Attacking man with gravitas is not without risk

There is some risk involved as political rivals of former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie seek to make Herbert Stern an issue in the 2009 gubernatorial campaign.  A former Federal Judge and U.S. Attorney, Stern is a man of considerable gravitas.  Making him look like a common pay-to-play lawyer could backfire if they seek to impugn his integrity. 

Stern was a career prosecutor who went from law school to trying Homicide cases as an Assistant Manhattan District Attorney. (He was the DA sent to the scene when Civil Rights leader Malcolm X. Shabbaz was murdered.) He spent four years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. When Frederick Lacey became the new U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in 1969, he hired Stern as Chief Assistant. The two met a year earlier during the prosecution of Peter Weber, the powerful head of the New Jersey Operating Engineers Union. Stern was the prosecutor and Lacey was the defense attorney; Stern won.

Stern was named U.S. Attorney in 1970, when Lacey became a Federal Judge. In 1974, Stern joined Lacey on the bench and was replaced by his deputy, Jonathan Goldstein, also a career prosecutor.

This trio of federal prosecutors won national attention for their war on political corruption and for their aggressive prosecution of organized crime figures. While nominally Republican (they were appointed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford at the suggestion of GOP U.S. Senator Clifford Case), they were viewed as fairly non-political. In fact, they took town several key members of Republican Governor William Cahill's administration; that scandal contributed toward Cahill's defeat in the 1973 GOP primary.

After Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in the 1976 presidential election, Carter replaced Goldstein with Robert Del Tufo, a Democrat who had served as an Assistant Morris County Prosecutor and as the Director of the state Division of Criminal Justice under Brendan Byrne's first Attorney General, William Hyland. During his three years as a federal prosecutor, the more partisan Del Tufo seemed to annoy Stern when he replaced many career federal prosecutors with lawyers that had political ties.

Stern spent thirteen years as a U.S. District Court Judge and was the presiding Judge at the U.S. Court for Berlin in 1979. Martin Sheen played Stern in the movie, Judgment in Berlin, based on his 1984 book.