The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  She was on to him, he knew. On to the fact that he had called her and hung up. Maybe even on to the fact that he had sent her obscene cards. But she couldn’t think he was Purdy. She couldn’t think a man like him would go to the lengths of impersonating a private eye. Sure that he was right, he donned his cowboy outfit, stuffed cloth beneath his shirt to increase his girth, and set out for her building. There, he shuffled into her lobby and handed the doorman a letter. And because he wanted to be certain he’d be remembered, he chatted awhile with the doorman, telling him to be sure to tell Mrs. Silverman that he was going to be getting his teeth fixed soon.

  The letter he left was filled with veiled threats. “After making some calls,” it said,

  I found out that you and the boyfriend were on Long Island—(like you said to me on the phone—tsk, tsk, tsk). I had stopped by 145 East 81st [David Samson’s residence] and they had let me in long enough to install some of my new equipment in 4A (of course, 1st I had to identify myself, but they were very cooperative). Nice digs—and I was pleased to see that you have already moved some of your stuff in. My bugs are smaller than a gnat’s ass so they won’t get in your way.

  I’m sorry I wasn’t in town last week to help you greet Jessica. I had some work to do in Houston (I thought for sure you would be there [for the Republican convention], but I guess your place was up here).

  I’m on my way back, but I should be back in the fall. I’ll tell you then how much it will cost you to get me out of your life.

  Just how crazy was Sol Wachtler? Joy must have wondered when she received this last communication from Purdy. Could he possibly have in mind doing some harm to her daughter? She hadn’t, despite her threats earlier in the summer, gone to the FBI. No doubt she’d been advised by various of her wired and politically savvy friends to wait before calling in the bureau until Sol made a specific threat, because it would be easier to nail him, to stop him once and for all, once he did. But now the situation was different. “Purdy” was saying he was coming back. Should she call the FBI? Or go on waiting for a specific threat? She decided to wait. But she advised all her friends not to speak to Sol under any circumstances. She no longer wanted him scared off. She wanted him caught.

  It didn’t take Sol long to realize that Joy had told her friends to cut him off. One day soon after he’d dressed as Purdy and gone to Joy’s building, he tried to reach Paola, and she, just like Eleanor Sloan, didn’t return his calls. But he was so hell-bent on scaring Joy that Paola’s distancing herself from him did not make him rethink his plan, did not cause him to consider that Joy did think he was Purdy. In fact, on September 12, he once again dressed as the private eye and once again delivered a letter to her doorman.

  “I was back in town this weekend,” this new letter said,

  and visited the apartment where you and your boyfriend shack up (more difficult to get in this time—did you tell them about me?). I replaced one of the bugs. Either it wasn’t working or you people screw very quietly.

  I left your nightgown on the blue bedspread just to let you know I was there. I also took a small suveneer [sic] which you will hardly miss (consider it a down payment for all my trouble).

  I’ll pick Jessica up at school in a month or so when I’m back in town. Don’t worry, by that time—like I told your doorman—I’ll have my new teeth in. I wouldn’t think about embarrassing her—not nearly as much as the 4 pictures of you getting it in Water Mill would embarrass you (although some of your friends—and I know who they are, would love to see them). I have the negatives and can make an unlimited amount of prints.

  If you are ready to talk business—and you better be—put a notice in the Oct. 1 out of state edition of the NEW York Times. It should read:

  LOST Texas Bulldog, answers to name David.

  The ad should be plased [sic] in the LOST AND FOUND Section. I will contact you at the listed number and we can talk terms. Don’t disappoint me or you’ll be very sorry.

  “LOST Texas Bulldog, answers to name David.” When Joy read the letter directing her to take an ad in the Times, she knew it was what she’d been waiting for. A true blackmail letter. She consulted with her various advisers, and a week after receiving the letter, she traveled down to Washington and saw William Sessions at the FBI.

  “I heard from a fellow,” Sol would one day say, “that Sessions got the call [to see her] from Bush.”

  CHAPTER 10

  CARRIE BRZEZINSKI, SPECIAL AGENT OF THE FBI’S NEWARK, New Jersey, office, didn’t think she was going to like Joy Silverman the day she and her partner, Bill Fleming, were assigned to meet her and look over those ominous letters and cards she’d been receiving. It was a Friday, the day after Joy went to Washington to speak with William Sessions, who had sent the case to Brzezinski’s office because many of the letters Joy had received had been postmarked from New Jersey. “My expectation,” Brzezinski remembered, “was someone—well, all I knew was she lived on Park Avenue, and you have your expectations, and mine was, she’s going to be someone hard to deal with, or who’ll demand a lot.” So Brzezinski, who hailed from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and hadn’t lived long in the metropolitan area, wasn’t all that eager when she went down to the lobby of the FBI building to get Joy and bring her upstairs to the office. Then, the first thing that happened was that she forgot Joy’s last name. “I felt like an idiot! But I remembered her first name, so I said, ‘Joy?’ like I knew her, and she goes, ‘Yeah.’ She was very nice. She wasn’t turned off by it. She wasn’t, you know, uppity about it.”

  They went up to the office, and Brzezinski introduced Joy to her partner. Joy brought out the documents and the three of them looked them over and talked. “Joy was very scared,” Brzezinski noticed. “And that showed. She broke down and she was crying.”

  “Who do you think is doing this?” her partner Fleming asked. “Is there anybody who might be angry with you for any reason?”

  Joy told them about Sol, but Brzezinski and Fleming were reluctant to focus solely on him.

  It could be Wachtler, Brzezinski thought. Or it could be someone trying to set him up. Or then again, it could be someone else. She’s going through a divorce. It could be the husband. She’s got a boyfriend. It could be the ex-wife. She’s got doormen at her building. You never know what doormen might be involved in. Plus she’s a wealthy woman. She’s got a staff of people who aren’t so wealthy. Did any of them have a grudge against her?

  Getting Joy to tell her and Fleming about anyone and everyone who might have reason to harass her, she drew up what the FBI calls a “universe” of suspects. Then, she and Fleming sent the cards and letters Joy had brought in with her down to the FBI’s Washington headquarters so that the handwriting could be analyzed, the paper examined for fingerprints, and the typing compared with that on other typewritten threats and extortion notes in the bureau’s capacious files. They also asked the FBI’s Houston office to check on whether there was a private investigator anywhere in Texas with the name David Purdy.

  On Monday, the two agents met with Michael Chertoff, the United States attorney for the District of New Jersey. Chertoff, a gaunt and balding man who looked far older than his thirty-nine years, was known for his brilliance, tenacity, and fierce intensity. He could get so focused on a case that, as he himself once admitted, “You could set a bomb off in the courtroom and I might not know it.”

  Chertoff already had a glancing familiarity with the fact that Joy was receiving extortion threats. He had been supposed to try Arthur Seale, who had just pled guilty to kidnapping and killing Sidney Reso, and back in the summer, when his office had received Sol’s anonymous letter warning that the Seales were scheming to blackmail David Samson and Joy Silverman, Chertoff had questioned Seale’s wife, Irene, about the allegation. But she had said she knew nothing about it, and the matter had been put on a back burner.

  Today, looking over the cards and letters Joy had received, Chertoff once again thought about Seale. Joy’s cards and letters weren’t so differen
t from the kinds of notes Seale had written. Those, just like these, were intricate and protracted. And Seale, just like this Purdy character who was claiming to be a security expert, had boasted of his surveillance ability. More, Seale had demanded that Exxon get a special telephone number and put it in a newspaper ad headlined “Florida Cattle Ranch.” And here was Purdy demanding Joy get a special telephone number and place an ad under the not altogether dissimilar heading “LOST Texas Bulldog.” Was it possible, Chertoff wondered, that Seale was running the operation against Joy from jail, and that he’d never told his wife about it? Or was it a better bet to guess that Joy’s extortionist wasn’t Seale, but someone with a great familiarity with Seale’s methods?

  Well, they’d know soon enough, Chertoff decided. Turning to his deputy, Victor Ashrafi, he said, “Let’s take the ad.”

  “Right,” Ashrafi said. “We’ll get a dedicated phone line, and we’ll trap and trace the calls.”

  Brzezinski and Fleming had already begun following up on some of the leads they’d gotten from the cards and letters. They’d spoken briefly on the telephone to David Samson and learned that his wife, Elaine, had received cards and phone calls from a man purporting to be David Purdy. They’d driven out to Short Hills, interviewed Elaine, and taken away with them the cards she’d received. They’d gone to Linden to the Church of the Holy Family and spoken with Father German. Now they drove into Manhattan and talked to Joy’s doorman and the doorman at David Samson’s apartment building to see if they could get a description of David Purdy. Both doormen remembered him well. He was a fat man, they said. An older guy, wearing western regalia. And there was something funny about his mouth or his teeth.

  When they got back to their office, there was word from Houston. Yes, there was a licensed private investigator named Purdy.

  Fleming was excited, sure they’d be able to crack the case right away. He got on the phone with Houston at once. “What does Purdy look like?” he asked his counterpart there.

  “He’s a young guy,” the Houston agent said.

  “How young?”

  “In his twenties.”

  So the Texas Purdy wasn’t their man. But who was?

  “LOST Texas Bulldog. Answers to name David. Please call 212-555-2169,” said the ad that the Newark FBI placed in the Lost and Found section of the out-of-state edition of The New York Times on September 30. From that day on, Brzezinski and Fleming began “sitting on the location,” spending their time almost solely in Joy’s apartment. Their job was to watch over her and to coach her about what to say if someone called the number listed in the ad. They wanted certain things from that conversation. They wanted her to keep the caller on the phone as long as possible. They wanted her to tell the caller she didn’t understand him, so that he’d repeat himself. And they wanted her to get him to say exactly what was going to happen to her if she didn’t pay him the money. Was he going to hurt her? Take her daughter? “We wanted to get his threats very specifically on the tape,” Fleming remembered, “so that there wouldn’t be any room for interpretation later on.”

  Joy listened to the instructions carefully and promised to stay cool, so that she wouldn’t frighten off the caller by becoming tearful or angry.

  The first call came on Saturday, October 3. The caller hung up, but the court-ordered trap-and-trace device that the FBI had installed in Joy’s apartment tracked the number instantly. It was a number assigned to Sol Wachtler’s car phone.

  Still, Brzezinski and Fleming, even after learning the results of the trace, weren’t sure the caller was Sol. It could be someone who had access to his car, they speculated. It could be a driver. An employee.

  They continued to tutor Joy. “You gotta get him to talk to you,” they said. “And keep him on the line.”

  Sol called again on Sunday, October 4. This time, he dialed Joy from a pay phone in a Laundromat in Glen Oaks, New York, not far from his Manhasset home, and, using a voice-disguising device he’d bought at a spying-equipment shop, said he was calling on behalf of David Purdy, who’d be phoning himself from out of town next week.

  Joy had learned her lessons well. “Pardon me?” she asked politely, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “Purdy’ll be calling you collect from out of town next week,” Sol reiterated.

  Joy tried her luck again. “You’ll have to repeat that,” she said. “I can’t understand you.”

  Sol seemed to grasp that the call was being taped. “I know you’re recording this,” he said. But he continued to repeat that Purdy would be calling next week, and then he brazened ahead, “The price is twenty thousand dollars.”

  Sol used the voice disguiser again on Monday, October 5; Wednesday, October 7; and Friday, October 9. That was the day he called Joy while attending a judicial conference in Reno, made the bizarre claim “I’m wearing a diaper,” and responded to Joy’s question about what he was threatening to do to her daughter with, “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?”

  In New York, a few days after that call had been traced, Chertoff sat down with Ashrafi and the FBI people to discuss what to do next. “This chief judge is either crazy or criminal,” he said. “We can’t have him running the court system of New York.”

  “We could go to him privately,” someone suggested. “Confront him with the evidence. Make him resign.”

  Chertoff was skeptical. “We don’t have a locked case,” he said. “What do we do if we go to Wachtler and he says, ‘This is bullshit. This is ridiculous. A setup.’ I can see it now. He kicks us out of his office, and we’re left sitting around with our knowledge. That’s not an acceptable way to leave things.”

  “Let’s arrest him,” someone else suggested. Chertoff didn’t want that, either. The evidence so far was all circumstantial. If they went to court, they’d probably lose. “We need more,” he said. “We need an overwhelming case. Not just calls, but proof that it’s him making the calls. Solid observation or, better yet, a fingerprint.”

  Esposito agreed. He’d have his agents tail Wachtler, he said. “But in a loose way,” he cautioned. “We don’t want to scare him off.”

  Chertoff nodded. “But we don’t arrest him right when we see him making a call,” he warned. “Because you never know until later if the recording is working properly. Or if maybe he’s just saying something innocuous. We have to have gotten the recording and listened to it. And we have to have a fingerprint. Only after we’ve got all that, would I agree to arrest him.”

  Sol was up in Albany, where increasingly he was behaving in a grandiose and scattered fashion. His clerks noticed that he barely listened to them when they tried to talk to him about complex issues, that he refused to make changes in documents once they’d written a draft, and that he no longer called them together for the traditional evening briefings at which they customarily prepared him for the next day’s arguments. One day, his clerks insisted on a briefing. Sol said he couldn’t be bothered, because he had to have a haircut. Then he thought better of what he’d said and backtracked. “Okay,” he told them, “if you want to brief me, come with me.” The clerks piled into his car, and talked to him as he sped through traffic and then raced on foot through a mall to reach his barbershop.

  He was hasty and distracted with family members too, so much so that his daughters found themselves competing for an iota of his attention.

  “How long were you on the phone with Daddy?” Lauren asked one of her sisters one day.

  “Twenty seconds,” her sister answered. “How about you?”

  “Twenty-one!”

  I won this little bout of sibling rivalry, Lauren comforted herself. But it’s little consolation, considering all the things I wanted to discuss with Daddy.

  After that, she began writing down the matters she wanted to talk to her father about, so that she’d be sure to get them all in before he said, “Okay, gotta go.”

  Sol wasn’t f
renzied when he was on the bench. On October 22, he heard his last case of the early autumn session of the court of appeals, a case involving environmental issues. “The legislature wants something done, but you say that, because there’s no single municipality or agency or group to do it, it shouldn’t be done?” he said to a lawyer opposing environmental restrictions. “Why doesn’t the county itself undertake [setting policy]?” he said to a lawyer in favor of the restrictions. “That would be a magnificent gesture.”

  Mike Trainor, one of Sol’s clerks, was present in the courtroom. Sol’s asking good questions, he noticed. Running things smoothly. Just like he always does.

  Brzezinski and Fleming were still spending most of their time in Joy’s apartment. There had been no further communications from “Purdy,” no opportunity to trace a call and send agents to try to get a fingerprint from the phone, or to actually observe who was making the call. But on October 27, Sol decided to call Joy again.

  He was at the Harmonie Club that night, where he and Matt Crosson had called a meeting of prominent civic leaders to catch them up on developments in the state’s judicial system over the past year. Sol filled the assembled guests in about the court system in general and about his now-resolved lawsuit against Cuomo. But he kept scrambling dates and statistical information.

  “You screwed it up to a fare-thee-well,” Crosson said to him when the meeting was over and the two of them had settled down in the club’s sedate dining room to have a drink and dinner together.

  “I did?”

  “Yeah,” Crosson said. But the chief seemed distracted and restless, so Crosson didn’t dwell on his mistakes. He talked to him instead about the upcoming presidential election, and when he had finished eating, said good-bye and left the club.