New York – Eric Schneiderman Isn’t Your Typical Attorney General

New York – Eric Schneiderman isn’t your typical New York attorney general, and that may be good news for Wall Street.

The last two men who held the office, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, followed a similar playbook: hammering Wall Street when financial scandals erupted, and using the victories as fodder for gubernatorial campaigns.

Mr. Schneiderman, 56 years old, isn’t in that mold. These days, the yoga-practicing health-food nut is much more passionate about fighting for social justice than about scouring Wall Street for evidence of chicanery, say friends and colleagues.

Before serving as a state senator representing parts of Manhattan and the Bronx, the Democrat was a corporate attorney with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart and represented such clients as the American Stock Exchange and Merrill Lynch.

That isn’t to say Mr. Schneiderman is likely to take it easy on Wall Street should problems emerge. But to the extent that Mr. Schneiderman is passionate about finance at all, it is when it intersects with civil rights. Areas such as predatory lending and health care could be fertile ground for action, say people close to him. He already has met with Elizabeth Warren, who is in charge of setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington.

“The New York attorney general is never going to back away from being sheriff of Wall Street,” Mr. Schneiderman said, noting the office also has broader duties statewide. “I find that the overwhelming majority of people in finance are hard-working. I’m working to get the bad actors.”

Mr. Schneiderman ran for attorney general on a platform of cleaning up Albany, the state judicial system and the environment. In his first case, he filed suit on Jan. 6 against a Pennsylvania power plant allegedly polluting New York state air. His agenda may include workplace discrimination issues, unscrupulous health-care brokers and companies that commit “green fraud” by falsely claiming products are organic, according to people familiar with the attorney general’s office.

Some bigger forces are at work. For most of the time that Messrs. Spitzer and Cuomo held the office, Washington was dominated by regulators who believed government shouldn’t intervene deeply in the affairs of Wall Street unless a crisis left no other option. Since 2009, however, overhauls have greatly expanded federal oversight of the financial-services industry, and could leave the New York attorney general’s office with a smaller financial regulatory void to fill.

At the same time, Wall Street isn’t the easy political target it once was. The weak job market and worsening fiscal situation in Albany have meant that New York must try to keep one of its biggest job engines, financial services, humming in the Empire State.

Mr. Schneiderman declined to comment on any pending cases, but says credit-card companies, debt collectors, and mortgage and foreclosure issues are “on my plate.”

Mr. Schneiderman was backed in part by labor unions, lawyers and hedge-fund managers, including donations from Greenlight Capital Inc.’s David Einhorn, Pershing Square Capital Management LP’s William Ackman, and financier George Soros. He also received $6,250 from each of the “Big Four” accounting firms, including Ernst & Young LLP, which is embroiled in a suit filed last month by Mr. Schneiderman’s predecessor, now-Gov. Cuomo.

Mr. Schneiderman is a native of Manhattan’s Upper West Side and the son of Irwin Schneiderman, a corporate lawyer who took on several high-profile clients, including the securities house Drexel Burnham Lambert during its ascent to the top of the junk-bond world in the 1980s. (The elder Mr. Schneiderman made an appearance in the James B. Stewart book “Den of Thieves.”)

As a teenager, the future attorney general worked as a clinic escort at a women’s health center in Washington before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973. He counts Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the lawyers credited with helping end racial segregation, among his heroes.

Mr. Schneiderman received a degree in English and East Asian studies at Amherst College, and then served for two years as a deputy sheriff in Berkshire County in Massachusetts, where his duties included transporting prisoners and establishing a drug- and alcohol-treatment program at the jail. He says he learned that “when the trees are down in storms, you have to clean them up.” After that, he headed off to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1982.

As a lawyer, Mr. Schneiderman became known for using old statutes in creative ways. In one 1995 pro bono case, he invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to argue that a New York City transit-fare increase was discriminatory. The transit agency eventually paid $150,000, and began offering discount transit fares. “He likes the chess game of it,” a former colleague says.

While some predecessors in the attorney general’s office were known for their explosive tempers, friends, colleagues and even rivals of Mr. Schneiderman say they expect a different demeanor, and less contentious dealings with the business community. “He’s not going to be screaming at you on the phone,” one friend says.

“He just doesn’t have that same darkness [as some predecessors],” said Jim Alesi, a Republican state senator. “He wants to do things legislatively. He’s trying to be a gentleman in an arena where collegiality has evaporated.”

Like Messrs. Spitzer and Cuomo and many New York politicians, however, Mr. Schneiderman has a colorful personal life.

His ex-wife, Jennifer Cunningham, was a media consultant during the campaign, and the two share custody of a teenage daughter, who is a senior at a public school in New York. While Ms. Cunningham doesn’t hold an official title in the AG’s office, she is a “trusted friend and adviser” to the attorney general, says a spokesman for Mr. Schneiderman.

Ms. Cunningham also advised on Mr. Cuomo’s campaign for New York attorney general. “Eric has always been an independent thinker who fights for what he believes in and never hesitates to challenge the status quo,” Ms. Cunningham said in a statement.

Mr. Schneiderman’s ex-girlfriend, Michelle Clunie, an actress known for her role on the television show “Queer as Folk,” actively campaigned for his competitor in the Democratic primary, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, the first woman to hold that job. Ms. Clunie’s manager declined to comment.

Now a bachelor, Mr. Schneiderman, 5-foot-10 with salt-and-pepper hair, lives in a large apartment building near Riverside Park in the Upper West Side and attends the nearby B’nai Jeshurun synagogue.

Mr. Schneiderman’s Rolodex is speckled with progressives, corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers and politicos. The crowd at his swearing-in ceremony last week included Gov. Cuomo and Sen. Charles Schumer, as well as a fleet of private-sector and public lawyers, and community leaders from his former Senate district. As the crowd nibbled on empanadas, Dominican band Los Clarinetes Magicos played a spicy mix of jazz, meringue and blues songs.

One friend, actor Alec Baldwin, joked that when Mr. Schneiderman visited the governor’s mansion he told a state employee to keep those towels with “E.S. on them,” a nod to the fact that Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Schneiderman share the same initials.

Mr. Schneiderman says he isn’t interested in running for governor. “I’m still learning to work the phones,” he says.