The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  The two women were on the same flight back to New York, and before the plane took off, they talked some more and their children chatted, clicked. But the two families didn’t have an opportunity to say good-bye. When the plane landed, Joy and her party were whisked through customs by two customs officers.

  “Who is she?” the editor overheard one of them say to the other.

  “Someone big in the Republican party,” the other man said. “I think Bush wanted her to get special treatment.”

  Sol’s immersion in psychiatry was just beginning. Charles Stillman, wanting as much expert opinion as he could get, hired two other psychiatrists—internationally known authorities—to have a look at his client, and Sol, who had once claimed to fear the stigma of the probing profession, saw the doctors willingly, hopefully. Both men, Dr. Donald Klein, one of the country’s leading authorities on psychiatric medications, and Dr. Robert Spitzer, who had written the standard diagnostic manual utilized by virtually all psychiatrists, agreed after examining Sol that most likely he had been suffering from mania—probably a drug-induced mania—when he undertook to frighten Joy.

  Next, Sol was examined by the prosecution’s mental-health experts. The first to see him was psychologist Louis B. Schlesinger, who gave him a battery of psychological tests. Early in their first session, which lasted four and a half hours, he was struck by Sol’s extraordinary social skills. This fellow’s got a way of making you feel that you’re the most important person in the world, he thought. But when the session was over and he had had time to reflect, he came to the conclusion that Sol’s interest in others was actually a pose, a mask. He acts as if he cares about you, Schlesinger decided, but at the bottom, his feelings toward others are shallow, manipulative.

  By the time he had spent another five hours with Sol, the psychologist had noted many other things about the former chief judge, among them that he was very naive about women and that he had an unusually strong need for attention and admiration. Wachtler, Schlesinger became convinced, was the type of man who is highly vulnerable to rejection, the kind who, when turned down by a woman, feels as if he’s been injured, given in some essential core of himself a veritable wound.

  Using these clinical insights and the results of the tests he’d administered, Schlesinger was ultimately to add an astute new diagnosis to those that had already been made of Sol—he felt the former chief judge might have a narcissistic personality disorder. It is a condition marked by feelings of grandiosity, a lack of empathy for others, and a profound sense of entitlement. “It’s not unrelated to psychopathy,” Dr. Schlesinger would one day explain, “and indeed, there’s a clear psychopathic streak to Wachtler.”

  Prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Steven S. Simring, who was the next to see Sol, found the famous patient’s only sickness to be “lovesickness.” That was a sickness not listed in the psychiatric diagnostic manual, he would later point out in a report filed with the court, yet it was

  no small matter, because individuals who have been spurned by the objects of their love can develop any number of symptoms which look like depression, including loss of appetite, crying, and loss of interest in the outside world. It is certainly not uncommon for people to commit suicide after the failure of an important relationship. [But] the point is that Sol Wachtler’s symptoms were not caused by some mysterious mental illness that was visited upon him, or by the injudicious use of psychotropic medication.…

  I do not think that anyone can be unmoved by the misfortune that befell Sol Wachtler.… he had been a good man who led a life of dedication to work and public service. Perhaps the problem was that Sol Wachtler was too dedicated, too much involved in taking care of his responsibilities toward others, while neglecting his own emotional needs.… [He] spent many years in a loveless marriage, accepting it for what it was, essentially denying that he had any emotional needs of his own. When Joy Silverman came along, he was starved for her affection and the passion that she stirred in him.

  But, Simring concluded, when Joy broke off the affair, Sol became angry—“perhaps he genuinely did not appreciate how angry he had become”—and sought revenge.

  Stalking is a vengeful deed, not an act of love. The letters that Judge Wachtler wrote to Ms. Silverman and the others leave little doubt how enraged he really was.… I can only conclude that he must have found some satisfaction in directly observing the effect on Joy Silverman of his threats and coarse language.

  At the time Drs. Schlesinger and Simring interviewed Sol, the former chief judge had not yet been indicted. Chertoff had agreed to wait before indicting him until the results of the medical evaluations were in. If Wachtler had an organic problem severe enough to excuse his conduct, he told Stillman, he might be willing to forgo pressing criminal charges.

  But it better be something serious, he told his staff. The defense better show Wachtler has something in his brain that’s pressing right on the part that does right and wrong.

  In the middle of January, Chertoff learned the results of the doctors’ examinations and was informed by Stillman that the defense wanted a deal based on the theory that at the time Sol threatened Joy, he’d been suffering from an attack of mania caused by bipolar, or manic-depressive, disease or a toxic reaction to drugs. The former chief judge would plead guilty, Stillman indicated, provided he was indicted on charges that didn’t automatically require jail time.

  Chertoff was unimpressed by the offer. He didn’t think Sol was a true manic-depressive. “We know enough about the disease,” he said to Ashrafi one day, “to know that a true manic-depressive can’t control his mania. So if Wachtler was one, he’d have been manic on the bench. He’d have been rattling on, and the people around him would have been talking about it. About him.”

  “Which certainly wasn’t the case here,” Ashrafi agreed.

  “Yeah,” Chertoff said. “The FBI interviewed scores of people who interacted with him while he was conducting his campaign against Joy, and no one noticed anything unusual about his behavior. Nothing.”

  Chertoff had, in general, little patience with psychiatric arguments. By profession and philosophy, he believed there was good and evil in the world—good and evil and right and wrong—and that not every evil act needed to be explained as an illness, something to be treated. Which was how, he sometimes mused, a whole lot of people who put great store by psychiatry viewed things. Besides which, psychiatrists were always stretching. Take those symptoms of mania Wachtler’s doctors had come up with. Like Sol’s having feelings of grandiosity. Yeah, well, if you’re chief judge, you’re going to feel grandiosity, aren’t you?

  There was something else Chertoff believed. It was that many crimes got committed by people who were depressed. Or manic. Or under stress. “They’ve lost their jobs,” he explained to a journalist one day. “They’re disappointed in love. But, hey, that’s the human condition. Okay, so life isn’t hunky-dory. But you’re supposed to be able to control yourself. And if you can’t—well, that’s what we’ve got the criminal law for.”

  On February 1, Chertoff indicted Sol on five felony counts: one count of making a false statement to the government, namely when Sol had accused the Seales of trying to blackmail Joy; three counts of using the U.S. mail to promote blackmail, namely in the letters Sol had written to Joy, Jessica, and Elaine Samson in which he’d threatened to injure Joy’s reputation; and one count of extortion, based on the many letters and calls in which Sol had posed as Purdy and demanded money in exchange for compromising photographs and audiotapes of Joy and David Samson. The indictment also pointed out that as part of Sol’s “extortion scheme,” he used his power, influence, and resources as chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals to obtain information and promote his plan.

  If Sol went to trial and was convicted of all the counts, he could be sentenced to five to sixteen years in prison. If he pled guilty to the charges, he could be sentenced to a year to eighteen months.

  Sol was devastated. And he was still upset when, sixte
en days later, he appeared at the court to which his case had been assigned, the U.S. District Court in Trenton, New Jersey, to lodge a plea to the indictment. Dr. Solomon, who had been seeing him two times a week ever since he got out of Payne Whitney, had put him on a regimen of lithium, the standard drug for the control of mania, and Prozac, the country’s most widely used antidepressant. He was, presumably, in emotional balance, chemically speaking. But when he entered the courtroom, a paneled hall adorned with gilt-framed portraits of famed, long-dead judges, he looked drawn and shaken, his body hunched, his hands dangling limply in front of him.

  Joan was with him. When he parted from her at the velvet rope that led to the defendants’ dock, she kissed him boldly and possessively.

  The Honorable Anne Thompson, the judge who would be taking his plea, arrived a moment later. She was a tall, reserved woman, a former prosecutor—the first black woman to serve as a prosecutor in New Jersey—and the state’s first female and first African-American federal judge. She had been a judge for fourteen years, but this was the most high-profile case over which she had presided.

  She kept the proceedings brief. She ordered the indictment read, then asked Charles Stillman how his client intended to plead.

  “Not guilty,” Stillman said. “Not guilty by virtue of insanity.”

  Judge Thompson, never a woman to dawdle, nodded, and set a trial date several months in the future.

  But neither she nor Chertoff nor Stillman expected the once-eminent judge looking up at her from the well of the courtroom to go to trial. A trial would be costly. Messy. An embarrassment. Rather, the point of setting a trial date was that now plea negotiations could begin in earnest.

  Why should his client plead guilty to extortion? Charles Stillman demanded of Chertoff soon after the indictment. Sol hadn’t extorted money—just threatened to extort it. He’d never picked up the twenty thousand dollars Joy had left for him in the manila envelope, the day of his arrest. Couldn’t the government drop the extortion charge?

  “Maybe,” Chertoff said. “But even if we do, Wachtler’s going to have to do jail time.”

  “What about letting him serve half the time at home?” Stillman asked. “Or in a halfway house? A work-release program?”

  “I don’t know,” Chertoff said.

  But in the next few weeks, his position hardened. He examined the federal sentencing guidelines and concluded that he would have to insist that Sol spend the bulk of his sentence in jail.

  His feelings toward Sol had also hardened. He had learned that Sol, who was still the trustee of Joy’s trust as well as of other Wolosoff family trusts, had, on the day before entering his not-guilty plea, authorized a payment to himself of $38,665 in trustee commissions and another payment of $20,000 for a lawyer representing him in a suit over the trusts. He was entitled to the money, he’d said. It was due him for work he’d done on the trusts in 1992.

  This guy’s unbelievably nervy, Chertoff thought. How can he claim he was insane all that year, and yet that he was doing sound work handling the trust money?

  Money—Bibbs’s money—had brought Sol and Joy together, but now it drove a final wedge between them. She wanted him out of her financial affairs—wanted him to return not only the payments he’d just withdrawn but all the money he’d taken in 1992, and she wanted him to resign his trusteeships and let her and her family appoint whomever they wanted to replace him. He wanted to keep the money and to appoint his daughter Lauren as his successor.

  Joy felt that no Wachtler, neither Sol nor his daughter, had the right to handle her stepfather’s money. Not after what Sol Wachtler had put her through.

  Sol felt he most certainly had the right to handle the money—Bibbs had given that right to him, and to Lauren after him, should he ever have to resign. Bibbs had even said it was their legacy. It had always irritated Sol that Bibbs, for whom he’d done so much, Bibbs, who had made a second fortune on the Florida land Sol’s own father had sold to him, had left him no outright inheritance—but the old man had left him this indirect one, and he didn’t intend to give it up.

  In March, the fight over Bibbs’s money intensified, and both Joy and Sol began to sound as if they were convinced that all that lay at the core of the other’s heart was greed. Joy pointed out that Sol had, over the years, collected more than $800,000 as executor of Bibbs’s will and from commissions on the family trusts, and told people that Sol, whose judicial salary was $120,000, had always resented people with real money. Sol pointed out that Bibbs had always accused Joy of being a spendthrift, and told people that he was beginning to think that Joy might have started her relationship with him because he was in charge of her trust. “I wonder whether she ever really cared for me,” he mused one day. “I wonder whether she just said, ‘Look, he controls my money.’”

  He had stopped being as tearful as he’d been in the days immediately following his arrest or as shaky as he’d been at the time of his plea. And he had begun to accept that he was going to have to go to prison—he still hoped it would be for only a brief part of his sentence. But he was frightened about being put behind bars. And he was worried about the humiliation that pleading guilty to Chertoff’s charges would bring him. He had spent his life concealing, perhaps even from himself, that his nature contained a dark as well as a bright side, had invested all his energies in being the model son, the overachieving adolescent, the perfect parent, the flawless friend, the principled politician, the peerless deliverer of justice. He had spent his life, more than most people do, in pursuit of reputation, renown, dignity. And now he was going to be humbled, forced to admit to acts that would make everyone who heard his admissions despise and revile him.

  Dreading that public shaming, he passed his days seeking concessions from Chertoff—tried to get him to agree to drop the extortion charge as well as the charge that said he’d misused his office, and tried to get him to agree to let him enter into the record a psychiatric diagnosis, something that might soften public opinion about him.

  Joy, on the other hand, was freer now than she had been in months, free to move about the city at will, free to stroll her neighborhood without perpetually looking over her shoulder. Moreover, her relationship with David Samson was going well. One day, she ran into the woman who had once criticized her for being overdressed and overjeweled. They met in a Madison Avenue coffee shop early on a Sunday morning. Joy was with David, she was dressed in a sweatsuit, and she was wearing almost no makeup, but her face was aglow with happiness. “Isn’t David wonderful?” she said to the woman. “Isn’t he the sexiest? Isn’t he divine?”

  “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” a clerk in Trenton said to Sol on an unseasonably warm Wednesday at the end of March 1993.

  “I do,” he replied, his voice loud and firm. He had at last agreed to plead guilty, and while he had won no concessions concerning the amount of time he would probably have to spend in prison, he had won several of the things that were important to him. He wasn’t going to have to plead to extortion or misusing his judicial office—the five counts of the indictment had been boiled down to one: that he had utilized interstate facilities to send kidnap and blackmail threats. And he was going to be allowed to include in his plea an affidavit from Dr. Miller that said that he had been suffering from a major mental illness during the time he had made his threats.

  “Have you taken any medication within the last twenty-four hours?” Judge Thompson asked him.

  “Yes, Your Honor. Prozac and lithium.”

  “What are those drugs?”

  “They are for the control of a manic or depressive state.”

  “Would that affect in any way your present ability to understand what’s going on, to comprehend and appreciate the circumstances in which you find yourself?”

  “No, Your Honor. I have been assured by my physician that I am in balance at the present time and capable of understanding and doing that which has to be done.”

/>   Judge Thompson nodded, but she wanted to be sure that Sol himself thought he was mentally competent. “You are mentally ill but not mentally incompetent?” she asked. “Is that the distinction you make?”

  Sol said yes.

  A few moments later, Judge Thompson turned to the matter of Sol’s mental health at the time of the crime to which he intended to plead guilty. “I cannot accept your guilty plea,” she said to him, “unless you are prepared to acknowledge here in open court that you committed the crime when you were competent, sane, not disabled by reason of mental illness.”

  It was an essential question, one that Sol would have preferred not having to answer in the affirmative. But he had no choice. It was part, a major part, of the plea deal. So assuring the judge that despite the psychiatric report, he would shortly make a statement asserting he’d been mentally competent at the time of his crimes, he began reading from a prepared speech. “I at no time intended to kidnap or harm in the slightest way Ms. Silverman’s daughter,” he read, “and I never wanted to nor did I take any money from Ms. Silverman. The extreme nature of my threats were meant to cause Ms. Silverman to believe that, in fact, there was someone named Purdy, and to be in fear so she would have reason to seek Sol Wachtler’s reassurance.”

  As he spoke, his voice grew even stronger, so that he could be heard throughout the courtroom. “At the time I made the threats, I was conscious and aware of my actions and understood the making of such threats was wrong and illegal. I have been told by several psychiatrists that I suffered from a mental illness during that year, but I do not believe this would or should excuse what I did. I was able to appreciate the nature and quality of my acts.”

  It was done. He had pled guilty. But there was one more thing he wanted to say. “I know, Your Honor,” he began, and suddenly his voice weakened, became almost inaudible, “that my behavior from late 1991 to late 1992 was foreign to my sixty-two years on earth. I am deeply ashamed and sorry for what I have done to others, to Ms. Silverman, to my wife and children, and to those who entrusted New York State’s court system to my care. I know that I can never make up for these acts, but I want to express my profound sorrow and regret.”