Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  For all that, there had been no cover-up, no payoff to Chief Baran or anyone else. Yes, the Greenwich police may have been initially intimidated and may have felt they had to “tread lightly,” to use Hale’s phrase. But when they did get their bearings and zeroed in on Tommy, they were aggressive enough that Rushton suffered a breakdown and had to be hospitalized.

  Of course, the story would address how the Greenwich police had focused on Tommy while the state’s attorney suspected Littleton. I wanted to use Keegan’s quote— “I believe I know who did it but I can’t prove it” —and the fact that he’d shared his belief with the Moxleys. The article would offer the disclaimer that there was no evidence to determine whether Keegan was correct or merely trying to justify having blown the biggest case of his career.

  Because of people’s damning remarks about him, I wanted to insert a line about Michael, if only to quote Keegan that if Martha had been murdered at 10:00 P.M., Michael could not have returned in time from the Terriens’ to have killed her.

  When I’d begun the story, I hadn’t realized why Dorthy believed so strongly in the police. When I’d asked about a cover-up, she had said, “I know it wasn’t Keegan. I know it wasn’t Lunney.” When I’d asked her why she was so supportive of them, she’d answered, “Because they were so sincere.”

  And there it was. Although they’d been misguided early on in their investigation, Dorthy understood that Keegan and Lunney genuinely wanted to solve Martha’s murder.

  I had come to know Lunney. Despite his missteps, I knew how much he wanted to arrest Tommy and perhaps Littleton as well. Whenever he saw Tommy on Greenwich Avenue, he would say to him, “I am going to pursue you to the ends of the earth until you admit you murdered Martha Moxley.”

  With Lunney everything was out there, on the surface. There was no guile to him. I believed not a moment went by that he didn’t regret his mistakes and pray he’d have another chance to get it right.

  •

  The story was to run on the day before Halloween 1983, the eighth anniversary of Martha’s death. I had worked on it for nearly two years.

  But as the publication date approached, Ken told me it was not quite ready. He said loose ends remained—trivial things, such as dates, quotes, transitions. I thought nothing of it then. How was I to know what lay ahead?

  Ken said he wanted the story to have maximum impact. That meant running it on the anniversary of Martha’s death in 1984, a year later.

  Okay, I told myself. Let’s make sure we have it right. Difficult as it would be to explain this to Dorthy, I knew the story could wait. If we wanted maximum impact, it would have to.

  •

  Beginning in the fall of 1983, the following events occurred in New York City: Michael Stewart, a black man in his twenties, died of a choke hold while under arrest for marijuana possession at the Union Square subway station in Manhattan. Six white cops were tried and acquitted of his murder. A congressional commission headed by Michigan’s John Conyers held hearings on police brutality. Mayor Edward Koch announced the appointment of the city’s first black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward.

  The knock on Ward was that a decade before he had released a dozen black suspects arrested for the murder of a white cop at a Harlem mosque. The president of the police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, referred to Ward as “Bubba.”

  A fellow Newsday reporter, Gerald McKelvey, found the transcript of a civil suit in the mosque case. The suit mentioned a confidential police document known as the “Blue Book,” which was circulated only among the highest levels of the department. Somehow, Gerry turned up a copy of it. It revealed the suspects at the mosque a decade before had been released not by Ward but by the former Chief of Detectives Al Seedman.

  I tracked Seedman to Alexander’s department store in Queens, where he was director of security. He acknowledged he had released the suspects.

  “Why didn’t you ever come forward?” I asked. “Why did you allow Ward to take the blame all these years?”

  “What good would it have done?” he answered.

  New York Newsday ran our story about Ward, Seedman, and the mosque murder on page one. Waving a copy at city hall the next day, Mayor Koch crowed, “Thank God for New York Newsday.” The paper that six months before I’d had to arrange to be specially delivered to police headquarters had finally arrived.

  And Susan was pregnant again.

  •

  Despite Ken’s promise that the Moxley story would appear on the anniversary of Martha’s death in 1984, it did not. As we re-edited it, I realized he was asking me questions I had already answered, minor questions such as dates and times. For the first time he mentioned unspecified “legal concerns.”

  “Ken,” I pleaded, “this is why we are on this planet as journalists. To do stories like this. What’s wrong? What are you afraid of? What’s happened that you can’t tell me?”

  The year before, when Ken decided to hold the story, I had tried to lift Dorthy’s spirits, assuring her that it would eventually run and that the police would restart their investigation. Now, seeing how frustrated I was becoming, she tried to lift mine.

  “We’ll just have to be patient, Len,” she said. “There is a time for everything. You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Poisoning the Well

  NEW YORK CITY

  1984–1991

  To assure Susan’s second pregnancy went as long as possible before certain premature delivery, our obstetrician devised a plan. Susan was to take to bed at the beginning of her seventh month. Tony Insolia gave me a leave of absence to play Mr. Mom.

  Each night we’d cross off another day on the calendar. We set our first watershed at twenty-six weeks, when we told ourselves the baby stood a fighting chance. We set our next at twenty-eight weeks; then at thirty-one when the baby’s gestation would equal Jennifer’s. When Susan entered the hospital in February 1985, she had hung on for thirty-four weeks. Whatever would follow, the baby was out of danger.

  Again, it was a Saturday night. The plan had called for delivery by cesarean section, but as it was Saturday, the hospital was short-staffed with only one delivery room. A woman lay there ahead of us, her contractions further along. Then, Susan’s contractions sped up. Two hours later she had delivered, by natural childbirth, a five-pound boy.

  I sensed there was trouble when the doctor ordered me out of the delivery room moments later. They could not control Susan’s bleeding. Transfusions were begun. After midnight, when the bleeding had abated and Susan lay in her darkened room in drugged slumber, our obstetrician, who specialized in high-risk pregnancies, confided to me that he was not certain what to do next. He said he was trying to call an expert in Cleveland. But as it was a Saturday night, he could not reach him.

  He suggested that when the uterus contracted, as it would by the next day, he perform a hysterectomy. Given Susan’s medical history and the realization now that she should never undergo another pregnancy, he saw this as the most conservative approach.

  The doctor slept down the hall through the night to be on hand should her bleeding begin again, while I stayed awake fighting the terror I felt that I might lose her that night in childbirth. As for our son Michael, born at five pounds and never at risk, could I ever have imagined that after all we had gone through to have him, he would become an afterthought?

  The following afternoon, the doctor performed Susan’s surgery. There were no complications. A few days later, she and Mike came home. Our family was complete.

  •

  October 30, 1985, marked the tenth anniversary of Martha’s death. Surely, I thought, the story would run then. But the date passed with no story in the paper—and no explanation from Ken.

  A month later, Ken did call. He asked to meet for dinner. He apologized for not leveling with me and said the story had been held because of objections from the new publisher, Steve Isenberg.

  Dave Laventhol, who headed all Times-Mirror’s East Coast newspa
pers, had appointed Isenberg a year after I’d begun my investigation. I had never met him. I knew he had been the former chief of staff to New York’s former mayor John Lindsay. I also knew he had little journalistic experience and that although he was a lawyer, he’d practiced for only about six years.

  Ken then told me that earlier in the year he had sent the Moxley story to Tony Insolia. “Tony said it was ready to be printed,” said Ken, “but that wasn’t good enough for Steve.”

  I called Tony, who confirmed this. “They sent it to me for my opinion. I may have suggested some editing but I said there was no reason not to run it. It was a very tough story. And I remember Ken seemed afraid of it. As an editor, you have to have a lot of self-confidence to go with a story like that. I think someone was putting pressure on him.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  At dinner, Ken added something else. Isenberg, he said, was leaving the Connecticut papers. His new job would be Associate Publisher of New York Newsday. Ken didn’t state the obvious. Isenberg was going to be my boss.

  •

  By the time Isenberg and I met two years later, I had moved from One Police Plaza and was working out of New York Newsday’s main office at 2 Park Avenue.

  The year before, I had been sent to the Bronx to open a bureau there. Soon after, I was in a fight with the spokesman for the newly appointed district attorney, who had promised me an exclusive on a murder story if I agreed to hold it a day. I did. Just after my deadline, he called to say he’d decided to give the story to the Post and Daily News. As payback, I identified him in the story as my source. He cut me off from the district attorney and threatened to run me out of the Bronx.

  Well, we’d see about that. That was another lesson I learned, albeit a midlife career lesson—a reporter had to be able to take a punch. Not a physical punch, although I suppose you should learn to take that, too. What you had to do in these circumstances was to have the confidence not to be bullied and the ability to develop sources outside the organization you are covering. Which is what happened.

  I befriended the district attorney’s enemies. An assistant district attorney had just quit the office to run against him. His supporters gave me documents, showing that the district attorney had used money from the office’s confidential witness fund to pay for a champagne brunch for his election campaign. I wrote the story. He dropped out of the race.

  Seeing the story’s impact, an embittered judge confided in me. He opened a trapdoor that led to a netherworld of corruption beneath the surface of the state’s judiciary.

  Unknown to me and the general public, the presiding judge of the civil side of the Bronx State Supreme Court, Louis Fusco, controlled the court calendar. While assigning cases to other judges, he kept the biggest ones, against the city’s hospitals, for himself. Each year the city paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in negligence claims in cases he heard. Before agreeing to a settlement, he forced the lawyers appearing before him to use his girlfriend’s insurance firm to structure the deals.

  A system had been set up to protect him. A politically connected Manhattan law firm, Bower and Gardner, had obtained a $25 million, no-bid contract to represent the city in all its medical malpractice cases. The firm had secured the contract through one of its partners, Stanley Fink, the former Speaker of the State Assembly. Meanwhile, the firm’s senior partner, John Bower, was a member of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, the body that disciplines judges.

  I started examining the cases before Fusco. Bower and Gardner, it turned out, had used his girlfriend’s insurance firm more than any other lawyers. Now I understood why those lawyers were afraid to protest. Until I came around, they had no one to protest to.

  I switched from the district attorney and began writing stories about Fusco. After they appeared, the state’s chief judge began an investigation. Fusco resigned as administrative judge and then retired.

  I did not realize it then, but I had tapped into a vein of corruption that ran from Manhattan through the Bronx to the state capital in Albany. Although New York Newsday had existed only a few years, we had unearthed the tip of a judicial corruption scandal.

  The more I wrote, the more lawyers and judges contacted me. I had penetrated the wall, cracked the perimeter. Presently, I was back in Manhattan, writing about two other powerful judicial figures, also unknown to the general public. Francis T. Murphy, the son of a Bronx district leader, was the presiding judge of the First Appellate Department, which heard appeals from state courts in Manhattan and the Bronx. Harry Reynolds was his chief clerk. Reynolds, I learned, had placed his wife and children on the appellate payroll. Murphy had worked out a deal with federal judge Charles Brieant to place their children as assistants in each other’s offices.

  Reynolds thought two of his aides were my sources and fired them. The Brooklyn District Attorney, Joe Hynes, jumped in and hired them. Then, the chief judge began an investigation of Reynolds, who resigned. Murphy hung on until his term ended, then retired.

  But this nepotism was but a minor concern compared to what I was learning about Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Marie Lambert. Also unknown to the general public, surrogates in New York state settle and distribute billions of dollars in estates.

  Lambert was awarding millions of dollars in guardianships and receiverships to a small clique of attorney friends. At least three of them were stealing from people she had appointed them to protect. One, Melvyn Altman, whom Lambert had awarded half a million dollars in legal fees, stole $200,000 from the estate of a retarded man and lost it in a Brazilian dance revue.

  Another, Lorraine Backal, became a civil court judge in the Bronx after Lambert awarded guardianships to the borough’s Democratic county chairman and two of his district leaders. Backal then hired an ex-con as her driver, who allegedly supplied her with drugs.

  After my stories appeared, Altman was indicted and convicted in federal court and went to prison. Backal resigned from the bench and was disbarred.

  Then, there was Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Francis Pecora. In a case before him, he seized an office building from its owner, then appointed a receiver to sell the building. The sale took three months. Pecora awarded the receiver a fee of $7.7 million, ten times larger than any ever awarded in state history. The receiver was none other than John Bower, the lawyer whose firm had the lock on the city’s medical malpractice cases and who was now the chairman of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

  And the office building he had sold was New York Newsday’s headquarters at 2 Park Avenue.

  As I continued writing, Pecora sued me and Newsday for libel. Newsday refused to settle, or even run an apology, as Pecora had demanded, in return for dropping his suit. (He eventually dropped it after I discovered he had given contradictory testimony in two personal injury suits he had filed in Brooklyn.) Nonetheless, before its deductible kicked in, Newsday and Times-Mirror were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend me.

  Tony Insolia had retired but neither Don Forst nor Tony’s successor as Newsday’s editor-in-chief, Anthony Marro, ever mentioned those costs to me or suggested that my stories might cause problems for Newsday with the new owner of 2 Park Avenue. It was an article of faith at Newsday and throughout Times-Mirror that truth is worth a price; that a lawsuit, expensive as it may be, is the cost a major media company pays to do business.

  That was what made Newsday and New York Newsday great newspapers and Times-Mirror a great media conglomerate. In the company’s culture, the news and the truth came first. If a reporter’s facts were correct, lawsuits would be dealt with later. That was why I’d never accepted Ken’s explanation of unspecified legal concerns as the reason for not publishing the Moxley story.

  And there was something else. Never while at Newsday on Long Island or in New York had I been warned off a story. Never did anyone tell me there was something—a sacred cow or favorite of an editor—that I couldn’t
cover. Never did anyone tell me to tank a story.

  In the midst of my lawsuit with Judge Pecora, Steve Isenberg introduced himself. He was tall and balding, a few years older than I, and he seemed pleasant, even hearty. We chatted about his former boss, Mayor John Lindsay, and about the Knapp police corruption scandal exposed during Lindsay’s administration by Frank Serpico. Like me, Isenberg said he had been Serpico’s friend.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “You know, Len, your Moxley story will never appear—not just in Connecticut but in any Times-Mirror publication. I poisoned the well.” He smiled as though he’d told a joke.

  I never for a moment believed that Isenberg, or anyone else at Times-Mirror, had been pressured or paid off by the Skakels or the Kennedys. Nobody had “gotten to him,” or to anybody else.

  Still, I could not conceive of a valid journalistic or legal reason not to run the story and I was furious that Isenberg, for whatever reason, was standing in the way of a critical piece of investigative reporting. (The fact that the story ultimately ran in much the same way I originally wrote it, without generating any problems, confirmed my earlier conviction.)

  Isenberg’s comments left me too stunned to speak. It was bad enough, in my view, that Isenberg was telling me he wouldn’t run the story in two small papers in Connecticut. For the entire Times-Mirror corporation to ban it from all of its newspapers, as Isenberg was suggesting, was a blatant abdication by a major media company of its responsibilities to its readership. I was offended by the offhand manner in which Isenberg was telling me this, as if he did not realize the import of what he was saying.

  I had become a journalist because I dreamed of righting wrongs, of helping those whom everyone else had failed. Here the Moxley family had been lost and alone with nowhere to turn. The local papers—the Stamford Advocate and the Greenwich Time—had been their last resort.

  Ken and Isenberg’s predecessor, Jay Shaw, had been prepared to help them. That was why Ken had called me. Now Isenberg was admitting in effect that the newspapers had abandoned them. If he were telling the truth, the Times-Mirror Corporation had abandoned them as well.