No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “You’re really a shit, V.T., you know that?” said Guma, flushing in discomfort.

  “Just trying to state your case, Goom. Let’s ask Karp, who is a true man of the world, and from San Francisco besides, which should make him an expert witness.”

  Karp washed down the last of his bagels with coffee and dabbed his lips. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” he said. “This conversation sounds like a cross between Screw Magazine and Archie Comics.”

  “No, really, Butch. This chick is driving me crazy. Look, I’m a nice Italian boy from Brooklyn. She’s a nice Italian girl from Queens. I try to talk to her, I get nothing but bullshit.”

  “Goom,” said Karp, sliding out of the booth, “I got to go, but let me suggest a change in approach. You’re trying to interest an individual who made Law Review at Yale, you don’t yell ‘Hey Champ, sit on my face, I’ll guess your weight’ across the bullpen. Which is, I think, the most endearing thing I ever heard you say to her. Meanwhile, if Veronica won’t put out, try Betty. See you guys.”

  Karp left the luncheonette to Guma’s despairing wail: “I don’t want her fucking law degree, I want her body!” He moved across Foley Square, at this hour already full of civil servants and their victims, and strode briskly up the steps of 100 Centre Street, the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building.

  This was a massive sandstone cube, Mussolini-modern in style, occupying a full square block. Stuck on to its left side was a similarly massive structure: the Manhattan House of Detention, New York’s jail, known as the Tombs. The first four floors of the Criminal Courts Building were packed with room after featureless room, each packed with paper, pink, blue, yellow, and white, on which were inscribed the names of New York City’s criminals, and those of their victims, and a history of their crimes and punishments. The men in the Tombs might come and go, but here, at least, they had achieved immortality.

  Four floors above the street, balanced on their midden of paperwork, sat the Criminal Court and the Supreme Court. In New York, Supreme Court was the name given to the top tier of courts in the judicial system, where felony trials were conducted. The Criminal Court was for arraignments, felony hearings, and motions and trials for misdemeanor crimes, such as shoplifting, indecent exposure, and possession of stolen property. The Criminal Court was also the place where young ADAs were initiated into the art of trying criminal cases, and was where Roger Karp worked. Above the courtrooms were the offices of the Manhattan District Attorney.

  As Karp trotted up the broad steps, he passed by and under a set of legal homilies engraved in the building’s imperishable stone. One of them, “Justice is denied no one,” leaped out at him. At one time these had been engraved in Karp, too. And, though the atmosphere of the judicial system was far more corrosive than New York air, he could still read them on the tablets in his mind. Karp was an innocent and he believed in justice. That made him one of the most dangerous men in the building.

  He got off the elevator at the fourth floor and entered the area known to everyone who worked at 100 Centre as the Streets of Calcutta. The hallways outside the courtrooms were thronged with people of every caste, race, class, and moral dimension, with poor blacks and Puerto Ricans being somewhat overrepresented. Some were desperate, others sneering and cynical, or sleepy with drugs or exhaustion. They were waiting their turn in the Criminal Court system and were packed here in the murmuring corridors because all the seats, all the standing room, in the courtrooms proper were similarly packed.

  These were the friends and families of criminals and victims. Many were witnesses for the prosecution or defense. There were a substantial number of people with swollen or bandaged faces, or with limbs in casts, the walking wounded of New York’s perpetual civil war. Defendants out on bail or their own recognizance lounged amid the victims and witnesses who would shortly testify against them. The defendants who were still jailed were kept in holding pens beside the courtrooms as they awaited their hearings or trials. An informal order was maintained by police officers, also waiting to testify, identifiable by their uniforms or—if off-duty—by the shields pinned to their clothing, but even more by the air of world-weariness and contemptuous humor they exuded as they stood chatting in little knots.

  Four courtrooms sat along each corridor and each of these had between 10 and 150 cases on its calendar each day. The system commanded all those with business before it to appear either at 9:00 A.M. or 1:30 P.M., which meant hours upon hours of waiting for most of them. Some courtrooms had seating for about sixty people, but others were merely converted cloakrooms or judges’ robing rooms. In these, justice was done in what amounted to the anteroom to the latrines; the Men’s Room and Ladies’ Room signs were taped over, a desk was squeezed between the flags of state and nation, and the system was ready for business. There was barely room for the defendant.

  In the standard courtrooms, furnished with heavy wood and dusty grandeur, people would rush in and scramble for seats like subway commuters. The overflow occupied the Streets of Calcutta. Here the experienced ones brought food and pillows, toys for the kiddies, playing cards, and plenty of smoking material. They sat on hard wooden benches and on the floor. The air soon became a dense fog of smoke, disinfectant, old paint, and too many people.

  Through this dismal village strode Butch Karp, like a prince, toward the courtroom to which he had been assigned for the past eleven months. Supplicants surrounded him, plucking at his sleeves like true Calcutta beggars: “Ey Señor, my son’s case, Hector Sanchez, wha time it is?” “Hey man, what you done wit ma property?” “Mister, mister, can I tell you something… ?”

  Pushing through, Karp opened the oak doors to Part 2-A of the Criminal Courts. Within, a similar crowd was seated, but more quietly. There was a dull, coughing chatter here and the sounds of rustling newspapers and discarded paper vending machine cups.

  The spectators from whom this noise arose sat on blond oak varnished benches arranged like church pews in the back of the room. A wide aisle dividing the rows of benches ran from the rear of the courtroom to a low barrier and a swinging, saloon-style gate. Beyond the gate sat the long oak tables for the prosecutor, on the left, and the defendant, on the right. Beyond these, the judge’s presidium rose like a squat wooden tower, with a table for the clerk at its base.

  This was the courtroom of Judge Edward Yergin. Its business was misdemeanor trials and felony hearings. Each day’s schedule typically included a mix of petty larceny, burglary, possession of a weapon, possession of narcotics, rape, indecent exposure, resisting arrest, assault, picking pockets, and mugging. A little shoplifting. A little murder. The felony hearings were held to determine whether for each felony charge there was reasonable cause to believe that a crime had been committed and that the defendant had committed it.

  Karp swung through the swinging door, Wyatt Earp entering the Last Chance Saloon, and dropped a six-inch-thick stack of papers bound with rubber bands onto the prosecutor’s table. Jim McFarley, the court clerk, looked up from his desk. “Hey Karp! Them Yankees, huh?” he said.

  “Unbelievable,” Karp replied. “Definitely their year. All the way.” Karp gestured at the crowd. “What’s going on, Jim? You passing out tickets? What’re you giving away today?”McFarley grinned. “Was up to me I’d give ’em all three to five. Nah, nothing special, just the usual hunnert ’n fifty.”

  The clerk was a cone-shaped man with a huge, gelatinous chin that seemed to flow into his shoulders with no need for a neck. He had ruddy cheeks and had played Santa at the annual Christmas parties for as long as anyone could remember. You rarely saw McFarley outside his wooden swivel chair; both of them were permanent fixtures of the court. McFarley dressed in polyester sport jackets and double-knit slacks of unlikely shade, and toted at his side a .38 caliber revolver he had never used. McFarley was strong against crime. The presumption of innocence did not carry a lot of weight with him. The people he saw accused in court every day must have done something wrong or the cops wouldn’t have arrest
ed them, for cryin’ out loud. For that reason he liked ADAs (they put the dirt balls behind bars) and mistrusted the Legal Aid lawyers (they got the dirt balls off).

  A simple philosophy, but one that had served McFarley well for nearly thirty years of providing the only continuity the New York criminal justice system would ever know. He and his colleague clerks ran the courtrooms; they were the traffic cops for a city without stoplights or signposts. They controlled the mountain of paperwork and determined what cases would be heard in what order on the daily calendar. Piss off McFarley and you sat in the Streets of Calcutta for days on end.

  McFarley said, “Butch, the judge wants to see you before he takes the bench. He’s at an administrative meeting, should be here in about a half an hour.” He waved at the courtroom. “Better get this moving.”

  “What does he want to see me for? Oh no! He finally found out I never passed the bar.”

  “We all knew that when you tried your first case.”

  “Thanks, Jim, I love you too.” Karp turned to the crowd and began the morning ritual of learning about the cases he would have to prosecute in just a few minutes. The first step was finding out which witnesses were present in the crowd. He had, of course, never met any of them before.

  Karp walked to the gate and scanned the crowd. Pitching his voice to cut through the chattering, he said, “Excuse me! May I have your attention, please! All private defense attorneys, please check in with the clerk. Would all civilian witnesses, all witnesses who are not police officers and are here to testify, please come forward.”

  One by one, the witnesses snapped out of their lethargy and began gathering in the well of the court. Quickly the space around Karp’s desk became crowded. He picked up a clipboard holding his copy of the day’s calendar. “People, listen up a minute. When I point to you, I want you to tell me what case you’re here for. And, if you know it, tell me the calendar number of your case. Then I may ask you a couple of brief questions. The important thing is for me to find out who is here and who isn’t. Does everyone understand?” Murmurs of comprehension. “Fine. OK, what are you here for?” Karp asked the man nearest to him, a balding, thin black man with thick glasses.

  “Ballroy. He assaulted me.”

  “What’s the number on the calendar?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  Karp found the number on his calendar and saw that it had been circled in red by the clerk, indicating that he was supposed to have the case complaint in his stack. He riffled through the stack and found the complaint, making a notation on it to remind himself that the witness was present.

  “You must be Alan Simms,” he said, reading the name off the top of the affidavit.

  “That’s right.”

  “Fine. Have a seat, and I’ll be calling you as a witness.” Karp repeated this sequence with the rest of the two dozen or so people in the crowd.

  After he checked through these, there was only one person, a tall, thin woman in her thirties, left standing by the table.

  “What are you here for,” asked Karp.

  “Mancusi, attempted murder. I’m his sister and I saw the whole thing. He’s innocent.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s innocent, I don’t care what the bitch says.”

  “I think you’re here as a defense witness. You’ll have to …”

  “Yeah, defense.”

  “Well I’m speaking with witnesses for the prosecution. Does your brother have an attorney?”

  “No. Just Legal Aid.”

  “That’s an attorney, lady. Look, when the Legal Aid lawyer comes he’ll speak with you. Now go sit down.”

  Karp went back to the railing and called out, “All police officers who are the principal complainants, please step up here now.” Nine cops, some off duty, some in dark blue, some detectives in street clothes, came up to the prosecutor’s table. Some had physical evidence connected with the crime, which they had retrieved from the police property clerk before coming to court.

  “What d’you got?” Karp asked the first cop, a young off-duty patrol officer with dark, close-cropped hair and a bushy mustache.

  “Resisting arrest. Defendant’s name is Marshall, a real scumbag.” He glanced at the pink slip in his hand. “It’s case one thirty-seven on the calendar.”

  Karp found the case on his calendar, circled it, picked up his yellow pad. “OK, shoot. Start with your name.”

  “Collingsworth, Ansel. I’m with the one-seven. This guy Marshall we collared maybe half a dozen times on burglaries on the East Side.”

  As Collingsworth spoke, Karp was searching his stack for the case’s paper work. He found the complaint, which had the defendant’s jacket clipped to it.

  “Yeah, I see he’s got nine burglary convictions and some trespasses.”

  “That’s what I mean,” the cop went on. “So I’m walking along the alley, on foot patrol. It’s about one in the afternoon and I see this guy get off the fire escape from an apartment building. He’s carrying one of those big, heavy color TVs. I sorta recognize him, so I say, ‘Hey, where ya goin’?’ So he walks right up to me and starts throwing some bullshit about how he’s a TV repairman and had to come down the escape because the front door’s too narrow? So I look him in the eyes and say, ‘Repairman, my ass. I seen you before, sucker.’ So the shithead drops the TV on my foot.”

  The other cops laughed. Karp looked down and saw that the young cop’s foot was in a cast and covered with a white sock.

  “He resisted arrest with a TV set?” Karp asked.

  “Fuck no! The scumbag punched me in the mouth and took off. I had to chase him down with a busted toe.”

  “All right, have a seat,” said Karp, putting a star next to the defendant’s name on top of the affidavit, to remind himself that this case was to be prosecuted to the fullest extent, with no plea bargaining. Then he went through the remaining eight cases, jotting down brief notes in anticipation of the arguments that might be made by the defense.

  Looking up, he noticed a small, sixtyish woman in a gray suit sitting in the row of benches directly behind the prosecutor’s table. He noticed her because she was scared, her face stiff, her body twitching like a cornered mouse. She kept glancing over to her left and then sharply looking away. Karp followed her glance and spotted a skinny kid with a turned-up porkpie hat jammed low over his eyes. He wore tight, black pants and a cream-leather sport coat, and every time the old lady glanced at him he grinned and shook his head slightly, no-no. He had a gold front tooth.

  Karp went over and spoke quietly to the woman. “Excuse me, my name is Roger Karp and I’m the assistant district attorney in this courtroom. Is anything wrong?”

  “That man,” she said in a whisper, eyes darting to her left. “He’s the one. He hit me and took my purse.”

  Karp glared at the kid, who returned the stare for an instant and then, smirking, dropped his eyes.

  “And you’re here to testify against him?”

  “Yes. But he’s trying to scare me.”

  “OK, let me tell you something, Mrs… .”

  “Murcovitch, Edith Murcovitch. Look, mister I don’t want no more trouble …”

  “Mrs. Murcovitch, you’re not in trouble. He’s in trouble. Now come right through here and sit next to me, at this table.”

  Mrs. Murcovitch came through the gate and sat down. Karp went through his affidavits until he found her case. “This guy’s name is Jenkins?”

  “That’s right. He hit me in the face.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t want you to worry anymore. When the case is called I’m going to ask you to testify and I don’t want you to be scared of him. Just tell the judge what happened.”

  He motioned to one of the cops he had just interviewed, the biggest and meanest-looking of the lot. When the cop came up to the railing, Karp said, “Doug, see that scumbag with the hat? He’s hassling my witness. Do me a favor, could you go sit by him and make him be nice?”

  “Glad to, Chief,” said th
e cop. He sat down next to the kid and gave him the New York’s Finest cop glare. The kid decided to take a nap.

  Karp went up to the clerk’s desk. “Jim, I’m about set. One thing, this case eighty-nine, could you call it first? The defendant is hassling my witness and I want to move her out of here as soon as possible.”

  “I already promised first to one of the private attorneys, but I’ll slide her in sometime after that.”

  “Great. Thanks, Jim.”

  “It’s OK. Hey, Yergin’s in his chambers. Why don’t you see him now. I want to get the show on the road.”

  “Whenever.”

  McFarley picked up the receiver on his ancient black phone and dialed one number. “Judge, Karp is here… . Fine, will do.” He hung up and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. Karp walked behind the clerk’s desk, went through a door, and entered Judge Yergin’s chambers.

  It was a room just a little bigger than a walk-in closet, with a government green two-seat leather couch on one wall facing a small desk, behind which sat the judge.

  Edward Yergin was black, one of New York’s first black Criminal Court judges and before that one of the first black assistant DAs. He had spent seventeen years prosecuting murder cases in the Homicide Bureau. He had convicted a hundred murderers and sent thirty of them to the death house. It showed on his face. He was a good judge and he liked Karp. The younger man had worked his courtroom for nearly a year and the two men had become sociable. They often had lunch together, sometimes with other ADAs or Legal Aid lawyers, sometimes alone. Away from the bench, Yergin never talked about court cases or the law, only about the old days in Homicide, city politics, or sports.

  Yergin rose from behind his desk and shook Karp’s hand. The judge was a tall, strong man, strong-featured, with close-cropped gray-black hair. He had a black nylon robe over a snappy sky-blue suit. His face shone with a wide grin as he pumped Karp’s hand. “Congratulations, Butch.”

  “Thanks, Judge,” said Karp, who had no idea what was going on. “What for? I usually show up for work on Friday.”