AS BUSH REPLACES PROSECUTORS, A FORMIDABLE ONE STAYS ON

Nearly five months after President George W. Bush was sworn into office,
his administration has begun to replace dozens of top federal prosecutors,
ousting Democratic appointees across the country and installing Republican
selections.

This political rite of change, though, has been postponed in at least one
prominent jurisdiction: Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the
Southern District of New York, has been kept on, largely to complete two
politically charged investigations that have already provoked precisely the
cries of partisanship Ms. White has so successfully avoided over the last
eight years.

The two cases could hardly be more loaded. The first involves whether there
was any wrongdoing in President Bill Clinton's 177 final pardons and
commutations, and specifically whether Marc Rich, the fugitive commodities
trader, in effect bought his pardon through contributions to Mr. Clinton's
causes; the other involves an investigation into Senator Robert G.
Torricelli's campaign finance dealings, and whether he accepted thousands
of dollars in unreported gifts and cash from a former political supporter.

In certain respects, it is no accident that Ms. White has remained in
place. She is a self-declared political independent who has even told
people she does not vote. And in convicting terrorists and corporate
officers, a union leader as well as a prominent Republican contributor, Ms.
White has also gained a reputation as an aggressive but unbiased
prosecutor. And in assigning the cases to Ms. White, the Bush
administration, at least on the surface, profits from having a Clinton
appointee at the forefront of two volatile cases involving Democrats.

But already, it has become clear that her selection will not halt
complaints of political motivation.

For instance, lawyers for Senator Torricelli wrote to Attorney General John
Ashcroft demanding that her investigation be given to an independent
counsel, saying there is no way the Democratic senator can be investigated
fairly by the Bush Justice Department, of which Ms. White is now a member.
At the same time, critics on Capitol Hill and in some conservative
editorial pages have questioned Ms. White's will and impartiality in
investigating the Clinton pardons.

"Whatever conclusions she reaches in these matters should be viewed against
an eight-year background of making decisions based on integrity, fairness
and nonpartisanship," said Robert B. Fiske Jr., who once held Ms. White's
job and who later served as the first independent counsel investigating the
Whitewater matter. He called her tenure "just an extremely powerful
performance right across the board."

But for Ms. White, 53, these final two cases amount to a delicate coda to a
career in which she became the busiest and most powerful United States
attorney in the nation, while remaining something well shy of celebrity
prosecutor. She is, in certain ways, the New York powerhouse nobody knows.

Across eight years — she has served longer in the post than all but one
other person in the last century -- Ms. White has won prominent cases and a
reputation as a formidable political player within the Justice Department.
She has used old laws, like the racketeering statutes, in new ways to bring
down violent gangs. She has taken on case after case of international
terrorism.

Roaming the globe, her office has investigated bankers in Russia,
terrorists for acts committed in Africa, and drug lords in Colombia.

She has made almost a crusade of prosecuting corporate misbehavior,
including taking the unusual step of having a federal monitor sit on the
board of a troubled corporation.

And through it all, she has said little publicly, staging few, highly
scripted news conferences, granting no substantive interviews and closely
guarding the details of investigations. And she has never once tried a case
herself.

"Her presence is felt, but she is without public persona," said Steven M.
Cohen, former chief of her gangs unit. "People do not know who she is."

She almost did not become a lawyer: born in Kansas City, Mo., Ms. White was
a psychology major at the College of William and Mary. She then got her
master's degree in psychology at the New School for Social Research in New
York City in 1971, before she changed career paths and went on to graduate
from the Columbia University School of Law in 1974.

Hired by Mr. Fiske in 1978 when he was the United States attorney, she
spent about three years as a young assistant in the Southern District,
helping prosecute the Omega 7 anti- Castro terrorist group, among others.
She also befriended Louis J. Freeh, then also a young prosecutor.

And she became something of a legend in the local lawyers' basketball
league. She often played point guard -- not surprising in that she stands
60 inches tall and likes giving directions. And she was up to challenges:
showing up for a tennis match with a cocky colleague, she rode in on a
bright red motorcycle, with loudspeakers blaring Helen Reddy's "I Am
Woman." She won, 6 to 1.

In 1990, when Andrew J. Maloney, the United States attorney for the Eastern
District at the time, interviewed Ms. White, by now a veteran litigator at
Debevoise & Plimpton, for a job as his chief deputy, they met at the
University Club. "She ordered a beer," Mr. Maloney recalled. "I knew she
was my kind of gal."

She felt particularly prepared for the job after her years in private practice.

"It's good for you to have been out in the world, to be beaten up a bit,"
she said once. "Partners. Clients. You come in a little more mature."

When President Clinton appointed her to be United States attorney in 1993,
Ms. White was expected by many to make her mark in securities enforcement.
But today it is clear that she has also made it in terrorism, turning the
Southern District into the most knowledgeable and aggressive outpost in the
government's fight against terrorists.

She convicted the men involved in the World Trade Center bombing; a group
that included Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who wanted
to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks; another group,
which wanted to blow up American jetliners over the Pacific Ocean; and,
last month, four men who conspired with the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden in
the 1998 bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

When the American destroyer Cole was hit in Yemen, she sent one of her
prosecutors to investigate. When an Algerian was tried earlier this year in
Los Angeles for his part in a plot to blow up American sites during the
Millennium celebrations, she had a prosecutor at the table.

Paul Shechtman, a chief of the criminal division under Ms. White, said of
his former boss's ambitious reach, "I think that her map of the Southern
District looks a lot like the old New Yorker cartoon of a New Yorker's map
of America.

"It can sometimes cause turf fights and bruised egos and the rest, but if
your bottom line is pretty good and you're winning, I'm not sure it's such
a bad thing."

"The best example," he said, "is the terrorism cases. If you go back and
say, 'Why are those cases here, and not in the District of Columbia or
elsewhere?' there's basically only one answer to that, and that is Mary Jo."

Her other triumphs reflect, at minimum, that she plays no favorites,
politically or otherwise.

She won a $340 million fine against Daiwa Bank for illegally covering up
trading losses and other crimes; she has investigated the New York City
Police Department for racial profiling; she indicted the Teamsters
president, Ron Carey, and convicted Paul W. Adler, the former chief of the
Rockland County Democratic Party and an active supporter of Hillary Rodham
Clinton.

She also convicted Albert J. Pirro Jr., a prominent Republican fund- raiser
and the husband of Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney.

"Mary Jo is not going to be affected by political considerations," said
Robert S. Litt, a former Justice Department official in the Clinton
administration and a federal prosecutor with Ms. White in Manhattan 20
years ago. "During the Clinton administration, she investigated and brought
charges against people in the Teamsters in a matter that was considered
highly charged with political peril for the president and his party, and
she did go after that case. She went after it vigorously."

Her range of interests and lack of regard for bruising others has angered
some: the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, was enraged
when Ms. White used federal law in 1997 to trump a securities fraud case
his office had filed first. And some lawyers say she has gone too far in
finding criminality where it does not exist.

"She's always pushing the envelope in trying to expand her jurisdiction,
trying to criminalize things that are civil in nature or just unethical,"
said Gerald B. Lefcourt, a past president of the National Association of
Criminal Defense Lawyers.

He agrees, though, that her work "is her passion -- she loves this like no
other, perhaps."

But her love for the job as she closes out her tenure may be tested in new
ways as she oversees the investigations into the Clinton pardons and
Senator Torricelli's dealings.

In the first case, she is examining the circumstances of how President
Clinton came to exercise his power to grant clemency in scores of cases,
particularly for Mr. Rich, whose former wife, Denise Rich, lobbied Mr.
Clinton for clemency after making a $450,000 donation to the Clinton
presidential library. She is also examining whether anyone, including the
former president's half brother, improperly profited from the pardon process.

The pardons spurred intense criticism of Mr. Clinton, from Republicans and
Democrats alike, for, if nothing else, incredibly bad judgment. The pardons
also led to a rare statement from Ms. White that hinted at outrage. She
said she was "totally unaware" that the Rich pardon was under consideration.

Mr. Rich had been prosecuted by the Southern District, and Ms. White's
office had resisted various attempts over the years by Mr. Rich's lawyers
to win support for his clemency.

Mr. Clinton has denied that anything improper happened.

John C. Coffee Jr., a law professor at Columbia University who is an expert
on white-collar crime, said: "She was the one person who could credibly
look at the Rich pardon without it appearing to be a political witch hunt.
That's one reason I think the Republicans kept her on. They could have
someone look at this who they knew was tough, hard and incensed."

The investigation of Senator Torricelli's personal and political activities
has grown into a major crisis for him, legally and politically.

Many details of the investigation, which was transferred to Ms. White's
office from New Jersey earlier this year, have been described in newspaper
accounts. Senator Torricelli, who also has denied wrongdoing, has been
quick to attack the government for leaks and overreaching, even declaring
at a recent fund-raiser that he had been "publicly raped."

"The public needs to know that Senator Torricelli will not be charged with
crimes in order to change the balance of power in the Senate," one of his
lawyers wrote in a letter to Attorney General Ashcroft.

Where Ms. White goes after the investigations is unclear.

She has, over the years, turned down a judgeship on the prestigious Federal
Court of Appeals in Manhattan, and a senior post under Attorney General
Janet Reno.

The two cases, though, have for the moment kept her where she has always
wanted to be. "She would not have been the person holding the reins on each
of these matters if there had not been confidence in her across the board,"
said Elizabeth Glazer, a former senior prosecutor under Ms. White.

"If there was a sense, in any way, that she sort of leaned one way or
another," Ms. Glazer added, "or that she was buffeted, depending on what
the political flavor of the day was, in the decisions she would make, I
think the landscape might look very different than it does."