by Linda Wolfe
But the phone had gone dead. Sol had hung up.
“Remember the Silverman case?” Victor Ashrafi, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey, said on the phone later that day to his boss, Michael Chertoff, who was home with the flu.
“Yeah,” Chertoff snuffled.
“You’ll never believe who the caller is.”
“Who?”
“Sol Wachtler.”
Chertoff was incredulous. “Victor, you’re kidding me!”
“No,” Ashrafi said. “The FBI’s got evidence. They’ll lay it out for you when you come in. There’s a call from his car. There are calls from places he could easily have been.”
Chertoff grimaced. Could have been! Garbage. Hanging up, he phoned Jere Doyle, the acting head of New Jersey’s FBI. “Jere,” he expostulated, “if you traced the call back to Chief Justice Rehnquist, it couldn’t be more ridiculous.”
Judge Wachtler had been asked to address a judicial conference in Reno, and on Thursday, October 8, he flew from his home in New York to Nevada. He checked into Harrah’s Hotel and Casino and spent the evening catching up with friends he hadn’t seen for a while. In the morning, before going to one of the conference’s panels, he found a pay phone in an isolated corridor of the hotel and, attaching his voice disguiser to the phone, once again called Joy. “You’re not tracing this call?” he asked her at the start of the conversation. “You’re not going to trace this call, are you?”
Joy said no, and he decided to accept her denial. “All right,” he said. “You deserve an answer to your question about how you can trust me—can you hear me now?”
“Yes, I can. Just talk slowly.”
“I was hired a year ago. To shake you down. I thought the fat pig who hired me was from New Jersey.”
“The what? The who?” Joy interrupted him.
“The fat pig. A fat pig hired me.”
“A fat pig?”
“Yes, hired me, and I thought she was from New Jersey.”
“Right,” Joy said. “Did she give you a name?”
“I know her name, but I’m not giving it to you,” Sol said. “She gave me a lot of shit about toxic waste and your boyfriend.”
“Right.”
“And she paid me to find out the rest, and I started calling you a year ago to track you.”
“Talk more slowly,” Joy demanded, in order to keep him on the phone. “It’s hard for me to understand. I don’t want to make you impatient. I’m just trying to understand you and to hear you.”
Sol found talking to her slow going. She asked him to speak more slowly or more loudly after virtually every sentence he uttered. He had to struggle to convey what he wanted to say. But after a while he managed, telling her about his compromising pictures and tapes. “Now, when you see and hear what I got,” he said, “it’s gonna blow your mind.”
“Why is it going to blow my mind?”
“Because you know you thought I was a big fuckin’ joke. You don’t know shit. You understand me? You don’t know shit.”
On her end of the phone, Joy was shaking. But she tried to keep her voice steady and, remembering that the FBI had told her to try to get her caller to be specific about any harm he planned to inflict on her or her fourteen-year-old daughter, Jessica, led the conversation to the subject of menace. “Why are you threatening my child?” she asked.
Sol wasn’t ready for the question. He wanted to tell her the sort of man David Purdy was. “Now, listen to me,” he directed her. “I got diabetes, all right. I lost one kidney and I’m losing another one. That’s why you didn’t hear from me, and that’s why I didn’t visit Jessica this summer—you understand that? Yeah. Now, listen to me. I’m wearing a diaper.”
“You’re what?” Joy said. “You’re wearing what?”
Sol made her be still and went on limning Purdy, his imaginary private eye from Texas, making him sound like a grotesque straight out of the fantasies of movie director David Lynch. “I’m wearing a diaper now. I’ve lost my teeth. I weigh over two hundred pounds.” Then, at last, he told her what he wanted. “I want only twenty thousand dollars. I’m not asking for a hell of a lot from you.”
“And what will you do to me, what will you do to me and my child, if I don’t give it to you?” Joy persisted dutifully.
“If you don’t give me, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do,” he answered. “The first thing I’m gonna do is, Jessica is going to spend Thanksgiving with me. Okay? That’s only one thing I’m going to do to you. Number two, what I’m going to do to you is, I’m going to take the material that I have and I’m gonna send it to people that—I’m gonna send it all over creation. You understand that? You won’t be able to walk down the street, lady. You understand?”
Joy had been so well coached that she didn’t express any emotion when she heard “Purdy” threaten her with exposure. She just asked again what specifically he had in mind doing to her child.
But Sol wouldn’t answer that question. “I’m sending you instructions out now,” he said, changing the subject. “November seventh is the date. You understand that? Now, listen. I’m a desperate man. I told your doorman I was going to get new teeth. I can’t get new teeth because my gums are—I can hardly walk now. I’m dying. I’m dying.”
Joy kept on trying to find out just what he was planning to do if she didn’t comply. “I wanna know what you are threatening me with my child,” she said.
Sol turned ugly. “Why don’t you fucking find out, lady? Why don’t you just fucking find out? Why don’t you just not pay me, and see what goddamn happens?”
“To whom?” Joy, still following her instructions, asked.
But once again, Sol terminated their conversation. He hung up the phone and began circulating among the judges and lawyers who were attending the conference. He was, some of them would later remember, affable, friendly, charming.
“There’s been another call,” Victor Ashrafi said to Michael Chertoff the next day. “It was from Reno.”
“Where’s Wachtler?” Chertoff asked.
“In Reno. Giving a speech.”
“Anyone from his staff go out there with him?” Chertoff asked.
Ashrafi shook his head.
“It still could be someone trying to set him up,” Chertoff said. But he knew that if asked to put money down on who was calling Joy, he’d have to bet Wachtler.
He and Victor, he decided, had best meet with James Esposito, the new head of New Jersey’s FBI. And with Doyle too. And Brzezinski and Fleming and their supervisor, Garey Chin. They’d all better put their heads together and decide what they were going to do about arresting the chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York.
That same day, Sol Wachtler headed home from Reno on a flight that required changing planes in Denver. When he boarded his plane, he had with him a small, stamped packet. In it were instructions about when and where Joy was to drop off the twenty thousand dollars “Purdy” wanted from her and a manila envelope in which she was to place the money.
When he landed in Denver, he walked to a gate where there was a flight departing for San Antonio. At the gate was a stewardess who would be assisting on the flight. “Would you mind mailing this for me from San Antonio?” he asked her. “It’s a gift for a friend. A handkerchief.” He was ingratiating, seductive. He wanted, he explained, to have the woman to whom he was sending the gift think he’d purchased it in San Antonio. He’d promised to send her something from there.
The stewardess was accommodating. She took the packet, and when she got to San Antonio, she mailed it for him.
She had no idea that inside it was a letter that said,
Even my assistant, a two bit hore [sic] from Queens, knew she was being recorded last Sunday. Don’t try that on me or all bets are off.
This is the deal—if you do anything to queer it you will regret it for the rest of your life. Tell the police or put your keystone P.I.’s on it and you’ll be sorry. They may
be good at deactivating bugs but they’ll not outsmart me in this operation. And you can’t take a chance that you will beat me. You will lose.
There is a laundry shop called Shanley located at 184 East 84th between Park and Lexington Avenues. Right next door is a cellar entrance. Have your doorman Ramón put the manila envelope which I am enclosing in that cellar entrance stairway. The envelope is to contain $20,000 (twenty thousand in used 100’s and 50’s).
One month later, on the morning of November 7, 1992, Joan Wachtler, blond, slim, and unabatedly beautiful, despite her sixty years, went to Saks Fifth Avenue to pick up some clothes she had ordered. She’d chosen a variety of items, dresses and skirts and tops, but everything was black—she was partial to black because it set off her pale complexion becomingly—and each of the knitted tops could be worn with any of the knitted skirts, some short, some long. She’d put a lot of thought into these purchases, choosing items that not only were interchangeable but would travel well, because this was a terribly special wardrobe. A campaign wardrobe. Her husband, Sol, was gearing up to run for governor in the 1994 election and had asked her to accompany him to the requisite statewide public appearances. She didn’t really want him to run—had, in fact, begged him not to run—but he’d had his heart set on it, and at last she’d given in and said she’d do as he asked.
Sol didn’t know about the clothes yet. When he came home this afternoon, she was going to surprise him by showing him her purchases and telling him they were her gift to him, the embodiment of her decision to participate in his campaign. But she was going to tell him, too, that if he won and moved up to the state capital in Albany, she wasn’t going to leave Long Island, where they lived. She had a job, children and grandchildren, a home, a life of her own, here on the Island.
She heard from him at about one in the afternoon. “Want me to bring some bagels?” he asked, calling her on his car phone. She told him yes, and he said he’d pick them up and be home around two.
Two o’clock came and went, and she was beginning to worry a little about why Sol wasn’t home yet, when the phone rang again. But it wasn’t Sol. It was some man whose voice she didn’t recognize. He didn’t know hers, either. “Are you Mrs. Wachtler?” he asked.
She said yes, and he said, “This is the FBI.”
She thought it was one of those nuisance phone calls, someone trying to scare her or a kid playing a puerile joke. “Who are you?” she said sternly, hoping to challenge the caller out of his game. But the man on the phone went on insisting he was with the FBI. Unsure, and wanting to check, she said, “Give me your number. I’ll call you back.”
He gave her the number, and she dialed it, and it was the FBI, and this time when the agent got on the phone, he said, “Mrs. Wachtler? We’ve arrested your husband.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. She’d just spoken to Sol. Surely he would be walking in the door with a bagful of fragrant, freshly baked bagels any moment now. Yet something about the man’s tone made her realize that what he was saying was authentic. “Where is my husband?” she demanded. “I want to talk to him.”
“You can’t,” the man from the FBI said. “He’s allowed one call, and he’s already made it. To your son-in-law.”
She had three sons-in-law, but she knew he must mean her eldest daughter’s husband. He was a New York lawyer. “Why have you arrested him?” she asked.
“For extortion. You can speak to him in a while from now.”
Suddenly, it was as if everything Joan knew and had ever known had scattered and skittered out of her mind. She couldn’t even recall what the word extortion meant. Dazed, she put down the phone and tried to remember, and then she ran for her dictionary. There it was: “Extortion. Illegal use of one’s official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage.”
That can’t have anything to do with Sol, she thought. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that Sol is as honest and honorable as the day is long.
Denying to herself that what the man from the FBI had said could contain even a kernel of truth, she waited by the phone to hear from her husband or her son-in-law about what she was sure must be a bizarre mistake.
But by evening she knew there had been no mistake. Sol had indeed written an extortion letter—an ugly, threatening letter filled with filthy language of the kind she’d never heard him speak and demanding twenty thousand dollars from its recipient in exchange for compromising photographs and tapes. Worse, the recipient of the letter was a woman who’d broken off an affair with her husband, an affair that had gone on for four-and-a-half years. Behind her back.
Not only that, she knew the woman. It was her cousin. Joy Silverman.
Joan Wachtler was shocked and puzzled by what she learned on that dismal November day. And so was everyone else when news of Chief Judge Wachtler’s arrest was broadcast later that night. He had the reputation of being an amiable, dignified, effective, and charismatic man. He also had the reputation of being immensely powerful, one of the most prominent men in the United States.
Why had such a man done the deeds Wachtler was said to have done, people everywhere wondered. Had he been at the pinnacle of judicial power for so long that he had come to consider himself above the law? Or had he been sick, the victim of a plaguing mental illness. And who was the woman who had prompted his tumble from grace? What was it about her that had made him lead a double life, deceive wife, friends, and family, and then turn criminal?
But above all, his arrest sparked a particularly dreadful question: If this man could commit the crimes of which he was accused, then how could one ever again trust one’s judgment of one’s fellows, how could one ever know what horrors might erupt from within them.
The story that follows, a tale of the members of a single family—the real-estate dynasty into which Sol Wachtler married—probes behind the proliferation of headlines and partial information sparked by his arrest in order to answer those perplexing questions.
PART 1
A Family and a Fortune
CHAPTER 1
SOL WACHTLER WAS BORN IN BROOKLYN IN 1930 AND LIVED for the first years of his life in a tiny apartment above a cleaning store on a bustling shopping street. He adored his mother, Faye, a warm and indulgent immigrant from Russia. About his father, an American-born traveling salesman who made his living auctioning off the estates of the dead or the failed, his feelings were more complicated. Philip Wachtler was a quiet, strict man with a highly developed sense of right and wrong, and although Sol knew he was a concerned father, he found him cold and unaffectionate.
Times were hard for the Wachtlers in those Depression days, as they were for many Americans. Philip, Faye, and the children had to share their little apartment with an aunt in order to make the rent. But in 1938 Philip began to earn some decent money and was able to move his wife and two sons—Sol and his older brother, Morty—to the South, where he was increasingly doing his business.
They lived in a number of small towns in Georgia and the Carolinas and finally settled down in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Philip opened a small jewelry store and the children went to public schools.
When the war came, the whole family—except for Sol—started working in the store. There was an Army camp nearby, and soldiers from the camp crowded into the shop all day long to buy trinkets for their sweethearts back home. But although he could have used an extra hand, Philip had other plans for his youngest son. He wanted Sol to stay home and study so he could go to college. So he could be the first person in the family to go to college.
The boy had proved himself to be a go-getter. When he was twelve, he’d talked the local radio station into letting him emcee an afternoon show, a comedy and variety hour. When he was thirteen, he’d started a little mimeographed newspaper, “The Eternal Light,” distributing it among the hundred or so Jewish families that lived in town. Philip was certain that one day Sol would make the family uncommonly proud, and told him repeatedly, “You’re going to be the professional man
in the family. So stay away from the store, and do your homework.”
Sol was pained by his father’s edict. It was lonely, coming home to an empty house. Taking meals by himself. “Let me work in the store like Morty,” he begged Philip one day. “I could help out. Wrap packages.” But Philip was adamant. “Stay away from the store,” he insisted. “I don’t want you tainted by it. By business.”
Sol did as he was told, and when he was in his junior year of high school, Philip, who like many businessmen had grown prosperous during the war, decided to bankroll him to a prep-school education, or at least the last part of one, so that he could go, not just to college, but to a good college.
He sent him to Milford, a Connecticut school that was reputed to have an excellent record of getting its students into Yale.
Sol arrived at Milford in the winter of 1946. He was a handsome adolescent. His nose was a tad too big, but his smile was ready and ample, and his eyes a remarkable crystalline blue. He was popular—students and teachers alike enjoyed his company. And he was immensely energetic. He flung himself into the life of the school, joining the public speaking club, the music appreciation society, the school newspaper, the varsity basketball team.
In the summer he went home to St. Petersburg and over the vacation got his nose bobbed. In the fall, he returned to school handsomer than ever and reaped the rewards of his initial popularity, getting elected president of the senior class. By the spring semester, his final one, he’d become such a big man on campus that even though he’d been at Milford only a year and a half, the school decided that, come graduation, they’d give him their principal award, the Wilson Cup, an annual prize awarded to the student who contributed most “to the life and spirit of the school.”
He was proud when he heard he would be receiving the award. But there’d been a big disappointment too. Yale had turned him down. The prestigious university had been harder than ever to get into that year, what with all the veterans getting preference, and his grades hadn’t been all that exceptional.