John F. Keenan, a longtime federal judge in Manhattan who presided over the high-profile trials of Bess Myerson, a popular former cultural-affairs commissioner in New York City and ex-beauty queen, and Imelda Marcos, the extravagant former first lady of the Philippines, died on Sunday at his home in the Bronx. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by Edward Friedland, the district executive of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York.
A no-nonsense former prosecutor, Judge Keenan was nominated to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan.
Five years later, he was presiding in the case of Ms. Myerson, a former Miss America, who was charged with bribing a state judge to reduce the support payments that her lover at the time was making to his estranged wife.
In 1990, Judge Keenan was again on the bench when Ms. Marcos, the widow of former President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, stood trial on charges of having joined her husband in stealing more than $200 million from their nation’s treasury and investing much of it in prime Manhattan real estate.
Ms. Marcos, famous for her spendthrift ways, including owning more 1,000 pairs of shoes, had fled to the United States with her husband after popular unrest ended his repressive rule in 1986. Mr. Marcos, also indicted, died before the trial.
Both Ms. Myerson and Ms. Marcos were acquitted in trials that were rife with theatrics, which repeatedly tested but never loosened Judge Keenan’s command of his courtroom. He was known to have little patience for witnesses’ digressions and to demand that lawyers in cases before him stick to the facts.
“I don’t want to turn this case into a daytime soap opera,” he declared more than once in the Myerson trial, on one occasion reacting to testimony by a housekeeper who recalled intimate details about weekends that Ms. Myerson and her companion had spent together.
Even the relevant evidence in the case was melodramatic.
The prosecution’s star witness, Sukhreet Gabel, a woman with a history of mental illness and employment difficulties, had secretly taped conversations with her mother, Justice Hortense W. Gabel of the State Supreme Court, who was also indicted in the case. Ms. Myerson, who had resigned as cultural affairs commissioner the year before, was accused of bribing Justice Gabel by providing her daughter with a job in her agency.
Testifying for nine days in a 1988 trial that drew headlines for its revelations of personal and political intrigue, the daughter was repeatedly reprimanded by an exasperated Judge Keenan for volunteering more information than requested.
“No, Ms. Gabel, stop that!” became a familiar, if futile, refrain from the bench. (Justice Gabel was also acquitted.)
In the Marcos case, Judge Keenan sought to rein in Ms. Marcos’s chief lawyer, Gerry Spence, a flamboyant but shrewd litigator from Wyoming with a rambling, homespun style whose opening statement invoked George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
“Which count of the indictment does this involve?” Judge Keenan sarcastically asked Mr. Spence more than once. “Let’s get to the facts of the case.”
The judge displayed flashes of anger at other times, as when he accused Mr. Spence of making “misleading statements in front of the jury.” Mr. Spence countered that Judge Keenan was impeding his efforts to defend Ms. Marcos.
“I’ve given you more courtesy than you’ve given the court,” the judge snapped back.
Judge Keenan earlier handled a case touched off in December 1984 by a catastrophic toxic-gas leak at a Connecticut company’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, which left more than 3,500 people dead and 200,000 injured.
Claims filed against the company, Union Carbide, in the United States by the Indian government and by American lawyers on behalf of thousands of the victims were consolidated in New York and assigned to Judge Keenan.
While Union Carbide wanted the cases litigated in India, the Indian government and the American lawyers wanted it done in the United States, where, they believed, the courts would move more quickly and be likely to award higher compensation. In 1986, Judge Keenan ruled that the litigation should take place in India.
India’s courts “have the proven capacity to mete out fair and equal justice,” he said in his decision, and retaining the cases in the United States “would be yet another example of imperialism, another situation in which an established sovereign inflicted its rules, its standards and values on a developing nation.”
In 1989, the Indian Supreme Court ordered Union Carbide to pay $470 million in damages.
Among Judge Keenan’s numerous other cases was the 1986 trial of Carmine Persico, the boss of the Colombo crime family. Handing down a sentence of 39 years in prison for racketeering and other charges, he described Mr. Persico’s story as a tragedy because, he told the defendant, “you are one of the most intelligent people I have seen in my life.”
John Fontaine Keenan was born in Manhattan on Nov. 23, 1929, to John and Veronica (Fontaine) Keenan. He graduated from Manhattan College in 1951 and from Fordham University School of Law in 1954. He married Diane Nicholson, a teacher, in 1956.
She survives him, along with a daughter, Marie Mutchler, and two grandchildren.
After serving in the Army from 1954 to 1956, Mr. Keenan was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan for two decades, rising to chief assistant. He was the special state prosecutor for corruption in New York City’s criminal justice system from 1976 to 1979, followed by posts as chairman and president of the New York Off-Track Betting Corporation and as the city’s criminal justice coordinator.
Despite his impatience with courtroom digressions, Judge Keenan himself could be expansive in making a point. Instead of simply advising lawyers to cease presenting repetitive witnesses, he sometimes used a baseball analogy, dictated by his passion for the New York Mets.
“If the issue in a case,” he once said, “is whether or not on a given night in the eighth inning at Shea Stadium, Dwight Gooden struck out Kirk Gibson on three straight pitches, all swinging strikes, it is not necessary to call the 50,000 people who were in attendance, all members of both teams, all the umpires and everybody who saw it on television. You can prove it through one or two witnesses.”
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