by Linda Wolfe
Unsure, he withdrew into a small conference room with Fox and Esposito and some of the other top men to confer. What to do next?
“This is the strongest case I’ve seen in twenty-four years with the bureau,” Mahaffey assured him.
Fox agreed. “Let’s arrest him now,” he said. “While he’s on the expressway.”
“Yeah, he may be heading home,” Esposito said. “And you never know what’s gonna happen if you wait to arrest a guy till he’s home. There could be weapons around. Or people. Someone could get hurt.”
But Chertoff wasn’t ready. I’m the one who has to make the decision, he thought. I’m the one who has to move this thing along once we get to court. “I need to know what’s in that last letter,” he said. “If it says thanks for the money, have a nice life, I’m inclined to sit on things, so we can do more surveillance. If he’s left the threat open—then okay. But I need to hear that last note.”
Esposito raced out of the conference room, grabbed a phone, and telephoned Fleming and Brzezinski, who had gone back upstairs to Joy’s apartment. Fleming answered the call, and as soon as he did, Esposito thrust the receiver at Chertoff and switched on the speaker box. “What’s in the letter?” Chertoff said. “Read us the letter.”
Fleming opened the envelope and began glancing at the densely packed paragraphs.
“Quickly!” Chertoff demanded.
Fleming’s eyes raced down the page, and he summarized what he saw. Purdy’s efforts. His self-pity. Then, “He says, ‘Do you think I went through all of this for a shitty twenty thousand dollars?’” he read. “He says, ‘Next time it’ll cost you more than another twenty thousand dollars.’”
Chertoff’s eyes hardened. The threat was still open. The scheme was still on.
Slamming down the phone, he gave up on the idea of waiting for an accomplice—though he never gave up wondering if there was one. “Unless anyone has any objections,” he said, “let’s take him down!”
Sol was nearly home. He had just called Joan to ask if she wanted bagels. And he was planning to stop for them in a shop near his house when suddenly, just as he was leaving the Long Island Expressway, three cars sped up out of nowhere and surrounded him. They forced him to the side of the road.
He pulled over and five men jumped out of the three cars and forced him out of his. They were rough. They were terrifying. They slammed him against a fender.
What was happening, he wondered, scared, and who were these men? Terrorists, he decided. Yes, terrorists, come to kidnap him because they knew he was an important personage.
But within seconds the men, saying they were from the FBI, were cuffing his hands behind his back.
“What did I do?” he asked. “What is this all about?”
“Extortion,” one of them said.
For a moment Sol Wachtler relaxed. It must have to do with one of the cases I’ve heard, he thought. Probably someone who didn’t like the way a decision went has accused me of taking a bribe. Well, I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t have a thing to worry about.
He didn’t even think about Joy Silverman, or so he would eventually say, until much later.
To the agents who arrested him, however, he seemed aware of the charges against him right from the beginning. He had made a tragic mistake, he told them several times after they’d put him in a bureau car and started driving him back toward New York and federal court.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” he asked. “The judges! What will all the judges think? They looked up to me.” Then he told the agents that it had recently been decided he was going to be the Republican candidate for governor in 1994, and that because of his mistake, his great political career would come to an end.
“Oh, my God,” he said several times. Then, “Oh, my God. I could have been governor.”
CHAPTER 11
THE NEWS OF SOL WACHTLER’S ARREST WAS ON RADIO AND TELEVISION within hours. There was almost no one who heard it who wasn’t stunned, shocked. Wachtler? That embodiment of propriety and judicial rectitude? Wachtler! The people who knew him and had spent time with him recently were the most startled. Matt Crosson, who took on the chore of notifying the state’s administrative judges about what had happened, kept thinking, “It can’t be! It’s bizarre.” Judge Edwin Torres, who had been with Sol at the Tribune Society banquet two nights before, mused, “It’s beyond bizarre. It’s in the realm of the fantastic.” Judge Milton Williams, who had spoken to Sol on Friday morning, reckoned, “It’s an aberration. Maybe he’s got a brain tumor.” Judge Judith Kaye, who had sat on the bench with Sol daily and who would eventually be named chief judge in his stead, speculated, “It’s as if somebody else invaded his body.” And Joe Carlino, who had known Sol ever since he’d gotten out of the Army, surmised, “If ever there was a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this is it.”
Additionally, many of those who knew him thought Joy Silverman and the FBI had overreacted, cried fire when there was only smoke—but they weren’t acquainted with the devastating details of Sol’s calls and letters.
Sol was arraigned in federal district court in Manhattan at bout seven-thirty that night. He had asked Paul Montclare, his daughter Lauren’s husband, to represent him, and Montclare requested that the judge release him on his own recognizance.
Michael Chertoff wanted him detained. Sol was potentially dangerous, he thought. He might try to hurt Joy or Jessica. He might try to kill himself. “Send him to a hospital,” he agreed at last. “But there’s gotta be tight security. Federal marshals guarding him.”
Joan was waiting at the hospital that had been chosen—Long Island Jewish, where for years Sol had been a board member—when her husband arrived. It was around midnight by then, but her son Philip was there, too. And Lauren; she already knew from her husband Montclare some of the details of what Sol had done, and she’d been saying ever since she heard about them, “It’s like one of Daddy’s Bad-Boy George Raft stories. A major George Raft story!”
Joan entered her husband’s room, a windowless nine-by-ten-foot compartment, and immediately Sol began to cry. “I’m sorry,” he wept. “I’ve disgraced you. Disgraced the family. I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Joan began to cry too. Then she put her arms around Sol and hugged him. “I love you,” she said as her arms enfolded him. “I love you very much.” And after that, for the next half hour—that was all the time she could have with him, the marshals had explained—the two of them sat there, crying and hugging, while Sol tried to explain what he’d done to bring him to this spot.
When he told her he’d been in love with Joy, it was like a knife in the heart. But she and Sol had been through a lot. You don’t stay married for forty years without going through a lot. She refused to let his confession crush her. She rallied her ego—she’d always had a strong ego—and said to herself, Joy! How could he have fallen for Joy? I’m prettier than she is, I’m thinner than she is, I’m smarter than she is—and I have more money.
Thinking that way made her feel better. Tougher. And although the marshals were just outside the door and she hated not having privacy, she hugged Sol again.
She was going to stick by him, she’d decided by then. He must have been mentally ill. That had to be the explanation.
When her half hour was up, she said good-bye to Sol without further ado and went outside to assume, resume, her role as matriarch of their now-wounded family. She told the children to take turns going in to see their father, and while they were deciding who should go first, she conferred with Sol’s internist, Dr. Lanman, who had admitted him to the hospital, and with Robert Match, the hospital’s director, about finding a psychiatrist for her husband.
By two A.M., she had chosen one—Dr. Sanford Solomon.
Dr. Solomon was in bed and asleep when he received a call from Dr. Lanman. He didn’t know Sol, and he hadn’t watched TV that night, so he knew nothing about the chief judge’s arrest. Dr. Lanman filled him in. Then she asked if he’d see the famous p
atient. He said yes, and that he’d be over in the morning.
“Can’t you come sooner?”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You mean you want me to come over now?”
“If you can,” Lanman urged.
Solomon got dressed and into his car, and he was at the hospital by two-thirty A.M. Joan and the children were still there, but they left once he went into Sol’s room to interview his new patient. So did the marshals, who agreed to let him conduct the interview in private.
Sol was dressed—he was wearing a charcoal gray suit—and he was sitting in a chair. But even so, it was difficult for Solomon to imagine the man facing him as the chief of anything, let alone of the state’s judiciary system. The man seemed rolled in a ball, curled up inside himself. And he looked dreadfully sad.
“I’ve done some terrible things,” he said. “I’ve ruined my family.”
Solomon, a genial, compassionate man, a tennis player and an expert in psychosomatic medicine, immediately struck up a rapport with him and soon got him talking about what he’d done. Sol explained that he’d been in love with Joy, who’d jilted him, and that he’d grown depressed and written her threatening letters. But when he talked about the letters he didn’t seem to see—or at least to explain—the logical pattern underlying the threats, nor their slow inexorable escalation over the months. Rather, he spoke confusingly, and confusedly, told things out of sequence, and sounded unsure about when various things had occurred. He’s bewildered, Solomon thought. Completely bewildered.
“What bothers you most?” he asked.
“What I’ve done to my family,” Sol said. “I always told my children that when I died, I wouldn’t be leaving them much money, but that I would be leaving them the Wachtler name. Now they’re going to be ashamed of that name.”
“Did you have any thoughts about what the consequences of your behavior might be?”
“No. I never even thought about it.”
While they were talking, a nurse came in and told Sol to get into his pajamas and go to bed. He did, and they went on with their interview.
“How did you feel when you made the phone calls? Mailed the letters?” Dr. Solomon asked.
“I felt I had to do the things I did,” Sol said. “Like something was driving me to do them. And then afterward, after I did them, I’d feel this great relief.”
“Why did you threaten Joy?”
“I thought that she’d get scared and call on me to help her. Call me back into her life.”
They talked for over an hour, and then a marshal entered the room, grasped Sol’s leg, and chained it to the bed’s metal frame.
Dr. Solomon looked down in discomfort. Was this any way to treat a man who was sick?
He took his leave soon afterward, leaving orders that Sol should be given no medications except Valium, to calm him.
Three days after his interview with the psychiatrist, Sol was released from the hospital and went back to Manhattan’s federal district court for a hearing. He had by then hired an older lawyer with more years of experience than his son-in-law—Charles Stillman, of Stillman, Friedman, and Show. Stillman had been working frantically to cut a deal with Chertoff that would allow Sol to be placed under house arrest.
Sol was dressed, that morning, in his expensive-looking gray suit, the one he’d worn at the hospital, the one he’d been wearing when he was arrested, but he seemed only a shadow of his former self: someone thinner, shorter, less substantial in every way. He walked to the defense table with his eyes cast down and took his seat silently, hands folded.
Stillman tried to distract him. He joked with him, made small talk. Sol smiled and nodded. But his responses seemed automatic. When he was not being spoken to, he kept his eyes fixed motionlessly on the front of the courtroom.
Then, “All rise,” bellowed the court clerk, “The United States versus Sol Wachtler,” and the judge, a woman named Sharon Grubin who had been an admirer of Sol’s when he sat on the other side of justice at his high court of appeals bench, entered the courtroom.
She wanted to know, before she agreed to release Sol to home arrest, whether he was dangerous. Chertoff took the position that he was. “The evidence developed in this case suggests a pretty strong threat,” he said. “We’re obliged to take it seriously, whoever the defendant is.” Nevertheless, he was willing to let Sol stay out of jail, provided that at home he was monitored by security guards—paid for at his own expense—and an electronic bracelet, which would report his movements to the police.
Did he need both these constraints, the judge asked.
“They certainly are not as foolproof as the Metropolitan Corrections Center,” Chertoff said wryly. He was hinting that the judge would be justified if she chose to send the celebrated defendant to jail, and Sol pressed his lips together, as if restraining a cry.
Judge Grubin ended the hearing. She was granting the home arrest, she said. Then she directed a remark to Sol. It was an admiring, even a fawning, remark. “Chief Judge Wachtler,” she said, “if my decision in releasing you reflects even a small amount of the wisdom you have shown on the bench, we will have done right.”
Sol had held himself together until then, but hearing her words of praise, the kind of praise he had heard day in, day out for much of his life, tears flooded his eyes.
He was still, officially, chief judge of New York’s highest court. His fellow judges on the court of appeals had held a meeting and declined to suspend him, and although he himself, shortly after his arrest, had asked his family to issue a statement saying he was temporarily withdrawing from his position, he had subsequently revoked the statement. Now, leaving Judge Grubin’s courtroom, he realized reluctantly that he had no choice but to resign, and as soon as he arrived at his Manhasset home, he telephoned the acting chief of the court of appeals and informed him he was stepping down.
Charles Stillman was known for his skills at working out deals, and over the next few weeks, he began the process of seeking a deal for Sol, one that would keep him out of jail. The scuttlebutt among the press corps was that he would be successful. “When the deal is done,” predicted Newsday’s Jim Dwyer cynically, “[Wachtler] will plead guilty to something that carries the approximate weight of having mailed a letter with an incomplete zipcode.”
Psychiatry was at the core of Stillman’s endeavor. If Wachtler could be shown to have a serious mental condition, perhaps the prosecution would go easy on him.
Two weeks after he was released from Long Island Jewish Hospital, Sol was sent to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for further psychiatric evaluation.
Dr. Frank Miller examined him there. He found Sol’s behavior inappropriate. “For approximately forty-five minutes,” he would later explain, “Mr. Wachtler imitated the David Purdy character. He was so enamored by his creation that he insisted upon demonstrating Purdy’s walk, talk, mannerisms, and gestures. Since Purdy was toothless, Mr. Wachtler instructed me to pay particular attention to the way he positioned his jaw and lips to conceal his teeth. When I realized that I was not able to interrupt this monologue, I asked two other physicians to join us in the hope that their presence in the room would calm him. To my dismay, their presence only served to intensify his display, and I asked them to leave. Although the situation of the interview was sobering and grim, he was not able to appreciate or grasp it.”
In short, Miller saw in Sol many of the characteristics of mania, among them poor judgment and an expansive and grandiose mood, the same characteristics that had marked Sol’s behavior toward Joy.
New York’s former chief judge, Dr. Miller would eventually conclude, had been manic during the period he tormented his ex-lover, and he had been so because he suffered from bipolar, or manic-depressive, illness, precipitated and exacerbated by the many drugs he had been taking.
This was a different diagnosis from the one toward which Dr. Solomon was leaning. He, too, believed Sol to have been manic when he threatened Jo
y. But he was convinced that his mania had resulted not from an underlying manic-depressive illness, but solely from the drugs he had been taking. Sol’s was a “toxic mania,” Dr. Solomon theorized. The difference might seem slight to a lay person, but it was very significant, for if Sol were a true manic-depressive, his mania was likely to return unless he was treated with lifelong doses of lithium. But if his mania had been caused by drugs alone, he would be all right in the future, provided he avoided medications that made him toxic.
While he was at New York Hospital, Sol was exceedingly depressed, even despairing. “I feel,” he said to one of his nurses, “as though I’m already dead.” But he wasn’t suicidal, he assured her. “I wouldn’t visit that on the good people I’ve already hurt.”
He still thought about Joy a lot, sometimes with an odd, lingering affection. He missed her. Missed her still. Or missed what she had come to represent to him: a Helen, a Beatrice. A fantasy.
But at other times, he thought about her angrily, especially around New Year’s, when he learned that Charles Stillman had received a letter from one of her lawyers demanding that Sol give up his position as trustee of her trust and the trusts of Bruce, Van, and Honey Wolosoff as well, and that he return all commissions paid to him during 1992. “I’d rather go to jail than let her have the money,” he fumed to one of his nurses, “because she would blow it all in one day.”
Joy was on St. Barts. She’d flown down with David Samson, and with Jessica and Evan. She swam and sunned and feasted, and after a while she began to relax, to put aside, however slightly, the ordeal she had endured all year.
A woman editor who met Joy at a party that week found her cheerful and friendly. She’d heard that in New York, Joy had been hiding out, avoiding the glare of publicity, and was pleased to see that, now that she was on St. Barts, she didn’t have to be reclusive.