All of the letters were attached to a memorandum written by Andy’s lawyer and submitted to the judge. Goldberg asked the judge to sentence his client to community service instead of prison so Andy could offer his construction expertise in repairing plumbing systems in shelters for the homeless. “Surely, Mr. Capasso’s substantial efforts to alleviate the problems of the homeless would far outweigh any benefit that society would derive from his incarceration,” Goldberg argued in his memo.
But Giuliani’s presentencing memo to the judge offered a sharp contrast to Goldberg’s. The prosecutor portrayed Andy as a greedy and corrupt man who had “achieved every social and economic advantage and used and abused those advantages for criminal ends.” In asking for a long prison term Giuliani pointed in his memorandum to an excerpt from the 1984 taped conversation of mob members in which Andy’s name came up. He harshly criticized Andy for not assisting the federal government in its ongoing corruption investigations:
Specifically, he repeatedly refused to discuss his documented and longstanding relationships with various city officials and political leaders who have been at the epicenter of the city’s corruption scandal (e.g., former Queens Borough President Donald Manes, former Bronx County Democratic Chairman Stanley Friedman and … Myerson) as well as convicted and reputed organized crime leaders (e.g., Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello).
At 9:40 A.M. on March 30 Goldberg and Lawrence presented their arguments in person before U.S. district judge Charles Stewart in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan.
As Andy sat at the defense table, Goldberg complained that the federal prosecutors were trying to prejudice the judge against his client by saying that Andy had declined to cooperate with investigators. “Your honor, he had no information, because, you see, Mr. Capasso’s work was awarded long before … Stanley Friedman emerged as a power, before Donald Manes emerged as a powerhouse. His work is awarded on the basis of a sealed low bid. No one, neither Mr. Manes, Mr. Friedman, or Miss Myerson, whose name has been mentioned prominently in the press, could help him one bit, could intercede for him in any way, for him to get a public contract.”
Lawrence, representing the U.S. attorney’s office, disputed Goldberg’s assertions and asked for a “substantial term of incarceration and substantial fines.…”
The judge then turned to Andy and asked whether he had anything to say.
“Well, I have never had any information, your honor, which is alluded to in the report about any other public corruption or any other criminal activities,” Andy replied.
“All right,” Stewart said. “Is there anything else in there that you have any problems with?”
“No, sir,” Andy replied.
“Anything you would like to say to me before I impose sentence?”
“Yes,” Andy said. “I feel I committed a serious crime and I apologize for it and I am ready to face the consequences.”
Stewart sentenced him to four years in jail and imposed $500,000 in fines. “I was amazed that someone with your intelligence, your abilities, and your resources, financial resources, found it necessary to engage in such deliberate, ongoing, long-term fraud,” he said.
Andy lowered his head. Goldberg said later it was one of the longest jail sentences for tax evasion that he could remember. He was eventually able to persuade the judge to reduce the sentence to three years. That morning, stunned by the lengthy term, he asked the judge to give Andy a few months to get his business and other matters in order before beginning his prison term. The judge ordered Andy to report to prison in June.
“I’m like a leashed tiger,” Bess told her friend, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams, in an exclusive interview only hours after she began her ninety-day leave of absence on January 14, the day Andy was indicted. “I am not down. I am not sad nor depressed. When I’m under pressure, I become energized.”
While some of Bess’s friends had urged her to resign instead of subjecting herself to a specially commissioned mayoral investigation, Bess refused to walk away. She fully expected to return to her job as cultural affairs commissioner at the end of ninety days and was already planning the celebration. She told Cindy Adams that upon her return she intended to hang a banner saying “Bess Is Back and Koch Has Got Her.”
She also lashed out publicly against Nancy for the first time, telling Adams, “Mrs. Capasso felt the way to bring her husband down was to bring me down. She didn’t want him. She wanted what he has. I appreciate him for what he is—for his vibrancy and sense of humor.
“This is a woman seeking vindictive triumph,” Bess continued. “Andy had said that she and her attorney threatened to go to the authorities and they did. And in all these years, I have never once spoken out to defend myself. But I am angry. Angry that for three and a half years, I’ve had to endure a repetition of the same lies.”
In the weeks after taking her leave, Bess became increasingly obsessed with what she believed were Nancy Capasso’s efforts to ruin her. She found it impossible to keep her vow not to talk to the press. One of her first calls was to Mike Taibbi at WNBC-TV, on February 3. “There’s no validity to any of the charges,” she began. “Look, I took the Fifth because I sat with four lawyers, including a criminal lawyer, and that’s what they told me to do. And it’s the grand jury, they said … nobody’s gonna know, because you can’t talk about it. So I didn’t. I held up my end of the bargain, but the prosecutors didn’t.…
“I mean, really. Do you think, really, I’d make any calls to anyone so Andy could get a contract? Christ, I’m not fucking stupid. And I have too much respect for the man I helped get into office.…
“About Horty Gabel’s daughter? Look, she went to Oxford, speaks seven languages. It’s not like she wasn’t qualified for the job.…
“I know Andy. I know the kind of man he is. And even though she claims I stole him from her and her five babies, let’s face it, the babies are twenty-seven and twenty-eight now.… Then she went crying to Giuliani, and she was going to destroy Andy. You know … a sixty-two-year-old lady isn’t gonna take a forty-year-old man away from his wife, unless that wife had created such a stormy marriage that he was gonna be vulnerable.…
“I was talking to the Times the other day when [public relations director] Robert Sklar called me. She [Bess’s secretary] said ‘Page Six’ [New York Post] was on the line. They got a tip I was dying of cancer. Christ, I had cancer. Back in 1974. I beat the shit out of it, just like I’ll beat the shit out of this stuff.… You know what the Italians say? Andy uses the expression ‘I swear on my daughter’s eyes.’ Well, I swear on my daughter’s eyes all this stuff is bullshit.…
“Again, I thought this was a country where you weren’t guilty just because you took the Fifth. I can fight the big lie.… I fought it before for Ed, when they were all saying he was a homosexual.…
“I’m coming back after ninety days. I have no doubt at all, even though I know Giuliani isn’t through with me. It’s not like me to quit: after all, the mayor’s gonna have a lot of trouble the next election.… I may wanna help him.”
Bess also made several calls to Marcia Kramer of the New York Daily News. One night, after Bess called the reporter at home and talked for more than an hour about “the big story” she had to tell without ever telling her what it was, Kramer became convinced that Bess was out of control.
At about the same time, writer Patricia Morrisroe was working on a story about Bess for New York magazine. At first Bess was reluctant to speak with her, telling Morrisroe that “there is no story here. There is no premise. Mr. Capasso never paid any of my living expenses. No man has ever paid my expenses. I’m sure everybody you’ve spoken to has said a lot of negative things. They’re eyeing my job. They’re jealous. So what have they said about me?”
“They’ve said you were very complex,” Morrisroe replied.
“Well, that’s nice. I hope when you get to be my age they’ll say the same thing about you. There’s nothing worse than being simple.”
&
nbsp; Morrisroe said that Bess called her back a few days later around nine o’clock in the morning and launched into what Morrisroe described as a “monologue” about jealousy and how Nancy Capasso had attacked her because of her celebrity and her name. Eight hours later, Bess was still on the phone.
“The reason this is happening is that I’m a woman. I’m a Miss America.… I’m queen of the Jews,” she told Morrisroe. “There’s a great deal of jealousy because most women haven’t achieved what I have and because they don’t have more men in their lives.…”
“Is it possible to continue this in person?” Morrisroe asked. It was 5:15 P.M.
“No,” Bess replied. “My lawyer told me I’m not supposed to talk to the press.”
On Monday, March 23, Morrisroe’s story about Bess and her troubles appeared as New York magazine’s cover story, with the headline “Bess and the Mess: Myerson’s Slide into Scandal.” By describing her eight-hour phone conversation with Bess and quoting her extensively, Morrisroe drew a devastating and unsympathetic portrait of her. With Bess pronouncing to Morrisroe that she was the “perfect route to the downfall of this administration,” City Hall insiders thought it would be impossible for Bess to return to the Koch administration gracefully, regardless of the outcome of former federal judge Harold R. Tyler, Jr.’s, investigation.
At the beginning of Tyler’s inquiry Bess had agreed to answer questions and explain the circumstances surrounding her decision to take the Fifth Amendment. But on the advice of her lawyer she changed her mind when she learned that she would not be granted immunity. Any information she provided to Tyler, she was informed, could be used against her in court, and with Giuliani’s office continuing its grand jury investigation of her and Andy, Bess could not take that risk.
Tyler and the three young attorneys from his law firm who were working with him on the investigation had the full cooperation of the city’s Department of Investigation, which was working closely with Giuliani. During the three-month probe they examined hundreds of records from the Department of Cultural Affairs, including letters and memos, staff meeting minutes, and personnel records. They scanned Bess’s telephone logs and her schedules for 1985 and 1986, looking for messages and notes that might indicate possible conflicts of interest. They scrutinized the Capasso v. Capasso divorce papers, listened to the tape-recorded conversations between Andy and Nancy, and read the dozens of letters Judge Gabel had written to her friends on behalf of Sukhreet.
In all they interviewed thirty-five witnesses, including sixteen present and former employees at the Department of Cultural Affairs. Among the others interviewed were Herbert Rickman, former chauffeurs for Andy, and even his former live-in servants in Westhampton Beach. Of all the witnesses, though, Tyler and his investigators became most interested in the testimony, that late February, of Judge Hortense Gabel, her husband, Milton, and their only child, Sukhreet.
Unable to find any evidence that Bess had abused her position as a city commissioner to help Andy win sealed-bid city contracts, they ended up focusing on the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Sukhreet while her mother was ruling on Andy’s divorce case.
In her previous testimony before the state Commission on Judicial Conduct and the federal grand jury, Sukhreet insists, she had been careful to protect her mother. An examination of her testimony before the judicial commission does show she responded “I do not recollect” to many of the questions posed to her at the time. And, she said, when she was unsure of how to respond, she would turn to her lawyer, Philip Schaeffer, a longtime friend of her mother’s, for guidance. “I was a very good Girl Scout,” she said later. “Defending my mother and Bess was second nature.”
But during an interview with Tyler and his lawyers at their law offices at Rockefeller Center, Sukhreet decided to break her silence.
One of the lawyers showed her a copy of the October 19, 1983, letter that Bess had written to Mayor Koch after the New York Post gossip item about her hiring and then asked whether she had ever seen the letter before. “Something snapped,” she said later. “I said, ‘Yes, I have seen that letter. It is a pack of lies. There is not one true statement in that letter.’ Then I pointed out exactly what the falsehoods were.
“I just had enough lying. I just had enough of protecting people. What the hell have they ever done for me? Had they protected me? No. They had made a monkey of me.”
During the three years since she had left city government Sukhreet had pent up anger at her mother and Bess for making her life “a living hell on earth.” She blamed them for her deep depression, which, in her words, had turned her into a “zombie,” and for her inability to find a full-time job. In her mind it was the fault of her mother and Bess that she now had to depend on her parents for financial support. She had virtually given up her job search, although her father frequently called to inquire about her prospects for employment and to offer ideas. Her mornings were spent reading and studying. To get herself out of her apartment in the afternoons she roamed around the city playing a strange, private game—spending an imaginary $1 million window-shopping. Sometimes her game would take her to a quarry in Queens, where they had the finest marble, or a small fish store in Brooklyn, where she pretended to buy fresh Norwegian salmon. When short on time, she went directly to Tiffany. In just a few minutes she could drop $1 million, not a “penny more or a penny less.”
Although her deep depression had lifted after she underwent outpatient shock treatments and started taking antidepressants, she could not help still feeling resentful of her mother and of Bess, whom she blamed for wrenching those years out of her life.
As Sukhreet saw it, if it had not been for those two powerful women “using her” in 1983 to achieve their own separate goals, she would not have to explain to potential employers why she had been pressured to resign from the city’s Commission on Human Rights after a few weeks and why she had lasted only nine months at the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.
Could she tell prospective employers what she really thought were the reasons behind her failure? That Bess had originally hired her as a special assistant but, after the press found out that her mother was ruling on Bess’s boyfriend’s divorce case, Bess had shunned her and made her life miserable?
While Bess had made her tenure at the Department of Cultural Affairs difficult, Sukhreet did not want to take responsibility for her poor job performance. It was as if she needed someone else to blame for all of her unhappiness and failures. And now, sitting in front of her at a table in one of the city’s most prestigious law firms were a former federal judge and three attorneys willing to listen to her story of how she believed she had been wronged. “I was absolutely delirious that the truth was coming out,” she said later.
In contrast to how they accepted Sukhreet’s story, Tyler and his investigators found Judge Gabel’s statement that she had known nothing of the relationship between Andy and Bess while deciding on his alimony payments to be “evasive and unconvincing.”
Even before Tyler handed over his report to Koch at Gracie Mansion on Wednesday, April 8, there seemed to be too much adverse publicity for Bess to return as an effective commissioner in the Koch administration. The seventy-four-page litany made it impossible. The report portrayed Bess as a scheming, manipulative woman who had abused her city office to help lower her boyfriend’s alimony payments by taking advantage of a distraught elderly mother worried about her troubled only child. Tyler had concluded that Bess had been guilty of “serious misconduct” and the mayor should ask her to resign.
In the report Tyler found that “Ms. Myerson’s employment of Sukhreet Gabel was intended to, and did, improperly influence Justice Gabel in the conduct of the divorce proceedings. Indeed, even the facts we found just beneath the surface of the allegations quickly began to change our perceptions of the events that occurred in the summer of 1983. Although Sukhreet Gabel was well-educated, we learned she also had a long history of emotional disturbances and had, in her father’s words, ‘lim
ited talents.’” The report further said that Bess “immersed herself in the Gabel household” and “developed an intense, almost surrogate mother relationship with Sukhreet.…
“As a result of these attentions, Ms. Gabel’s emotional health blossomed. Her mother said Ms. Gabel had ‘a crush’ on Ms. Myerson and that she could see a change in her outlook. At the same time, we conclude, Justice Gabel showed in tangible fashion what Ms. Myerson’s attentions could achieve. On July 5, 1983, in response to an ex parte motion from Mr. Capasso, she cut his weekly maintenance and support payments in half.…”
The summary continued with additional details of the Capasso divorce, of Sukhreet’s experience at the Department of Cultural Affairs, and of Bess’s having told Sukhreet to keep her “big mouth shut.”
The report noted, too, that while its most “significant findings are that Ms. Myerson misused her city office to give employment to Sukhreet Gabel for the purpose of influencing her mother … we also find other less serious, improper behavior by Ms. Myerson.”
The report harshly criticized Bess for having used city employees for personal errands, for once having directed one of her drivers to falsify travel records when she had him drive her out to Westhampton Beach, for having asked an assistant commissioner to lie on her behalf to cover up Sukhreet’s hiring, and for having received “substantial gifts from Mr. Capasso of jewelry, and perhaps furs and the use of credit cards, a Mercedes, and a limousine, none of which had been disclosed to the city in violation of city law.”
Tyler noted, however, another conclusion: “No witness had provided us with substantial evidence to support any allegation of misconduct by Ms. Myerson in connection with awarding of contracts to Mr. Capasso.”
After reading the report, Koch agreed that Bess should resign. The mayor decided that if she refused to resign he would have to fire her. Peter Zimroth, the mayor’s new corporation counsel, conveyed the mayor’s thoughts to Bess’s lawyer, Fred Hafetz, early that Wednesday evening. Haftez told him the mayor would receive a call from Bess in an hour or two.
Queen Bess Page 35