by Linda Wolfe
In the middle of the second day of deliberations, after hearing the charges for a fourth time, the jury finally pronounced Magliato guilty of depraved murder. His girlfriend, the jewelry designer, wept copiously. Mrs. Giani’s fingers caressed her crucifix. And Magliato shuddered. Then, SoHo and Southampton suddenly behind him, he was abruptly swept off to jail by a phalanx of guards.
I visited him at Riker’s Island two weeks later. He was again cheerful and optimistic. His luck had turned, he told me. His lawyer had received from Judge Sullivan a copy of a remarkable letter. One of the jurors, a woman, had written to the judge, spelling out in great detail a conflict that had come up in the jury room. The conflict turned out to be precisely what Lefcourt had suspected. The jurors had been trying to compromise, to convict Magliato of one of the lesser crimes, but they hadn’t understood how to go about it. According to the letter, they had screened out intentional murder and were deadlocked on intentional manslaughter. At this point, the woman wrote, she and several other jurors had concluded that depraved murder might be a less serious offense than intentional manslaughter because it appeared third on their verdict sheet, so they had voted for this crime.
There were other confusions, she said—about the meaning of “depraved” and about the difference between murder and manslaughter. “I admit to you your Honor that we do not appear to be very bright,” the juror wrote. But she begged Judge Sullivan to review what had happened because she thought that Magliato had been denied his right to a fair trial.
Another juror had sent Magliato a poem. And a third had telephoned Lefcourt and confirmed the account of confusion in the jury room. So Magliato was exuberant. And, surprisingly, he hadn’t been having a bad time at Riker’s, he told me. He’d been sleeping and eating well and had been reading The Grapes of Wrath and rereading War and Peace. He’d also been getting a kick out of observing his fellow inmates. “Would you believe,” he asked, “that none of the guys here were interested in watching the vice-presidential debate? There are two TV sets, and everyone votes about what to watch. There were only two votes for the debate, so everyone watched some murder movie instead.”
Then, obviously a sharp student of value structures, he began to describe the new world he had been forced to enter. “It’s like a great big fraternity house,” he said. “Only what you have in common isn’t sports or classes but criminal stuff, like whether you’re here ‘on a body.’ Some people have one body, some two, some none. I’ve got one, so that lends me a certain distinction.”
Did he miss anything?
“Friends,” he said. And he also told me that he thought the make of his car had a great deal to do with everything that had happened to him. He said that if he hadn’t been driving a Ferrari, Giani and Schneider might never have hit him in the first place and that the police, the D.A.’s office, and even the judicial system might have been less harsh on him, perhaps letting him plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide. There is something symbolic about a Ferrari, he maintained, something that arouses prejudices in others. What bothered him most about this fact was, he said, that his “wasn’t even one of those eighty-thousand-dollar Ferraris. It was a special European car, only a thirty-nine-thousand-dollar model.”
His friends were all in court on the day of his sentencing. Surprisingly, so were four jurors—three regulars, one alternate. The jurors had come to demonstrate their concern about the verdict. They sat together in a back row, exchanging reminiscences and copies of their protests and poetry.
The woman who had written to Judge Sullivan told me, “I’ve done what I did as a matter of conscience.” An administrative assistant at a law firm, she belonged to a theater group and owned a horse. “I blame myself for not speaking up in the jury room,” she said. “But I felt intimidated, because there were outbursts when some of us wanted to reopen deliberations. There were people in there who just wanted to go home.”
The jurors’ afterthoughts had little effect on the day’s proceedings. Judge Sullivan declared that he’d found this case particularly troublesome, largely because some of the blame for Giani’s death rested on the community. “We require of policemen who get guns that they have at least ten hours of training in how to handle their weapons,” he said. “But we let any ordinary citizen who shows need of a gun get one, and then we don’t demand that he learn safety and competency. By Magliato’s own testimony, he had only fifteen minutes’ training with the gun.” Then, taking Magliato’s previously unsullied record into consideration, Sullivan sentenced him to the minimum for murder—fifteen years to life (the maximum would have been twenty-five to life).
A year later, while Magliato was serving time in an upstate New York jail, an appellate court reduced his crime from murder to manslaughter. He had been guilty, in the view of three judges on the five-person court, not of a “depraved indifference to human life,” but of having caused a death through recklessness. The businessman was joyous, according to his lawyer, Lefcourt, and was anticipating that he might be freed on probation. No doubt, in his inimitable, optimistic way, he may have even begun to make plans for a rosy future. But at a resentencing hearing, Judge Sullivan, saying, “Nothing new has been presented to me. A man was killed who did not deserve to die,” again confined him to jail, this time for a term of four to twelve years for manslaughter.
It was a crushing blow for Magliato, who seemed stunned and perplexed. But I thought of Nietzsche, who warned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” In the space of a few crucial moments on a late summer evening, Magliato had jeopardized all he had gained in his lifetime by becoming as reckless, as monstrous, if you will, as the man who was his victim.
DR. QUAALUDE
New York, New York
1979
IN THE SPRING OF 1977, Richard Macris, a nineteen-year-old student at New York University, became an assistant in the laboratory of Dr. John Buettner-Janusch, chairman of the Anthropology Department. For the young undergraduate, the appointment was a coup. To be singled out to work in the anthropology chairman’s lab meant that he had passed a tougher test than any written exam. Buettner-Janusch was famous for smiling on only the best and the brightest.
Macris began his work—centrifuging and analyzing blood samples—eagerly. Buettner-Janusch had made his name, some years earlier, by doing complex biological studies that had established relationships between the blood proteins of lemurs and those of the higher anthropoids, and Macris was under the impression that the experiments he was being asked to do were somehow related to the chairman’s interest in monkey-to-man blood factors.
Buettner-Janusch had come to NYU in 1973. His academic credentials were impeccable. He’d received a B.A., B.S., and M.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He’d taught at Yale for seven years and in that time written a highly regarded anthropology textbook, The Origins of Man. Then he’d moved to Duke University in North Carolina, where he’d gone on to do elegant research into the blood relationships among lemurs, apes, and man, research that answered key questions about evolution. By 1973, the forty-nine-year-old Buettner-Janusch was one of the best-known physical anthropologists not just in the United States but in the world, and he regularly received large research grants from the National Science Foundation. Indeed, he was so respected a scholar that NYU had to lure him away from Duke by promising him a new and lavish research facility, which cost the university $200,000.
Macris, a middle-class youth from Queens whose Greek Orthodox family had had to make sacrifices to send him to college, felt fortunate indeed throughout his first days in the costly facility. With lab experience, he would surely be able to get into graduate school, perhaps even win a good fellowship. But shortly after he began his work, he heard disturbing rumors. Some of the other lab assistants, boastful about their old-timer status and close relationships with BuettnerJanusch, hinted that B-J, as they fondly called him, wasn’t doing lemur research at all; he
was making illegal drugs—methaqualone and LSD. One day, one of the old-timers told Macris to wash his hands carefully because the material he was handling “could cause you to go crazy.”
Macris didn’t quite believe the rumors. Still, there were funny things about the lab. As time went on, he noticed that former students of the chairman’s, fellows who had long since graduated, were turning up in the lab. They arrived at odd hours, often at night, and held whispered conversations with B-J. Then, one day B-J asked him to come in on a Saturday, and when he got there, the chairman closed all the doors to the customarily unguarded facility and indicated that today they would be making anacetyl anthranilic acid, a precursor of LSD.
From that time forward, Macris began to wonder if the stories he’d heard could be true, and in early February 1979 he confronted B-J with his suspicions.
The chairman shrugged them off. “We’re making neurotoxins to be used with lemurs,” he said.
“Isn’t it available commercially?” Macris asked.
“Yes,” the chairman answered, “but the commercial product isn’t pure enough.”
Macris’s conscience started to bother him. Suppose the chairman was making illegal drugs. Suppose they weren’t for use with lab animals. Perhaps he ought to notify the school authorities. Troubled, he sought the counsel of another renowned NYU professor, Dr. Clifford Jolly, an anthropologist who worked in the lab next door.
Jolly listened to Macris’s suspicions, then warned him that he was making a weighty charge. If what he was suggesting was true, Buettner-Janusch was breaking the law and could get into serious trouble. But if the boy reported his suspicions and there was no truth to the charge, he himself would be in serious trouble. Jolly advised him to keep his anxieties to himself but to start keeping a notebook of all experiments being conducted in the lab. And, said Jolly, he himself would see what he could find out.
Professor Jolly, an Englishman, had been an admirer of Buettner-Janusch and had even served on the search committee that had brought him to NYU. He respected the chairman, but he too had had misgivings about him for some time. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, except that there was about the chairman a breath of the outrageous, an air of épater le bourgeoisie. And once B-J had said something peculiar to him. It was back in the winter of 1978, when the National Science Foundation had unexpectedly turned down his grant request. B-J had said to Jolly that he wasn’t worried about this rejection because there was a possibility of finding alternative funds for the lab. He might get money from private foundations—and other sources. When Jolly had thought about what these might be, unaccountably, he’d been scared. But he’d put the conversation out of his mind until the day Richard Macris came to him.
In the next few months, Jolly began acting like an amateur sleuth. At night, when the student assistants had all gone home, he snapped photographs of their equipment and sifted through notes in their wastebaskets. Every two weeks, he took samples from chemical flasks and vials in the lab and stored them in a bookcase in his home. One day he submitted these samples to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and soon afterward, the DEA, without knowing where or by whom the chemicals had been made, reported back that one sample was methaqualone—known as Quaalude—an illegal drug.
What was he to do? Professor Jolly got in touch with Richard Macris and the two went at once to John C. Sawhill, then NYU’s president, and told him what they’d discovered. Sawhill informed the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the following night, without a search warrant but with the authorization of NYU, DEA agents surreptitiously searched the anthropology lab, seizing various pieces of equipment and numerous chemicals.
The chemicals were analyzed and found to contain LSD, methaqualone, and synthetic cocaine, and almost immediately the government opened a full-scale but secret investigation of Buettner-Janusch. The detectives would be a handful of junior gumshoes—students who, like Macris, were working in the lab. Some were persuaded, and some volunteered, to monitor B-J’s correspondence, to listen in on his conversations, and even to wear hidden tape recorders on their bodies when they spoke with him.
At first Buettner-Janusch didn’t know he was being investigated. On the night of the search, Macris and Jolly had let the agents into the lab with a key, but the search party had, upon leaving, broken down the frame of the lab door in order to make their visit appear to be a burglary. The chairman had been merely irritated at the time. But quite quickly he began to suspect that the burglary hadn’t been haphazard, for six days later he remarked to Macris, “I’ve been denounced by someone. But who? Who?” And he said to a student named Danny Cornyetz, the director of the lab, “The only thing that’s missing is, who’s the goddamn informant?”
It would have been intolerable to him to suspect that his student assistants, the very people he had rewarded with his favors and power, could be disloyal. He was a man who insisted on loyalty, running his department in so authoritarian, so dictatorial a way that he even expected students who sought advancement from him to make his enemies theirs. And for the most part his students complied. “We were discouraged from taking courses with any of the professors of whom B-J disapproved,” one student explained to me. “And we accepted this, believing that if we wanted to study the subject matter any of these professors taught, and went ahead and registered for their classes despite the warnings, we wouldn’t get recommended for graduate school, or we might even get flunked out. Lots of us just went along with this. And it got so bad that one of the professors B-J didn’t like, a man who had a specially endowed chair in the department and ten thousand dollars’ worth of fellowship money to give away every year, couldn’t even find any student takers for his money.”
It was hardly the ideal academic atmosphere. But then B-J was hardly the typical academic.
Showy and sartorially splendid, he dyed his graying hair blond and dressed in expensive suits and custom-tailored shirts. He enjoyed the opera and ballet and went frequently to the Met. His spacious apartment on Washington Square was decorated with exquisite Navajo rugs and the finest American Indian pottery. His wife of many years, Vina Mallowitz, a biochemist, had died in 1977, but he had a wide circle of friends—not just scholars but playwrights and novelists and painters—and took great pleasure in entertaining them lavishly. His large parties were gala affairs, catered and served by uniformed butlers and maids. His small ones featured costly wines and gourmet fare that he himself cooked.
But if living well was one of his favorite pursuits, shocking people was one of his favorite pastimes. He’d been in jail, he used to tell colleagues. Then, after evoking wide-eyed surprise, he’d explain that it had been because he had been a conscientious objector during World War II. But, inconsistently, he’d also claim on occasion that he’d been a Nazi hunter in his youth and explain—somewhat anticlimactically—that before the war, his father had sent him on a bicycle trip to Europe which was in fact a secret mission to kill Germans. Flamboyance was his stock in trade, self-dramatization his principal currency.
Part of his fondness for calling attention to himself took the form of mocking or painfully taunting others. When NYU, under pressure from the women’s movement, printed departmental memo forms that called for the signature of a “chairperson” rather than a “chairman,” Buettner-Janusch bought a stamp and inked onto each of his memos: “Please change this form! Stop defiling the English language with the vulgar neologism which I have corrected above.” When he wanted to indicate to a particular professor that he had no respect for his work, he walked into the man’s office and, insultingly, removed his typewriter. He was explosive with his staff during faculty meetings, and he frequently assailed his teachers’ academic credentials, calling them into question, not just in front of other teachers, but even in front of students. “He actually hounded me from the department,” said one professor, who left NYU and went to the University of Maryland. “He not only humiliated me in the presence of students but excluded me from departmental meetings.” Two other
professors at NYU said that after they had had certain policy differences with him, the chairman tried to curtail their responsibilities and to prevent them from having any voice in departmental decisions. He was, said a vice president of Duke University, “a fine scientist but an iconoclast of the first order, who made a lot of people mad by his statements and ultimata.”
Certainly, he did make a lot of people angry. Perhaps that was why rumors of scandal trailed him wherever he went. Some colleagues said he’d plagiarized a fellow student’s work when he was at the University of Michigan. (The university refused to discuss the matter.) Others said he’d mishandled the food and shelter money of an anthropological expedition he’d led while at the University of Chicago. (The charge was never pursued.) Still others said he’d never really done serious research, that the studies for which he’d become famous at Duke had actually been performed by his wife, an accomplished scientist herself.
Yet despite the rumors and his own abrasiveness, Buettner-Janusch led a charmed life in academic circles, every year garnering more and more fame and more and more research grants. But in 1977 his luck changed. That year, the National Science Foundation ceased funding him. He claimed the rejection was personal, not intellectual. Someone at NSF had it in for him, he said. But Dr. Nancie Gonzalez, an NSF program director for anthropology at the time, said, “NSF turns people down for one reason and one reason only—their work lacks scientific merit. And before such a decision is made, their proposals and their lab work are always meticulously scrutinized.” Buettner-Janusch’s laboratory had been visited by an NSF team; his proposals had been studied, and he had been abandoned.