Albuquerque is an isolated place where change comes slow. With half a million residents, it is the biggest city in the state, making up 80% of Bernalillo County’s population, but it feels like a place forgotten about, choked off from everywhere else. Faded and chipped pastel buildings line the commercial districts. On Central Avenue, part of Route 66, broken neon signs from demolished buildings stand tall on the sidewalks in front of vacant lots. Empty storefronts dominate the big mall in the center of town, where the parking lot is mostly empty even at rush hour. Homeless men and women sit on curbs in fast-food parking lots, push shopping carts down major thoroughfares, and sit at the base of the highway exit ramps holding cardboard signs.

“If you drive out of town, it’ll be desert with a couple of exits, then desert,” said Tom Grover, the former APD sergeant who now works as a lawyer. “And when you have that sort of environment, people get very entrenched in their power structure.”

In Albuquerque, around 20% of residents live below the poverty line. Many of them live in the southern part of the city, in squat houses made of stucco or cement blocks. The rich folks live in the northeast pocket at the base of the Sandia Mountains, and that is where Kari Brandenburg lives, in a gated neighborhood, in a two-story, high-ceilinged house beside a golf course. She has lived here for 22 years, but in recent years she has lived here alone. Her four children are adults now. She adopted the three oldest with her second husband and the youngest with her third husband. She considered adopting more kids, but decided against it. “The police department — if a kid fell and hurt their knee, they’d probably charge me with child abuse,” she said.

Her children were still young when she first ran for office. She was an unknown candidate then, a veteran lawyer with a vaguely familiar last name who had done 20 years of criminal defense work after graduating from Southern Methodist University law school. Her first race was close. Two months before the November election, polls showed her tied with Skip Vernon, the Republican leader of the state Senate. Then, weeks before the election, Brandenburg revealed that she received a love note from Vernon: "Even if we could be together we probably wouldn't get along but I would keep you entertained and thinking,” the email began. Vernon claimed he had meant to send the email to his wife. Brandenburg accused him of sexual harassment. She won the election by 12%. It would be her closest race over the next 16 years.

A month after the 2000 election, just days before she took office, her second husband died from cancer. Her oldest son, Justin, who was 12 at the time and had watched his father quickly deteriorate, took it the hardest. A year later, her third husband died from an infection. She wondered if she should quit her job. But within days she was back in the office “putting in her usual 50 to 60 hours a week,” Chief Deputy DA Debbie DePaulo recalled. “She just plowed through.”

She brought a wave of changes to the office. She allowed her lawyers to have unframed pictures at their desk. She relaxed the dress code, and soon lawyers in cowboy boots and polo shirts and long flowy dresses prowled the halls. She made sex jokes in staff meetings and played pranks, like hiding a fart machine under a chair.

Over the years, a nanny helped out with the children on weekdays, though sometimes Brandenburg brought the older ones to watch her trials — often headline events in which she convicted defendants accused of high-profile crimes. One of her daughters went on to become a lawyer. Another daughter works in retail. Her youngest son attends college in California. Justin ended up in prison.