After law school, he joined a New York firm, Webster Sheffield, and as a young associate helped successfully defend liability suits against Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co., the firm's biggest client.
He left the firm in 1972 to take on corrupt cops and politicians as an assistant in the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, where he met an aspiring young prosecutor by the name of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who remains one of his closest friends.
A few years later, Mukasey and Giuliani joined the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, which was noted for representing Dow Jones & Co. and the New York Daily News. Mukasey defended, among others, reporters in legal jams, including a Daily News writer who had printed secret grand jury testimony about associates of former New York Yankee Joe Pepitone, on trial for drug charges in the mid-1980s.
Mukasey spent 12 years at the firm before President Reagan named him to the bench in 1987.
He seemed immediately comfortable there.
"Typically when you appear before new judges, they are a little bit unsure of themselves," said Robert Cleary, a New York lawyer and former prosecutor who handled a major arson and insurance case before Mukasey in 1988 not long after the judge had been appointed. "You would have thought he was on the bench for 15 years."
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A formative trial
In his judicial chambers, Mukasey kept photos of personal heroes, including George Orwell -- "a particular idol of mine for his clear writing and complete disdain for cant," he once said -- and former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, known as one of the great stylists in high court history, who also wrote an influential opinion on the limits of executive power, a subject of no small interest to the Bush administration.
Visitors also could find a bulletproof vest on a hanger in his office, a vestige of the lengthy terrorism trial in 1996 of the radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik," whom he sentenced to life in prison for masterminding a plot to destroy New York City landmarks, including the United Nations building.
Mukasey's friends say the experience dramatically reshaped his view of the world and his life.
"Before 9/11, people didn't connect the dots; it wasn't in people's consciousness," said Kenneth J. Bialkin, a New York lawyer and longtime friend of Mukasey's. "But in the course of that trial there was clear evidence that began to show these were not just isolated fanatics. They were part of a doctrine. And he came to see that."
