Thomas Spota
Hall of Fame
He’s responsible for the arrest and prosecution of more corrupt politicians than Woodward and Bernstein, but this Democratic district attorney relied on much fancier investigative tools in the process. With Fred Towle as his Deep Throat, replaying for juries the scandalous wiretapped conversations Spota used to catch the misdeeds of dozens of Brookhaven political figures was just the dazzling courtroom drama needed to turn the prosecutor into an overnight media darling. Not all the district attorney’s investigations have been as high profile, like the relatively mundane unlicensed contractor sting last summer. But the industriousness of Spota’s office and use of tactics usually reserved for the mafia on public officials landed him in this list’s No. 1 spot last year. His independence is so highly regarded that he was considered as a candidate for special prosecutor in the Choppergate scandal, when former Gov. Eliot Spitzer allegedly misused state troopers’ documents that were leaked to the media to attack Sen. Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Although losing his fight to defend the 1988 murder conviction of Martin Tankleff and seeing the Belle Terre man released from prison last December after 17 years gouged a chink in his armor, it hasn’t slowed his office from getting Suffolk’s bad guys off the streets.
Inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2008