by Tom Wolfe
Mr. Andriutti said yesterday that he would call Mrs. Chirazzi as a prosecution witness in Mr. McCoy’s new trial despite the fact that it was a controversy over her testimony before a grand jury that led to the dismissal of the first indictment by Judge Kovitsky. She did not testify at the first trial.
Fashionable Estate
Mr. McCoy’s legal problems were multiplied yesterday when a real-estate-firm employee, Sally Rawthrote, filed suit against him in Manhattan Civil Court for $500,000. Ms. Rawthrote had received a $192,000 commission for the $3,200,000 sale of Mr. McCoy’s Park Avenue apartment. But Mr. Lamb, via Mr. Vogel, sued her for the $192,000 on the grounds that the money should go toward the payment of Mr. Lamb’s $12,000,000 judgment against Mr. McCoy. Mrs. Rawthrote’s suit yesterday accused Mr. McCoy of “deceptively proffering encumbered property for sale.” In a statement she said she was “merely hedging against the possible loss of my rightful commission” and in fact wishes Mr. McCoy well.
Just how Mr. McCoy might deal with this and other complex legal matters growing out of the case was uncertain. Reached at his home on Long Island, Mr. McCoy’s former attorney, Thomas Killian, said that he was no longer able to represent Mr. McCoy due to Mr. McCoy’s lack of sufficient funds to mount a defense.
Mr. Killian himself currently has his hands full with a barrage of lawsuits brought by his new neighbors in the fashionable North Shore community of Lattingtown. He recently purchased the 20-acre Phipps estate and commissioned the noted Neo-Shingle architect, Hudnall Stallworth, to design a large addition to the main house, which is listed by the National Historic Registry. Local preservationists object to any alteration of the stately Georgian structure.
Mr. Killian is heated in his support of Mr. McCoy, however. In a speech before a private luncheon group yesterday, he reportedly referred to the manslaughter indictment with a common tauro-scatological expletive and was quoted as saying, “If this case was being tried in foro conscientiae [in the court of the conscience], the defendants would be Abe Weiss, Reginald Bacon, and Peter Fallow of The City Light.”
Milton Lubell, spokesman for Mr. Weiss, said the District Attorney would not respond to “kibbitzing” by “someone no longer involved in the case.” He added: “Only preferential treatment by certain elements of the judicial system has kept Mr. McCoy aloof from the law so far. It is tragic that it has required the death of Henry Lamb, who represented the highest ideals of our city, to see to it that justice will at last be served in his case.”
Buck Jones, a spokesman for the Reverend Mr. Bacon’s All People’s Solidarity, dismissed Mr. Killian’s charge as “the usual racist double-talk by a racist mouthpiece for a well-known capitalist racist” who seeks to “avoid paying what he owes for the racist destruction of a fine young man.”
Mr. Fallow, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the McCoy case, could not be reached for comment. He was reportedly on a sailing vessel in the Aegean Sea with his bride of two weeks, Lady Evelyn, daughter of Sir Gerald Steiner, the publisher and financier.
Also by Tom Wolfe
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Pump House Gang
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
The Painted Word
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
The Right Stuff
In Our Time
From Bauhaus to Our House
A Man in Full
Hooking Up
I Am Charlotte Simmons
© 2004 by Mark Seliger
Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City.
THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Copyright © 1987 by Tom Wolfe. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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ISBN: 978-0-312-42757-3
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux