David Soares shakes his head.

“The oldest working prostitute in Albany,” he says, pointing out the woman in caked-on makeup and a pink coat on the bench across the street.

Soares is sitting behind the wheel of his black Dodge Charger—his Batmobile, as he sometimes calls it—complete with toy motorcycle and Teddy Grahams wrapper (as well as a few stray cookies) on the floor in the back, left over from his children.

He knows her face. He knows her case, just like he does for the many people whose files come across his desk each week. That they keep showing up, he says, is one of the most upsetting parts of the job.

Two seconds pass. The light turns green. Soares presses the gas and returns to the question. No, he will not call his latest big case a “steroids investigation.” He is prosecuting drug dealers, he says, plain and simple.

Soares is a self-conscious idealist. At age 6, he immigrated from the African island of Cape Verde and came of age as the son of two blue-collar workers and the brother of a drug addict. In the privileged and the impoverished layers of the Albany community, he sees himself and, more importantly, he sees his wife and children’s future.

New York’s approach to illegal drugs has been a disaster, he says. New York’s approach to political corruption has been just as bad. But as he thinks about the crossroads many feel is facing the state on both fronts, Soares sees a different path, and he is driving himself and the district attorney’s office there at full speed.

An hour earlier, Soares was downstairs in the grand jury room, there to thank the group for their eight weeks weighing evidence and deliberating over indictments. Looking up from their doughnuts and crossword puzzles as he enters, they greet him excitedly, many calling out “David!” and waving. They exchange some pleasantries. He tells them about the 47-pound striper bass he caught off Cape Cod while on vacation a few weeks before. They chat some more.

Then he gets down to business. He asks them to take a moment to think back over the cases they have reviewed. Once they get through a few comments about the sadness and strangeness of the many drug cases they considered, Soares has one simple question for them: “Did you pay attention to the addresses?”

They did, they say. Almost all the addresses, they recognize, came from within one small area of the city, not far from where they sit.
“These are what I call the million dollar blocks,” he says. “Because when we think about things in dollars and cents—we’re willing to invest millions of dollars to deal with the problems that are there, but not to deal with prevention.”

They nod. With a style that resembles a community activist’s more than a litigator’s or a teacher’s, Soares gently leads them along.
“You and I share a special experience,” he tells them. “Because if I had stood here eight weeks ago and told you about the problems of these same 75 blocks—inner city life—you’d sit there and think, ‘This guy is full of crap.’ But now you’ve got the names, the facts, the details. You’re luckier than 99 percent of the population.”


Soares’ life over the past few years almost sounds like the scri pt treatment for a classic Hollywood tale: He graduated from Albany Law in 1999 and took a job as an assistant district attorney in Albany and was put in charge of a community accountability board of representatives from the district attorney’s office, the parole board, the local police department and other agencies in a consortium office on Clinton Avenue.

After what Soares and those around him claim was a politically motivated shutdown of the community accountability board, the young assistant district attorney spiraled into a brief soul-searching crisis. He emerged with the decision to run a 2004 Democratic primary challenge against Paul Clyne, the incumbent district attorney. In other words, he was out to unseat his boss.

As the story goes, he and Clyne met for about seven minutes. For the first few, Clyne laughed at him. In the last few, Clyne yelled at him. Then Clyne fired him.

Soares had a natural base of those who knew him from the community accountability board, and groups like the Working Families Party were drawn to his Rockefeller Drug Law reform platform, which argued that the state’s stringent approach to punishment for possession and abuse should be replaced by smarter enforcement and treatment—though not, Soares notes, through any legalization. With their combined support, Soares won the primary in a landslide and the general election with 54 percent of the vote.

In the movie version, this might be where the story ends, with the triumphant underdog giving his victory speech on election night while the rest of the country waits for John Kerry to decide about contesting the vote in Ohio.

Then Soares showed up to work in January. He had as many plans as he’d had campaign promises. Albany was going to show New York how to combat the drug trade more intelligently. And he was going to show district attorneys how to do their part.

He had his prosecutors restructure their approach to drug cases to focus on long-term investigations of dealers and treatment. Today, the restructuring continues: rather than just busting street-level dealers, Soares pushes his prosecutors to move vertically up the chain to the kingpins and suppliers. Rather than relying on one witness to make a possession charge, Soares urges them to try cases with testimony from three or four people.

Ultimately, by paying more attention to the larger view than the number of convictions his office racks up, Soares believes he can actually be more effective in fighting drugs and, in turn, save his constituents money by reducing the burden of the corrections department. Of the 1047 plea bargains and indictments by his office in 2006, 487—or just over 46.5 percent—came from the Street Crimes Unit, which goes after drugs and guns.

“We’re creating a nexus between the average homeowner and taxpayer and Rockefeller,” he says. “I think we’re talking about the next evolution of what we need to do.”

Jeffrion Aubry (D–Queens), chair of the Assembly Corrections Committee and a strong advocate of Rockefeller reform, believes Soares has made real progress enhancing Albany County’s efforts to combat drugs and thinks that the state has a lot to learn from his approach.

“The difference between David and other prosecutors, as I see it, is that he looks beyond the role of district attorney and looks at what are the social implications of the enforcement of the law,” Aubry said. “What I think he understands is there’s more answers than simply incarceration, incarceration, incarceration.”

While arguing that other agencies should reinvest in the community to battle drugs and other crimes preemptively, Soares is trying to do his part. He plans to reinstate Legal Lives, a special program for sixth-graders designed to teach them the consequences of getting involved in crime.

Going through the schedule and the basics with the three sixth-grade teachers at the Thomas O’Brien Academy of Science and Technology, which will be the test school for the program, he warns they will need to do everything possible to make the material resonate with the students. He will bring them to court. He will show them case files. He will teach them the difference between mens rea and actus rea.

Soares thinks back nostalgically to his own years in junior high, which overlapped with Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House. The Legal Lives curriculum, which itself dates to that era, needs to catch up, he says.

“We were talking about McGruff the Crime Dog,” he says. “I say, bring a crackhead.”


But the work that has brought Soares the most attention has little to do with drugs—unless, of course, a few DWI charges count.
“He’ll go after the crackheads, but he’s shown that if you go higher up the food chain, that’s where you’ll find some of the real villains,” said State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D–Manhattan), who counts Soares as a friend and an ideological ally on Rockefeller reform.

In the past year, that has led him down some unexpected paths, from the eventual plea bargain by Comptroller Alan Hevesi (D) to the drunk driving charges against Assembly Member Karim Camara (D–Brooklyn) and State Sen. John Sabini (D–Queens). Then came the summer-long investigation into alleged government misconduct about the use and the tracking of the use of state aircraft in the web of accusations and admitted errors now known as Troopergate.

Toppling Hevesi—especially after the former comptroller’s landslide re-election just weeks earlier—was like nothing most people could remember. But to Soares, this was the clearest demonstration that his office preached and practiced equal standards.
As Robert Morgenthau (D) is responsible for keeping Wall Street honest in Manhattan, Soares believes he is charged with the larger responsibility of cleaning up the state government, no matter how difficult.

“As a state and as a country, we’ve got to start standing up for something,” he says.

Especially since the Hevesi investigation, Soares says, there has been a steady stream of public integrity complaints and tips trickling into the office. Between five and 10 tips come in per week by letter, email or phone calls.

“It’s a regular flow,” he says.

Most, he says, can be dismissed quickly. But some, like those that caused him to investigate Troopergate, require weeks and sometimes months of effort.

Neither the effort nor the report Soares and his office produced on Troopergate much impressed State Sen. George Winner (R–Chemung/Schuyler). Section 195 of the penal law, Winner believes, should have been enough to hold Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) and his staffers criminally accountable—had Soares decided that the type of benefit the statute refers to could be a political benefit.

“He chose not to interpret the statute in that fashion, which he certainly could have done if he chose to,” Winner said, “which begs the question of whether he was trying to assist in not embarrassing Governor Spitzer.”

Soares rejects the suggestion that he should have subpoenaed former Spitzer communications director Darren Dopp or others, noting he could only have issued subpoenas by impaneling a grand jury, and his preliminary investigation did not find the criminality necessary to do that.

Especially in pursuing investigations into government officials, who he says traffic in their reputations, Soares necessarily treads lightly.
“We have to be very careful,” he explains. “Everything that is done in the realm of public integrity is done for political purposes.”

Part of the problem, he says, is the vagaries within the law. Soares has seen questionable conduct and intentions much more than he has seen actual crimes in these investigations.

“You have laws that pretty much address just about every single issue in society, except when it comes to white-collar crime. When it comes to matters of public integrity, the laws are so porous,” he says. “And it makes it so frustrating.”

He says this can leave him in an uncomfortable spot, with his personal inclinations occasionally at odds with his professional judgment.

“It may not be ethical, it may not be moral. But if it’s not illegal, we have no business in it,” he says. “Most of these cases, we’re working just as hard to exonerate as we are to inculpate.”

Kevin Cahill (D–Ulster/Dutchess), chair of the Assembly Ethics Committee, believes his colleagues understand this.
Cahill added that he was particularly impressed with Soares’ ability to be so thorough, given how many public integrity investigations there are mixed in with what is an already heavy caseload.

“There are district attorneys who hesitate, who turn away cases of the sort that David has taken on, for no other reason than it takes away from their resources,” Cahill said.

Soares makes this point himself. If he is going to continue functioning as government watchdog, he argues, he needs the State Legislature to begin contributing to his office’s budget.

To do the job properly, he says, he needs to give the public integrity unit he created five prosecutors and three investigators—a major increase from its current staff.

“You can’t accomplish all of those objectives with a two-person office and one investigator. It’s impossible,” he says. “So I think our State Legislature has a responsibility there to assist us with that.”

Albany County currently gives his office a $5 million annual budget, much less than he feels he needs or is appropriate. He chalks this up to lingering vengeance from the Albany political establishment for his 2004 win.

“I believe in my heart and my soul that it’s purely politics,” he says.

Betsy Weiss, research director for the Albany County legislature’s majority counsel, quickly and pointedly disputed this claim. Soares’ budget has increased $1.15 million and his office added eight employees since he became district attorney, she says, with a 23-percent increase in funding from the county in that period.

Not enough, Soares says. Plus, he believes he has saved the county since taking office. For every 100 people he sends to treatment instead of jail—which would cost about $32,000 per person per year—Soares calculates that he saves the county corrections department $3.2 million. Soares believes a quarter of that money should be put to the district attorney’s office.

Through his Making Crime Pay Program, Soares has taken the lead himself. Hundreds of thousands of dollars seized from drug traffickers has been split between the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services (which gets 32 percent), the arresting law enforcement agency (which gets 41 percent) and the district attorney’s office (which gets 27 percent). Soares in turn splits the money between community programs, training and equipment for his attorneys and training and equipment for local police.

He thinks Albany County as a whole—again, leading the way for the state—should act accordingly.

“Those savings you’re experiencing have to be reinvested in the community. It’s justice reinvestment,” he says. “And that’s not being done.”

And the State Legislature should follow this principle as well when it comes to paying for the public integrity unit, he says.

“I’m just hoping that we would receive some support from our local and state legislatures, and that they, too, could understand the importance of the work that’s being done here—not just with respect to holding individuals accountable, but upholding the entire institution of integrity for all of us elected officials,” he says. “I think we have a big task winning confidence back, restoring faith. That’s part of the mission.”

Still, as serious as he is about his responsibility to clean up government, there are no microphones in the bushes, no spies in the hallway. He is not waging a war on the elected officials, he says. He is just acting on reliable tips and police investigations.

“I try to steer clear from that image of me standing over the State Capitol with my hands to my waist and a big ‘S’ on my chest, because that’s really not my role,” he says.

Nonetheless, says Richard Gottfried (D–Manhattan), who has been serving in the Assembly since 1971, Soares has caught people’s attention. Though it may be subtle, Gottfried says, he has had a direct and specific impact.

“Of course human nature being what it is, lots of people go through life thinking they’ll never get caught,” he says. “But I think his high-profile investigations and prosecutions have helped remind people in the Capitol that none of us can count on that.”


Looking out the window to the right of Soares’ desk stands a pewter pig with wings about the size of a small poodle. He bought the statue himself, he says. He could not resist.

Soares likes the idea of himself as the underdog, as the man waging a war against what so many people have told him is the impossible.

He is up for re-election next year, and he expects another tough fight.

“If we continued to be a small DA’s office that prosecuted street crime and we never went into the public integrity business, then it’d be less interesting,” he says. “But I think there’s going to be a lot of interest in this position. That I’m very excited about, because I think that we’re getting the attention that we deserve to be getting.”

There was speculation that Soares might opt out of the race himself, instead trying for the seat of the retiring Rep. Michael McNulty (D–Albany). He dismissed this speculation, saying that he has “much more work to do in Albany County.”

And both those in Soares’ inner circle and other political observers expect that he can and will go on to bigger things than Congress. He is 38, an immigrant, African-American, accomplished, respected and increasingly well known. The palm card almost writes itself. Another few years—and fewer if Andrew Cuomo challenges Spitzer in the 2010 Democratic primary—and, many expect, Soares will be gliding into office as the next attorney general.

He himself gently brushes past any speculation. He never expected to be in elected life, he says, and insists that he views his political career only as a vehicle for change. Already, he believes, he has brought about some of that change, positively impacting those on Albany’s streets and the government officials who drive by them en route to the Capitol.

Whatever happens, he says, he will make choices without fear of repercussions from the political powers he has already taken on or will in the future. Look at his personal history as an immigrant, he says. Look at his professional history toppling those who tried to stand in his way.

“I’m a self-made man. There’s not a person in this world that will determine where I go,” he says. “That’s in my control.”

He tangled with bullies in the schoolyard as a child, he says, and though he sometimes went down, he always went down swinging. He urges his political enemies, present and potential, to remember that as they set him in their sights.

“You may kick my ass,” he says. “But you’re going to know you’ve been in a fight.”