The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  As soon as he was gone, Sol went into a lobby phone booth and dialed Joy’s number.

  “Is Mrs. Silverman there, please?” he said to a maid who answered the phone.

  “Who’s calling, please?” she inquired.

  “This is David. Is she there?”

  “What David?”

  “David,” was all he’d tell her. “Is she there? Where is she?”

  “Let me see,” the maid said. “David Baker?”

  “Where is she?” he demanded.

  “She went out.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Frustrated, he said good-bye and hung up. But he wanted to find Joy badly, and early the next morning he called David Samson, looking for her.

  “Is Joy Silverman there?” he asked, speaking to Samson from a phone booth at the Long Island Jewish Hospital.

  Samson said nothing.

  “Put Joy Silverman on the phone!”

  Again, Samson said nothing.

  “Can you hear me?” Sol asked.

  But when Samson again made no reply, he said, “That’s all,” and hung up.

  For a few hours, he put Joy out of his mind. He drove into the city, where he was scheduled to be the moderator for a lunchtime seminar on mediation at the headquarters of the New York County Lawyers Association. When he walked in, he spotted his old friend and onetime competitor for the chief judgeship, Milton Mollen. “Do you think I should take the mike and go down into the audience, Phil Donahue style?” he asked Mollen.

  “By all means, do it,” Mollen said. “The audience will love it.”

  Sol did, handling the discussion in what was, Mollen would later recall, “his usual warm and witty way.”

  But that night, he again tried to reach Joy, dialing her from a pay phone outside a Boy Scout camp in a countrified area of Roslyn, New York, eight-tenths of a mile from his home. This time, she was home.

  “Are we all set for November seventh?” he asked as soon as she answered.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  “Are we all set for November seventh?”

  “Well, I don’t understand one thing,” she challenged him, attempting to stretch out their conversation so that he’d stay on the phone. “How do I know that this is all going to be over on November seventh. You haven’t left me any package. You expect me to just leave twenty thousand dollars without getting something back?”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re getting back, lady,” he said. “If you don’t do it, if you fuck me up at all, I promise you it will cost you two hundred thousand dollars to get your daughter back. How does that suit ya?”

  Joy tried to keep him on the phone, but he had hung up.

  Joy was jumpy after this call. Brzezinski and Fleming had already gone home to New Jersey for the night, but she wanted to speak to them, wanted to let them know about this latest, more substantial threat. She dialed Brzezinski at her apartment. “I got another call,” she said.

  “What’d he say?”

  Joy summarized the conversation, and as soon as she was done, Brzezinski leaped into activity. She called the FBI’s contact person at the telephone company to find out where the call had come from, learned it was Roslyn, New York, and telephoned Fleming.

  He wanted to go out there. “Let’s take the phone,” he said. “Let’s get out as fast as we can and take it.”

  “What if we do and he comes by and notices it’s missing?” Brzezinski asked. “What if it tips him off?”

  “He won’t come back. He’s never used the same phone twice.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Yeah, but if we hit a home run, if we get his prints, we’ll put this thing over the top.”

  They decided to go. And a few minutes later, Brzezinski picked up Fleming in her white Mustang. It was late, around eleven P.M., but there was still a lot of traffic on the roads. “Damn,” Fleming said. “By the time we get there, who knows if the prints will be recoverable.”

  “Yeah,” Brzezinski said. “Dozens of people could have used that phone booth after our guy did.”

  They worried about it the whole time they were driving, but when, after nearly two hours, they reached Roslyn and arrived at the location of the phone booth, they relaxed. The booth was alongside a road, but it was on a dark corner, with nothing but trees and bushes around it. “Not many people would want to make a call from a spot like this,” Fleming said.

  “Not at night,” Brzezinski said.

  Unless they’re nuts, Fleming thought. Or up to no good.

  He slipped out of the car and into the phone booth. Brzezinski stood guard. “It’s okay. It’s okay now,” she whispered when a stream of cars had sped by and the road was dark once again. He pulled out his crime-scene kit, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, grabbed a pair of bolt cutters, and snipped the telephone cord.

  The handset swung free.

  Stuffing it into a plastic evidence bag, Fleming hurried back to the car, and he and Brzezinski drove to FBI headquarters in Newark.

  “I’d like to make an appointment,” Sol said over a different phone a few days later—it was just before Halloween—to the receptionist at a beauty salon. The salon was a few doors away from the laundry shop at which he’d directed Joy to leave him twenty thousand dollars on November 7. “My name is Samson. David Samson,” he went on. “But I can’t make the appointment now.” Then he asked the woman with whom he was speaking what her name was.

  “Yesim Oklu,” she said.

  He promised her he’d call back soon for his appointment.

  “Wachtler used that phone outside the Boy Scout camp,” an expert from the latent-fingerprint section of the FBI’s Washington headquarters notified the Newark office several days after Sol called the beauty salon. “His print was on it.” The handset Fleming and Brzezinski had retrieved had been sent from Newark to Washington, where the identification division had used laser equipment to lift off every fingerprint and then matched them against a set of Sol’s prints that had been taken years before, when he had joined the Army.

  The FBI had the two things Chertoff had said he wanted—a clear recording of a specific extortion threat from Wachtler, and proof that he’d been in the phone booth from which the threat had been issued.

  But now, Chertoff changed his mind about arresting Wachtler and decided to wait a few more days. It was nearly November 7. Why not see if he was really going to go through with his plan to extort money from Joy, and if he was, catch him in the act? Why not watch him closely and find out if he was in this alone or had some coconspirators. Convinced this was the best plan, on November 3, Chertoff requested the FBI to put Wachtler under close, not loose, surveillance. From now on, there’d be agents following his every move.

  The day Chertoff decided to ask the FBI to start closer surveillance, Sol attended a high-powered political luncheon in Mineola. It was the annual luncheon of The Has Beens, a group of influential Republicans all of whom had once held political office. One of them was Sol’s old friend Joe Carlino.

  For some time now, Carlino had been touting Sol for governor in 1994. “With this guy’s family,” he’d been saying to various and sundry rainmakers, “if we can get him to take this thing, this will be one of the best-funded elections the Republicans have ever had. Plus, we got a product with him. A good product.”

  Today, Carlino’s buttonholing seemed to have paid off. Throughout the luncheon, many of the still-powerful Has Beens came over to Sol and told him he ought to run. Carlino, sitting alongside Sol, joined in with them. “You have no obligation to Cuomo,” he said to Sol. “He’s done some bad things.”

  Sol nodded.

  “You’ve been on the court a good long time,” Carlino went on. “Whadda ya going to do? Sit there till retirement? There’s more to life than that.”

  Carlino was pretty certain Sol was in agreement. So, “Ya oughta announce now,” he told him. “You’re king of the walk today.�
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  “We’ve got time,” Sol replied. “I want to wait a year or so. Because if I announce now, I’ll have to step down as chief judge. I’m going to wait, and when it’s closer, I may do it.”

  Carlino was pleased with the answer. It seemed to him that at long last, Sol was ready to make the run they’d been talking about for years.

  At about two-thirty or three o’clock, Sol got up to go. He was flying to Louisville, Kentucky, he explained. He was going to be making a speech there.

  He said a fond good-bye to Carlino and drove to the airport. There, he called Joy again, and once more pretended to be Purdy. He told her he was in an airport, but said he was on his way to New York. And then he asked, “Are we in business?”

  Joy, thinking fast, parried. “I said to you when you called me before that I want to know what I’m getting back, and when I’m getting it back, and I’m not just going to leave money there, just leave it and not have anything back in return.”

  “Now listen here! I’m trusting you. I’m trusting you not to put me on to the police, right?”

  “I didn’t call the police. But I’m not gonna just leave twenty thousand dollars for you as a present.”

  “I’m trusting you,” Sol repeated. “But look. Listen to me. If I don’t come back with that twenty thousand dollars, I’m gonna stay in New York and snatch your kid. Now, I mean that.”

  Joy had decided to be as tough as her tormentor. “Well, let me tell you something,” she said, and began challenging him with the bravado of a detective-novel moll. “I’m not dropping off twenty thousand dollars only to have you come back to me two weeks from now and ask for another twenty thousand dollars.”

  “I’m not gonna do that,” Sol said.

  “No? You want to make a deal with me? Look, I want this over with, okay? I don’t like what’s going on. I want my life back, but I’m not about to have you come up on my behind two weeks from now—”

  “If you want your life back, leave the goddamn money.”

  They continued to argue, each of them playing a role, until Sol hung up and caught his plane to Kentucky. When he arrived there, he called Joy from the Louisville airport, and this time claimed to be in New York. “Now listen carefully, girl,” he said. “Listen good. You get twenty thousand dollars to [your doorman] Ramon. He will drop it off at ten-fifteen. At one o’clock in the afternoon, I’m gonna give you all the papers you want. Also, I’ll give you the name of the fat pig who brought me into your life. You understand that?”

  “Where are you going to put it?” Joy asked.

  “They’re going to be dropped off,” Sol said. “They will be given to your doorman.” Then he made a stronger threat than any he had made before. “If you don’t do it,” he said, “I’m gonna spend the rest of this year making your life a nightmare, and you’ll end up spending ten times the twenty thousand to get your girl back. Now, do you understand what I’m saying? I’m gonna give you thirty seconds to tell me what you’re gonna do.”

  Joy said she just didn’t get it and began demanding that “Purdy” drop off the pictures and tapes he had for her at the same time he picked up the money.

  Sol laughed. “You think I’m some kind of fool, girl? They would arrest me on the spot. Okay, now are you gonna do it?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Joy begged him. “Wait.”

  “No, I’m not gonna wait. You’re gonna get everything you want at one o’clock in the afternoon, and then I’m taking the evening plane back to San Antonio. Okay, is that a deal? Are we on? I’ll give you ten more seconds.”

  Joy continued to ask for guarantees, and Sol got uneasy. “You’re tracing this goddamn call,” he said. “I’m getting off!”

  “I’m not tracing anything,” Joy lied. “I just want this over with, and I want some kind of guarantee that you’re going to be out of my life. What guarantee do I have that I’ll never hear your voice again?”

  “You’ll never hear my voice again,” Sol said. “You’ll never hear from me again.”

  “How do I know that?”

  But Sol was tired of Joy’s temporizing. “You just give the twenty thousand dollars to Ramón,” he said. “I’m gonna be there ten-fifteen at the Shanley.” Then he hung up and took a taxi to his Louisville hotel.

  The morning after Sol arrived in Louisville, a surveillance team of five FBI agents in five separate cars was assigned to follow him as closely as possible. They were part of what was increasingly becoming a major FBI operation—eventually there would be some eighty agents working on Sol’s case.

  The Louisville agents saw nothing untoward at first. Sol was picked up at his hotel by Donald Burnett, the dean of the University of Louisville’s law school, driven to the campus, and given a short tour. Then he gave a lecture to the dean’s constitutional law class. Afterward, he attended a luncheon at the University Club, gave an interview about himself and the New York court system to the campus radio station, and talked about the law with a group of select students. By then it was five o’clock, and he repaired to his hotel room to dress for the trip’s main event, a banquet at which he would be addressing a group of eminent Kentucky lawyers and judges.

  At the banquet, which was held in his hotel, Sol spoke as eloquently as ever. The chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court found his speech insightful. Dean Burnett thought it intelligent and knowledgeable.

  But afterward, Sol didn’t linger in the banquet hall—he was catching an early plane to New York the next morning, he explained, and he retired to his room, where he remained through the night.

  At dawn he checked out of the hotel. He took a cab to the airport. But he directed the cabdriver to take him, first, to a shop at which he might buy some pornographic items. The driver stopped outside a shop called the Blue Movie Adult Bookstore.

  Sol went in, made a purchase, then got back into his cab and headed for the airport.

  The FBI surveillance team had been tailing him. Conferring by radio, the agents decided some of them ought to go into the shop and see what he’d bought. Was it something he planned to use in his plot to extort money from Joy? Three agents followed Sol to the airport, while two went into the adult bookstore, where, identifying themselves, they asked the salesman what his previous customer had purchased.

  “Two porn flicks,” he said.

  “Which ones?” one of the agents asked.

  The salesman shook his head. “I don’t remember. We got so many of ’em.”

  “He buy anything else?”

  “Yeah. Cards.” He gestured toward a display of pornographic playing cards. “Two decks of Raunch-O-Rama.”

  “You got any more of those?”

  “Sure.”

  The salesman showed them the cards, and the agents said they’d take two decks too.

  While they were making their purchase, Sol reached the airport.

  That night, back in New York, Sol attended a dinner being held in the Bronx by the Tribune Society, an organization of nonjudicial court workers. The society was giving an award to Matt Crosson, and they’d asked Sol to present it. He rose from the dais in the chandeliered banquet hall, strode to the podium, and began telling jokes. His timing was perfect, and his deadpan impeccable. He delivered a stream of punchy one-liners and amusing anecdotes, and then, saying Crosson was “a man of unexpected abilities,” he used that bit of praise to tell one of his favorite jokes.

  It was the story about the variety show emcee who auditions potential contestants only to find yet another one who says he does bird imitations. “So the emcee says, ‘Bird imitations? We’re not interested,’” Sol bantered. “Whereupon”—and here he raised his arms and flapped them—“the contestant turned around and flew away.”

  It brought the house down. Sol’s in top form, the novelist and judge Edwin Torres thought. Ebullient. Hilarious. Beautiful.

  The next day, November 6, Sol worked in his Mineola chambers in the morning. He went over papers, did some reading, made some telephone calls. One of the peo
ple he spoke to was Milton Williams, the deputy chief administrative judge of New York City. Sol had proposed to Long Island University that they give Williams an honorary degree, and he’d just gotten word that the arrangements were underway. “I’m delighted,” he told Williams.

  “Me too,” Williams said, and came away thinking, Sol Wachtler’s a super person. Always going out of his way for other people.

  In the afternoon, Sol drove up to Albany. He went to his house, the house where he had first made love to Joy and where, that first day, he’d wondered guiltily if she’d ruin his life by pursuing him, “fatal attraction” style. There, he dialed Elaine Samson and, pretending to be David Purdy, offered again to sell her pictures of Joy and her husband.

  Elaine declined, and shortly thereafter, Sol drove to the New York State Bar Association, where he was scheduled to attend a dinner.

  His colleagues were pleased to see him, and some of them prevailed on him to address the gathering. He did, making a forty-five-minute impromptu speech. It was a lively speech. “Vintage Sol Wachtler,” John Bracken, the president of the association, thought.

  After dinner, Sol asked his driver to take him to his chambers at the court of appeals. En route, he gave an interview over his car phone to Fred Dicker, a reporter for the New York Post. What did he think of Senator Al D’Amato’s surprising victory in last Tuesday’s election? Dicker wanted to know. What did he think were Cuomo’s chances of getting appointed to the Supreme Court? And what was happening with his own political career?

  He answered Dicker’s questions so cooperatively and at such length, commenting as he talked on New York’s many problems, that the interview wasn’t finished when he arrived at the court of appeals, so he promised the reporter he’d continue talking to him once he was upstairs in his chambers. Dicker called him there, and they talked some more. He sounded, the reporter would later say, “happy, decidedly upbeat, and politically engaged,” albeit “slightly manic—overly excited.”

  When he was finished speaking to Dicker, Sol leaned forward on his leather-topped desk that had once belonged to Benjamin Cardozo and began writing letters, scribbling his thoughts onto scraps of paper, then copying them out both in bold black hand-printing and on his typewriter. Tomorrow it would be exactly twenty years since he had first sat at that desk. No matter. Concentrating on the future rather than the past, he wrote a letter to the New York tax authorities in which he made anonymous allegations against David Samson. And then he wrote a letter to Joy, a letter he could deliver to her tomorrow if she left him the twenty thousand dollars that “Purdy” had been demanding.