Let’s play a little game.

You’re the District Attorney for Manhattan, the closest thing American electoral politics has to a lifetime tenure position. The guy who had the job before you had it for thirty-four years and only retired because voters were bound to notice that he was fucking ninety. Between 1942 and 2009, three men served as Manhattan DA…THREE! This is pretty much the sickest gig around. All you really have to do is lightly engage in local democratic politics and bring a big case once in a while to remind people that you exist.

So back to the game. Take a gander at this list of high value targets and pick who to prosecute in service of staying relevant:

1. Harvey Weinstein

2. Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

4. Sergey Aleynikov

Did you answer, “Definitely not #3. Who even is that?”

If so, congratulations! You’re maybe already a better Manhattan DA than current Manhattan DA Cy Vance.

See, we’ve recently learned that Vance has had some trouble getting his indictments up for certain high-profile cases. According to some top-shelf reporting from The New Yorker, ProPublica, Vance took a hard pass on fraud charges against those rascally Trump kids even though many in his office believed they had a very strong fraud case centered around Ivanka and DTJ.

Even without that stunning and troublesome little piece of info that Trump family lawyer and Vance “mega”-donor Marc Kasowitz, pretty much bragged about using his influence over Vance to keep his prosecutorial power holstered, Vance’s political acumen must be called into question here.

Charging the Trumps with fraud in Manhattan might seem complicated now, but this all went down in 2012, when it would have been way more politically straightforward and actually played nicely to the now comparatively meager 85% of Manhattan residents who hated the Trump family.

And this week we’ve learned about Vance playing Impotent Hamlet with some pretty stark and disturbing evidence surrounding film mogul and apparent serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.

Also from The New Yorker, we have this damning piece of reporting alleging that after NYPD sting operation yielded a recording of Weinstein admitting to a young actress named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez that he had previously sexually assaulted her, Vance decided not to move forward after getting cold feet about Gutierrez:

Two sources close to the police investigation said that they had no reason to doubt Gutierrez’s account of the incident. One of them, a police source, said that the department had collected more than enough evidence to prosecute Weinstein. But the other source said that Gutierrez’s statements about her past complicated the case for the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr. After two weeks of investigation, the District Attorney’s office decided not to file charges. The D.A.’s office declined to comment on this story but pointed me to its statement at the time: “This case was taken seriously from the outset, with a thorough investigation conducted by our Sex Crimes Unit. After analyzing the available evidence, including multiple interviews with both parties, a criminal charge is not supported.”

That did not sit well with some involved in the case…

“We had the evidence,” the police source involved in the operation told me. “It’s a case that made me angrier than I thought possible, and I have been on the force a long time.”

While Harvey Weinstein might be a rather powerful force in the film industry and a generous Democratic donor, filing sexual assault charges against a guy who many in the Manhattan elite had been whispering about for years would have been another not-so-risky political gamble.

Somehow, Vance kept his hands in his pocket on both these cases. Adding in the fact that his office dropped the rape case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’ve got what seems to be a pattern of real political cowardice on the part of Cy Vance.

But that’s not the feeling you’d get if you polled folks on Wall Street.

See, as much of a Casper Milquetoast as Cy Vance has been when offered the chance to indict people who appear on PageSix, he has been Judge Dredd when it comes to turning the screws on people who appear nowhere in the power pages of finance.

The most clarion example of this other side of Vance’s personality is his apparent obsession with Sergey Aleynikov.

Alyenikov is a computer programmer and former Goldman Sachs employee who worked on some high-frequency trading software for Goldman and then left for a competitor. Within days of parting from Goldman, Alyenikov was arrested and charged criminally by the feds for stealing proprietary code from 200 West Street. The whole case against Aleynikov was baroque in its combo of tech and legal vagaries. Over the course of three years, he was convicted and then freed on appeal. By the summer of 2012, Aleynikov seemed to many like a martyr, punished by a powerful financial firm and its political goons for doing something that no one really understood enough to know whether it was bad or just normal.

Basically, Alyenikov was a political hot potato that many were content to let cool off forever. Except Cy Vance.

Just months after the feds gave up on Aleynikov, Vance had him arrested in Manhattan and tried him again on subtly different charges. In addition to fucking up the arrest, Vance managed to only nail Aleynikov on one of the counts, and that was eventually overturned. But Vance wasn’t done. He filed an appeal and managed to get the guilty verdict reinstated. Aleynikov is now appealing that.

So it turns out that when Vance gets his claws into a virtual nobody who has pissed off a huge Wall Street bank and exonerated by federal courts, he can be a real terrier. It’s just that the Aleynikov case only plays well politically to people who genuinely empathize with the plight of Goldman Sachs. And even in Manhattan, those people are…scarce.

Vance also managed to literally chain a few Chinese immigrant women together and have them marched through a courthouse after charging Abacus Federal Saving Bank with mortgage fraud in 2012. Abacus, a tiny bank catering to Chinese immigrants in New York City, had already self-reported its improper mortgage lending behavior. Vance’s charges against Abacus were ultimately dismissed.

We’re not lawyers, so we won’t insult you by offering our opinion on whether Cy Vance is a good lawyer or not. But we do spend a lot of time watching Wall Street and the political morass that surrounds it, so let us offer you this: Cy Vance is undoubtedly a terrible fucking politician.

[Ed. note: Cy Vance did not sign off on the sting operation in the Weinstein case. That fact was misrepresented in an earlier version of this post]