by Ron Liebman
“Be there as soon as I can,” I told Sean, leaving out that I had another stop to make first.
“Okay, bro. I’m good. Get here when you can.”
I was about to hang up. I hadn’t asked what he was being held on. Murder? What if he’d killed someone? Oh, Christ.
“What are they charging you with?”
“Criminal trespass and burglary.”
“Use of a weapon?”
“Unclear.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll be there soon as I can,” I told him, somewhat relieved.
“Thanks, bro,” Sean said, and hung up.
I was halfway to the subway when I realized I hadn’t said good-bye to Diane. I tried her cell. She didn’t pick up, so I left her a hurried voice mail as I jostled my way down the crowded station steps.
45.
No time to go to my office. Too much to do.
By 3:00 p.m. I was seated in the courtroom used by one of the magistrates in the federal district court at 500 Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan. I had spent the morning first at one jail and then the other. (I’ll get to that.)
The afternoon session scheduled in this courtroom was about to begin. Magistrates—or magistrate judges, as they’re called—are the workhorses (beasts of burden?) of the federal court system. They’re sort of junior judges. Federal judges exist through the U.S. Constitution, are appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate, and have the job for life. Federal magistrates are appointed for eight-year terms by the judges of the court in which they sit. The magistrates are the courtroom domestics who sweep up the dirty work of the day’s docket. Their job is to tend to routine matters, in theory to free up the judges for more important . . . well, judging.
This courtroom was packed with the criminal bar. Squeezed shoulder to shoulder on the courtroom’s dark wooden benches sat a fashion array running from ill-fitting off-the-rack suits and lunch-stained neckties to the flamboyantly overdressed style favored by Iván the Impaler. Everyone (including, today, me) waiting for the magistrate to hear his or her clients’ cases. Pleas would be entered (almost always “Not guilty”). Bail would be set or denied.
Judging by the babel of conversation, including the occasional argument, this was far from a refined lot. Not, however, to be confused with a dull lot. Some of the sharpest legal minds populated this world. And these lawyers knew the courtroom inside out. It’s where they lived. Their law offices? Essentially unnecessary. A place for mail drops and late-afternoon sofa naps.
The guy next to me had just finished reading his copy of the New York Times. He nudged me.
“Want it?” he said.
There were a few fingerprint stains on the paper from the Starbursts he’d been nibbling as he repeatedly licked his thumb to turn the pages. Nothing too bad, kind of what you might see when you pick up a discarded newspaper off the subway bench. Okay, some of you wouldn’t pick it up. Fine.
“Thanks,” I said as I accepted his offer, doing my best to avoid touching the dark crimson bits in the margins.
Just as I opened the paper, I heard the bailiff shout for all to rise, that the court was now back in session, the Honorable Anthony Fazzano, magistrate judge for the Southern District of New York, presiding. I rose with everyone else and remained on my feet until the magistrate motioned us all back down onto our benches.
The bailiff (an out-of-central-casting heavyset, jowly guy in a suit I think he slept in) called the first case. The side door not far from the judge’s bench opened, and a federal marshal in blue blazer and gray slacks led out the first shackled and jumpsuited inmate. He stationed his shuffling prisoner at the defendant’s table and stepped in close behind, just in case his continued services might be needed should the guy get any ideas.
And that was the pattern. Case after case. The charges read, the magistrate asking, “How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” The defense lawyers making bail arguments. Bail either set or not. The shackled defendant hauled away. The next orange-clad defendant(s) frog-marched in. This was the judicial version of wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
As I said, earlier that morning I had been to the two jails.
By the time I got to the federal facility at 150 Park Row (before 9:00 a.m.), there was already a line of people waiting to visit inmates. They were patiently standing there, more or less single file, mostly black and Hispanic, mostly women and children. An unhappy bunch. They looked so horribly downtrodden. Really an upsetting sight.
There was a separate queue for the lawyers. The lawyers got priority. It didn’t take long at all for me to gain entry to the building, then pass through the metal detector and go to a designated interview room. All the while that other line of impoverished and tragic-looking friends and family moved at a snail’s pace, the guards shouting repeated word-for-word instructions as though these people were a bunch of abject morons. No one voiced a complaint. “Troublemakers” were most likely sent to the back of the line.
My client, Geraldo, was led into the interview room in chains. The jailers just about shoved him into the chair facing me at the small metal desk where I was seated. The desk was bolted to the cement floor. The dealer’s leg shackles were fastened to an iron loop in the floor, and his wrist shackles were attached to another loop on the top of the table. He was kind of beat-up-looking, sporting a black eye and some nasty abrasions on his face and arms. Had that happened at the arrest or in the jail?
“You want us to stay in here with you, Counselor.”
This jailer was rat-faced. Not white, but who knows what? In his starched uniform, half military-, half police-looking. Hollow-cheeked. Short-cropped kinky hair. Pinprick eyes. Quite a comparison with his Barney Fife clone of a string-bean sidekick, standing timidly near the door, clearly ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.
“No, I don’t.”
“Up to you.”
I watched him shrug at the other guard like I had just made the mistake of my life. Then they left. I almost jumped out of my seat when the steel door behind me slammed shut and the bolt clanged into place.
Alone now. Geraldo staring at me across the table. Waiting. Visibly angry. Where to start? I watched him shift in his seat, causing some disconcerting chain rattling.
I cleared my throat. “How you doing?”
“What?” he barked.
The guy’s in federal custody, shackled to the cement floor, charged with conspiracy drug dealing, and felony murders. Yes, murders, as in multiple. Facing life in prison, no parole. And How you doing? I ask him.
Bad icebreaker, I admit.
I quickly removed his indictment from my briefcase and laid it on the table.
“Let’s start here,” I said, and we then managed to get down to business.
What I learned from him was that his entire operation and virtually all of his crew had been taken down in this massive drug bust. The FBI, the DEA, and several New York State law-enforcement joint task-force divisions were all involved. The case had been made through wiretaps. There were hours upon hours of recorded talks, many of them incriminating conversations between Geraldo and his lieutenants.
“Some of my boys were picked up by the state guys,” he told me.
His point?
“Your point?” I asked.
“You think you’re the only one who knows that your brother got popped and’s sitting down the street, like me here? My boys in there keeping tabs on the motherfucker, know what I’m sayin’?”
I did.
If I didn’t perform for Geraldo, like get him bail . . . well, Sean would be the one to pay for that.
“Look,” I told him, “you need to get an experienced criminal lawyer. Let me find you someone—”
“No dice, motherfucker,” he said, cutting me off as he bent his head within wrist-shackle range and touched his forefinger to his nose. “My . . . how do you say it? My in
tuition says you. So you better fucking get me bail today. You do? I’m gone, man. History. We clear on this, Counselor?”
“Clear.”
“Yeah,” he continued, rattling his wrist chains for emphasis. “Out of this motherfucking miserable country, someplace nobody’s gonna find me.”
Miserable country?
This didn’t seem like the best time to give this scumbag, my new client, a civics lesson. So I just nodded, Okay, got that. And besides, guys like him probably never went anywhere. They stayed in their neighborhoods, where their action was. Where they were kings.
An hour later I was at 100 Centre Street, standing on one side of a set of bars, Sean on the other, in a large holding cell that must have had thirty men in it. Interview rooms in the state system?
Forget about it.
46.
I leaned in close to the bars.
Sean laid out what had happened: A car-repair shop in Astoria, Queens. A late-night break-in, Sean and two other junkies looking for the cashbox, or maybe some tools to steal and fence.
The owner had endured one break-in too many and so had taken to sleeping nights in his cubbyhole of an office on some ratty Barcalounger. He hears the clumsy B&E, and in two seconds flat he’s got all three of them down on the floor, holding a shotgun at their heads as he cradles his phone in the crook of his neck 911-ing them. One of the guys (not Sean) had a starter’s pistol stuffed in his tighty-whiteys.
As Sean was telling me all this, another inmate in the holding tank, an absolute behemoth, staggered over. This guy, African (as I judged by his accent), six foot eight at least, with heavily tattooed tree-trunk arms growing out of a sleeveless T-shirt, put one of those massive limbs around Sean’s shoulders.
“Look here,” he said. (Sounded like “Luke he-a.”)
Sean and I stopped and gazed up at this giant. He leaned in to the bars, closer to me.
“You a lawyer?” (“Loyaaa?”)
Here we go, I started thinking. Here we go.
I watched as Sean started patting the big guy’s shoulder like he was some frisky Great Dane pup. The guy didn’t budge, standing there with his arm still in place around Sean’s neck.
“Cool down, big guy,” Sean said.
I could see this guy’s eyes were kaleidoscopes. Whatever he was on, it was powerful.
“I want you to be my loyaaa, too,” the guy told me.
Sean kept gently patting the guy’s shoulder, also nodding, Yeah, sure, okay, gotcha.
“Yo,” Sean then told the guy, “this is my brother. Family. Understand? He’s not no lawyer.”
The jolly black giant started nodding appreciatively. Sure, family. Equating that with the apparent need for some privacy over here.
“Okayyy,” he said, his freaky bloodshot eyes still captivating me. “I wheel geeve you and your brodda some privacy.” (Which he pronounced in the Queen’s English, “PRIV-uh-see.”)
I watched as he stumbled back to the bench attached to the holding cell’s far wall. He roughly pushed aside some long-haired, skinny white kid sitting where he wanted to be and took a seat. Then he smiled over at me. I gave him a little thank-you wave.
Sean looked at me. Just shrugged. It was what it was.
• • •
My brother’s arraignment was scheduled in the state court’s morning session, so I got to handle that before hightailing it over to the nearby federal courthouse for Geraldo. When Sean’s case was called, I told the judge all about his impressive war record and his PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder).
The judge released Sean on his own recognizance, meaning he didn’t need to put up any bail, just promise on threat of further charges to show up in court when required. The judge also suggested I look into a deferred-prosecution arrangement with the DA so Sean wouldn’t have a record when all this was over for him. And also rehab for his addiction.
And then I hoofed it to the federal court for its afternoon session, where I was sitting thumbing through the Times, waiting for my case to be called.
On the front page of the local section was the story of Miller’s death. The paper got it mostly right. Below the article was a little teaser suggesting that the reader might also want to see the story appearing on the front page of the day’s business section about Dunn & Sullivan and its “brain-drain loss,” as the notice put it. I turned to that section and started reading.
What the fuck?
The story, another in the paper’s continuing coverage of the travails of Big Law, was about the loss of my law firm’s entire Washington, D.C., office. A total defection. To? Yup. Mason Rose. Peter Moss was quoted as saying that Dunn & Sullivan’s glory days were over. He also talked about his suit against Dunn & Sullivan in the GRE case, mentioning me by name. (The reporter had never contacted me for comment. Wasn’t he supposed to?)
Moss called me a young partner who had lost his ethical way and now stood accused of professional misconduct. I read on, my jaw dropping. Moss said that I was a criminal, that to his “shock and amazement” I kept pursuing a case where perjury and bribery (of the Indian judge) had taken place. I had just gotten to the part about “sources” saying that a grand-jury investigation of my (allegedly criminal) behavior had been empaneled when the bailiff called my case.
I didn’t hear it. Astonished. Stupefied. Reading and rereading that sentence about me. Then the lawyer who had handed me the Times nudged me.
“That you?” he said.
Me? What?
The bailiff: “Last call. Is counsel for the defendant Geraldo Alvarez in the courtroom?”
I shook my head free of cobwebs and rose.
“Yes!” I shouted, way too loud. “Yes, I’m here,” I said.
As I grabbed my file and raced to the front of the courtroom, I saw my client standing facing me.
Staring daggers.
47.
Counsel, are you sure you’re in the right place?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘Counsel, are you sure you’re in the right place?’” the magistrate reiterated.
I was standing at the defendant’s trial table. Geraldo (still chained, cuffed, and jumpsuited) stood by my side all the while, warning me under his breath that I had better fucking get him bail or else.
I was here, of course, after having raced up to the well of the court when finally realizing that my case had been (repeatedly) called. As I stood facing the magistrate, my brain was flooded by riptide thoughts of an incoming grand-jury tsunami heading straight for me.
And this junior judge was asking me if I thought I was in the right place?
“Counsel, you’re an ‘uptown’ lawyer,” the magistrate continued with air quotes, “and this criminal docket is most decidedly ‘downtown.’”
That got a collective chuckle from the assorted lawyers who were still benched and waiting for their own cases to be called.
Ah, now I got it.
Earlier, when I entered the courtroom, I’d signed in, as all lawyers were required to do, listing my client’s name and mine, along with name of the law firm I was with. Big Law was not, to put it mildly, a habitué of the drugs-and-murder docket. Seeing Dunn & Sullivan on my sign-in sheet, this judge was about to have some fun with me.
“We don’t see you guys in here all that often. So what gives, Counsel? Slumming?”
Trick question, of course. I said nothing, simply smiled as pleasantly as I could and hunched my shoulders in a Beats me, Judge, pantomime, all the while mentally stacking sandbags against my flooding thoughts of grand juries and criminal charges.
The magistrate was just getting some kicks at my expense, ineligible as he and the lawyers in here were for Big Law membership. That door was permanently locked so far as they were concerned. (If only they knew.) This magistrate—a forty-something, olive-toned, middle-aged guy with a hairline so low there wa
s hardly any forehead showing—would get in another jab or two, and then he’d get back to business and arraign my client.
So that was not going to be a big problem here. The big problem was that I was keeping the fact of my representation of Señor Alvarez from my law firm.
I had not, as required by firm rules, opened a new client file. Nor would I. No way would Dunn & Sullivan allow me this representation in the firm’s name, even if I weren’t doing this for free. That was so even if I were to tell them that I was doing it to save my brother’s life. And no, I also hadn’t notified the firm that I was also acting as counsel to my brother in his criminal case.
“I guess all those stories we’ve been reading about the hard times you ivory-tower lawyers are having are true. You being here and all.”
I went for another bemused shoulder hunch. After waiting for something more from me and not getting it, the magistrate finally turned to his bailiff and told him to begin the arraignment.
“The defendant will rise,” the bailiff told the already-standing Geraldo. Then harshly demanded to know how the defendant pleaded to the ten or so crimes he’d been accused of committing.
“Not guilty,” Geraldo told the guy, no doubt thinking something like, You and me? You fat fuck. Anyplace other than here? You talk to me like that? I skin you alive.
The not-guilty plea now on the record, the magistrate turned to the prosecutor.
“What’s the bail situation?” he asked.
The federal prosecutor hadn’t so much as glanced my way. She was very young, seemingly fresh out of law school, just north of albino white with frizzy, colorless, center-parted hair and elongated Freddy Krueger fingers. She would continue ignoring me for the scum-sucking, low-life criminal-defense lawyer she considered me to be, Dunn & Sullivan partner or not.
“The government opposes bail,” she said. Then, pointing an accusing skeletal forefinger over at Geraldo, she added, “This defendant is a danger to the community.”