It had been eight months since that fateful day when his intern, Oliver Gray, had surprised them all by attempting to assassinate Karp and dying in the process.
The district attorney had been saved only by a bulletproof vest that absorbed the impact of the two bullets that struck him. However, if what Vansand had heard was true, the blow from one of the bullets had actually stopped his heart. Karp had been in cardiac arrest when the detective who’d been at his side scooped him up like he was no more than a child, put him in a police car, and administered CPR all the way to Bellevue Hospital. It was there that Karp had come back to life on an emergency room table.
After the attack, Vansand had been questioned by the police about Gray, but he’d mostly played dumb. He said the young man had applied for a job, and he’d taken him on as part of his station’s effort to afford opportunities to minority students. He said he had “no indication” that Gray was a radical bent on murdering the district attorney of New York, or any warning that Gray was planning something. He made no mention of the fact that Gray had been forced upon him by Nat X.
Hiding behind media shield laws that allowed him to protect his sources, Vansand refused to answer when asked by a police detective if he knew whether Nat X and Anthony Johnson were the same person. Privately, he was sure of it, but he’d invoked his journalistic privileges, and the disgusted detective had given up trying to get anything more out of him.
As he’d gushed to his cameraman on the day of Karp’s shooting, Vansand had parlayed being in the right place at the right time, and in the company of the would-be assassin, into a regional Emmy Award. He’d been sorely disappointed that his story failed to win a national Emmy, losing out to a reporter who’d covered a mass shooting by an ISIS sympathizer in California.
However, that disappointment had paled in comparison to his frustration that the national news shows had yet to offer him a full-time gig. They kept putting him off, saying they’d talk about it “when this case is over . . . In the meantime, do you have anything new for us?”
At first, he’d been able to keep up with the demand, including an exclusive interview with Johnson, who had been transported from California to the Tombs. In the interview, Johnson denied being Nat X, “though I can sympathize with his cause.” Vansand had gone along with the subterfuge. In fact, he was Johnson’s main conduit to the media. Several other journalists, including some of the big names in the business, had tried end runs on him, promising his source all sorts of things under the table. But Vansand had put an end to that when he informed Johnson, and then the public, that the two of them had landed a seven-figure deal with one of the big New York publishing houses for a memoir they would co-author.
Margarite Nash had given him some preferential treatment, especially after he’d run with several of her story “suggestions,” and she’d used her attorney-client privileges to slip messages to him from Johnson without the police seeing them. But she courted the national news teams, too, especially as time had gone on.
The streets had quieted after the assassination attempt on Karp. Even the most vociferous of his detractors, including Reverend Hussein “Skip” Mufti, whose own brush with death at the hands of rogue police officers had launched him into activist superstardom, had toned down the rhetoric, though not without caveats. He’d issued a statement that while it was “regrettable” that the district attorney had been attacked, and that Oliver Gray felt the need to resort to violence, “it is in some ways understandable that a ‘troubled’ young man might strike out at a symbol of the oppression he’d been born into, no matter how inappropriate that act may have been.”
At the same time, Mufti denied that his own inflammatory rhetoric contributed to Gray’s attack or the riots that preceded it. “I am the messenger, not the message,” he proclaimed in an interview for Vansand’s feature story on the assassination attempt. “I am merely giving voice to what so many other of my people are feeling.”
The activists ramped back up when Johnson was extradited to New York and arrived proclaiming his innocence and labeling himself a “victim of a system dedicated to silencing its critics.” Johnson had soon been indicted for the murder of NYPD Officer Tony Cippio and, in a move that caught everyone off guard, the attempted murder of Officer Bryce Kim. The indictment for the second charge read that Johnson had “acted in concert” with young Ricky Watts—supplying him with a gun and encouraging him to use it to shoot a police officer.
Mufti went ballistic over the second charge. He appeared on all the Sunday-morning news shows, including a new New York program hosted by Vansand, where he accused the DAO of “shamefully using the death of Officer Cippio to sweep the murder of an unarmed black male under the rug of an unrelated case.”
There’d been a protest that night, with demonstrators showing up outside 100 Centre Street in front of the Manhattan House of Detention for Men, otherwise known as the Tombs, located in the northern sector of the Criminal Courts Building. They shouted and waved signs such as FREE ANTHONY JOHNSON and DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGERS.
The gathering turned ugly after Mufti arrived and protesters began sitting in the middle of Centre Street, blocking traffic. Television news crews had been on the scene and broadcast images of the police dragging the demonstrators out of the way. But things didn’t get out of hand until Vansand’s news team showed a clip of three police officers violently taking a large young black man to the ground. The newscast didn’t bother to note that they edited the scene prior to the takedown, when the young black man attacked an officer with a baseball bat, sending the officer to the hospital with a cracked skull and broken arm. Soon reports of small but violent demonstrations erupting in various neighborhoods throughout the city began filtering into the newsroom.
The next day, Johnson had contributed to the circus when he refused to participate in the legal process as he was being formally charged in court and asked if he wanted an attorney appointed for him. Instead, he’d stood up and shouted, “I am a political prisoner and as such do not recognize the legitimacy of these proceedings.” He then shut up and sat back down, refusing to answer any more questions from the judge or the Legal Aid lawyer there to assist him.
Johnson changed his tune somewhat when Nancy Kershner, the judge assigned to the case, informed him that a trial would be scheduled and go forward “with or without your participation. I’ll leave you to determine the consequences of that.” After thinking about it for a minute, he’d responded, “I won’t allow my voice for the liberation of my people from the yoke of white tyranny to be suppressed. Therefore, I have decided to represent myself against the oppressor.”
However, even that stance didn’t last long. The following day, Schmendrick, Fritz, and Schmidt, one of the top criminal law firms in the city, announced that it would be engaging its “full weight, experience, and resources to prevent this travesty of justice” and had agreed to represent Johnson. In addition to a reputation for throwing lavish cocktail parties attended by the stars of stage and film, athletes, lobbyists, and politicians, they were known for taking on liberal causes pro bono so long as there was a lot of publicity involved. Rumor was that the firm had wealthy benefactors both in the city and nationally who sponsored the firm’s causes célèbres for political reasons.
The firm revealed that its latest “star” attorney, Margarite Nash, would be heading up the defense team. Tall and beautiful, if somewhat severe-looking with her long blond hair pulled tightly back in her signature bun, Nash was the daughter of one of Vermont’s wealthiest power couples. Growing up, she’d attended only the finest prep schools, got her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr, and then graduated magna cum laude from Yale Law. Now in her late thirties, she basked in the limelight of her celebrity status, having never met a television camera or print journalist she didn’t love. “Some of them quite literally,” was the joke around the New York Press Club.
When the indictments were first announced, the media had engaged in varying degrees of eye rolling
and faux outrage. The television broadcasters, including Vansand, openly smirked and scoffed at DAO spokesman Gilbert Murrow’s oft-repeated mantra that the DAO would not comment “except to say that we will let the evidence speak for itself at the trial.”
The New York Times, having admitted in the previous election cycle to giving up any attempt at objectivity in its news columns, saturated its front page and main city page with what were essentially anti-DAO opinion pieces. They skirted the issue of fairness by quoting defense-friendly and anti-law-enforcement sources, often anonymously, knowing that District Attorney Karp would not respond in kind.
Meanwhile, the New York Post ran pretty much any rumor that came across the transom on its front page in large, stacked headlines punctuated by exclamation marks. Again, most of the inflammatory content in the paper was attributed to unnamed “inside sources”; it didn’t seem to matter to either paper that the sources, if they even existed outside of the reporters’ fantasies, were invariably wrong and/or one-sided.
Margarite Nash made sure they all had plenty to quote. However, she was more than just a pretty face or a media whore. She was smart, tough, arrogant, and expensive—at least when the clients were wealthy. She also knew how to use the media attention she sought, declaring on the day she took over the case that the charges against her client were “outrageous.”
“They are simply more proof, as if we needed it,” she complained at a hurriedly put together press conference, “that the powers that be in New York County, as well as this country, want to silence the voices of dissent and quash the notion of justice for the black community—especially if those voices are challenging the racist monolith of law enforcement.”
No wallflower outside the courtroom or press conference, she’d even managed to get herself arrested several times in the past for her “causes.” And those now included another demonstration arranged by Mufti to protest an appellate court decision overturning a motion she won before Judge Kershner to split the two charges against Johnson into separate trials.
After Kershner granted her motion, Nash had confided to Vansand over martinis at Bemelmans Bar on the Upper East Side that she’d made her motion “because the prosecution’s case is stronger when taken as a whole. Viewed separately, the juries won’t see the connections.” She said that she’d have a better chance if she could try them separately. “And that, by the way, my dear Petey,” she’d purred, pulling him by his necktie so close he could feel her breath on his lips, “is off the record. At least for now.” He’d swallowed hard and nodded.
However arrogant and manipulative Nash was, she didn’t always get her way. After Kershner granted Nash’s motion, Karp’s office had filed a writ of mandamus asking the appellate court to promptly hear arguments to overturn that decision. As he had unsuccessfully argued before Kershner, the district attorney persuaded the appellate panel that the murder of Officer Cippio and attempted murder of Officer Kim were both part of a “common scheme, plan, and design by the defendant to assassinate police officers.”
Karp went on to argue that “it was all part of the defendant’s delusional ideology that leads him to believe that he is at war with the police and civil society. Therefore, the assassination of Cippio and attempted murder of Kim are consistent with the defendant’s evil plan.” The appellate court had agreed with Karp and directed trial judge Kershner to keep the cases joined and move them forward to trial.
Seething at the setback, Nash had joined the demonstration the next day outside the Criminal Courts Building and was arrested along with a dozen other protesters for blocking the sidewalk. She then shocked even Vansand after she got out on bail by tweeting, “No wonder Nazi Karp was shot. Sic Semper Tyrannis #freeanthonyjohnson.”
Even Nash’s bosses were apparently displeased with the “poorly worded” message and Latin reference to what John Wilkes Booth had shouted after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. The tweet had been quickly removed from Nash’s account, but not before it had gone viral and hundreds of thousands of people—many of them potential jurors—had seen it. She’d later that day issued an apology of sorts through the law firm’s public relations team, explaining that “I believe so deeply that an injustice is being done to my client that I allowed my emotions to get the better of my judgment.”
Karp did not respond to her tweet or apology. “There will be no comment,” Gilbert Murrow said when Vansand called.
Still, as the months dragged on leading to the trial date, the activists and the national press began to lose interest, taking their bullhorns and cameras elsewhere. Occasionally some event tied to the case would cause a flare-up. The most notable of those had been when Murrow sent out a press release announcing that NYPD Lieutenant Jack Gilliam had pleaded guilty to the murder of Imani Sefu and the attempted murder of Reverend Mufti. The tersely worded statement noted that Gilliam had agreed to testify against his co-conspirators, Joe Satars and Johnny Delgado, both of whom had pleaded not guilty.
It made little difference to the activists, including Mufti, that an investigation coordinated by the NYPD and DAO had uncovered the truth behind Sefu’s death and saved the reverend’s life. Nash, who repeatedly ignored the judge’s gag order, issued her own statement, contending that Gilliam’s admission of guilt and the charges against the other two “just prove that a cancer resides in the body of New York City law enforcement, as well as law enforcement throughout this country, that seeks to destroy its critics by any means possible.”
Mufti, who didn’t like falling out of the spotlight, called for a demonstration in the park across from the courts building, but the day had been bitterly cold and the event sparsely attended. A few demonstrators were arrested when they tried to take over the entrance to the District Attorney’s Office on the Leonard Street side of the building. The small crowd was summarily removed by the police, which didn’t generate the expected media coverage.
Otherwise, the case slowly ground forward as Nash and her law firm’s army of attorneys, clerks, and secretaries flooded the DAO and court with motions, including demands that the charges be dropped for a lack of evidence and because of “the outrageous conduct of the New York district attorney, the defendant has been denied a reasonable and fair bail.” Most of these pro forma motions were rejected by the court.
At last, eight months after Johnson’s arrest, with winter and spring battling for supremacy in Manhattan, jury summonses were sent out to several hundred Manhattanites to appear as prospective jurors in the case of The People of the State of New York v. Anthony Johnson. Then seventy-five of them at a time were directed to go to Part 38 Supreme Court New York County, where Judge Kershner was presiding. From this venire group, the court clerk called twelve names and told them to be seated in the jury box.
When Kershner asked Karp to proceed, he introduced himself, Nash, and Johnson. He explained that Johnson had been indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Officer Tony Cippio and the attempted murder of Officer Bryce Kim. After reading the indictment to the prospective jurors, he listed the witnesses he expected to call during the People’s case in chief. “Defense counsel, Ms. Nash, has also provided me with a list of witnesses whom she may call. If you are familiar with any of these people, please let us know during the course of questioning.”
Facing the jury box, Karp continued. “A jury of twelve will be selected one at a time beginning with seats one through six in the front row of the jury box, going from my left to right, and then seats seven through twelve in the back row. The first juror selected and sworn in will be the jury foreman. There will also be four alternate jurors, who will hear the testimony but will not take part in the deliberations unless one or more of the twelve jurors cannot perform his or her duties.”
Turning slightly so that those prospective jurors in the box and in the gallery could see him, he concluded, “Judge Kershner will instruct you as to the law that applies in this case. But you are the fact finders, the sole arbiters, who will decide this case based upon the evidence fro
m the testimony that is offered from the witness stand and whatever exhibits Her Honor places in evidence. In coming to your final decision, you will do so without fear or favor to either party.”
Judge Kershner then invited Karp to begin the questioning, the voir dire, of the prospective jurors seated in the jury box. It was clear to Vansand that Karp wanted jurors who would fall in line with his pro-law-enforcement spiel despite his call for “fair, reasonable, open-minded jurors.”
As expected, Nash’s questioning leaned toward finding jurors who had a dim or skeptical view of law enforcement. She obviously wanted people of color on the jury while challenging the presence of white jurors, particularly if they seemed “law and order types” or well-to-do and educated.
Vansand wasn’t surprised by her blatant anticop line of questioning and attempts to seat a favorable jury based on race and socioeconomic status. Her task was easier than that of the prosecution.
“All I have to do is find one juror who will vote for acquittal, and we’re in hung jury country,” she gloated during another two-martini lunch following several days of jury selection. “I’d love to get a black woman from Harlem on the jury. Want to know why? A black woman, especially one from a low-income neighborhood, is likely to either know of someone with a kid who has had a run-in with law enforcement, or have a child herself who has. The maternal instinct comes out, and she is likely to give the benefit of the doubt to a young black man being unfairly treated.”
She laughed. “Meanwhile, Karp has to find twelve for a unanimous verdict. Try to find twelve people in Manhattan who agree on anything.”
Karp had to combat not only the obviously pro-defense/anti-cop prospects whom Nash favored, using up several of his peremptory challenges in the first few days whenever Kershner, a former ACLU lawyer, wouldn’t dismiss a prospective juror for cause. He also had to counter preconceptions created by popular culture that focused on corrupt law enforcement as a central theme. One female juror insisted that she knew how to judge evidence because she’d watched a lot of Law & Order–type shows and expected the real police to conform their procedures to those of Hollywood cops.
Without Fear or Favor Page 14