God Bless our Law Enforcement People.
But, most of all God Bless Lawrence for never giving up the fight for justice to honor his brother. He walked the talk. 🙏🙏
Lawrence Byrne, Former Lawyer for New York Police, Dies at 61
His younger brother, a police officer, was assassinated by a drug gang at 22, a key moment in the city’s crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Lawrence M. Byrne in 2016, when the was the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for legal affairs. He served for four years in that post, managing roughly 100 lawyers who handled all legal issues involving the department and its 56,000 employees.
Credit...Jake Naughton for The New York Times
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Dec. 12, 2020
Lawrence M. Byrne, who as the top lawyer for the New York City Police Department defended several hotly disputed police policies and who also kept alive the legacy of his brother, a rookie police officer who was executed by a drug gang, died on Dec. 6 in Manhattan. He was 61.
The cause was renal failure, said Joseph R. Guccione, a close friend and the former United States marshal for the Southern District of New York.
Mr. Byrne had a varied legal career. He served in private practice as a corporate defense lawyer, as a federal prosecutor and as manager of legal affairs for the nation’s largest local police force.
But he was perhaps best known to the public because of the gangland killing of his younger brother, Edward, in 1988.
The same week that Lawrence Byrne reported to work as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District, Edward Byrne, who was 22, was shot in the head five times on the orders of a jailed drug dealer as Edward sat in a marked police car in Queens, guarding the home of a key witness who was due to testify in a drug trial.
The killing, which Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward called “a deliberate assassination,” attracted national attention and came to symbolize the brazen reach of the 1980s crack epidemic and the rampant lawlessness of that era. President Ronald Reagan called the Byrne family to express his condolences, and Vice President George Bush carried Edward’s badge with him during his 1988 campaign for president. A major Justice Department grant was named in Edward’s honor.
After six years as a prosecutor in New York and Washington, Lawrence Byrne, known as Larry, went into private practice for two decades, conducting internal investigations for corporate clients and defending many of them in court.
In 2014, the New York police commissioner, William J. Bratton, tapped him for the job of deputy commissioner for legal affairs. He served for four years in that post, managing roughly 100 lawyers who handled all legal issues involving the department and its 56,000 employees.
One of his highest-profile cases involved defending the department over its spying on Muslims, a practice that began with the help of the C.I.A. after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, long before Mr. Byrne arrived. In a settlement, the city agreed to appoint an independent civilian to monitor the Police Department’s counterterrorism activities, a step that Mr. Byrne said he welcomed.
He also helped develop new policies after a federal judge ruled in 2013 that the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics violated the constitutional rights of people of color.
After Eric Garner died in a police chokehold in 2014, Mr. Byrne grew impatient with the Justice Department’s inaction on whether to charge the officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo. Mr. Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” had galvanized the national Black Lives Matter movement and had become a rallying cry against the use of excessive force by police officers.
Four years after Mr. Garner’s death — after a grand jury had declined to indict the officer, and with the Justice Department’s review not completed — Mr. Byrne said that the Police Department would no longer wait to conduct its own disciplinary proceeding. That proceeding led to the officer’s firing. (In 2019, five years after Mr. Garner’s death, the Justice Department dropped the case.)
But Mr. Byrne was generally protective of police officers. He expanded the interpretation of an obscure statute in the state’s civil code, known as 50-a, which barred public access to police officers’ performance records, to keep disciplinary proceedings secret. This led to strenuous criticism, especially after the killing of Mr. Garner, that the department was shrouding police abuse in secrecy.
After protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, the New York State Legislature repealed that secrecy law as part of a package of police reforms. Police unions are challenging the new secrecy measure in court.
Mr. Byrne, right, in 2016 with Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. As the Police Department’s top lawyer, Mr. Byrne was generally protective of police officers.Credit...Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press
Lawrence Matthew Byrne was born on Dec. 1, 1959, in the Bronx. His mother, Ann (Appignani) Byrne, was a homemaker who raised four boys. His father, Matthew, was a lawyer and a member of the New York Police Department for 22 years; he retired as the commanding officer of the legal division in 1976.
Matthew Byrne had set a tradition of public service for his sons in the realm of criminal justice. In addition to Edward’s joining the Police Department, Larry’s brother Steve became a special agent with the F.B.I., and his brother Ken became an assistant district attorney in Queens County.
Larry was raised in Massapequa, N.Y., on Long Island, and graduated from Hofstra University with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1981 and from the New York University School of Law in 1984.
After a stint in private practice, he was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District from 1988 to 1992. For two years after that, he served as the deputy chief of the organized crime and racketeering section of the Justice Department’s criminal division in Washington.
While there, he helped prosecute the Pizza Connection case, which involved a $1.6 billion heroin and cocaine smuggling ring run by the Mafia. He worked related cases with Louis J. Freeh, who became director of the F.B.I. in 1993. When Mr. Freeh became chairman of the law firm Pepper Hamilton in 2013, he hired Mr. Byrne as a partner in the white collar and investigations units.
Mr. Freeh went on to found a global risk management consulting firm, which Mr. Byrne joined after his tenure at the Police Department. That firm was acquired in August by AlixPartners, another global consulting firm, where Mr. Byrne was a director when he died.
In addition to his brothers, Mr. Byrne is survived by his wife, Lynn Byrne, from whom he was recently separated, and three sons, Patrick, Christopher and Peter Byrne.
For Larry Byrne and his family, the loss of Edward Byrne was always front and center.
“My family and I think of Eddie every single day,” Mr. Byrne told IrishCentral.com, an online news site, in 2018.
Every year, he attended a police-led prayer vigil on Feb. 26, the anniversary of Edward’s death, at the southwest corner of 107th Avenue and Inwood Street in Jamaica, where Edward was killed.
And every two years, Larry led a campaign to ensure that the state parole board did not release the four men who had been convicted of killing Edward and were sentenced to 25 years to life. They are still in prison and have never shown remorse.
Having to appear regularly before the parole board forced the family to keep reliving the crime. But Mr. Byrne told IrishCentral.com that he would rather do that and make his case “than see these assassins on the street.”
“And after I’m gone,” he added, “my three sons will continue to do it.”
Katharine Q. “Kit” Seelye is a Times obituary writer.
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