Alvin K. Hellerstein (Federal Judge), who oversaw 9/11, Trump and Maduro cases, dies at 92

Alvin K. Hellerstein was a federal judge in Manhattan for 28 years, best known for steering two decades of lawsuits that grew out of the Sept. 11 attacks and for later cases involving President Donald Trump and former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.  He died the morning of Oct. 28, surrounded by his family, at age 92, Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said in a statement.  No cause of death was given.

Hellerstein was born Dec. 28, 1933, in New York City.  He earned his bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1954 and his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1956.  After a year clerking for a federal judge, he served three years as a lawyer in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps.  He then spent almost four decades as a trial lawyer in New York, rising to help lead the litigation department at the firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan.

President Bill Clinton named him to the federal bench in 1998.  He took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in 2011 but kept hearing cases until his death.  After the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, he handled dozens of suits over deaths, injuries and property losses.  In 2010 he refused to sign off on a proposed settlement for ground zero workers because he felt it did not give them enough, sending lawyers back to improve it.

In 2020 he ordered Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen moved from prison to home confinement, finding that officials were retaliating against him over a book he planned to write.  He presided over the fraud trials of investor Bill Hwang, whom he sentenced to 18 years in 2024, and startup founder Charlie Javice, whom he sentenced to about seven years in 2025.  He turned down Trump's requests to move the New York hush money case into federal court three times, most recently in August.  Two weeks before he died, he held a hearing in the drug conspiracy case against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Hellerstein's wife of 54 years, Mildred "Millie" Hellerstein, died in 2017 at 80.  Hellerstein is survived by their three children, Dina, Judith and Joseph.  A funeral was set for Oct. 29 at Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan.