Bureau Chief:
Assistant District Attorney
James W. Evangelou
The Career Criminal Major Crimes Bureau (CCMCB) was formed by District Attorney Richard A. Brown for the express purpose of prosecuting cases involving career criminals and the most serious armed or violent felons. The Bureau handles designated robberies, kidnapings, assaults, attempted murders and burglaries, as well as cases in which a defendant has at least one prior felony conviction.
CCMCB is staffed by a number of veteran prosecutors and all of the cases are handled vertically, i.e. from arrest through trial by one Assistant District Attorney.
CCMCB maintains a beeper rotation schedule for all the assistants in the Trial Division. Those assistants are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The assistant on call typically responds to a precinct shortly after an arrest is made and works with police to ensure that all leads are followed and that evidence necessary to strengthen a case is immediately pursued. While on call, the assigned assistant may take statements from witnesses and/or defendants, supervise line-ups, provide appropiate assistance to the investigating officers.
Since its inception, CCMCB has prosecuted thousands of indictments, the vast majority of which charged violent felony offenses. Since many CCMCB prosecutions involve “pattern” crimes, many indictments encompass more than one criminal incident. CCMCB has found that consolidating indictments and conducting coordinated investigations of pattern crimes greatly enhances the strength of its cases and the effectiveness of its prosecution.
The Bureau is also responsible for investigating and prosecuting cases developed under the New York City Police Department’s BIOTRACK Program. In BIOTRACK, DNA evidence recovered from the scenes of burglaries and robberies is compared to DNA samples on file in the state DNA index system. When a match is made, the case is assigned to the CCMCB Bureau for prosecution.
Over the years, CCMCB has had an outstanding success rate in its prosecutions. Much of that success is directly attributable to the Bureau’s vertical system of prosecution and to the assignment of some of the office’s most experienced assistants to the Bureau. The vertical system also benefits witnesses, who are spared the difficulty of having to work with different assistants at various court appearances. As a result of this, most witnesses remain cooperative at the time of trial, when their cooperation is needed the most.
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