the Southern District in its more than 233 years of existence.
Mr. Williams, who spent nearly a decade as a prosecutor and supervisor in the office, took charge in October 2021 after a tumultuous period during the Trump administration. In a book published last year, Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney from 2018 to 2020, accused Trump Justice Department officials of interfering with Southern District investigations and trying to use the office to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics. Mr. Trump eventually fired Mr. Berman after he refused a request to resign made by Attorney General William P. Barr, who had sought to replace him with a Trump ally.
Under Mr. Williams, the Southern District has obtained the convictions of such notorious defendants as Ghislaine Maxwell, the former companion of Jeffrey Epstein, in a sex trafficking trial, and Sayfullo Saipov, who killed eight people in a 2017 terrorist attack on a bike path.
Mr. Williams recently sat down with The New York Times at his offices in Lower Manhattan for his first extensive interview since taking office.
He declined to discuss the case of Mr. Bankman-Fried or other pending matters. But he talked about his job, his office’s relationship with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and other issues of importance to him.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why has it been important for the office to move quickly in major white-collar investigations?
What we’re trying to do is collapse the distance between criminal conduct and criminal sanction.
If we do everything we can to move as quickly as we can — and as responsibly as we can, because we don’t cut corners — then I think it can enhance the legitimacy of the justice system to show that there is a consequence for bad behavior.
Under President Trump, Justice Department officials were said to have been motivated by partisan concerns in urging the Southern District to pursue certain cases, even pushing for a criminal investigation of former Secretary of State John Kerry, whose efforts to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran angered Mr. Trump. How is the office’s relationship with the Justice Department under the current attorney general, Mr. Garland? Have there been any interference attempts by government officials that seemed improper?
There have been absolutely no attempts, not even an inkling of an attempt, to influence the work that we’ve done, to improperly inject politics in any decision. I think this attorney general and the deputy attorney general have been outstanding when it comes to returning the department to where it was under Republican and Democratic administrations.
We are firmly rooted in the same traditions that we’ve always operated under — the political independence, the incorruptibility. That is our North Star, and it’s theirs, too.
New York City’s Rikers jail complex has a long history with the Southern District: investigations, findings of civil rights violations, a lawsuit. Last year the office raised the prospect of placing Rikers under court control to stem violence and disorder. Talk a little bit about Rikers.
Obviously we’re in active litigation so I can’t say much, but I have made clear before that it was the first briefing I asked for when I was sworn in as U.S. attorney.
As a society, when we prosecute people, often the sanction is the loss of liberty when imposed by a judge. But that sanction never includes abuse or neglect, mistreatment, things of that nature. That’s not part of the sentence that society expects to impose on someone for breaking the law.
The problems at Rikers run deep, and they’re decades in the making. And they’re very complex. And we understand that. So we’re cleareyed about it, ultimately. But yes, it’s something that is an urgent priority for us.
You have said that New York City is “awash” in illegal guns. How do you address that?
I really do believe that safety is a civil right. It’s the freedom to be safe, to live in peace. And I think that, like all civil rights, in order to keep it, you have to enforce it.
Violent crime has countless victims. Anyone who has ever been in a neighborhood where you hear a gunshot knows that even if the bullet is unintended for you, the fear is broadly felt: Where is that gun? How close is it? Do I need to run? Where do I run?
These things have kind of deep and entrenched impact on communities. They impact kids and how well they can perform in school. It impacts people feeling safe, whether they can go out at certain times of night to the grocery store to get the basic necessities. Anyone who’s been woken up in the middle of the night by the bang of a gun knows that it’s truly terrifying. And I speak from personal experience. This is not academic to me.
In summertime, trying to distinguish between firecracker and gunshot is a thing that you have to become good at if you live in certain parts of New York.
So I don’t view violent crime just through the lens of just protecting people from specific perpetrators, because the chances of being the victim of a violent crime are relatively low. I know that. I think we all know that.
But the blast radius of an act of violence is so broad.
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Since taking office, Mr. Williams has announced a series of indictments against people accused of participating in violent gangs across the Southern District — in Manhattan and the Bronx, in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie. In the interview with The Times, he said his office continues to investigate such organizations, their leaders and the so-called trigger pullers said to be disproportionately responsible for driving the uptick in violent crime.
Mr. Williams recalled working as a young prosecutor a decade ago on a trial involving members of a Bronx gang that had turned an apartment building and playground into an “open-air drug market,” as he told the jury then. The gang stashed narcotics behind a jungle gym and threatened violence to silence the building’s residents. After the indictments and arrests, families reclaimed the building and playground.
“I got into this work because I don’t like bullies,” Mr. Williams said. “And anytime you see something like that happen, I think it compels you to want to do something about it.”
Benjamin Weiser is a reporter covering the Manhattan federal courts. He has long covered criminal justice, both as a beat and investigative reporter. Before joining The Times in 1997, he worked at The Washington Post. More about Benjamin Weiser
A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2023, Section MB, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘I Really Do Believe That Safety Is a Civil Right’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe