by Linda Wolfe
When he was finished, he sat down at the defense table, rubbed at his eyes, and folded his hands together in a prayer-like position.
Chertoff was satisfied. Outside the courtroom, he told the press that the case had been one of the most important of his entire career because it had challenged the very integrity of the court system. “People identified with Wachtler,” he said. “That is, prominent people did. Judges. Lawyers. They went around saying what a terrible thing this was for the defendant, as if we should give him special treatment, take him out of the category of everyone else.”
“Why do you think Wachtler snapped?” a reporter called out.
“There was no snap,” Chertoff said. “That’s the position the government takes, and it’s the one we’ll be taking when it comes to the sentencing. Wachtler’s acts weren’t the product of a severe mental illness. They were the product of anger. Here was a man who, by God’s grace, had the things everybody dreams about, position, honor, an intellectually challenging job—and yet when he was scorned in one area, he simply couldn’t let go. A snap? Mental illness? This was a man capable of going up on the bench and conducting lucid, erudite oral arguments—he wasn’t a man who was staying home in a bathrobe, or going around like a screaming banshee.”
Going around like a screaming banshee? Joan Wachtler, when she read Chertoff’s remarks in The New York Times the next day, was enraged, and for the first time since Sol’s arrest, she stepped forward to defend her husband publicly. “I am a licensed certified social worker who has been practicing in mental health for sixteen years,” she wrote in a letter to the editor of the Times. She continued:
Michael Chertoff’s characterization of a manic-depressive as someone “staying home in a bathrobe or going around like a screaming banshee” destroys the progress made by the medical-psychiatric community and the entire mental health profession in educating the public about mental illness.
Mr. Chertoff with this stereotyped negative bias has made a retrograde contribution to the mental health movement, setting it back many decades to a time before the advent of clinical assessment, diagnosis, and treatment with psychotherapy and medication. He has redrawn the archaic picture of any person with a mental illness as an unproductive citizen—an out-of-control raving maniac.
“Whatsa matter, David? You didn’t like my taste?” Larry Bathgate said to David Samson one day later that spring. Bathgate had just read in the New York Post that David had broken up with Joy. He’d read it in Cindy Adams’s column. “Joy Silverman, the Judge Sol Wachtler fatal attraction,” the gossip columnist had written, “is 0-for-5. Three marriages went poop. The extramarital affair with New York’s former Chief Judge went poop … and now, her subsequently well-publicized romance with Jersey lawyer David Samson pooped. It broke up months ago. He’s hunting for a replacement.”
“Aw, Larry,” David said. “You still believe everything you read in print?”
He insisted that he and Joy were still a couple.
So were Sol and Joan. But it was not easy to pick up the shards of their relationship. As for Joy, Sol was no longer in love with her. Indeed, he had come to feel that he had never really loved her, that he had loved, instead, the fantasy of love. Yet as late as the middle of July, more than nine months after she had effectuated his downfall, he wondered if he would always have a lingering sense of loss about Joy. She had been, for so long, the center around which his whole life had orbited.
Their long-term affair still aroused anger and resentment in Joan—perhaps it always would. One day, when Sol talked about Joy’s having a different, more casual attitude toward sex than did the members of their generation, Joan snapped at him, “Joy’s not that young!” and when he said she had been willing to cheat on Jeffrey, but not on David Samson, because she’d been married to Jeffrey, Joan sniffed, “Quite a standard! She wrote a new book!”
If she ever ran into Joy, she sometimes thought, she’d murder her.
But she was angry at Sol too. When he talked about Joy’s astrologist, she blurted out, “How could someone as intelligent as you fall for that crap?” and when he said Joy’s psychotherapist, Eleanor Sloan, had been a bright woman, she exploded, “Oh, God!”
Sol, placating her, told her he’d never loved Joy as much as he’d loved her, and that the thing he loved most about her was her empathy. “The way you can’t even stand to see a movie where an innocent person gets beaten up. Joy’s exactly the opposite.”
But why, then, had he fallen in love with her? Why had he enjoyed seeing her?
Sol himself sometimes thought that maybe he’d enjoyed seeing someone who could be such a bitch.
Dr. Solomon was still seeing Sol twice a week. When the doctor sat in his small, book-lined office and reflected on his famous patient, he thought that a lot of what had happened to Sol could be traced to his childhood. To the way he’d been such a very good boy. He’d had tremendous needs for approval, so he’d always done everything he could to make the adults around him think well of him. And in a way, he still did. He was on the phone with his mother every day. “Hello, Ma. How are you?” Every day.
That was Sol. He worried about everyone. Took care of their needs. But not his own.
Take all that time when he and Joan weren’t making love, all that time before the affair with Joy started. Other men would have acted a lot differently. But Sol didn’t wander. He was still the good boy.
Of course, the end result was that he was very naive, sexually.
Joy had helped him with that. So in a way, she did good things for him, not just bad. She also told him how handsome he was, how smart. Which he needed. And wasn’t getting from Joan. Joan’s a very loving wife, but she isn’t the type to fawn over a man.
Of course, now they would have to work on their marriage. Both of them. And Sol would have to work on becoming more aware of his feelings. Those headaches he always got? They had to do with his hiding his feelings from himself. Feelings like anger. Like his anger at Joy.
Dr. Solomon had talked to Sol about that. He’d told him that he believed he’d been poisoned by the drugs he’d been taking and that was what made him do the things he’d done to Joy. But was there anger behind it? You bet there was.
On June 29 the trust suit between Sol and Joy was settled. He agreed to give back the money he’d taken in commissions from the Wolosoff family trusts in 1993 and from Joy’s trust in 1992 and to let Joy choose whomever she wanted to succeed him as trustee. She agreed not to challenge his administration of the estate. The last ties between him and Joy were over, severed. The last ties between him and Bibbs too.
Lots of his old ties were being severed. His old friend and chief administrator, Matthew Crosson, was stepping down from the position to which Sol had elevated him. There was going to be a farewell party for him this very night. Crosson had begged him to come, but he’d been reluctant. He hadn’t been to a public event since his arrest, even though, now that he’d pled guilty, he no longer had to wear the electronic bracelet. But then Dr. Solomon told him it would be a good idea for him to get out and about, and Sol decided to go.
He went to the party, which was being held in the glittering Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York’s Central Park, accompanied by Lauren and his son-in-law Paul Montclare. Unsure of the reception he would receive, he stood for several minutes at the entrance to the party room, just feeling nervous and staring at the guests. They were mostly state judges—there must have been two hundred and fifty of them.
Then someone spotted him and, to his surprise, came over and grabbed his hand and said, “Hello, Chief!” And then some of the other judges saw him, and they began mobbing him, shaking his hand and kissing him and calling out, “Hey, Chief!” and, “How are ya, Chief.”
And that wasn’t the end of it. When Crosson got up to speak, he said such flattering things about him that all the judges began clapping and clapping for him. And some even began crying.
What’s the matter with those guys? Chertoff thou
ght when he read the account of Sol’s trip to Tavern on the Green in a newspaper the next day. Don’t they understand that what Wachtler did isn’t simply a case of boys-will-be-boys?
It wasn’t just this crew—judges!—who got it wrong. Ever since the case began, he’d been meeting people who shrugged their shoulders and said, “Well, man-woman stuff. What do you expect?” Didn’t they know that this was a crime of violence? Well, there was no act of violence. But you had to be very inexperienced in the ways of the world not to understand that just by making threats, Sol had effectively done violence to a mother and a daughter.
Chertoff hoped Judge Thompson would understand it and would sentence Sol to the maximum prison time possible under the federal guidelines—eighteen months.
Hoping to influence her, he put together a thick packet of presentencing materials that contained every shred of evidence the government had collected against Sol.
Charles Stillman was hoping Judge Thompson would give Sol only twelve months in prison—the minimum possible sentence—and would allow him to serve as much of that sentence as possible in a halfway house, and he, too, put together a thick packet of materials that might influence her decision.
His packet contained letters attesting to Sol’s good works and character. There was one from New York’s governor, Mario Cuomo. Another from New York City’s mayor, David Dinkins. And there were scores of communications from other, less famous people.
The letters laid out a picture of Sol as a man who had spent his life dedicated to serving just causes. They pointed out that he had formed the New York State Judicial Commission for Minority Concerns to combat racial discrimination, established the Workforce Diversity Program to ensure fair hiring and promotion in the court system, and worked closely with New York’s Task Force on Gender Bias to eliminate the unequal treatment of women.
The letters also reported Sol’s numerous acts of kindness as a friend, and many spoke of him in glowing, admiring terms. “I always found Sol’s great charm,” wrote Vivian Berger, the vice dean of Columbia Law School, “to be backed up by the substance of character and genuine warmth as a human being.”
“He represented for me,” wrote the Reverend Frank N. Johnston, the former rector of the Christ Episcopal Parish in Manhasset, “the highest aspirations of our Judeo-Christian culture.”
Sol was happy about the great outpouring of affection and support in the letters and hopeful that it would indeed influence Judge Thompson to give him a short sentence and a quick release to a halfway house. But he felt there was something more that could be done to make the judge look favorably upon him—and not just the judge but the public too. His story needed to be in the press. His story of mental illness. Told in his own words, and with his own spin on things.
Stillman wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Sol, like many politicians, had been in thrall to the press his entire life, and he believed in its power the way the ancients believed in the power of their gods. More, he was convinced he knew how to manipulate that power, make it work for him. So in the middle of the summer, feeling not unlike his old energetic and politically savvy self, he mounted an enormous publicity campaign, giving lengthy interviews to numerous local newspapers. In his interviews, he talked about his mental illness—the mania that had resulted from bipolar disease or a toxic reaction to medications, or both—and blamed the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey, and Joy for not stopping his campaign of harassment.
It was, he seemed to be saying, he who was the victim. The state’s victim. Joy’s victim. In regard to Joy, his stance resembled the age-old one used by men who have abused women: What I did was her fault, not mine; it would never have happened if she hadn’t gone walking there, if she hadn’t dressed the way she did, if she’d said “No!” and meant it. Sure, he’d done bad things, went his message, but it wasn’t his fault.
Not surprisingly, given the enlightened temper of the times, within a few days the campaign backfired. While several papers presented sympathetic or at least uncritical interviews with him, four days before September 9, the date that had finally been set for his sentencing, The New York Times, the forum that mattered most to him, pointed out in a front-page article that the former chief judge was “seeking leniency in the court of public opinion by impugning those who brought him down.”
As the day of sentencing approached, Sol felt he couldn’t get anything to come out right anymore.
On September 9, a dank and gloomy day, the press turned out in force to record the day’s events, the closure they had been awaiting for nearly a year. Outside the limestone steps of Trenton’s handsome WPA-constructed courthouse, there was a veritable trailer park of television vans, a battalion of cameramen, a phalanx of TV newscasters and newspaper reporters. Many of the journalists covering the story knew Sol Wachtler, had known him back in his palmier days, and felt pangs of pity for him, for he had always been immensely popular with them, a ready source of snappy sound bites and winning one-liners.
“Remember the ham sandwich?” one reporter reminded another. “‘A grand jury’ll indict even a ham sandwich’?”
“Remember ‘the death penalty is the chicken soup of politics’?” another reminisced. “‘A folk remedy that can’t hurt, but hasn’t been proved to do you any good’?”
Wachtler was being memorialized. He was dead—but the burial was yet to come.
Then he arrived and cameras whirred. But court officers swiftly whisked him indoors—him and his entourage, his children and their spouses, his psychiatrist, and three lawyers. There was Stillman, of course. And Theodore Wells, a highly regarded New Jersey lawyer who had been working with Stillman ever since the case began. And Paul Montclare, Lauren’s husband, who had represented Sol when he was first arrested.
Only Joan wasn’t there. Early in the morning, she and Sol had talked things over and decided that no matter what sentence Judge Thompson handed down, the day was bound to be traumatic. “Maybe you should stay home,” Sol had said. And she had given him no argument.
“Mr. Stillman,” Judge Thompson called out as soon as the court came to order. “Mr. Stillman, is there anything you would like to say in mitigation of sentence?”
“I would like to speak to you of Sol Wachtler, the public man,” Stillman replied. “One must consider the nature of the man’s life and the price he has already paid, and will pay, for what he did.”
He then proceeded to spell out many of Sol’s accomplishments and to urge Judge Thompson to consider the punishment he had already received—public disgrace, the loss of his judgeship, and the loss of his law license, which he’d voluntarily given up. “Sol Wachtler’s sixty-two-year path through life,” he asserted, “has been marked by extraordinary contributions and a commitment to the judicial system, which is a critical part of an ordered society. Along the way, he stumbled and fell. Quite simply, he will never fully recover from the injuries he has suffered from that fall. Surely, the dispensation of justice has room to credit Sol Wachtler for all the good he has done.”
Chertoff, listening attentively, thought, I’ve got an answer for that! I’ll turn it around, ask the judge to think about the guy who gets convicted and gives as the excuse for his crime, “I never had anything my entire life.” The guy comes in, he says, “My entire life I was devoid of love, success, prosperity, and health. That’s why I committed the crime. So don’t punish me.” But, hey, we don’t accept that as an excuse for breaking the law—even though in some ways it’s a more powerful argument than “I was rich, I was powerful, I had prestige, an unlimited vista—and I didn’t get something I wanted, so I committed a crime, but don’t punish me. I’ve been punished enough because I lost all my advantages.”
Paul Montclare spoke next. “One should not equate insanity with mental illness,” he declared, and then talked about Sol’s mental troubles and the medications that had exacerbated them. “He was taking amphetamines,” he reminded the judge, “he was taking antidepressants, he was taking steroids for
chronic headaches, and he was taking Halcion, a drug that has been banned in England. The cumulative effects of these drugs on a vulnerable person like Mr. Wachtler cannot be underestimated. His judgment was impaired.”
Mental illness? Chertoff thought. It’s like they’re trying to thread a needle with a camel! On the one hand, they’re saying Wachtler had impaired judgment when it came to Joy Silverman and David Samson and all the other people he called while he was conducting his campaign. And on the other hand, they’re saying that in all his capacities as a judge, he had unimpaired judgment. Well, you can’t be a judge on autopilot. And anyway, if his judgment was unimpaired most of the time, how come in those unimpaired moments he didn’t exercise his good judgment to prevent himself from doing what he did? It makes no sense.
By the time Sol’s third lawyer, Theodore Wells, spoke, Chertoff was growing fidgety, his long, lean, Ichabod Crane figure shifting in its chair, his long, lean fingers riffling papers. He listened restlessly while Wells asked for twelve months’ incarceration, to be served at a halfway house or community correction center, and if a halfway house was ruled out, imprisonment in the federal minimum-security prison in Pensacola, Florida. And then finally, Wells was done, and Judge Thompson was saying, “Mr. Chertoff?”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” he began. “It is not a happy day to speak at a sentencing, at any sentencing, still less a sentencing in which a person who once occupied high judicial office confronts the court in the status of a criminal.”
A few moments later, he was reciting the entire litany of Sol’s crimes—the hang-up calls, the dirty cards, the card with the condom in it, the kidnap threats, the extortion letters, the use of court of appeals staff to obtain information about Samson, the attempt to implicate the Seales. “What Joy Silverman should have done, according to Mr. Wachtler,” he flung out, “at least as he recounted to The New York Times last week, is she should have sought a protective order to prevent him from harming her, or she should have gone to the family members so they could seek help for him. Your Honor, it’s the old theme … She should have stopped me.”