A prosecutor who worked under Larry Krasner has endorsed his opponent in Tuesday’s primary.
Tuesday’s district attorney primary in Philadelphia represents a stark referendum on the vision of criminal-justice reform championed by the cohort of progressive prosecutors who swept into office in cities across the country in recent years by promising radical change.
No one represents the bold promises of the era more than incumbent district attorney Larry Krasner, a civil-rights lawyer who in 2018 headlined a fleet of like-minded prosecutors backed by George Soros.
Even Krasner’s critics recognize his talent for churning up publicity. In April, PBS released an eight-part documentary on his tenure as Philadelphia’s DA and Random House happened to publish his memoir the same day. The progressive incumbent has become something of a national police-reform icon in progressive circles, appearing on Pod Save America and securing endorsements — and phone-banking — from celebrities such as John Legend.
His challenger — Carlos Vega, a veteran prosecutor of 30-plus years whom Krasner fired upon taking office in 2018 — has cast himself as a no-nonsense alternative who can roll back the tide of violent crime that has risen under Krasner. Instead of national celebrities, Vega has focused on local stakeholders, earning the backing of the Philadelphia police union, which earlier this month parked a “Mr. Softee” ice cream truck in front of Krasner’s office to emphasize his lackadaisical approach to law enforcement.
But it’s not just tough-on-crime veterans who now claim that Krasner has failed to live up to his attention-grabbing promises. Young progressives, including some who have worked under him, now say that Krasner’s incompetence has prevented him from delivering on the ambitious promise of his candidacy.
“You can really ruin a movement, if everyone associates Larry Krasner with reform itself, because his record is abysmal,” Thomas C. Mandracchia — who worked as a prosecutor under Krasner for over two years, and is now advising Vega — told National Review. “ . . . Frankly, I don’t know how well some of his policies work because his office is simply bad at its job.”
* * *
Coming out of law school in 2018, Mandracchia — who still believes in criminal-justice reform despite his recent experience — said he was keeping a close eye on Krasner’s ascendancy.
“I voted for him — it’s rare people even vote in local elections, but I wanted to get out for this one,” he recalled. “I was very excited that he won, I did expect him to win, because he was like the real standout progressive in a time where criminal-justice reform had become a huge national thing, with Black Lives Matter and whatnot.”
Bright-eyed and excited for the challenge, Mandracchia said he and his fellow incoming class of about 40 new hires headed in for six weeks of training, expecting a crash course on revamping the system.
“I expected it to be progressive, you know, we’re not going to be prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, we’re not going to give excessive sentences, yada yada yada,” he said.
Instead, what they got was “like, a graduate seminar mixed with a religious retreat,” according to Mandracchia. The instruction that Krasner brought in — led by consultant and former prosecutor-turned-criminal-justice-reform-advocate Adam Foss, included “almost no practical trial training.”
“You would have these lectures from, maybe Adam himself, or he’d bring in some professor, or he’d bring in a former inmate, and they would talk to us about reform, systemic racism, bias — which I think makes sense for training to an extent — but it was like every day, for six weeks,” Mandracchia said. “And then we would have like these group discussion circles where we would not only reflect on the content of what we just heard, but literally talk about our feelings.”
Foss — who was recently found to have engaged in “concerning conduct with at least two female Office interns and students,” according to an independent investigation into his time as a prosecutor in New York’s Suffolk County — told Krasner’s rookies “to do with our cases whatever we wish, like ‘in the name of justice,’” Mandracchia recalled. Coupled with Krasner’s sweeping firings of Vega and 30 other veteran prosecutors in his first week, the office quickly devolved into chaos.
In the past, Krasner has publicly bragged about calling those who have left his office “war criminals” and said former prosecutors who went to work for Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro have “fled to Paraguay,” in reference to Nazis fleeing to South America after World War II. Mandracchia said that behavior continued with those who chose to stuck around, as Krasner was happy to serve as “an instigator,” emboldening his naïve young employees to go after their more experienced counterparts.
“It was so strange to me to see this kind of behavior, young progressives coming in just with indignation at the old heads and no respect for institutional knowledge and literally demanding that people that had been prosecutors for 30 years to listen to them, because they were brought in to reform,” he said. “I was like, ‘guys, you just got out of law school, you don’t even know how to reform yet.’ You can’t read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and know what to do in Philadelphia specifically. That’s not how it works.”
Without learning the ins and outs of how trials and appeals actually work, Mandracchia said the early enthusiasm quickly vanished as reality set in.
“The mood in the office, like immediately after our training, went in the gutter,” he recalled. “Some of the most progressive people in our class, in the training, became like the most hardline prosecutors within weeks, because they’re dealing with all of these problems: judges who are crazy, defense attorneys who hate you and are aggressive, complainants and witnesses who are thankless or like not showing up — all of the problems a young attorney has to deal with from the prosecutor’s side, and we were prepared for none of it.”
A month later, things got even worse when Krasner began replacing many of his divisions’ supervisors with outside people, including former defense attorneys, who had little knowledge of how to prosecute whatsoever, leading to situations where units in the office would do “two totally different things on the same types of cases, and the supervisors didn’t know what the right answer was.”
“They would tell Larry, ‘I can’t do this, I’m not prepared, I don’t know how to do this stuff,’ and he’s like, ‘no, no, you’re fine. You’re fine,’” Mandracchia said. “ . . . I think everyone was doomed to fail. Like a football team with talent that has a terrible coach.” He added that he recently heard the new hires only found out “a few months ago” that prosecutors could appeal after losing a bail hearing.
And as chronic understaffing was exacerbated with more and more veterans leaving the office, Mandracchia said some of his classmates were reaching senior positions so fast that they doubted their own ability to successfully prosecute crimes.
“People were getting promoted left and right, and they knew they couldn’t do it,” he said. “These people were telling me, ‘I’m scared, I’m not ready for this, I can’t do it.’ So if no one believes they can succeed, they’re not going to.”
* * *
Violent crime has spiked during Krasner’s tenure — the year before he took office, Philadelphia saw 315 murders; in 2020, the city saw 499, the most in three decades, with 2021 already setting the pace for a new record-high. While Krasner has defended himself by arguing that a national surge in violent crime means Philadelphia’s spike can’t be pinned to his policies, Mandracchia said the Philadelphia surge is “becoming harder and harder to explain away.”
“You don’t have a comprehensive study showing that like policy XYZ increased crime X amount,” he admitted. “But you know intuitively that there’s no way an office in shambles is doing its job.” He pointed to the tragic example of seven-year-old Zamar Jones, who was shot and killed last August by Michael Banks, a convicted felon with a long rap sheet who was arrested in 2018 on a felony gun charge but managed to eke a plea deal of three to nine months in jail from Krasner’s office.
“Some people are just kind of holding on to this notion that Krasner is ‘the progressive,’ and any challenge against him is a challenge on reform itself,” Mandracchia said. “It’s just delusional. It’s like they’re married to probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to the reform movement, because he’s so personally incompetent.”
Mandracchia, who left in August 2020, said he thinks “only a quarter of my original class is still there.”
“People have told me since I left just in August, that ‘that was like before the Titanic even hit the iceberg,’” he revealed. “I was flabbergasted, I thought it was awful when I was there . . . . I know maybe 10 people in that office that are still like gung-ho about things, maybe 20. Out of like hundreds. The rest are so disheartened.”
In the buildup to the primary, Krasner has tried to frame Vega’s challenge as “old-guard” and has called him “a fake Democrat.” But Mandracchia rejects the notion that Krasner’s defeat means the end of reform in Philadelphia.
“I don’t see any reason why Vega would jettison the good aspects, that Krasner brought in. I really don’t — I know there’s this conspiracy theory, it’s like ‘oh the FOP backs him, so he’s just lying about all the reforms.’ Look, I know the guy well, I talk to him all time. If he’s lying, he’s really good at it,” Mandracchia states.