When a high-profile criminal case emerges in Manhattan—from the prosecution of accused UnitedHealth CEO shooter Luigi Mangione to the arrests of suspects in the alleged kidnap and torture of a wealthy crypto entrepreneur—Andrew Warshawer ’06 is responsible for helping to ensure that it doesn’t overwhelm the wide-ranging caseload at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. As deputy chief of the Trial Division, Warshawer likens his role to “steering an aircraft carrier.” The division’s six trial bureaus are staffed by some 300 prosecutors along with legal supervisors, investigative analysts, and paralegals; other, specialized units focus on violent criminal enterprises and offenses ranging from hate crimes to vehicular crimes to animal cruelty.
For Warshawer, no two days are the same. At any given time, he could be tracking felony cases, advising the DA, or reviewing the latest in digital tools as the office’s counsel for emerging technologies. In this Q&A, Warshawer tells what drew him to the law, discusses the value of career shifts, and explains why digital evidence is increasingly central to building cases.
What sparked your interest in law?
I came to New York City in 1996 to attend Columbia University, where I studied political science and economics. When I graduated in 2000, it was kind of the end of the dot-com era. All of these businesses exploded. What was left were companies looking to hire liberal arts majors. And so I got a job at Ernst & Young as a business analyst.
My father was a lawyer and he had a very long career as part of a three-person law firm. But I resisted the idea of being a lawyer because I wanted to do something different. I spent three years at Ernst & Young, but it just wasn’t the right fit for me. So I quit. And that’s what motivated me to go to law school.
Why did you enroll in NYU Law?
I applied all over the place. Even though I had fallen in love with New York, I wanted a couple of years outside of the city. But NYU just felt right. By far, I met a greater number of like-minded people with a sincere interest in public service than anywhere else I went. NYU felt like the best place to call home.
Any memorable experiences while at NYU Law?
My 1L summer, I was at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, which is where I decided that I wanted to be a prosecutor. Working in that place was inspiring. In the office, there were a lot of really good, public service-minded lawyers. The idea that you’d come into work every day not trying to figure out who you were billing for what, but in pursuing what was intellectually and morally right—it was a really thrilling environment. I was a 25-year-old who had been in the working world for a while. I probably had more fun than I should have and [did] less class work than I should have, but it all worked out later.
After graduating NYU Law, you joined the Manhattan DA’s Office as an assistant district attorney. Tell us about your work.
I was actually involved in what was, at the time, the biggest gang prosecution in the history of the country here in New York. We indicted 103 gang members from two housing developments in West Harlem. We brought this case after a couple of murders and a lot of shootings. I think that we’ve gotten better as a profession in seeking accountability for those people who are collectively causing a problem, not necessarily doing it one at a time. That case was about three years long. We started investigating in the summer of 2013 and the last trial occurred in the spring of 2016.
Along the way, we saw one of the most common problems for our victims, witnesses, and defendants was that the apartment buildings they were forced to live in were appalling. So despite the case being focused on violent crime gang prosecutions, [then-DA Cy Vance] agreed that we should make an example out of these landlords.
We found one for a five-story property that, inside, felt like a polar vortex in winter. There was no heat and dangling electrical wires. Normally, the lawyer would get to negotiate the landlord’s surrender to police. It would be very genteel. But in this case, a search warrant was executed. He was pulled out of bed and brought out in cuffs, instead of being given special treatment as a white collar defendant. I don’t know what impact it had, if any, but we should probably do more of that kind of work—and I wish we had time to.
How do you foresee technology affecting the work of the Manhattan DA’s Office in the years ahead?
We have a really robust cybercrime bureau with just over ten lawyers. They are fantastic at prosecuting crimes that are committed by electronic or high-tech means. Over the years, I have developed more than a passing specialization in digital evidence and technology companies, etc. There’s still this thought process [among] many lawyers—not just prosecutors—that there is a case, and then there’s kind of the digital silo of stuff that relates to that case. That’s just not the way the world operates. The digital evidence should be a part of every one of [our] cases. I think we’re kind of stumbling around unintentionally on what evidence do we get? How do we use it? How well do we understand it? How trustworthy is it? There is no investigation that doesn’t implicate your digital life.
We’re also going to need to figure out how we approach different uses of AI. Trying to look for a certain image in a pile of 90 hours of video is an AI process. You can’t read everything. There are natural language processing [programs], like semantic processing tools, that will let you say, “Find me anytime where they’re talking about a cover-up.” And it’s not looking for the word “cover” or the word “up,” it’s looking for the place where someone says dump the duffel bag in the river. Everything that you think is ten years out with AI is really two years out.
Which case has taught you the most about your work?
There are many. I’ve had cases where we dismissed charges, even though they were probably guilty, in order to see if they could move on with their lives. There was a woman who was basically being used as bait for robberies. She was attractive. She’d go to bars, pick people up, and bring them out to a car where she would then have them robbed. She seemed kind of irredeemable at times. But she eventually testified against the robbers and completely turned her life around. She’s now in a very professional pro-social career, and a Christmas card comes in every year from her.
What piece of advice would you give to current students?
Despite the fact that I’ve been here [at the Manhattan DA’s Office] for 19 years, I’d say move around a little when you’re younger. I’ve seen people leave government service and come back, and I think they’re better for it. I love being here. But my career would only have been enhanced if I also had experiences that allowed me to see things from a defense perspective, a civil litigation perspective, or even through another enforcement agency—at the state attorney general’s office or at a federal agency. If I had to design it all over again, I’d be sitting here now with two or three other agencies under my belt.
Posted May 28, 2025