When he was working for Manhattan district lawyer, Alvin Bragg, a son of Harlem and onetime Black scholar chief, spoke of his dream of “reworking” what’s arguably the nation’s premier legislation enforcement workplace “to ship security and justice for all”.

Within the occasion, Bragg will virtually actually be remembered for Donald Trump.

A little bit greater than a yr into what has been a stormy tenure, the Manhattan DA is making historical past as he brings legal prices in opposition to the previous US president. A grand jury handed down an indictment on Thursday after a tortuous, four-year investigation initiated by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance.

The costs stem from a $130,000 fee to the grownup movie actor Stormy Daniels, simply earlier than the 2016 election. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, has testified that he paid Daniels on Trump’s behalf to purchase her silence a couple of 2006 affair with the then candidate. Trump denies having had any liaison with Daniels (whom he not too long ago referred to as “horse face”) and has dismissed the probe as “politically motivated”.

The case threatens to separate open an already divided nation and is hovering over the 2024 election. Trump has raised fears of a January 6 repeat by calling his supporters into the streets, though thus far just a few have turned up by the courthouses in decrease Manhattan. In Washington, Republicans have promised to research Bragg and one, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, mentioned he must be jailed.

Former prosecutors, in the meantime, stand in awe of a case they are saying is magnitudes larger than any introduced by the legendary Robert Morgenthau. Throughout his 34-year reign as Manhattan DA he remodeled a neighborhood prosecutor’s workplace into one which bestrides the world, because of the highly effective monetary and company pursuits headquartered there and his personal ambition.

“It’s the most important case within the historical past of the workplace, and that’s a weighty factor,” a former prosecutor mentioned. Trailing that sentiment is the important query: Does Bragg have the products?

To those that know him, Bragg, 49, is even-keeled, well-liked throughout the workplace and missing within the narcissism and ego which might be customary for New York politicians. Whereas that could be personally admirable, Bragg’s temperament has stirred considerations about whether or not he has the appropriate skills to supervise a case that’s certain to transcend the same old bounds of the legislation.

“Folks may riot,” a New York political adviser warned. “How are they going to elucidate this to America?”

Bragg is aware of what it’s to function in numerous worlds. He was raised in Harlem, the place he nonetheless lives, and grew up attending the native Abyssinian Baptist Church. He additionally skilled the rougher components of the neighbourhood.

A formative, and traumatic, expertise occurred when police held a gun to the pinnacle of the 15-year-old Bragg throughout a routine “stop-and-frisk” search — an expertise he mentioned often throughout his 2021 marketing campaign and which gave him an early understanding of the judicial system.

But at the same time as a boy, Bragg was concurrently navigating elite, largely white establishments. He attended Manhattan’s prestigious Trinity Faculty after which went to Harvard. As president of the college’s Black Pupil Affiliation, he gained a popularity as a conciliator amongst campus teams, in accordance with a 1995 profile within the Crimson, Harvard’s school newspaper. “There’s a particular sense of the anointed about him,” wrote Anna Wilde, noting that Bragg stored a map of Harlem in his Cambridge dorm room.

After Harvard Regulation Faculty Bragg did stints within the New York attorney-general’s workplace and the Southern District of New York. He returned to the AG’s workplace to deal with police misconduct. Though his workplace would open greater than a dozen investigations it didn’t win any convictions, and misplaced two high-profile circumstances at trial. “There’s no disgrace in an acquittal. You carry the circumstances that you simply imagine in,” Bragg mentioned in Could 2021, when opponents hammered him in the course of the Democratic major.

Legal justice reform was central to a marketing campaign launched throughout a nationwide reckoning about race after the 2020 homicide of George Floyd. However when Bragg took workplace in January 2022, many New Yorkers had turn into gripped by worry of rising crime and the brand new DA did not sense the shifting political winds. A “day one” memo to workers — wherein he instructed them to not prosecute minor crimes — provoked a firestorm. “Alvin made some rookie errors,” one admiring lawyer conceded.

Across the identical time, the Trump investigation appeared to unravel. Vance’s group had pursued the hush cash case however got here to see one other as extra promising: Trump’s behavior of exaggerating the worth of his belongings, which, they believed, helped him safe financial institution loans and different advantages.

However, hindered by the Trump authorized group’s delaying ways and the disruption of Covid, they did not safe an indictment earlier than Vance left workplace. When Bragg took over he pumped the brakes — prompting the 2 prosecutors overseeing the probe to give up, with one blasting Bragg’s reluctance to prosecute as “misguided and fully opposite to the general public curiosity”.

These sympathetic to Bragg complain he was thrust into an unattainable place. “If Cy had an indictable case, he would have indicted,” one mentioned. It was solely pure, they added, for the brand new DA to make his personal judgments.

Bragg and his group would finally conclude that the valuations case was problematic however that the so-called “zombie case” was value reviving. One cost they’ve thought of is falsification of enterprise data, based mostly on Cohen’s declare that Trump reimbursed him in instalments that had been then recorded within the firm books as authorized charges. These funds may additionally fall foul of federal marketing campaign finance legal guidelines.

It’s tough to evaluate the deserves of such a case with out seeing the proof. Some former prosecutors view it as official, and the final word instance of American justice served with out worry or favour.

Nonetheless, Cohen, a convicted felon, would make a problematic witness. And with the intention to rise from a misdemeanour to a extra critical felony, the case might depend on an untested mixture of state and federal legal guidelines. Even some who despise the previous president worry his pursuers might have turn into blinded by their very own investigation. “Alvin is underneath loads of stress from people who find themselves obsessive about Trump, inside and outdoors that workplace,” mentioned one former prosecutor. “[Trump’s] not value what we’re doing to our legal justice system.”

joshua.chaffin@ft.com