SAM ROBERTS

She was New York’s longest-serving female inmate when her conviction was overturned in 1998. She left prison 25 years to the day after her arrest.

Three decades after establishing herself as a civil rights lawyer, she became a trailblazer for women on the bench in two upstate New York districts.

A historian and novelist, he provided a 96-page “interrogation” memo for David Frost’s TV interviews that prodded Nixon to say, “I let the American people...

He helped New York City avoid bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and later served as lieutenant governor.

Shunning fire and brimstone, he became a best-selling author and founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which drew young New Yorkers.

With a wide-reaching spiritual message in books like “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he drew on his own experience with grief and doubt.

A former milkman, he combined attentive customer service, low prices, quality goods and gimmicks, like singing cows, into a retailing phenomenon.

He was best known for his formal portraits of prominent politicians and entertainers. Less famously, he took thousands of candid shots of John, Paul, George...

Called “the American Venus,” she was a model immortalized by sculptors, her image remaining visible in monuments across New York City.

Though his political career was brief, after storming to victory with a former Miss America by his side, he made millions by buying the fried...