Eugene Gold, a former tough-on-crime Brooklyn district attorney who in the late 1970s spearheaded the successful prosecution of David Berkowitz, the so-called Son of Sam serial killer, died on Aug. 5 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 100.
His son, Michael, confirmed the death, which a funeral home announced in August but which had not been reported elsewhere until this week.
After a 13-year tenure, Mr. Gold stepped down as district attorney in 1981, having gained further prominence as a leading voice in an international campaign to win emigration rights for Jews in what was then the Soviet Union. But his reputation also suffered two years later when he was charged with a sex offense involving a minor.
Mr. Gold was one of three district attorneys in New York City who sought to prosecute Mr. Berkowitz, but he was the first to proceed against him.
A 24-year-old postal clerk from Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Berkowitz was arrested in August 1977 and charged with shootings that claimed the lives of six people, most of them young, and left seven others wounded in a yearlong series of nighttime attacks in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx that terrified New Yorkers. While he was at large, the news media called him “the .44-caliber killer.”
In pretrial hearings, Mr. Gold personally, and successfully, questioned psychiatrists in an effort to demonstrate that Mr. Berkowitz was mentally competent to stand trial.
Mr. Berkowitz called himself the “Son of Sam” in reference to a neighbor named Sam Carr whose dog, he said, was possessed by a demon that drove him to kill. His defense lawyers planned to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
But two state judges in Brooklyn ruled successively that Mr. Berkowitz was fit to stand trial, and in May 1978 he pleaded guilty to all six murders.
Mr. Gold — joined by district attorneys from Queens and the Bronx, who by then had also opened prosecutions — demanded the maximum sentence, which was what Mr. Berkowitz received: 25 years to life for each of the six killings. He remains in prison in upstate New York, having been denied parole multiple times.
Mr. Gold was a criminal defense lawyer for 20 years before switching to the other side. He was first elected district attorney in 1968, running on the Democratic and Liberal lines.
In 1972, he drew headlines for a mob investigation in Brooklyn that involved a listening device hidden in the ceiling of a trailer that was being used as a headquarters by a top figure in the Lucchese crime family. The trailer was in a junkyard in Canarsie.
At a news conference, Mr. Gold said the device had captured conversations over six months, providing damning evidence of, among other crimes, labor racketeering, drug trafficking and payoffs to police officers, a sizable number of whom had visited the trailer. The officers and hundreds of mobsters were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.
After the news conference, Mr. Gold took two busloads of journalists to the junkyard.
“You fellas want to see the bug?” he asked, referring to the listening device, while he stood on a box inside the trailer.
As television cameras whirred and flashbulbs popped, he ripped out a ceiling panel and pulled down the electronic device.
Two years later, his office reported that 45 people had been convicted of charges stemming from what had come to be called the “Gold Bug” investigation.
Nearly 40 more cases were reported pending in the office, and about 50 had been turned over to other prosecutors and the F.B.I. But like most newsmaking assaults on the Mafia, this one ultimately did little to keep it from flourishing in the city.
Mr. Gold was 59 and had left the district attorney’s office when he faced sex-abuse allegations.
In 1983, while visiting Nashville to address a convention of the National District Attorneys Association, he was charged with sexually molesting the 10-year-old daughter of an Alabama prosecutor, accused of kissing and fondling her in a hotel room while her parents were elsewhere in the building. In an affidavit, her father said that the girl was “crying and visibly upset” when she later told her parents.
Under Tennessee law, sexual abuse of a child younger than 13 was charged as aggravated rape, and conviction carried a maximum sentence of life in prison. Mr. Gold avoided prosecution under an agreement in which he admitted to “unlawful sexual fondling” and consented to undergo psychiatric treatment while on probation for two years.
The Nashville district attorney said that the girl’s family had approved the agreement to spare her the additional trauma of testifying at a trial.
Eugene Gold was born on June 24, 1924, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to Abraham and Fannine (Schnapper) Gold. His father was an accountant.
After graduating from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, Eugene briefly attended Brooklyn College. He joined the wartime Army in December 1942 and served until 1946.
After his discharge, to complete his college education, he attended night school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and took home-study courses, accumulating enough credits to enter Brooklyn Law School. He received his law degree in 1948 and began two decades in private practice, eventually becoming a partner in a criminal defense firm.
Mr. Gold became Brooklyn district attorney by winning a special election in November 1968, called to fill out the term of Aaron E. Koota, who was leaving to become a State Supreme Court justice.
Mr. Gold won his first full term the next year.
Among his notable cases was one in 1973 in which he dismissed the last remaining charges against George Whitmore Jr., who had been wrongfully convicted and incarcerated after falsely confessing as a teenager to what the news media labeled the “career girls murders” — the killings of three young women, one in Brooklyn and two in Manhattan, in the 1960s.
This case was widely credited as the reason the death penalty was outlawed in New York State. It was also cited in the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision, which required the authorities to advise suspects of their rights before questioning them.
Also in the 1970s, Mr. Gold prosecuted Devernon LeGrand, who called himself a bishop as he presided over a Pentecostal church in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and who was charged with killing and dismembering his wife and two young women and raping another woman in the building that housed the church. He was convicted.
But Mr. Gold was thwarted in another high-profile case. In 1975, he obtained a felony indictment of Stanley Steingut, the Democratic speaker of the State Assembly, and his son, Robert, a member of the City Council from Brooklyn, on corruption charges. The indictment accused them of agreeing to arrange for an honorary city post for a businessman in exchange for a $2,500 contribution to Robert Steingut’s first campaign for the Council. The man never received the post.
An appeals court threw out the indictment before trial on the ground that Mr. Gold lacked jurisdiction to bring the case. The defense successfully argued that even if the Steinguts were guilty of the misconduct, which they denied, it would have occurred in Manhattan. The Manhattan district attorney’s office later decided that the evidence did not support criminal charges.
Mr. Gold announced in 1981 that he would not seek re-election that year, saying he wanted to devote more time to Jewish causes. He had already been serving as chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry in its campaign to win emigration rights for Soviet Jews. He made numerous trips to the Soviet Union on their behalf and lobbied officials and lawmakers in Washington.
He and his wife, Rosaine (Schwartz) Gold, who was known as Ronnie, moved to Israel the next year. They returned to the United States in 1995.
In addition to his son, Mr. Gold is survived by his daughters, Caralee Gold Moor and Wendy Gold; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His wife of 77 years died last year.
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