by Neil Gordon
To big girl
Leila Ili Gordon
with all the love in the world
JACK SINAI, 87, RADICAL LAWYER, DIES IN MANHATTAN HOME
The New York Times, November 21, 1995
Julius Aaron Sinai, a civil-rights lawyer known for his appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee, died in his Manhattan home on Saturday night. He was 87. The cause, announced by his son, Daniel Sinai, an author and professor at Columbia Law School, was pancreatic cancer. Mr. Sinai had been diagnosed within the past six months and had refused treatment.
Julius Sinai, known as Jack, first gained prominence for his defense of Hollywood Ten defendant Dalton Trumbo before the Hollywood hearings of HUAC, for which he was dubbed by Senator Joseph McCarthy the “most dangerous lawyer in America.” His numerous politically charged defenses included members of the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican separatist group The Young Lords, and Black Liberation Army defendants in the 1981 Brinks Robbery Trial. He appeared three times before the Supreme Court, where he was known to Justice Thurgood Marshall as a “regular customer.”
Citing his Spanish Civil War service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and his subsequent Dies Committee classification as a “Premature Antifascist,” McCarthy attempted unsuccessfully to have Sinai’s passport revoked in 1951, a defeat widely thought to have been the beginning of the senator’s decline in power.
But Jack Sinai was best known as the father of the ’60s radical Jason Sinai, a fugitive of the Vietnam era, who disappeared as a member of the Weather Underground after the accidental bombing of a Manhattan townhouse in March, 1970. Four years later, Jason Sinai was implicated in the Bank of Michigan robbery in which a security guard, Hubert Krosney, was killed. With his alleged partners Mimi Lurie and Sharon Solarz, Jason Sinai is one of the last “Weatherman” fugitives remaining at large.
Seven months prior to his death Jack Sinai had been awarded the Medal of the Legion of Honor by the government of Spain in recognition of his “heroic wartime service to the citizens of the First Spanish Republic,” during the Spanish Civil War and “a postwar career incarnating the noble ideals of the International Brigades.”
In a statement announcing the death, Daniel Sinai explained that his father had concealed his illness for fear that his fugitive son would attempt to make contact. The Sinai family, Professor Sinai explained, had been under police surveillance for most of the twenty-five years since his brother’s disappearance.
In addition to his sons, Jack Sinai is survived by his widow, the painter Eleanor Singer, an adopted daughter, Klara Singer of Tel Aviv, and two grandchildren.
JASON SINAI, WEATHERMAN FUGITIVE, ARRESTED IN MICHIGAN
The New York Times, October 29, 1996
In a dramatic operation involving mounted police and helicopter surveillance, Jason Sinai, the last remaining fugitive from the radical anti-Vietnam group Weatherman, was arrested yesterday in the northern Michigan woods, the Travis City FBI station announced today. Sinai had been the object of a six-week-long Federal manhunt, and was attempting to evade police in the dense Michigan forest north of Travis City. Mr. Sinai, the eldest son of the famed civil-rights lawyer Jack Sinai, who died last year, was arrested on charges of aggravated manslaughter stemming from the 1974 Bank of Michigan robbery in which a guard, Hubert Krosney, was killed.
The manhunt began in upstate New York when, following the equally dramatic arrest of co-conspirator Sharon Salzburg, the Albany Times revealed that Mr. Sinai was living under the name James Grant. Grant had been practicing as an attorney in Saugerties, New York, a small town next to Woodstock, where he was raising a 12-year-old daughter. Among the dramatic revelations of the story was that Grant had been married to the actress Julia Montgomery, the daughter of former U.S. Senator and current ambassador to the Court of St. James Robert Montgomery. A year previous to her husband’s capture, Julia Montgomery had entered a rehabilitation facility in England, and was reportedly suing Grant for custody of their daughter.
After the revelations of the Albany Times, Grant—Sinai—had gone on the run, after succeeding in leaving his daughter Isabel in the custody of his brother and sister-in-law, prominent lawyers Daniel Sinai and Margaret Calaway. Speaking from their home in Martha’s Vineyard, where they are currently fighting an extradition suit for Isabel Sinai/Montgomery, Daniel Sinai said that his brother was innocent of the manslaughter charges, and that they would continue to use the protections afforded by the commonwealth of Massachusetts to protect their niece from extradition to England.
While Isabel Sinai’s future remains a question, her father’s arrest marks one of the final steps toward closing a chapter of American history. Only Mimi Lurie, the last remaining Weatherman fugitive, is still at large. Ms. Lurie’s whereabouts, according the FBI Travis City field office, remain unknown.
MIMI LURIE, LAST REMAINING ’60S ERA FUGITIVE, SURRENDERS IN OHIO
The New York Times, October 30, 1996
In yet another of a stunning series of events following the manhunt for Weatherman fugitive Jason Sinai, who was arrested two days ago in a dramatic capture in northern Michigan, Mimi Lurie surrendered herself in an Ohio police station yesterday to face 25-year-old charges of robbery, aggravated manslaughter, and evading arrest.
In a statement released to the press by her lawyer, Gillian Morreale, Ms. Lurie declared that she was surrendering in order to clear her co-defendant Jason Sinai from charges of aggravated manslaughter in the 1974 Bank of Michigan robbery. Interviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Morreale said that “Mimi Lurie’s testimony will show that Jason Sinai was not present at the Bank of Michigan robbery, nor involved in its planning.” This claim will be supported, she went on to say, by Sharon Solarz at her upcoming trial.
Daniel Sinai, Jason Sinai’s brother and lawyer, speaking to the press from New York, went on to say that the exculpation of his brother will ensure “that his daughter, Isabel Sinai, will not be subject to extradition to England,” and that Mr. Sinai will continue to vigorously contest his ex-wife’s attempt to gain custody of their child, born while Sinai was living under an assumed identity as James Grant in Woodstock, New York.
Ms. Lurie’s surrender closes a chapter of American history stemming from the war in Vietnam, when a group of self-styled revolutionaries named themselves “Weatherman” after a line in a Bob Dylan song and conducted a campaign of bombings designed to force the Nixon administration to end the war in Vietnam. But public attention, in the coming weeks, is likely to be more focused on the continuing drama of Jason Sinai and his attempts to retain custody of his 12-year-old daughter in a continuing legal battle with his ex-wife, the actress Julia Montgomery, which brings to the public stage a pantheon of American left-wing royalty. If Mr. Sinai is indeed exculpated by Mimi Lurie’s testimony, it is likely that Ms. Montgomery and her father, ex-Senator and current Ambassador to the Court of St. James Robert Montgomery, will find themselves facing a much larger challenge to their custody suit than previously thought.
Meanwhile, Isabel Montgomery is being held under legal protection by her uncle, the prominent left-wing legal scholar Daniel Sinai, and his wife, civil-rights attorney Margaret Calaway. Daniel and Jason Sinai are the sons of yet another prominent left-wing attorney, Jack Sinai, dubbed by Senator Joe McCarthy as “the most dangerous lawyer in America.” Jack Sinai died last year at 87, shortly after receiving the Medal of the Legion of Honor from the government of Spain for his volunteer service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
Our conversation was short and sweet
It nearly swept me off-a my feet
And I’m back in the rain, oh, oh
And you are on dry land
You made it there somehow<
br />
You’re a big girl now.
—BOB DYLAN
“You’re A Big Girl Now”
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART ONE
Chapter One
Isabel Montgomery
March 4, 2011
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
1.
It was an amazing series of accidents.
Riyadh to London, six hours late for my connection to the States.
It is midnight already when the airport lights recede below and then give way to the sweep of desert from the city to the sea.
Nothing that could have gone wrong hasn’t. I am going to miss my connection in England. I have just screwed one assignment, thoroughly, and I am going to lose another because I am so late. Fortunately, I don’t actually have to think about it now, because I am about to spend the night in Heathrow on a molded plastic chair, staring at planes parked on tarmac as I am parked on plastic, and I can think about it then, all night. Particularly so because no sooner have we overflown Tel Aviv and put the Med below us than I find in my pocket and digest, rather than waste, a good gram of pitch-black, nearly liquid Afghan hashish—“tribute from the brave Mujahedeen, my love,” Crown Prince Ibn Saud Cuntman had told me when he gave it me—and by the time I get settled for my night in the airport I am going to be very, very high.
With this inventory of what a fucking terror it all is—when I am pissed off, I tend to think in Momma’s voice—I hit my wine again and try to convince myself, okay, this is bad, but at least it is as bad as it gets.
But the thought doesn’t seem to alleviate the free-fall in my stomach, so rapid that I wonder at it.
In a minute, I understand.
See, I am not really at the bottom.
Not yet.
To get all the way there I have to realize not just that I have a 5,000-word article due to the Guardian Weekend Magazine in a matter of hours and I don’t have the material I need; not just that I have missed my flight to the central event I’m covering for a New York Times Magazine article; but above and beyond all this I have to understand suddenly, inevitably—and this just as the first tendrils of hash-induced anxiety are reaching up into my womb—what it means to me now that I am wearing a miniskirt.
And then, there it is: not just rock-bottom but rock-bottom at a time when I have a whole sleepless, stoned night to think, long and hard, about how I got here.
1: First I got fed up with Crown Prince Cuntman, the days of waiting for minutes of interviewing, his long fingers on my knee, his office bottle of Glenmorangie, hidden in actual Biedermeier in a desert tent that took a crew of twenty to pitch and cost as much as a house in the suburbs of Detroit every time he decided to race his camel in the sand.
2: Then, when we did finally talk on the record, I meticulously disproved his denial of support for sharia as concerns divorce and the veil; argued over his refusal to acknowledge contracts with Halliburton; expressed amazement at his disavowal of state ties with Iraqi Islamists. Of which each point was a mistake not because I was wrong—in each I was right—but because it tended to make the Crown Prince irate, and when the Crown Prince became irate, that tended rather to imperil my status in his horrid little country.
Most purely self-destructive, though, was 3: my refusal, on my last day, to cover my head during my final audience with the son of a bitch, because although it did piss him off, which was good, it also got him to cancel the interview, which was not.
And finally, 4, once my credentials had been revoked; once I had been escorted back to Riyadh in one of the Humvees that had carried his son’s Xboxes and flat-screen TVs out to the desert so they could amuse themselves while communing with their bedouin souls and been taken to my hotel room for the five-six hours before my plane left, late; finally, when Prince Cuntman’s bodyguards came knocking at my door to escort me to the airport, it was a serious miscalculation on my part to have put on a miniskirt, just to piss the fuckers off further, because—and this is what I realize as we drop out of the sky over London toward the tarmac; this is what makes my stomach sink as, finally, a wash of realization of my own utter idiocy comes over me like the sad little film of rain streaking the plastic window of the plane—I will not only be spending the night in a molded plastic chair in the airport, but I will be doing so in a miniskirt, and that means the whole night I will have to worry about keeping my legs crossed every time I fall asleep.
If I ever fall asleep.
Heathrow circling below, the engines decompressing, wheels coming down with that little whine that announces that the inevitability of arrival is upon you, it seems to me that these bad decisions, these bad mistakes, are all there is to me. My little bad-girl act, my brash luck and fine connections that have let me muscle open so many doors over the years, has grown thin, extremely thin; this time my editors, my publishers, my employers are going to see through me, right through me.
And because I’m here, because I’m right into it now, contemplating, as I exit the plane, a night with tightly crossed legs in a molded plastic chair, being stared at by sexual psychopaths, hungover from the couple-three bottles of first-class champagne I’d downed to cover how stoned I am in anticipation of the airport bars being closed, unable to smoke, I could at last—this night—perhaps make some sense out of the amazing series of wholly inexplicable events “of which,” to misquote Eliot, “my life was constituted.” I could think about how much I drink, how much I smoke, why I am, at twenty-seven, single. I could think about why I have been on assignment for four years straight and written, over that time, three hundred and twenty thousand words of instantly disposable journalism rather than a book. I could think about my father—no doubt, I would think about my father. And I could think about how, normally, I wouldn’t have to think about any of this, because there’s a pill for that. Only, unless I wanted to do a Janis Joplin, I couldn’t take one tonight because I am too fucking drunk, and I have to stay too fucking awake, legs crossed, in a molded plastic chair like a fucking Airbus 380 sitting, idle, on tarmac in a North Atlantic spring in the middle of the fucking night, because like a fucking idiot I am wearing a fucking miniskirt.
But aren’t you just a laugh a minute? That’s what Momma used to say to me when she drank. You’re just the funniest little girl in the world, aren’t you? Because no sooner have we deplaned than an amazing series of accidents begins to occur.
Off the plane at Heathrow, I run to the transit desk and am trying to keep from erupting while a bald, bookish little fellow asks for, guess what, a flight to New York, and when that’s a no, then a flight to anywhere that changes to New York. I listen with interest, biting my tongue, as he strikes out—no coach, no business, no first-class—and then settles for a hotel coupon and flight the next afternoon. When I step up to the counter, I wait for him to be out of earshot, then I ask for an itinerary that stops over anywhere and finishes, not in New York, but in Philadelphia, and I find that guess what? A flight to St. Louis has been shockingly delayed, and there’s a single first-class seat available—see why I didn’t say anything to the bald guy?—and that, furthermore, from St. Louis there’s a direct flight to Philadelphia, putting me in with more than enough time to drive to Washington Square Park in New York City, which is precisely where the Times expects me to be in just under twenty hours.
Fucking Philadelphia, man. Sometimes I think my whole career has been based on understanding that when all else fails, you can fly in to Philadelphia.
And yay! First class! Even my miniskirt turns out to be a help: it gets me right back through security after I get
my bag, skipping the whole line, feeling the guards’ eyes on my ass as I run from security right back to the gates, and down the corridor, and watch the steward close the door behind me as I slip into the empty seat in the first row of first class and take the immediately proffered flute of champagne.
All I need now is a car. When the stewardess isn’t looking, I get out my iPhone and get avis.com, which wouldn’t you know has availability right out of the airport in Philadelphia. On screen I scroll down to a Chevrolet Aveo, the least expensive car in the Avis Philadelphia stable which my contract with the Times specifies I am to take. And I am about to take it. Then I pause the transaction.
Because a moment of clarity has come to me, suddenly and without warning, and what it is, is, I don’t want a subcompact rental. What I want is this little Mitsubishi 3000GT Spyder that my phone has somehow scrolled to, even though that took six screens, each requiring a movement of my thumb.
And at the thought I understand suddenly that I am not spending the night in a molded plastic chair in Heathrow. I have not missed my next assignment. And that, far from having screwed up my last one, I know exactly how to write the Prince Cuntmuscle thing—his name morphed subtly as we took off—because the whole article, the whole fucking article is not about him, it is about me—about the whole trauma of trying to be a woman in his horrible country; about the endless difficulty of trying to get him to tell the truth; about the lie after lie he seems to believe as he tells them, sipping his scotch in Saudi—and so the forced exit from the country was exactly what I needed to finish it. And, finally, I understand that I am going to have the motherfucker, lead to peroration, ready to file by the time we overfly Greenland because it is a walk in the god damn park.
With that thought, I reserve the Mitsu.
After all, Momma drives the GTP V6, and she will want to know whether to upgrade.