To hear the media tell it, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is soft on white-collar crime. First came the news that an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had arranged a fund-raiser for Vance after he refused to prosecute them for fraud. Then there was Vance’s decision not to file sexual-assault charges against Harvey Weinstein, even though police had caught the Hollywood mogul on tape confessing to the crime. Last month, spurred by a story in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the state attorney general to investigate Vance’s handling of the case. The incidents have cost the DA: During his uncontested election for a third term in November, 10 percent of voters were so fed up with him that they went to the trouble of writing in someone whose name wasn’t Cy Vance.

This story was produced in partnership with New York Magazine

But all the attention on Vance’s treatment of the rich and powerful has obscured a more surprising aspect of his record: The DA, who styles himself a progressive reformer, is actually far more punitive toward poor and minority defendants than his counterparts in other boroughs. According to a report issued last year by a special commission on Rikers Island, Vance’s office was responsible for almost 38 percent of the city’s jail population in 2016, even though it handled just 29 percent of all criminal cases in New York. “No other borough comes close,” the report concluded. Brooklyn — despite having a million more residents than Manhattan — accounted for only 22 percent of those behind bars.

Vance’s selectively tough approach to law and order continued last year. Even as the DA supported the growing movement to close Rikers, his office continued to fill the jail at a far higher rate than other boroughs’ DAs. As of December, according to data published by the Department of Correction, a third of the city’s inmates — including 2,251 at Rikers — had been sent there from Manhattan.

That parade of imprisonment is compounded by Vance’s onerous demands for bail. In 2016, the DA’s own statistics show, his office detained 17 percent of those it charged with misdemeanors or minor infractions — anything from smoking a joint to jumping a turnstile. Only Staten Island, with one-seventh as many petty crimes as Manhattan, matched that level of incarceration.

Then there’s Vance’s notoriously stingy approach to providing defense attorneys with the police reports and witness statements they need to defend their clients. While most of the city’s other DAs have moved toward the practice of “open file discovery,” releasing crucial records shortly after arraignment, Vance pursues what defense attorneys call “trial by ambush,” using the narrow requirements in the state’s law on pretrial disclosure — considered one of the most restrictive in the nation — to withhold vital evidence from indigent defendants until the last possible moment. As a result, public defenders say, poor clients in Brooklyn can easily obtain evidence that is denied to those accused of similar crimes in Manhattan. “It’s two boroughs divided by a river,” says Bill Gibney, a veteran of the Legal Aid Society, the city’s oldest and largest public defense organization. “Different policies, different results.”

Read More Vance and the Game of Hide-the-Evidence Even North Carolina and Texas have more liberal laws than New York when it comes to letting defendants know what kind of evidence will be used against them at trial. In the Empire State, all prosecutors need do to comply with the law is to provide witness statements, police reports and grand jury minutes when the case goes to trial. State bar associations call it the “blindfold law” since it leaves defendants in the dark. At a City Council hearing on criminal discovery practices in February chaired by Queens councilman Rory Lancman, Sergio de la Pava, a supervising attorney for New York County Defender Services who has been representing indigent defendants in Manhattan for over 20 years, described a typical experience in the borough’s courtrooms: After waiting six months or a year for trial, he said, “The DA comes in with a cart and drops about six inches of material on your desk. If you say to the judge, ‘Look what I’ve just been given, I need an adjournment,’ the judge will say to you the truth, which is that they are complying with the statute.” That’s markedly different from what happens in Brooklyn, where for decades the D.A. has provided that kind of crucial evidence shortly after arraignment. At the council hearing, representatives of both the Staten Island and Bronx district attorneys announced that they are both moving toward adopting aspects of Brooklyn’s more open discovery policy. As Lancman pointed out, that was the breaking news of the day. The Manhattan and Queens reps, however, dug in largely for the status quo. Speaking for Vance, top assistant Karen Friedman Agnifilo cited a 2008 case in which a gang member accused of murdering a 13-year-old boy in a shooting outside a Harlem housing project had issued instructions from a Rikers Island phone to have potential witnesses confronted. “Witness intimidation is real,” she said. “It can result in harassment, intimidation and violence and prevent people from coming forward.” Defense attorneys acknowledge that some evidence may be too sensitive for an early release, but argue that protective orders can readily be obtained from the judge. Vance said he is working toward expanding his office’s discovery practices in coming months. But he said he is most comfortable when evidence is exchanged between those he called “experienced” lawyers. “Informal discovery practices,” he said, “really are best when they are done between lawyers who know each other.” As an example, he offered the Etan Patz case, which resulted in a long-sought conviction in one of Manhattan’s oldest and most harrowing cases. “We turned the whole file over,” he said.

In a lengthy interview, the usually mild-mannered Vance bristles at any suggestion that his office takes a different approach to justice based on class or race. “Do we treat the wealthy different than others purposely? The answer is no,” he says hotly. Any such suggestion is “offensive,” he adds, pointing to two recent cases prosecuted by his office: “Ask the two young white men just convicted of rape, both from wealthy families.”

In Weinstein’s case, Vance says, his office’s sex-crimes prosecutor decided the charges were unprovable. “A judgment was made — that I could not disagree with — that we wouldn’t go forward with that case,” he says. “It was a B misdemeanor at the time,” he adds dismissively. That comparison, however, serves only to underscore the way Vance’s office takes a different approach to the poor. Ordinary misdemeanors like the one Weinstein faced usually don’t merit personal attention from the DA — and usually wind up with the accused being prosecuted. “We see a lot of complaints drawn up with a lot less evidence,” says Edward McCarthy, a Legal Aid supervisor who has two decades of experience in Manhattan’s criminal courts. Jonathan Oberman, a professor who trains public defenders at Cardozo Law School, also scoffs at Vance’s reasoning. “There are conflicting stories from a witness?” he says. “Okay — then just apply the same standard to poor and low-income people and let them derive the same benefit.”

Read More The Reform Prosecutors Amid protests over mass incarceration and police abuses, progressive district attorneys have been voted into office in cities around the country in recent years. “We are in an incredible moment right now,” says Miriam Krinsky, a former career prosecutor from California who heads a group called Fair and Just Prosecution that provides assistance to newly elected DA’s. “We have seen individuals elected coast to coast -- Houston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Denver, and everywhere in between. They start with recognition that the criminal justice system has gotten too large, and too often we criminalize things that are better attended to in other ways.” Those new officials include Kim Foxx, who took office last year in Chicago on a platform of prosecuting corrupt cops and righting wrongful convictions. In March, in a rare and massive move of prosecutorial transparency, Foxx released six years’ worth of felony complaint data covering tens of thousands of arrests. “I think she recognizes that the news isn’t all going to be good news,” said Krinsky. “But the community has a right to know it, and she’s encouraging her community to dig deep into those numbers and help her in understanding what the lessons learned are.” Then there’s Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s newly elected DA. In March, Krasner issued a memo that turned traditional prosecution strategy on its head, ordering his attorneys to begin their plea offers at the low end of sentencing guidelines, instead of the other way around. He has also insisted that prosecutors cite the costs of any sentence they seek, in dollars and cents to government, as well the collateral consequences to the defendant and his family. That progressive club is one in which Vance would like to claim membership, although, aside from his recent decision not to prosecute most fare beat cases, he’s been a cautious reformer. His order to end bail on misdemeanors came nine months after Brooklyn’s newly elected DA, Eric Gonzalez, made the same move in his borough. Gonzalez’s predecessor, the late Ken Thompson, declared in July, 2014, soon after his own election, that his office would no longer prosecute simple marijuana possession cases – another broken-windows catch-all that has pulled thousands of young, mainly black and Hispanic men into the criminal justice system. Vance meanwhile held back as he negotiated with police brass. “We were very much part of the process,” he said. Earlier this year, a group of activists held a small rally outside of Manhattan’s criminal courts on Centre Street to announce a new initiative they called “Court Watch.” The group said it would use volunteers to observe criminal arraignments to monitor the kind of justice practiced by Cy Vance’s prosecutors. Asked about the effort, Vance said he welcomed it. “You know, keep us on our toes,” he said. “If you think there is some case where a mistake has been made, we should be alerted to it.” The D.A. acknowledged that he’s had a sharp learning curve since taking office in 2010. “This whole idea of right-sizing the justice system -- I wasn’t there when I started this job,” he said.

Such criticisms are especially awkward for Vance, who prides himself on being at the forefront of progressive reform. In 2010, Vance became the first DA in the state to create a special unit to address wrongful convictions — but ever since, he has refused to disclose whether the unit has actually exonerated anyone. During our interview, however, Vance reverses himself and provides me with a list of seven names. “I was told you’d asked for this, and I said we should provide it,” he tells me. He had previously kept the cases secret, he explained, because “generally speaking, there’s a view that these people want the cases behind them.”

On closer scrutiny, though, it turns out that one of the defendants on Vance’s list was convicted after a retrial, while another was released only after he pleaded guilty to lesser charges. All told, after eight years, Vance’s unit has exonerated only five defendants who were wrongly convicted — compared to two dozen in Brooklyn. Vance’s office is “much more interested in preserving convictions than in taking a fresh, objective look at all the evidence,” says Robert Gottlieb, a former member of Vance’s transition committee who has been seeking to win exoneration for a defendant named Jon-Adrian Velazquez since 2011. “I call it the conviction-rejustification unit,” adds Ron Kuby, who has won several wrongful-conviction claims on behalf of clients in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. “Their method is to collect evidence to attack your witnesses and your argument.”

In recent months, seeking to bolster his image as a reformer, Vance announced that his office will no longer demand bail for most misdemeanor charges. He has reduced penalties for marijuana possession and reinforced a vow he made last year not to prosecute most cases of fare evasion. He proudly displays a chart showing that his office has reduced the number of misdemeanors it prosecutes by 26 percent since 2014. Prosecutions for smaller-time offenses, like unlicensed vending or taking up more than one seat on the subway, have plunged by 87 percent.

Read More Vance the Philanthropist Cy Vance is not only New York’s top prosecutor; he’s also quietly become the city’s biggest philanthropist. That’s thanks to the massive $800 million in forfeiture funds that his office has collected from corporate wrongdoers, mostly banks found to have violated U.S. sanctions. The forfeiture deals are controversial: corporate investigation targets are allowed to avoid prosecution by paying hefty fines, a deal out of reach for lesser defendants. Vance critic James Yates, a former state supreme court judge and legislative counsel, calls the deals “little more than outright bribery.” They’re controversial as well since the D.A. gets to decide how the funds are spent with little public scrutiny. “Given that these are essentially public dollars, more transparency and accountability is warranted,” the city’s Independent Budget Office said in a February report on the funds. Few question that Vance’s spending has gone for the public good: He’s allocated some $316 million for efforts that include providing cops with tablet computers, cameras for public housing and funding a task force on crime and mental health. And in a gesture that belies criticism that he has been tone-deaf to sex crimes, he has provided millions to tackle the vast backlog of rape-kits sitting untested around the country. Vance pays for so-called “diversion” programs across the city that shift those charged with nonviolent misdemeanors into counseling instead of jail. Another $164 million has gone to provide services for youth, families, college education for state inmates and weekend evening sports programs aimed at keeping kids off the streets. Recipients range from nonprofit groups like Joe Torre’s Safe at Home program for domestic violence victims, to the Osborne Association, the venerable prison reentry group. Overseeing that effort is former city correction commissioner Michael Jacobson whose Institute for State and Local Governance at the City University of New York coordinates and evaluates the programs. But Vance signs off on each award. Asked if it isn’t strange to have the county’s top law enforcement officer distributing such immense sums, he offered a patrician-sounding sense of duty: “It is a responsibility and a privilege to steward that money,” he said.

But critics say Vance is taking credit for broader trends he has no influence over. “The reason marijuana arrests went down was because of political pressure,” says Issa Kohler-Hausmann, a Yale Law School professor and the author of “Misdemeanorland”. “There was a massive campaign against low-level arrests that targeted blacks and Hispanics. It had nothing to do with Cy Vance being a good guy.”

Lawyers for the poor, meanwhile, say that Vance has failed to enforce many of his much-heralded reforms. “We’re still getting bail requested on people who are not a flight risk charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies,” says Tina Luongo, chief attorney for criminal defense at the Legal Aid Society. “The entire nation is talking about not setting bail for these groups of people, but somehow he can’t inspire or motivate his staff to do it. It’s frustrating to hear somebody boast themselves to be about reform and not recognize that they are running almost two separate shops of prosecution — one for people with access and influence and one for poor people.”