by Linda Wolfe
When he finished with Sol and Joy, he turned to the question of whether antidepressant medication had caused Sol’s crimes. “Pamelor and Halcion are the principal culprits in Sol’s version of events,” he said, leaving out any reference to Tenuate, the amphetaminelike drug whose use had predated them. “His lawyers say that all his truly aberrant conduct starts after he filled the prescription for these drugs on November 11, 1991. But the actual genesis of his scheme occurred well before he took those two medications. Two weeks before he took them, he called Jeffrey Silverman and, posing as a private investigator, asked Silverman if he was interested in retaining him to look into the activities of his wife. And five or six days before he filled his prescription, he called Elaine Samson and for the first time used the name and identity of David Purdy.”
“Javert!” a famous television newscaster sitting on a front bench whispered loudly, referring to the heartless French detective in Les Misérables who mercilessly hounded poor Jean Valjean. But if Chertoff heard him, he gave no sign. He went on talking.
He talked about the poor man and the rich man, and about threading a needle with a camel, and finally, he said, “This was a crime of violence, even though there was no act of violence.” Then he explained that harassment was a form of violence against women, and declared, “We don’t deal with crimes against women very much in federal court, but the sentence ought to speak to that issue as well as to everything else.”
When he was done, he asked for eighteen months of incarceration and opposed letting Sol serve his time in a halfway house.
Women’s issues? Theodore Wells was on his feet as soon as Chertoff sat down. “Your Honor, could I please have a few minutes of response time? I will not be long.”
Judge Thompson nodded, and he began to speak. “In terms of women’s issues,” he said, “there is another dimension to this case. It involves relationships not just between Joy Silverman and Judge Wachtler, but between Joy Silverman and Lauren Wachtler, her friend, and Joy Silverman and Joan Wachtler, the judge’s wife.” Yes, there was a whole women’s issue surrounding the case, he tried to point out, and it wasn’t the one Chertoff had been talking about. But he didn’t call it by a name. Did he mean Joy’s sexual betrayal of her cousin Joan? With the innuendo left hanging in the stale air of the courtroom, he moved quickly away from the matter, insisting, “There is no attempt to blame Joy Silverman for anything.”
Sol had been listening to the arguments with his head hunched down between his shoulders. Now at last, it was his turn to speak. He rose from the defense table, laid some notes on a podium, and looked searchingly at Judge Thompson, sitting high on her elevated platform, as he used to sit high above the men and women who came before him for justice. Then he started talking. “The last time I appeared before Your Honor,” he said, “I told you of my misdeeds. I told you then I was fully responsible for them. I don’t blame anyone else for those misdeeds. They were my actions.”
The words were coming out smoothly. Making speeches was an art he had been practicing since he was a boy. “I did this,” he went on clearly. “And I apologized then and I apologize now to Mrs. Silverman, to Jessica, to my wife and children, to the court system, to the profession in which I served, to all those people who believed in me who I disappointed by my aberrant behavior—”
But then suddenly, he couldn’t go on. His mouth was dry. His words were choking in his throat.
“Would you like some water?” Judge Thompson asked with concern.
He shook his head. Behind him, several of his children bit their lips. Above him, the painted eyes of New Jersey’s long-dead famous judges stared sightless and impassive at his coughing figure. Then, he swallowed, and regained his composure. “I’m all right,” he assured Judge Thompson, and although he wasn’t, not really, and might never feel altogether all right again, he continued with his prepared speech. “In January of 1991, the New York State Bar Association presented me with its gold medal,” he said. “The highest honor that can ever be given to a lawyer in my state. Yesterday, I received a letter from the president of the New York State Bar Association advising me that my name has been stricken from the membership rolls.”
Several reporters, their heads up, their pens forming sentences as if directed by an autopilot device, sighed. The irony of Wachtler, the gold-medalist, and Wachtler, the outcast, had moved them, or at least arrested them, assured them they’d be leaving with that greatest of necessities, a good quote.
“Mr. Chertoff speaks of responsibility,” Sol was continuing. “How do you manifest the acceptance of responsibility? First of all, by saying you are responsible, and then by showing a sense of responsibility. I have done this. After my arrest, my court convened and would not suspend me, but as soon as I could get to a phone, I called and told them I was resigning. I did not want to bring further or greater disgrace to the institution which I revered.
“More, because of the nature of my offense, I would not be automatically disbarred in the State of New York. Nevertheless, I have voluntarily filed my resignation from the bar. I didn’t want to bring further disgrace to the profession which has nurtured me, and for which I have such high respect.”
The courtroom was as quiet as a tomb. Only the scratching of pastels, as courtroom artists tried to capture his likeness, broke the remarkable stillness.
“My only hope now is to try to put my life back together again,” Sol said into the silence. “To try to make amends for what I have done. And in my punishment, I would just hope that the Court would please consider my forty years of public service.”
Then he sat down.
Judge Thompson had not tipped her hand, had not displayed, throughout the long morning of arguments, any reaction that might indicate what she was thinking, where she stood. Now she herself addressed the waiting defendant, lawyers, and spectators. She remarked that she was convinced that Judge Wachtler had lived an exemplary life—she had read about it in the papers the defense had submitted. She said, too, that she knew that there was a dispute among the psychiatrists who had examined Judge Wachtler, with the defense’s doctors attributing his criminal episode to a major mental illness and the government’s attributing it to no malady, just lovesickness.
But, “The Court cannot resolve the apparent conflict between the highly regarded doctors,” she intoned. “Nor can the Court rationally explain the defendant’s behavior.
“His bizarre acting out of make-believe characters, like David Purdy, the investigator from Houston, complete with cowboy hat and toothless diction, and Theresa O’Connor, the devout parishioner from Linden, New Jersey, seems beyond the norm for lovesickness. His simultaneous conduct as competent, responsible, professional chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York defies logical explanation.”
Where was she going? Which side would she favor? She had given no clue. And then, it came. “In trying to perform the impossible task of understanding the defendant,” she said, “we cannot lose sight of the fact that there were real victims here, people who endured protracted anguish and suffering as a consequence of the defendant’s calculated actions. The defendant’s behavior was not an expression of love. It was an expression of anger, intimidation, and grotesque control.”
She paused, gazed down at Sol, and then delivered the sentence: fifteen months in prison—three more than the defense had wanted, three less than the prosecution had wanted. She had done the Solomonic thing.
She also levied fines against Sol, among them a fine of thirty-one thousand dollars to repay Joy for having had to hire security guards and tutors for Jessica. And while she refused to recommend to the Bureau of Prisons that Sol’s sentence be served in a halfway house, she did agree to suggest to the bureau that he be placed in the minimum-security federal correctional institution in Pensacola, Florida.
He had lost, Sol knew. He had lost almost everything he had been fighting for. A short sentence. A halfway house. But there was still Pensacola to hope for. Standing in the courtroo
m, his three lawyers surrounding him, he tried to smile, and his lips curled up, but his eyes were misty. A few moments later, he retreated to a room down the corridor with the lawyers, his family, and Dr. Solomon. “It’ll be all right,” he said to his children. “It’s going to be all right.”
Dr. Solomon drew him into a corner of the room. “How’s your head?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Sol said. “I don’t have any headache at all.”
Dr. Solomon was astonished by his answer. “No,” he said. “I mean, your emotions. Your head.”
Sol hadn’t wanted to deal with feelings. Not here. Not now. But Dr. Solomon was standing alongside him saying, “It’s good to cry. You’ve been through a great deal, you should let yourself cry.” And at last, the tears that all morning had been lurking in the corners of his eyes and the back of his throat began to fall.
He grabbed a handkerchief.
In the afternoon, Joy, who had not attended the sentencing or any of the court sessions, came forward as a spokesperson for victims. “With Sol Wachtler’s sentencing today,” she asserted in a statement issued through her lawyers, “a message has been sent that society will not tolerate men who terrorize, stalk, abuse, and victimize women and children.”
The next day, Joan Wachtler told Cindy Adams, “Joy’s an avaricious person whose pathological greed destroyed a gentle and naive man. I’ve known Joy since she was a young girl. All her treasured possessions came from men. Two husbands. Two divorces, plus a third upcoming. And she wanted more, from my husband.”
Sol didn’t have to report to prison for another couple of weeks. Judge Thompson had granted him a grace period because September was the season of the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
He used some of his last moments of freedom to try once again to tell his side of the story. He told it to Cindy Adams, saying, “Joy never knew her father. A psychiatrist told me that she’s been taking it out on men ever since. That she destroys men. One by one.”
He told it to Barbara Walters, adding, “The Talmud teaches us that a person who serves as a judge sits beside God, and I was given that privilege for twenty-five years, and it’s lost to me now.” He told it to newscaster Gabe Pressman. And when Pressman asked him what he might do when he got out of prison, he said he might teach law or become a spokesperson on the subject of mental illness—“educate the public with respect to the implications of it.”
“Teach?” Dick Lavinthol, who worked in Chertoff’s office, said when he heard about Sol’s plans. “Educate the public about mental illness? I’ve got a better idea. Why doesn’t he get out of jail and start a foundation devoted to stopping the harassment of women. The problem’s endemic—but he could have a real impact. He could set up projects that would give men sensitivity training. And he could get grants to teach women how to handle harassment. He’d be a hero again!”
On Sunday, September 26, two days before he was due to report to prison, Sol was informed that the prison he was to report to wasn’t the minimum-security facility in Pensacola, Florida, that he had requested, but the Butner Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in Butner, North Carolina, that had a psychiatric hospital on its grounds.
He told his psychiatrist that he was exceedingly frightened. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “There’ll be murderers there. There’ll be people with grudges against judges.”
But there was no recourse, and on the twenty-eighth, Sol traveled back to North Carolina, one of the states he had lived in as a boy, before he had gone north to prep school, before he had married Joan, before he had gotten to know Bibbs Wolosoff, before he had gone into politics and become a judge. Before he had met Joy.
As he was surrendering himself, photographers caught his picture. He looked young, boyish, his unlined face a Picture-of-Dorian-Gray mask.
Then, he was behind bars.
What had brought him to that pass? What had made him a perfect embodiment of what the ancient Greeks considered the only truly tragic figure—a man like ourselves who falls from a high place as a result not of vice or depravity but of some great error or frailty. There was hubris, of course. He had lived so long in the corridors of power, had opened so many of its doors, and had found himself a room with a seat that, thronelike, put him in command of the lives and fates of millions. He was not just above the law. He was the law. And that had made him vain, overbearingly proud.
Such a man takes it hard when a woman rejects him—especially if he has not often offered himself to a woman. To such a man, rejection is an affront, not a blow to the soul but a slap at dignity. It brings out the urge to punish.
Perhaps, in Sol’s case, that urge might have stayed under control were it not for the inflaming effects of the amphetaminelike drug he began taking some months before he started his campaign against Joy. The drug Tenuate often promotes restlessness, feelings of invulnerability and of grandiosity. The drug did not cause his actions, but it enabled him to take the actions. It disinhibited him. It loosed or let him loose the dogs of wounded pride that gnawed at him.
One thing is certain. He became—there is no other word—demonic. And yet, even as he rode his demons, or they rode him, he never ceased being a fair judge, a fond family man, a loyal friend.
History tells us that from time to time there have been other men like this. Men—and women too. Invariably, they fascinate—but it is difficult to say whether that is because they are different from the rest of humankind or because they are Everybody writ large.
EPILOGUE
AT THE TIME THIS BOOK WENT TO PRESS, JOY SILVERMAN WAS, AS far as her acquaintances knew, still seeing David Samson, and Sol Wachtler was still in prison—but not at the Butner Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, the prison to which he had been assigned. Something had happened at Butner, something startling and enigmatic. Sol had been stabbed. He had received two wounds in his back, just above the right shoulder blade, wounds that penetrated his flesh to the depth of an inch, and were so close together, they could have been made by a fork with its middle tine removed.
The incident occurred on a Sunday evening late in November. According to Sol, he had been lying in his room—an unlocked private chamber in Butner’s mental-health wing—and listening through earphones to a radio, when someone crept into the area, put a pillow over his face, and attacked him.
According to the FBI, which quickly undertook an investigation of the incident, the injury appeared to be self-inflicted. They based this hypothesis on the location and shallowness of the wounds, and on the fact that at the time of the stabbing there had been only one other prisoner in the area, a delusional inmate whom they apparently judged incapable of the crime.
Sol’s family and his psychiatrist were enraged by the FBI’s supposition. “Why would he have wanted to hurt himself?” said Dr. Solomon. “I’d been down to see him just before this happened, and he was doing great. Sure, in the beginning they had him cleaning the grounds, picking up papers with a spoke. But now he was helping some inmates prepare for their high-school equivalency exams, and he was doing aerobics and lifting weights. And he’d gotten to know many of the prisoners, heard their stories, met their families—he told me that unlike the press, which kept calling him ‘the disgraced Sol Wachtler,’ the prisoners called him ‘Judge’ and ‘Your Honor.’ He felt comfortable. He had adjusted.”
But some of Sol’s friends accepted the FBI’s theory, seeing in it evidence that Sol was irrational, an idea that confirmed their loyal conviction that some form of madness had made him harass Joy Silverman in the first place. “Maybe he was just crazier than any of us ever knew,” one friend, a judge, said.
After the stabbing, Sol was kept for a month in what prison authorities call “administrative detention,” and prisoners call “isolation” or “the hole,” a locked cell where food is passed in through a slot in the door. Alone, he became noticeably depressed and seemed to lose tra
ck of time. Then, wearing leg irons and handcuffs, he was sent to a different prison, one with a full-service psychiatric wing. It was the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was given extensive psychiatric attention, treated with Prozac, and at last pronounced well enough to join the general prison population. He began living in an eight-by-fourteen-foot cell, sharing the limited space with three other inmates. And he began working, collecting a salary of twelve dollars a month. Ironically, the job he was given was to teach creative writing.
Occasionally, he would communicate with friends, writing letters in which he sometimes adopted a breezy, offhand style that seemed to make fun of all that had happened. “There isn’t a murderer, rapist, arsonist, or major drug dealer who doesn’t think of you as a great man,” he wrote to lawyer William Kunstler. “That includes the harasser of Joy Silverman.” “Here I am with murderers, rapists, bank robbers, drug dealers,” he wrote to columnist Cindy Adams. “Despite the stabbing, I have no fear of them. Of course, they’re scared to death of me, the man who harassed Joy Silverman.” He even told jokes in his letters. He was out of the psychiatric hospital, he wrote to Adams, and then, with an eerie allusion to the kidnap ad he had demanded Joy take, said, “I guess I’m just lucky—like the newspaper ad: ‘LOST. BEAGLE. Left ear missing. Blind and castrated. Answers to the name “Lucky.”’”
But sometimes his tone turned dark. In another letter to a friend, he described a visit paid to him by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, shortly before he resigned his august office. “We had met on several occasions,” Wachtler wrote, “and the summer before last, we both were given doctoral degrees at Claremont College in California. Blackmun was now honoring me by visiting me at a federal prison. We embraced on his arrival, and on his departure I wept, remembering what was—and will never be again.”