Authors: Stephen Solomita
“Dr. Park,” he said, his enunciation precise, his voice pitched high enough to thoroughly disguise the steel trap between his ears.
“Sid Kaplan, Kim. How’s it hangin’?”
“Well, Sidney, according to the inside dope on Asians, not very far.”
I dredged up an appreciative chuckle. “Look …”
“Over the weekend, while I was in New York, I read something about your case in
Newsday.
It sounds quite interesting.”
“It’s hot, Kim. Definitely hot.”
I quickly outlined the case and the strategy we intended to pursue, both in the courtroom and through the media, ending with the blood-alcohol rumor. Kim took a moment to think it over, then asked the inevitable question.
“Did the … the deceased have cocaine in his system?” He’d been about to use the word
victim.
“Don’t know.” I paused, took a deep breath. “What I’d like to do, Kim, is send you the autopsy material as soon as I get my hands on it.”
“No problem. I’d love to see it.”
“Oh, there’s a problem, all right, and it’s called money. As in we don’t have dime number one.”
“Well …”
“But what you gotta think about is your value on the lecture circuit.” I knew that Kim worked the circuit for all it was worth, knocking down between seven and ten grand per speech. “We’re looking at a
New York
trial here. With
New York
publicity.” I ran on before he could interrupt. “Don’t give me an answer now. What I’ll do is fax the forensic material out to you as soon as I get it. You don’t like what you see, I can always find some pro bono jerk to say Byron was about to run the hundred yard dash. Maybe the jury’ll believe it. And maybe they won’t care.”
Ever the entrepreneur, Kim responded without hesitation. “And maybe,” he reminded, “they’ll convict an innocent woman.”
The mid-week period went by in a blur. I got the details of Priscilla’s indictment early Tuesday morning. Her crime having lacked any of the special circumstances necessary for a charge of murder in the first degree (and a possible death sentence), she’d been charged with second degree murder. This in addition to drug possession in the first degree, criminal use of a firearm in the first degree, and criminal possession of a weapon in the first degree. The homicide and drug possession charges, both A1 felonies, each carried a maximum penalty of twenty-five years to life. The others were all B felonies and, given Priscilla’s repeat offender status, carried seven year minimums.
I remember gathering my troops that evening and reading the charges and penalties out loud, adding, “If the sentencing judge strings them out consecutively, Priscilla Sweet’s gonna go from prison directly into the ground.” This time there were no wise guy remarks. Caleb went back to his desk and continued to laboriously enter his interview notes. Julie returned to the motion she was writing while I pored over a rough draft of our demand letter.
We were riding a high generated by the evening news. All three networks had run with a press conference held by the Sweet family. Sebastian, Rose, and son William, along with Reverend Mathias Silverstone, had been perched on stiff, high-backed chairs that looked to have been dragged out of somebody’s dining room. Their attorney, on the other hand, Henry Lee Thompson, had been seated just off to the left on a cushioned armchair. Thompson, tall and impossibly wide-shouldered, had delivered a passionate, rapid-fire speech on the vilification of black males, adding a homily on victim’s rights that contradicted every other speech he’d given in the course of a long, successful career. Then he’d ducked the matter of Byron’s abuse by accusing a reporter (black, by the way) of harboring racist sentiments. Thompson’s face was all forehead, cheekbones, and jaw. His nose and lips, small anyway, seemed to fade away beneath a pair of black eyes angry enough to loosen the bowels of judges, jurors, and hostile journalists alike.
Thompson and I shared a number of traits. We were, the both of us, mindless advocates, belligerent to a fault and as committed to personal victory as champion pit bulls. The difference was that Henry Lee’s advocacy extended beyond himself and his client to a political agenda that interested me not at all.
On the other hand, what did interest me was that Henry Lee’s diatribe was certain to provoke a response from members of the community with political agendas of their own. That response wasn’t long in coming. The phone rang about 8:30 and I picked it up without thinking.
“Kaplan.”
The woman on the other end identified herself as Rebecca Barthelme, chairwoman of the New York Women’s Council’s advisory board.
“Oh, right,” I said, interrupting. “I believe you’ve already been in touch with my client.”
“That’s correct.” Her delivery was tight, her voice almost breathless with tension. “Before you came into the picture.”
“I see. Well, what can I do for you?”
“The Council is considering an offer of aid to Priscilla. But we need a little more information before we can proceed.”
“Is that right?”
“Mr. Kaplan, let’s not make this any harder …”
“Call me, Sid. Please.”
She took a deep breath, finally said, “Tell me what we can do for Priscilla.”
“Okay, Priscilla needs two things from the Council. First and foremost, an expert on battered spouse syndrome. There’s no money here, so I can’t, much as I’d like to, simply go out and buy one. Second, a quiet, competent lawyer to act as my assistant.”
“That’s certainly possible,” she replied. “Assuming Priscilla’s circumstances …”
“Her circumstances? Rebecca, what you wanna do is take the following back to your governing board: that my client is innocent; that we have a legitimate claim of self-defense; that we have a documented history of abuse; that we have more witnesses than we can use at trial; that my client maintained a spotless record, both with her employer and with her parole officer, from the time she was released from prison until she went back to her husband.”
“And you’re prepared to prove these assertions?”
“One hand washes the other, Rebecca. Let me know what the board decides. Maybe we can get together when I give my press conference after Friday’s arraignment.”
I hung up a minute later, then turned to Caleb and Julie with a big smile on my face. “That was Rebecca Barthelme from the New York Women’s Council. Looks like she wants a piece of the action.”
“You gonna give it to her?” Julie asked.
“What I’ll do, Julie, is put it to Priscilla, see what she thinks. But I’ll tell ya, given the state of our finances, it feels like manna from heaven to me.”
Priscilla, after I detailed the Council’s generous offer, accepted without hesitation. “Now that you have some help,” she told me, “maybe there won’t be so much pressure about money. My mother’s a nervous wreck.
The news kept getting better. On Thursday evening, the day before Priscilla’s arraignment, as we awaited a delivery from a Thai restaurant on Fourteenth Street, Caleb proudly declared, “The Bellevue incident is in the bag.”
He was talking about the confrontation that led to Priscilla’s visit to the emergency room, then to her husband’s incarceration.
“I’ve got three witnesses lined up and they’re telling the same basic story. Priscilla’s in Pentangles, the restaurant on Avenue B, having a quiet drink with a female friend. Byron shows up, rips her off the bar stool, and slaps her in the face. Priscilla makes the mistake of fighting back and he beats her into unconsciousness.”
Caleb looked from Julie to me, tossed each of us a hard cop glare. “You hear what I’m sayin’? He got her down on the floor, sat on her chest, smashed her in the face with both hands. The bartender had to pull him off.”
“This bartender,” I asked after giving him a minute to calm down, “he available?”
“Yeah. His name’s Lance McCormack, a would-be actor. I tracked him down at his apartment in Astoria. He remembers the incident and he’s eager to testify. A waitress, too.” Caleb glanced at his spiral notebook. “Amelia Green. She still works at the restaurant.”
“Are either of them,” Julie asked, “close friends of Priscilla’s?”
“Never met her before and haven’t seen her since. Mr. McCormack and Ms. Green are just two good citizens out to perform their civic duty. Why, I’ll bet, between ’em they don’t do more than four grams of coke a week.” When neither Julie nor I responded he went on. “Seriously, partners, we get these folks on the stand, nobody on the jury’s gonna have any doubts about the abuse. The deal in the restaurant leads directly to the Bellevue emergency room visit which leads directly to Byron’s stint on Rikers Island.”
“And the order of protection,” Julie said, “which was still in effect when Priscilla went to prison.”
P
ART 81 OF THE
New York Criminal Court, the fiefdom of Judge Rob Winokur, was one of two Parts dedicated to Supreme Court arraignments. Arraignment, in theory, is a simple procedure: the charges in the Grand Jury indictment are read to the defendant, a formal plea is taken, a brief appeal for bail (or the lack thereof) is considered, then the gavel bangs down. On a productive day, Judge Winokur processed as many as a hundred defendants.
In the early days of my private practice, I spent many an hour waiting in Judge Winokur’s courtroom for my client’s name to be called. Later on, at the height of my career, unless the client was very famous, I sent one of the flunkies to handle the dirty work. Then, after my career nosedived, I turned full circle and became just another
schmucko
lawyer reading a newspaper on the front row of benches because I didn’t have other clients in need of my attention.
In a way, it had been comforting, like anything else that seems immutable. Part 81, a large room on the fifteenth floor of the Criminal Court Building at 100 Centre Street, was virtually devoid of ornamentation. It reeked of shabbiness, of surrendered irretrievable gentility. At one time, for example, though not within my memory, the floor tiles with their brown swirls probably resembled marble. Now they were scuffed and scratched and dusty. As if during some budget crunch, decades before, the maintenance staff had decided to sacrifice mops and polish.
The room was lined with wood paneling that ran a third of the way up each wall. The panels may originally have been of some attractive, valuable wood—maple, perhaps, or walnut, or even mahogany. But over the years they’d received so many coats of chocolate-brown paint, they now had the color and consistency of dried mud.
The seats in the jury box were in even worse shape, their brown leather covers torn and cracked. The excuse, I suppose, if anyone cared to ask, was that juries played no role in the arraignment proceedings. Just as well, because there was no way they could have followed the action. Not only were there no cameras in Judge Winokur’s courtroom, there were no microphones either. The attorneys on the front bench talked among themselves, as did the four armed court officers and the spectators, a mix of defendants on bail, the families of the incarcerated accused, and assorted court buffs.
The din reduced the pleadings of the prosecutor and the defense attorney, who stood with their backs to the courtroom, to a vague murmur. Even Judge Winokur, who faced the spectators, could only be understood when he shouted at the attorneys in front of him. Winokur was halfway through his third, ten-year term of office, and had long ago mastered the art of attorney abuse. He was short and bald, with an ordinarily florid complexion that brightened to scarlet whenever the process of arraignment lasted longer than the three minutes it took the sand in a tiny hourglass sitting on the forward edge of his desk to run out.
Winokur had just taken his seat on the bench when I entered Part 81 on that Friday morning to discover a half dozen reporters gathered at the bar. They were almost certainly asking where Priscilla Sweet’s name stood on the court calendar. If her case wouldn’t be called until after lunch, they didn’t want to waste the morning sitting in a courtroom. I started forward to clock in, looking for an answer to the same question, when a court officer named Moscowitz tapped me on the arm.
“Forget the mob,
boychick
,” he said as he pulled me back into the hall. “Today you’re a star.”
Ira Moscowitz was the only Jewish court officer I’d ever met. He was short and burly, with arms as thick as my skull.
“Your client’s gonna be called first in the afternoon session. Meanwhile, the guinea wants you downstairs in his office.”
I was about to ask for the identity of “the guinea,” though I knew he was talking about Carlo Buscetta, when the door burst open and the reporters charged into the hallway. They literally surrounded me, despite my verbal assurance that all of their questions would be answered after Priscilla’s arraignment. I think they would have followed me onto the elevator if Ira hadn’t barred their way.
Carl Buscetta’s crowded office was just about the size of a prison cell. A fine layer of dust covered the window frame, the top of the filing cabinet, the seat of the visitor’s chair. I wiped the seat with my handkerchief, then dropped the handkerchief in the wastebasket before I sat down.
“Big day, right
Sid
ney?” Everything about Carlo Buscetta was tight, from the black, vested suits he habitually wore to the acne-pitted skin stretched across his prominent cheekbones.
“Medium day, Carlo. If that.”
Carlo stared at me for a moment, his little acne pits glowing red. “The plea board,” he finally said, “has
ordered
me to make the following offer. If your client pleads guilty to the top charge, all lesser charges will be dismissed and the minimum sentence recommended.”
I watched him straighten in the chair, his equanimity recovered, and tilt his head back to stare at me along the length of a prodigious nose. “So what you’re saying here,” I declared, “is that if my innocent client pleads guilty she can look forward to spending the next dozen or so years in Bedford Hills? You want me to recommend this travesty?”
Carlo responded by leaning over the edge of the desk. His mouth curved into a thin white crescent. “Your client,” he snarled, “is a sleazebag dope dealer who got her ass kicked because she was skimming her partner’s share of the profits.”