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Robert C. Moller, a former New York Metropolis police detective who as a State Division diplomat spent 20 years shielding visiting U.N. delegates from the idiosyncrasies of New York Metropolis and vice versa, died on Dec. 6 at his residence in Freehold Township, N.J. He was 85.
The trigger was a degenerative mind situation referred to as progressive supranuclear palsy, his son Thomas Moller mentioned.
As if Mr. Moller’s job within the police Intelligence Division wasn’t perilous sufficient, his subsequent portfolio because the host nation’s liaison for some 50,000 United Nations envoys and employees would have examined the persistence of any referee or pacificator.
Mr. Moller (pronounced MOE-ler) gently pressured deadbeat nations to cut back what they owed in lease, parking fines and overdue utility payments (together with $86,000 Uganda and Cameroon owed Consolidated Edison). He helped broaden the jurisdiction of U.S. courts to garnish the wages of United Nations staff who miss alimony and little one assist.
He handled challenges to journey restrictions the USA positioned on diplomats from sure nations and immunity claimed from native felony and civil statutes.
In 1983, his office intervened with officers in Englewood, N.J., who objected that Libya’s United Nation’s ambassador had turned a million-dollar one-family residence right into a retreat for greater than a dozen workers of that nation’s U.N. Mission.
That very same 12 months, Mr. Moller’s workplace negotiated the give up of a North Korean diplomat who had been hiding in his nation’s Manhattan mission for 10 months to keep away from arrest for sexual assault. The diplomat left the mission, pleaded guilty to sexual abuse and vowed to depart the USA and by no means return.
His give up affirmed the authorized doctrine that diplomats from observer missions are entitled to immunity from arrest just for acts linked with their official duties.
The job — Minister-Counselor for Host Nation Affairs of the USA Mission to the United Nations — typically required inventive diplomacy. Mr. Moller as soon as sought to power the recall of a Mexican ambassador who drew his gun on a New York Metropolis driver over a parking dispute, The Washington Submit reported. When a low-flying helicopter almost hit the weekend residence of the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, Mr. Moller was the one making an attempt to elucidate it to the Soviets.
Mr. Moller’s workplace typically attracted extra mundane considerations, together with requests for assist from poorer nations challenged by the town’s excessive price of residing, complaints about water foremost breaks and energy failures, and episodic crackdowns by politically-sensitive public officers on double-parked diplomats and different abuses by drivers with diplomatic license plates.
In 1984, the State Division assumed accountability from state motorized vehicle departments for issuing diplomatic plates, requiring that unpaid parking tickets be settled earlier than plates could possibly be renewed.
The notion that international diplomats get away with homicide is misplaced, Mr. Moller instructed The Washington Submit in 2003. “Our statistics present that the diplomats are in all probability victims of crime 30 instances in comparison with the one time they commit the crime,” he mentioned.
Robert Charles Moller was born on March 30, 1937, in Brooklyn. His father, Viggo, was a police officer. His mom, Helen (Bodenstedt) Moller, was a homemaker.
He graduated from James Madison Excessive Faculty and earned a bachelor’s diploma in economics from Albright Faculty in Studying, Pa., in 1958. He served within the Military Reserves and obtained a grasp’s diploma in public administration from Baruch Faculty of the Metropolis College of New York in 1971.
Along with his son Thomas, he’s survived by his spouse, Margaret (Carrigy) Moller; their different sons, Robert and Kenneth Moller; their daughter Christine Mitchinson; his sisters, Marilyn Slaker and Joan Taks; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Moller’s first job after school was with the New York Metropolis Police Division. He retired as a primary grade detective within the intelligence division in 1976.
Mr. Moller then joined the USA Overseas Service, a job through which he drafted an analysis of New York Metropolis’s vulnerability to terrorist assaults.
His analysis, coupled with 5 years of expertise within the diplomatic service, led to his appointment in 1981 to the State Division’s newly-created place of liaison to the United Nations.
Whereas New York Metropolis had its personal commissioner for the United Nations, roughly as a courtesy and to advertise tourism and financial growth, since 1962, Mr. Moller’s workplace was established to offer a diplomatic stage liaison with delegates, missions and residences of member and observer states and their staffs.
He served in that function till his retirement in 2004.
When he retired, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright characterised him as “considered one of America’s greatest diplomats.”
“I’ve typically mentioned if the United Nations didn’t exist, we must invent it,” she wrote him. “The identical goes for you. If Bob Moller didn’t exist, we must invent him.”
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