THE UPSTART.(Leslie Crocker Snyder )

At almost every campaign appearance in the race for Manhattan District Attorney, Leslie Crocker Snyder talks about how she came to prosecute murder cases. In 1968, when she was twenty-five, she joined the staff of Frank Hogan, who was then the D.A., and quickly mastered the basics of her job, but soon found her progress stymied. "I kept asking Mr. Hogan to go to the homicide bureau, which was a big bastion of male chauvinism at the time," Snyder recalls, "and he kept putting me off, saying I should do consumer affairs, which is where the few women in the office tended to go. And then finally one day I said, 'You know, come on, it's really time, Mr. Hogan.' And he said, 'Well, if you bring me a letter of permission from your husband.' "

When the audience laughter dies down, Snyder always adds that even though she never actually produced such a letter, she still went on to prosecute homicide cases. But the people who come out to Democratic clubs and civic organizations where Snyder is making the rounds sometimes miss the point. Hogan, who took office in 1941, succeeding Thomas E. Dewey, was already old and out of touch by the time Snyder asked for her chance to move up. "By the mid-seventies, things had changed totally," Snyder said recently. "That's when we started to have women in law school, and that's when women started to come into the D.A.'s office in real numbers." In 1973, when Hogan was running for what turned out to be his final term, he would mention that there was a woman in his office trying felony cases--Leslie Crocker Snyder.

Snyder grew up in Baltimore; her father was a professor of literature at Goucher College, and her mother a homemaker. She's been married for thirty-seven years to Fredric Snyder, a successful pediatrician, and they have two grown children; one works in the foreign service and the other in finance. Throughout her career, Snyder has gone after the opportunities that were becoming available to women of her generation. She left the D.A.'s office in 1976--about two years after the new District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, arrived--and soon applied for a criminal-court judgeship. As a prosecutor, she "ably performed to the satisfaction of her supervisors," Morgenthau wrote to the mayor's commission on judicial selection on June 9, 1978. "Mrs. Snyder has a pleasing presence and is well-spoken." It wasn't until 1983, however, that she was named to the criminal court, by Mayor Ed Koch. She spent the next two decades on the bench, often seeking out difficult trials. She retired last year and joined Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, a firm of about a hundred and fifty lawyers that specializes in litigation.

Among the few decorations in Snyder's law office is a laminated front page of the Post--"kill the judge"--from the time a defendant put out a contract on her life. Snyder's style as a judge was pugnacious and led defense lawyers (and their clients) to give her nicknames like Ice Princess and Judge 232, for a sentence she once imposed. (The actual sentence was 213 years.) In a tribute of sorts, one local drug gang distributed bags of heroin stamped with her likeness and the words "25 to Life," and Snyder, in turn, proudly used those words as the title of an autobiography she wrote in 2002.

While Snyder was still a judge, she became a frequent television commentator on legal cases, including the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and, to an unusual degree, made herself the center of attention inside the courtroom as well. When Bruce Cutler, the lawyer for the late mobster John Gotti, represented another organized-crime figure in a case before her, she grew so annoyed with Cutler that, out of the presence of the jury, she said to him, "If you want to bullshit me, then look me in the eye and do it." At bench conferences, she even registered her distaste for Cutler's cologne. "During the trial, she bought me some toilet water, nice stuff, because she didn't like the Grey Flannel I was wearing," Cutler recalled. (Despite the change in scent, Cutler's client was convicted.) "She's very smart, gave me a very fair trial, but, boy, she's harsh on the sentences," Cutler said. "She gave everybody the maximum." Because of her reputed harshness, Snyder was often the judge favored by Morgenthau's prosecutors, and "judge shopping" formed the basis of a recent appeal by a defendant convicted in her court. The U.S. Court of Appeals said that the practice of letting prosecutors choose judges "raises serious concerns," but still affirmed the conviction. Other defendants have challenged her combativeness--for instance, she called a defense witness "full of baloney." But Snyder never had a conviction overturned on that ground.

Four years ago, Snyder thought about quitting her judgeship and running against Morgenthau. "I wanted to do it then," she told me, "but, out of respect for him, I decided to wait until the next time. I thought there was no way he was going to run again--when he was eighty-six--but I was wrong. He did decide to run again, and this time I wasn't going to wait."

Ever since Snyder left the bench, her law office, on Broadway at Fiftieth Street, has been a staging area for her campaign ...