Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  The accountant nevertheless agreed to testify before the grand jury about what he had found in the books. So did another former Nanco employee, who feared so much for her life that she moved out of state after testifying.

  Her testimony before the grand jury was particularly damaging to Andy. She described in detail how Andy would direct her to pick out of a Coles directory names of people who lived near his sewer construction projects and then make out phony insurance and damage claims for them. She said she was then instructed to endorse the checks for the phony liability claims to generate cash for Andy. “I could not go over fifteen hundred dollars per claim; no more than ten thousand dollars a day,” she said.

  By the end of April Lawrence was exploring whether or not Andy’s relationships with Bess, Stanley Friedman, Donald Manes, and Herb Rickman had affected the awarding of city contracts.

  At the end of April Bess called Rickman and told him that she understood Giuliani’s office was investigating them to see whether they had used their influence with anyone over at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to help Andy win his city contracts. Rickman was terrified. With dozens of top-level city administrators having been forced to resign since January amid allegations of corruption, he was concerned that he too might be swept up in the scandal. He was prepared to tell all he knew to any federal investigator who asked.

  At 4:30 P.M. on Thursday, May 1, Rickman got a phone call from Lawrence asking him if he would mind answering a few questions. Eager to persuade investigators that he had not been involved in any wrongdoing, he volunteered to answer any question that night.

  The U.S. attorney’s office, tucked behind the federal courthouse on St. Andrew’s Plaza, was only two blocks from City Hall. Rickman arrived about an hour after talking with Lawrence, and from the moment he sat down he spewed forth all sorts of information about his frequent visits during the summer of 1983 and early 1984 to Andy’s homes in Westhampton Beach and Palm Beach and his trips to the Hamptons with Bess on a seaplane at Andy’s expense. He said that Andy had never asked him to influence anyone at City Hall. In fact, he told them that Andy had once said to him jokingly: “I wouldn’t ask you for a favor because you don’t have any fucking influence anyway.”

  Rickman also told them he had stopped visiting Andy in Westhampton Beach in the spring of 1984 and had also urged the mayor not to attend a Fourth of July party at Andy’s home that year. He said he became concerned about being seen with Andy after reading in the New York Times that two of the minority-owned subcontractors Andy had hired to qualify for federally funded contracts were under investigation for allegedly serving as fronts for companies owned by white males. “From that point on, I no longer took up invitations for further visits,” he said.

  Before leaving the U.S. attorney’s office that night, Rickman decided to tell all he knew about the hiring of Sukhreet Gabel as well. He remembered how Bess had tried to attach his name to the hiring of Sukhreet three years earlier, and if that ever became an issue again, he wanted prosecutors to know that he had had nothing to do with the matter. His comments about Sukhreet Gabel interested Lawrence, who had not yet focused on that aspect of the investigation.

  On the same day that Rickman volunteered to go to the U.S. attorney’s office for questioning, Barbara Ross and Marilyn Thompson of the New York Daily News were finishing up a story to run in the next day’s newspaper, quoting sources that said Giuliani was probing Andy’s contracts and his relationships with Rickman and Bess.

  WNBC-TV’s Gabe Pressman, the best-known television reporter in New York, was also working on the story. At eleven o’clock that night he reported on the air that Giuliani had subpoenaed court papers linking Bess and Rickman to Andy Capasso, whom Pressman described as a “Long Island construction man who won a multimillion-dollar city contract to repair a sewage treatment plant.”

  At the mayor’s City Hall press conference the next morning, reporters from the city’s other television stations and newspapers crowded into the Blue Room to record the mayor’s reaction to the latest news—that the woman who had helped make him mayor in 1977 was now being swept up into the scandal as well.

  Disgusted that the press and the prosecutors appeared to be trying to drag Bess into the corruption scandal because of her personal relationship with a city contractor when her city agency had nothing to do with sewers, Koch launched into a diatribe, saying the allegations smacked of “McCarthyism.”

  Reached for comment at the Department of Cultural Affairs that afternoon, Bess told reporters that the allegations were “absurd.” “There is no foundation for it. There’s no reason for the story.”

  But the story would not die.

  That Monday, May 5, Mayor Koch was attending a luncheon at New York Newsday’s editorial offices in midtown Manhattan to discuss his new $21.5 billion city budget when he got a message from an assistant press secretary that a New York Daily News reporter was looking for a comment about another story about Bess. This time the story was going to focus on Bess’s hiring of Sukhreet Gabel in 1983 while Sukhreet’s mother, Judge Gabel, was ruling on Andy Capasso’s temporary alimony payments.

  Koch immediately called Bess at her office at the Department of Cultural Affairs and asked, “What the hell is going on?”

  Bess replied, according to Koch, that she had already told him about the matter. “I sent you a memo, and you sent me a letter.”

  Koch had forgotten all about the single-spaced three-page memo that Bess had sent him on October 19, 1983, following the gossip item in the New York Post that had raised similar questions about the circumstances surrounding Sukhreet Gabel’s hiring. When he returned to City Hall that afternoon, he pulled Bess’s memo from the file and ordered that it be given to the Daily News reporter, Marcia Kramer, who was working on the story. Koch still did not know that Bess had lied to him in the memo. “I believed it to be true at the time,” he said later.

  Kramer, a tenacious reporter who had been named the newspaper’s City Hall bureau chief that January, had been working on the Sukhreet Gabel angle of the Bess story for weeks. She had assembled all of the court records from the divorce case and had finally persuaded Nancy Capasso to talk with her on a not-for-attribution basis. Inexperienced in dealing with the press, Nancy had been reluctant at first. Finally Kramer’s persistence paid off. By the middle of April Nancy had agreed to meet with her and to give her a copy of the letter she had written to Judge Gabel in 1984, asking the judge to remove herself from the case.

  With the letter and Bess’s October 19 memo from the mayor, Kramer was now almost ready to write a story raising ethical questions about Bess’s hiring of Sukhreet Gabel. Bess refused an interview, so Kramer had only one person left to talk to, Judge Gabel. She walked across the street that afternoon and headed three blocks north to the judge’s chambers in the state supreme court building. In a brief interview Judge Gabel claimed that she did not remember anything about the Capasso case. “The chances are dollars to donuts that the decision was drafted by a law assistant,” Judge Gabel said.

  The story, headlined “Bess’ Role: All in the Family, Myerson Hired Daughter of Judge Who Cut Beau’s Alimony,” appeared in the Daily News the next day and made public for the first time that just weeks after Sukhreet got the job Judge Gabel had cut Capasso’s combined alimony and child support payments from $1,850 to $680 a month. Kramer quoted legal experts who said the canons of judicial ethics generally prohibit judges from participating in cases where “personal or familial interests” are involved.

  Within days after the Daily News story appeared Judge Gabel, who was seventy-four years old, suffered what she later described as a “mild stroke.” She was hospitalized for eight days.

  Although the New York Post had first reported Sukhreet Gabel’s hiring three years before, on October 18, 1983, it was not until Kramer laid out the facts about the slashing of the alimony payments within two weeks of Sukhreet’s becoming Bess’s special assistant that the story caught the a
ttention of judicial watchdogs. In the anticorruption climate that prevailed that spring, Kramer’s story prompted the state Commission on Judicial Conduct to conduct an investigation of Gabel’s rulings in the divorce case—three years after they had been made.

  Meanwhile, over at the U.S. attorney’s office, Lawrence, Lombardi, and Ford were still working to put together a federal tax evasion case against Andy and determine if he had any connections with organized crime. They had not yet turned up any evidence that Bess had used her influence to help him win his city contracts, but they were continuing to look.

  On May 20 Lawrence sent a subpoena to the Department of Cultural Affairs requesting copies of Bess’s professional daily diaries and telephone logs dating back to 1983. The subpoena arrived in the office of Gwen Hatcher, the agency’s inspector general, who was responsible for conducting criminal investigations within the agency. She brought the subpoena upstairs to show Bess so that Bess could help her put the material together.

  When Bess heard about the subpoena, Hatcher later recalled, she erupted into a fit of rage, calling Giuliani’s federal grand jury investigation a “witch hunt” and promising that he would find “nothing.”

  Bess said she could not produce all of the documents requested by the subpoena because she had not kept her diaries from 1983 and 1984. She said that she had “lost” her diary from 1986. She did, however, tell Hatcher about a black loose-leaf binder containing copies of her schedule for the past several years.

  The next day, Hatcher said, as she was trying to gather the telephone logs and other documents, to comply with the federal subpoena, Bess burst into her office and started screaming that she did not want her working on this matter anymore because she was “tying up” the department. “I don’t give a fuck about any of this shit,” Hatcher recalled Bess shouted at her that morning. “I’m still the commissioner here, and I don’t care what [Department of Investigation commissioner Kenneth] Conboy or Giuliani have to say; I don’t want the staff working on this.”

  Hatcher was astonished. She said Bess then demanded the return of her black loose-leaf binder containing her schedules. Hatcher had to explain to Bess that the binder had been subpoenaed and that she could not remove it from the office. Bess stalked out of the room.

  She returned, though, about ten minutes later to apologize for her outburst and to request that Hatcher make copies of the pages in the loose-leaf book. “I’m sorry, but all of this is happening because his wife, who was offered ten million dollars, only got two million dollars in the court,” Hatcher recalled Bess told her at the time.

  Marcia Kramer had been trying for weeks to get Nancy’s former divorce lawyer, Herman Tarnow, to play for her the potentially damaging tapes that Nancy had made during her divorce negotiations with Andy. Tarnow finally agreed, and on Sunday, June 15, Kramer published a story in the Daily News headlined “Bess’ Guy Begs, Jury Hears Tapes of Contractor Capasso Pleading with Ex-Wife Not to Spill the Beans.” The story contained direct quotes from the tape recordings in which Andy begged Nancy not to run “to authorities and put me in jail for four hundred or five hundred years.” Kramer revealed for the first time in the press that the tapes, along with copies of bogus insurance and damage claims, were in the hands of federal prosecutors. After reading the New York Daily News that Sunday, Andy and Bess probably learned for the first time that Giuliani knew about the tapes. It was now possible that the investigators had enough evidence to put Andy in jail.

  At about 9:00 P.M. the next day Bess called Sukhreet Gabel at home and invited herself over to Sukhreet’s apartment. Bess must have thought that Sukhreet was a loose cannon and could cause her a lot of trouble. Who could say what Sukhreet might tell federal investigators about the circumstances surrounding her hiring and how that information might be construed during what Bess believed was a “witch hunt”?

  Sukhreet was surprised to hear Bess’s voice on the phone that night. It had been a long time since they had last seen each other. In the two years since Sukhreet had left her unsuccessful city jobs, she had experienced much pain. But the deep depression that had followed her firing in August 1984 and her British boyfriend’s rejection of her had finally lifted, and she was able to maintain a good mood with the help of lithium and other antidepressant drugs. She had not been able to find a steady job, however—in part, she thought, because she was unable to explain to a prospective employer why she had failed at the two city agencies. Sukhreet blamed Bess for this blotch on her résumé because she suspected that Bess had set her up to fail at the Department of Cultural Affairs and had had something to do with her forced resignation from the Commission on Human Rights. She believed that Bess had used her to try to influence her mother, who was then making decisions in Andy’s divorce.

  At first Sukhreet didn’t know Bess was calling out of concern about the federal investigation and the state Commission on Judicial Conduct probe. No reporters or federal investigators had yet contacted Sukhreet, and she had not seen any of the articles in the New York Daily News. She knew there was some sort of investigation, but she had been led to believe by her mother that it was no big deal.

  On the telephone that night, she recalled, Bess told her she had “wonderful news” and that she would like to come over right away and “talk about it.”

  About an hour later Bess arrived in the lobby of Sukhreet’s modest apartment building on East 69th Street wearing a gray running suit, dark glasses, and white Reebok sneakers. Her hair was hidden under a scarf that she had wrapped around her head. No one would have recognized her that night as Bess Myerson, former Miss America.

  Sukhreet said Bess called upstairs on the intercom and asked if anyone else was with her in the apartment. When Sukhreet told her she had a friend staying with her, Bess said that she did not want to come upstairs and insisted that Sukhreet meet her in the lobby.

  “And so, I come down,” recalled Sukhreet, “and she looks at me and says that I need a sweater … in her typical Mother Bess way. Always, you see two sides of her behavior with me. It has two faces: incredible cruelty and sort of babushka motherliness.

  “I said, ‘Bess, c’mon.’ I thought I’d be out for five minutes. But she insisted that I go up and get a sweater, so I trot upstairs dutifully, feeling childish and foolish, to get the sweater, and I put my little sweater on, and down I come.”

  It was a few minutes past ten o’clock before they stepped out on East 69th Street into the cool summer night. Sukhreet said that Bess opened the conversation by asking her to tell her “exactly” what she had told her mother’s lawyer. “I didn’t know why she was so worried,” Sukhreet said. “I was confused about the whole thing.”

  As they walked around the Upper East Side, circling a five-block area around Sukhreet’s apartment, Sukhreet said Bess told her the investigation was “very serious” and Sukhreet could “make a lot of trouble for everybody.” She also said that Bess told her to “keep my big mouth shut.”

  As Sukhreet recalled, Bess told her, “You’ve got a terribly big mouth, and I’ve got to know exactly how you came to be working for me so that we can coordinate our stories.”

  “Then she told me this cock-and-bull story about Herb Rickman sending her my résumé, and I said, ‘No, Bess, that isn’t how it happened.’”

  Bess then became angry with her, Sukhreet said, and told her, “You could be dangerous. Don’t you know what you’re doing? … Before you talk to your lawyer I would like you to tell me exactly what you’re going to say. We should keep in touch at all times.… Call me at the Department of Cultural Affairs and tell them that it’s Ms. Grant calling. When Barra calls, she always says, ‘This is Barra calling.’ Use Ms. Grant, and I’m going to know who it is.”

  It was almost 11:30 P.M. before Bess said good night and they walked home their separate ways. The next morning Sukhreet called her mother’s lawyer, Phil Schaeffer, and told him about Bess’s visit the night before. Schaeffer suggested she sit down and write out everything she remembered
about the conversation and then send a copy to his office. Sukhreet agreed. She said she never called Bess or consulted with her about her testimony or her discussions with her mother’s lawyer after that night.

  That summer, as Giuliani’s office concentrated on building a federal tax evasion case against Andy, the state Commission on Judicial Conduct started interviewing witnesses for its investigation of Judge Gabel. Bess was not among the witnesses asked to testify.

  Confident that she would be found not guilty of any wrongdoing, Judge Gabel agreed to testify before the commission in her own defense. After more than forty years of public service, she did not want to leave the bench in disgrace. In her testimony Judge Gabel admitted to having talked frequently with Bess about Sukhreet during the summer of 1983, but she denied ever having asked Bess to give Sukhreet a job. When asked to describe her telephone conversations with Bess, Judge Gabel replied: “It’s very hard to. I was very eager for Sukhreet to find this kind of interesting work, and I wanted her to be in public life and I was certainly being nice to Bess, not to be nice to her. But I would have been nice to her anyway.”

  She said the reason for lowering Nancy Capasso’s alimony payments was simple: she was impressed by Andy’s lawyers’ argument that Nancy had her own substantial income as a real estate broker.

  In July Sukhreet testified at the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, but she was not very forthcoming. She admitted later, in federal court, that she had ducked some of the commission lawyer’s questions and tried to respond to most of them with a simple yes or no. She was trying, she said, to protect her mother from having to resign from the bench in shame.

  All during her divorce proceedings, Nancy Capasso had felt as if she had the “power of an ant” while opposing her politically connected husband in court. Now, with both a federal grand jury and the state Commission on Judicial Conduct trying to determine whether Bess had improperly influenced Judge Gabel while the judge was ruling on Nancy’s divorce, she felt vindicated. The system was finally working.