When Johnson didn’t comply, Karp continued. “Would you agree that the serial number on the gun is”—he turned to the easel and read—“according to People’s Exhibit 42, SW 952-3?”
Johnson just kept mumbling and turning the gun over in his hand. He flipped open the empty chamber and snapped it shut.
“Your Honor, let the record reflect that the defendant is unresponsive,” Karp said.
Kershner addressed Johnson. “Mr. Johnson, please answer the district attorney’s questions.”
Johnson looked up at Karp, his eyes filling with hatred and malice. He raised the gun, sighted down the barrel at Karp’s head, and began to pull the trigger. Click. Click. Click.
The court security officers reached him about the same moment he pulled the trigger for the sixth time. One wrested the gun from his hand, and they were about to haul him down when Karp interceded. “Hold on a second.”
Johnson didn’t speak. He just glared at Karp, who didn’t react except to turn to the judge. “The record will reflect, Your Honor, the defendant continued to be unresponsive except to point a gun at me and repeatedly pull the trigger.”
Karp moved toward the defendant. “Mr. Johnson, thank you for showing the jury how you used your forty-five-caliber, mother-of-pearl-handled revolver, loaded with cop-killer bullets, to execute Officer Tony Cippio as he pleaded for his life.”
Johnson lunged out of the grasp of the court officers and tried to climb over the witness box rail to reach his antagonist before he was restrained again. “I’m not done with you, Karp,” he screamed.
“But I am done with you,” Karp replied mildly. “No further questions, Your Honor.”
25
KARP GRIMACED AS HE LOOKED out over the spectators who’d packed the gallery in anticipation of the summations of The People of the State of New York v. Anthony Johnson. Eight months after the fact, he still, occasionally, felt where the bullets fired by Oliver Gray had broken his ribs, the impact of the first round stopping his heart.
He didn’t remember much about the shooting. A young black man calling out his name, raising the gun, and then a blow like someone had kicked him in the chest. After that it was all a dream.
As he lay on the exam table, he dreamed he stood in a courtroom, alone except for the men, and a few women, who crammed the jury box to overflowing. He recognized them as the killers—the sociopaths and terrorists, the brutal, evil animals of society—that he’d tried and convicted in the past. Their bright, glittering eyes were filled with hatred and malice as they mouthed voiceless threats. The young black man, Oliver Gray, was there, too; he stood with a gun in his hand and pointed it at Karp.
Click. Click. Karp twisted to avoid the expected bullets, but there was no sound of gunshots, no impact like being kicked in the chest. Instead, he looked up and found himself facing the gallery, only now it was filled with men, women, and children he recognized as the victims of the killers sitting in the jury box. They were smiling and one at a time stood and began applauding.
Karp left his place at the prosecution table and, opening the gate, moved past the rail separating the well from the gallery and began walking down the aisle. Although they didn’t speak, the victims continued their applause as he passed them, heading for the closed double doors at the back of the courtroom.
Light filled the edges around the doors. He felt drawn to it, at peace, but just as he reached for the handles to leave the courtroom and step into the light, he heard a voice call out behind him. Turning, he saw Marlene standing in the well of the court, their children—Lucy, Zak, and Giancarlo—as they had been when young, clutching at her legs.
Tears rolled down Marlene’s cheeks as she held out her hand. “Butch, don’t leave me.” He took a step toward her . . . and that’s when he’d come to on the table in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. A bright light glared above his head, making him squint. “We have a heartbeat,” a voice shouted triumphantly.
Someone else squeezed his hand and his eyes shifted to that side, where he saw Marlene, her face wet with tears. “Oh, God, thank you,” she cried out, and pulled his hand to her mouth, kissing it repeatedly.
Later the doctor had told him that he had Fulton to thank for insisting on his wearing the Kevlar vest under his shirt and jacket, so while the bullets had broken ribs, turned his chest the color of a ripe eggplant, and stopped his heart, they had not penetrated. He continued to feel the occasional twinge, which the doctor had attributed to the healing process, “as well as the physical and psychological trauma, which can cause ‘phantom sensations.’ ”
One of those twinges had grasped him for a moment now, then released its grip as he looked out over the gallery, waiting for Judge Kershner to invite him to address the jury for the last time. Nash, who had already given her summation that morning, sat looking off into space, dressed entirely in funereal black, including her stiletto heels. Her client brooded next to her, lost in his own thoughts.
On the defense side of the gallery, the benches were filled with solemn black faces and a smattering of white “community activists.” Reverend Mufti had taken his customary seat in the row behind the defense table with bodyguards on either side. The disposition of those sitting on that side was muted, like fans of a baseball team that had just been crushed in the World Series. Only the scores had been so lopsided, the outcome so evident from the first pitch, that there was no point complaining about the umps or even that the games had turned on this play or that at bat and only a few twists of fate had decided the outcome. Just the humiliation of knowing that their heroes had been beaten by a much better team.
On the bench behind the prosecution table, Vince Cippio Sr. sat next to Ricky Watts’s father, Robert, both men finding solace in each other while coping with the loss of their sons. Marlene was next to them, and on her other side was Judy Pardo, who’d asked if she could attend the trial after she had testified.
Karp had requested that she wait until the defense rested its case in the event there was a reason to call her back to the stand. “But if you want to attend the summations, and be there for the verdict, that’d be fine,” he’d told her. “But can I ask why you want to, after having to deal with those thugs who attacked you, and then what the defense attorney put you through?”
Pardo had shrugged. “I told you that when I was a young cop, I dreamed of putting a killer behind bars. This isn’t the same, but it’s as close as I’m going to get. I’d like to be there until the end.”
Now she sat dressed in the sweater and skirt she’d worn on the day she testified. Her head was up, and it seemed to Karp that her posture was straighter, more self-assured than he’d remembered. He’d heard from Marlene that she was back in touch with her family and was planning on joining her parents in Florida, where they’d moved. She saw him look at her and smiled shyly.
Much of the rest of the gallery behind the prosecution side was filled with cops, both in uniform and plainclothes. Their faces were grim, and when they looked at Johnson the hatred was palpable. But they didn’t engage with the opposition on the other side of the gallery in spite of the glares they received.
Among them was Officer Bryce Kim. He’d been disciplined for withdrawing his weapon from its holster in violation of department policy as he walked down the stairs, but otherwise he’d been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing and reinstated to the job he thought he’d lost forever.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Kim had told Karp in a meeting before the morning’s session.
“I’m just doing my job,” Karp replied. “Like you were doing yours.”
The only other seats were occupied by the media and the few court buffs who’d managed to arrive early enough—hours before the courts building even opened—to be at the front of the line. Many others, disappointed not to get a ringside seat, joined the crowds outside braving the bitter February wind to wait for a verdict.
Pete Vansand was sitting with other members of the media, though Karp noticed the journal
ist seemed to be a pariah among his own. How quickly they turn on a wounded member of the pack, he thought. There’d already been a thinly disguised reprimand of Vansand in an editorial in the New York Times calling for “more restraint in the coverage of high-profile and controversial cases.”
Karp had read the duplicitous column that morning after getting the newspaper from Dirty Warren, who’d teased him for “channeling Jack Nicholson as . . . whoop whoop . . . Colonel Nathan Jessup” at the end of his cross-examination of Feldinghaus.
“You can’t . . . crap balls . . . handle the truth,” the news vendor chortled as he danced from foot to foot in the cold.
“I see your inside intel is as good as ever,” Karp replied drily as he turned to go into the Criminal Courts Building. “But your impression of Jack still leaves a lot to be desired.”
The suspicion was that Pete Vansand had followed Marlene and Judy Pardo to the women’s shelter and then that information had “somehow” been passed to the defendant. It was one of those suspicions that might never be proved. One man who knew the truth was lying in the city morgue, and the other two weren’t talking . . . yet. But if the day came, Karp would be ready to investigate the newsman and those with whom he acted in concert to kidnap Judy Pardo. In the meantime, he had an exclamation point to put on the end of this trial.
Those in the gallery who were hoping for fireworks would be disappointed. With her client sitting sullenly in his seat, Nash began her summation by excusing Johnson’s outburst as “a natural reaction after sitting here day after day listening to the lies and distortions, as well as the insults hurled in his face by the district attorney.”
Karp looked at the jury as Nash rambled on, and although they were listening, he could tell they weren’t buying it. Their glances at Johnson were unsympathetic.
As expected, Nash’s summation was essentially a repeat of her opening statement with a few added details and invective. “She’s got nothing else,” Karp had said to Katz when they went over his closing one last time. “She has no evidence, she has no case; her only option is to try the district attorney and the police.”
And that’s what she did by trying to pull the prosecution’s case apart into its individual pieces, hoping that whatever small inconsistencies or blanks she could turn up would confuse the truth for at least one juror. She invoked the ghosts of wrongful convictions, citing statistics on the percentage of innocent prisoners in American penitentiaries—“most of them black”—and decrying the DNA profiling “as fraught with fraud and mistakes,” thus denying thousands of defendants their constitutional rights.
The witnesses were misguided, or liars, she claimed, and “whether knowing or unknowing were part of a conspiracy to silence the voice of my client because he’s black, because he’s a threat to their racist power structure, and because he was a convenient scapegoat when they needed to sweep the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager under the rug.”
Calling on the jurors to find her client not guilty, Nash did her best to strike a note of righteous indignation. But her words sounded hollow, and she sat down with an air of defeat about her.
As the jurors now filed into their seats, Karp was ready.
He carefully reassembled the People’s case as he’d promised during his cross-examination of Johnson into a “corroborated, dovetailed, comprehensive mosaic” of his crimes, depicting “a desperate killer trying to thwart justice.”
All that was left was for him to put it into perspective. He talked to them about the Big Lie of the frame defense and how “if a lie is repeated often enough, even those who know better can no longer separate fact from fiction.”
He pointed out that during the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ numbers were small but they were violent, more organized and focused than their opponents, and by using the Big Lie to further their cause as the cause of all Russians, they were able to take over the country. “And from there they exported the Big Lie so that even a brutal mass murderer like Che Guevara was romanticized as this cigar-chomping, heroic revolutionary. I wonder how many young people wearing T-shirts with CHE LIVES over a photograph of him are aware that he advocated murder as a means to an end.”
He pointed out that the fallacy was no different than when considering the defendant, Anthony Johnson, who, speaking to impressionable young black teens, advocated the murder of police officers. “The goal of terrorists like the defendant, and those who support him, is to remove the barrier between you and their vicious, exclusionary worldview.”
Karp left that image in their minds as he asked why Vince Cippio and Eddie Evans and every good cop would want to frame an innocent man “knowing that the killer of their son, their partner, their colleague is out there walking the streets ready to kill again. Such venal arguments are ludicrous and fly in the face of reason and common sense, as well as decency.”
With his own voice rising in genuine indignation, he pointed out that Johnson had victimized many more people than Tony Cippio ever had, among them the slain officer’s wife, Fran, “and their three children, including an infant who will never meet his father.”
Picking up the gun from the prosecution table and holding it up, he added to the list of victims Vince Cippio, who had two sons “sacrificed by terrorists, some crashing airliners into buildings filled with thousands of innocent people, and the one who sits at the defense table and used this stainless steel, forty-five-caliber revolver with a mother-of-pearl grip.”
There were also the teenagers to whom Johnson had told the Big Lie, especially Ricky Watts, “who just wanted to be accepted in his own community and respected because he and his family value education and trying to make something of oneself.”
“And let’s not forget Officer Bryce Kim, who had to shoot a teenager to defend his own life. It’s not something he wanted to do, but it’s something he will have to live with for the rest of his life. All of these lives devastated by one man with a gun and a cause.”
Finally, after Karp had gone through all of the evidence and tied it back together and made his points about the Big Lie and the frame defense, he wrapped up with a story that had come to him several months earlier. He’d been going through some old mementos from his past, when he came across a yellowed envelope addressed to him many years earlier. He knew then how he would end the People’s case.
As he told the jury, the letter was written by Victor Dubensky, his best friend when growing up in Brooklyn. Since kindergarten they’d done everything together—from street stickball to basketball, pinochle to blackjack, and on late summer nights as teens, talking about girls, the Yankees, and their dreams of the future.
Then shortly after high school graduation, Victor called him. “I’ve been drafted,” was all he said, but they both knew what that meant in those days. There was a war raging in Southeast Asia, and young American men were being shipped off to fight it by the thousands.
Some who received an induction notice were running away to Canada. Others didn’t have to worry as they protested the war on college campuses; their status as students kept them safe from the bombs and bullets. But not Victor, who reported to the induction center and from there to boot camp.
After receiving his orders that would send him to Vietnam, Victor came home on leave. He and Karp had done their best to cram a year’s worth of beers and reliving their past together into a few nights. Then on the last night before he was to report, Victor handed the envelope to Karp. “Don’t open it unless . . . unless I don’t come home,” he said. In the morning he was gone.
“Victor Dubensky came home from the war,” Karp told the jurors. “But it was in a flag-draped coffin, and he was buried at Arlington where so many other fallen heroes lie in honor. I flew to Virginia from California, where I was going to college, safe from the bullets and bombs, to attend his funeral. Then afterward I returned to Brooklyn, where I opened this letter I’d now like to read to you.”
Karp knew that reading the letter would be difficult for him, ev
en after all the years that had passed, but he believed that the jurors would understand if his voice cracked and he had to pause from time to time. And so he read the words that started by thanking him for his friendship but moved inexorably on to the last paragraphs that told him not to mourn too long.
“We all have to die at some point,” Victor had written, “and I can’t think of a better way than for my country. It’s not about whether this war is just, that will be on the politicians’ consciences. For guys like me, we put on the uniform and answer the call because we’re Americans and that’s an ideal worth fighting and dying for. So don’t dwell on how my life ended. Pay me back by becoming a basketball star and putting a law school degree to good use. Get married, have kids, grow old, enjoy your freedoms. That’s what I answered the call of duty to ensure. So if you remember me, remember the good times and know that I died for something worth believing in. Love you big guy, Victor.”
Fighting back the tears, Karp folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, giving him enough time to regroup so that he could finish.
“You don’t have to wear a uniform to be a hero in our society,” he said as he strolled along the jury rail. “Every one of you who gets up in the morning and goes to work, and sees your children get good educations and become productive, law-abiding citizens is a hero for the part you play in our society. And sometimes, heroes are asked to sit where you’re sitting now and perform their civic duty for long hours and listen to all the horror and visceral emotions that a murder trial can invoke in a solemn, sacred search for the truth. And then, without fear or favor to either party, render a just verdict. You are also owed a debt of thanks and are heroes even if you don’t wear the uniform of our armed services or that of the police officers and firefighters who serve the community.”
Then his jaw set and his voice grew angry as he drove to the finish. “There is a movement afoot in this country,” he warned, “that would have you believe that this country and its institutions are broken, that they no longer serve a purpose, and that the people you rely on to protect you and those who also serve the ends of justice are no longer trustworthy. There’s a lot of money and a lot of energy being spent to convince you of that from this courtroom to the halls of Congress and the White House. But you know what?”
Without Fear or Favor Page 28