Authors: Stephen Solomita
I brought Priscilla to those final hours with Byron right after lunch. Ordinarily, I would have stretched her testimony through the afternoon, left the jury to sleep on our version of the evidence. But I’d laid a trap for Carlo, a small packet of prison letters now resting in one of Janet Boroda’s files, and I knew he’d step into it before the afternoon wore down. Priscilla had admitted to dealing drugs, both before and after her separation; she’d spoken of her love for Byron in the same light. Carlo would try to convince the jury that drugs, and not love, had brought the Sweets back together, because it was the most obvious point of vulnerability in Priscilla’s testimony. At that point, the letters would become relevant.
Priscilla, by design, kept her responses short and to the point as she described the final beating, two nights and a day unable to leave her bed, Byron’s waving a cigarette in her direction. I’d urged her to show a small measure of reluctance to speak about those last hours, a proper respect for the horrific nature of the final act.
“When Byron threatened to burn you, Priscilla, did you believe that he would actually do it?”
“Yes.”
“And would you tell us why you believed him?”
“Because he’d done it before.”
Over Carlo’s thunderous and quickly overruled objection, Priscilla, her breath coming in little chuffs, slowly unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a pair of shiny scars. The entire courtroom, the prosecution, the defense, the jurors, the spectators, came to an abrupt halt, as if posing for a photograph. If I’d had my way, I would have passed my client around, let the jury run its collective fingers over her wounds. Instead, I waited only long enough to let Priscilla button up, then asked, “And what happened next?”
I let her go through the rest of it without interruption, how she’d gone back into the bedroom, picked up Byron’s gun, the gun he’d already told her she didn’t have the courage to use, and pressed the cylinder release.
“Two of the bullets fell out,” she said, “fell on the floor. I picked them up and put them back into the gun, then went into the living room. My hands were shaking and it took me a long time.” She was rocking slowly in the chair, eyes down, back curved, and her voice was slightly hoarse, as if she lacked the breath to fully form her words. “When Byron saw me, he just laughed. He asked me what I was going to do with the gun, and I didn’t have an answer. I wanted to get out of there, but I knew he wouldn’t let me. I knew I didn’t have any place to go.” Her hand rose to briefly cover her mouth. Then she drew a deep breath, raised her chin, said in the saddest voice I’ve ever heard, “He started to get up, to get up out of the chair and the gun … No, he started to get up and I pulled the trigger. I did it. I killed him.”
I fought an urge to say, “Poor baby,” stepping back instead to give the jury an unobstructed view. Priscilla was sobbing silently, her chest heaving. She clutched the edges of her sweater, drew them together, shook her head in disbelief. The jurors stared at her for a moment, then, one by one, turned away in embarrassment.
I milked the tableau for all it was worth, waited until Delaney ordered me to proceed before asking, “Will you tell us what happened next, Priscilla?”
“Byron fell to his knees. He crawled a few feet …” Again, the hesitation, the sharply drawn breath. “And then he collapsed. I think I expected him to get up because I just stood there for … I don’t remember exactly how long. Forever, it seemed like, until I knew he was dead. Until I knew I couldn’t take it back.”
“And what did you do then?”
“Do?” She looked at me, head cocked, eyes round and questioning. “I did nothing. I sat in the chair and I waited for something to happen.”
“Did you think about escaping before the police arrived twenty minutes later?”
“No.”
“Did you consider what might happen to you when the police arrived?”
“No.”
“Even though you’d been in prison? Even though you knew what prison was like, you didn’t think about running away?”
“I felt,” she told the jury, “like I was paralyzed. Like I couldn’t move. I felt like I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.”
I walked back to the defense table, shuffled a handful of papers, finally said, “No further, your Honor,” before sitting down. Rebecca Barthelme, her courtroom face appropriately solemn, gave my sleeve a little tug before whispering, “Priscilla was perfect, Sid. Absolutely perfect.”
According to the trial transcript, Carlo leaped eagerly into the trap I’d set for him. I can’t draw the tone of his voice from the printed words, but I know his first task was to obliterate the emotion of the moment, to demonize Priscilla before the jury voted for canonization. His initial question—“Mrs. Sweet, did you ever sell drugs to children?”—set the stage for a barrage of similar questions. Priscilla, for her part, admitted to dealing drugs only before her separation from Byron. After they came back together, she’d been, she declared, nothing more than a mule, a prisoner forced to transport quantities of cocaine, to take the risks, from the police and from Byron’s clientele, with no hope of eventual reward.
“I thought Byron was going to kill me,” she told Carlo and the jury at one point. “What good would money do me if I was dead?”
They went back and forth for perhaps thirty minutes before Delaney, without an objection from me, ordered Carlo to move on. Carlo, as if on cue, asked, “Mrs. Sweet, is it your contention that after your and the victim’s separation, he forced you to reconcile?”
At this point I was supposed to object. And not only because Carlo had completely mischaracterized Priscilla’s testimony. It was my job, as it would be the job of any trial lawyer, to give my witness a little breathing room. Still, according to the transcript, I remained silent, partly, I’d like to believe, because Carlo, by attacking Priscilla’s credibility, opened the door, not only for the admission of Byron’s prison letters, but also for Byron’s phony passport. The further Carlo went, the more latitude Delaney would grant when my time came on redirect.
There was something else, however, something obviously more important to me and which I still remember clearly. As I sat next to Rebecca and Janet, my legs crossed beneath the defense table, wishing for a cigarette, I began for no apparent reason to recall a long-forgotten period of my mother’s life.
I believe I was six or seven years old, still young enough to spend virtually all of my time in the house of my parents, when Gregor Glitzky, via telephone, introduced himself as a trade minister attached to the Soviet U.N. mission. By then, of course, Magda had been sending out her letters of inquiry for several years and so the call may have seemed to her the logical culmination of an overwhelming effort. Or perhaps she was merely seduced by Gregor’s enthusiasm. Without doubt, he expressed unbounded confidence, a belief in a world where things got done, where he, Gregor Glitzky, got them done.
In either event, what Gregor told my parents on the following Saturday, as he sat sipping tea in our kitchen, was simple enough and true on its face. Tens of thousands of European Jews (the exact number could not be known), faced with almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis and with no hope of escape to the west, had fled into the broad bosom of Mother Russia. Unfortunately, given the post-war political atmosphere, these refugees could not be allowed to leave and were now scattered throughout the vast Soviet empire.
“How to find them, eh? This is big problem for families in West.” Gregor, as I resurrected him in Judge Thomas Delaney’s courtroom, was a tall muscular man with enormous shoulders and a belly to match. His narrow Slavic eyes, pale blue and veiled by epicanthic folds at the corners, flicked from my father to my mother as he made his points. “But for Gregor Glitzky is simple matter. Cut through tape, this I say.” He leaned as far forward as his gut would allow, flapped pale bushy eyebrows. “Somewhere in KGB, I tell myself, there is records of refugee foreigners. This must be so because in KGB there is records of every Soviet citizen.”
I doubt very much that my father was impressed with Gregor’s confident manner, any more than he was impressed with Gregor’s cheap, double-breasted, Soviet blue suit. I remember him sitting there, my father, arms folded over his chest, staring along the length of his nose at Gregor Glitzky, smoking one cigarette after another. For Magda, it was an entirely different matter. As she listened to Gregor describe encounters with one or another Jewish exile, the efforts he made to establish contact with whatever remained of their families, she at first displayed a nervousness that masked an emotion she’d already come to fear. I don’t know if Gregor sensed her hesitation or if he was simply in love with the sound of his own voice, but he continued on, hands flying as if the conversation was being conducted in sign language, until finally hope emerged, until Magda’s sallow cheeks began to glow, until the bait was thoroughly taken. Only then did he set the hook.
“Corruption is sad fact of Soviet life,” he declared. “For price, if you are knowing the right people, anything can be did.”
The price, a mere one thousand dollars, would guarantee access to all KGB records in perpetuity, he told my parents. There would be no further payments. “I take nothing for self,” he explained as he fumbled in a battered briefcase, drew forth a stack of worn testimonials. “For me is love labor.”
Gregor Glitzky’s love labor stretched out for nearly three years and eventually cost the Kaplan household more than five thousand dollars. I remember, early on, a flood of letters posted not only from Moscow and Leningrad, but from a host of smaller industrial cities. I remember Magda’s face, as she slipped a polished fingernail under the flaps, projecting a radiance with which I was entirely unfamiliar. I remember a shy smile, a quick glance in my direction, a brief hesitation before she removed the folded sheet of paper inside. I remember a map of the Soviet Union pinned to the wall behind our kitchen table, Magda’s hands sweeping across the Urals, the Steppes, the highland plains of Asia as she gave substance to the words on the page.
Gregor’s letters, right up to the end, were uniformly optimistic. Working from a list of relatives supplied by Magda, he developed various leads. The name Isidor Leibovits, for instance, Magda’s brother, appeared in the wartime records of the Soviet Labor Ministry. A payment of the appropriate bribe to the appropriate KGB colonel revealed that after the war Isidor Leibovits had been moved east, to the oil fields of Kamchatka. A trip to the Kamchatka (for which, naturally, expense money was needed) yielded the sad fact that Isidor had moved again, to Leningrad, five thousand miles away.
Eventually, Isidor Leibovits, tracked to a lair in Minsk, disclaimed all knowledge of Magda’s family. No big deal, however, because the trail of another Leibovits, an uncle, aunt, or cousin, had by this time already been crossed. By this time the chase was already in motion.
Oddly, my father reversed field, expressing, in the early months, a measure of respect for Gregor Glitzky. I remember him telling Magda that Gregor could neither move freely through the Soviet Union, nor freely correspond with an American, unless he had some clout. Later, he took a different tack. “For all I know,” I heard him tell Grampa Itzy out of Magda’s hearing, “this
gonif
never gets off his butt. For all I know, he mails letters to his buddies who mail them to us. I’m not writin’ the bum another check.”
I believe that my father recognized the terrible price Magda paid for Gregor’s small-time con. Certainly, he kept writing checks long after he decided that Gregor was a hustler. But my father went off to work six days a week, busied himself with household chores on his one day off, while I, friendless even then, was left to watch Magda twist at the end of Gregor’s line. Always quiet, over time she simply folded in on herself. Over time she became almost insubstantial, a vague, dreary presence hunched over the kitchen table, pen in hand, scratching away.
Dearest Gregor Glitzky.
I’ll make this as simple as I can. At 4:30, Delaney sent the jury home and Priscilla came off the witness stand. As if expecting coronation, she strode, her chin high, across the well of the court before turning to embrace her mother. The trio of corrections officers assigned to escort her to the pens, though personal contact was expressly forbidden, made no attempt to interfere.
It was a beautiful moment, no doubt, a perfect moment, but what Sidney Kaplan did, out of a pressing need to redefine the aesthetics of that moment, was step up to his client, jam the barrel of his .32 beneath the base of her skull, and blow the top of her fucking head off.
S
ECOND DAY INSIDE. I’M
sitting on a bunk in an open housing area, an out of shape, middle-aged slice of Jewish whitebread, when Omar Skepps, his ebony skin humped with muscle, walks to within five feet of me and stops. Omar is the convict out of my worst nightmare. His eyes reflect a prison glare of such purity that it takes all the courage at my command to meet his gaze. Already I’m wondering if his cock will hurt a great deal more than a proctologist’s gloved finger.
“Can I come in?”
Although I don’t understand the question, the only conceivable answer is simple enough. Later, I will come to learn that a prisoner’s bunk or cell is his home, that entry without permission is a deadly insult.
“Sure, c’mon in.”
“I was wondrin’ …” When Omar scratches the top of his freshly shaved head, the muscles on his shoulders rise to the tops of his ears. “… if you’d help me with my case.”
Thus my new career begins. That night, over Styrofoam cups filled with muddy-black pruno, Omar and I cut a deal. For a price, I will work on any prisoner’s case. (Not as an attorney, of course, but as a citizen adviser.) For a cut, Omar will screen clients, negotiate terms, collect debts, and protect his investment by watching my back.
Payment comes in many forms: cigarettes, of course, and cash, but also coke and smack, freshly pressed uniforms, smuggled legal forms, access to a typewriter, pork chop sandwiches from the Deputy Wardens’ mess.
Business is at first desultory in the extreme. Everybody wants a free consultation, but only a desperate few are willing (and have the means) to pay for the service. Then Paul Blanchard, indicted for Possession 2, is released after his Legal Aid attorney, at Paul’s insistence, files a motion for dismissal authored by yours truly. After that, success breeds success and my career takes off.