Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  Michael Feldberg rose to deliver the last opening statement that afternoon. In a voice filled with emotion he spent more than an hour describing Judge Gabel’s achievements during her forty years of public service. He called her “a model of integrity and decency” and asserted that the charges against her were unfounded and based on “conjecture and speculation.”

  Feldberg questioned why Judge Gabel had met with Bess in restaurants, in public view, if she had been engaged in a “secret conspiracy.” And he argued that if jurors looked closely at this “so-called horrible decision, this so-called product of the bribe, this tremendous reduction was really not a reduction at all. It was a rearrangement, it was appropriate, and it was justified by the facts.”

  As he neared the end of his statement, Feldberg walked behind Judge Gabel’s chair and lowered his voice for dramatic effect. “We are in the presence of greatness in this room in the person of Hortense Gabel,” he said, looking down at the judge. “Hortense Gabel is of a time when honor was everything, when people in public life put their good names ahead of personal gain and would never dream of compromising themselves.… You hold in your hands the light of Hortense Gabel’s freedom.”

  It was after five o’clock when Feldberg ended his statement and the first day of the trial came to a close. Bess looked exhausted. She had been fidgeting in her chair for the last twenty minutes of Feldberg’s statement and glancing at the jury box as if to study the faces of the twelve men and women who would decide her fate.

  The next day, the testimony would begin.

  When Bess arrived the following morning, she seemed more relaxed. Inside the courtroom she stopped and chatted with reporters, complimenting WNYW-TV’s reporter Barbara Laskin on her on-camera appearance. Bess complained that the lighting was too harsh when the cameras televised her daily entrances and exits on the courthouse steps. “Maybe I should have gotten a face-lift like Nancy Capasso did in 1985,” she said.

  After that comment was reported in the newspapers the next day, Bess became more cautious in talking to the reporters who were covering her trial.

  The first major government witness was Howard Leventhal, Judge Gabel’s former top aide. A pale man in his early forties with short-cropped red hair and thick glasses, Leventhal had worked as a civil servant in the back rooms of the state supreme court for more than ten years.

  He seemed to enjoy his role as a witness, frequently offering the lawyers—and occasionally the judge—his interpretation of legal points. Observers could not help concluding that testifying at one of the most dramatic and highly publicized cases of the year seemed to be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him.

  He looked directly at Judge Gabel when he was asked to identify his old boss in court. She rose from her chair, half stooped, peering at him through her thick glasses. A clear plastic cup holding two roses and a spray of baby’s breath, a gift from her daughter, was on the table in front of her. Goldberg had seated the elderly judge in the direct line of vision of those on the witness stand so that when Sukhreet was called to testify she would face her mother and her father, who sat in a chair behind his wife.

  Under questioning by prosecutor Stuart Abrams, Leventhal portrayed Judge Gabel as a veteran of city politics rather than one of the great judicial minds in the city’s history. Abrams had Leventhal describe how Judge Gabel had handled the Capasso case differently from the other divorce cases during her two years as the court’s presiding matrimonial judge. Of the thirty-seven hundred divorce motions that passed through her chambers, Leventhal testified, he could “count on one hand” the number Judge Gabel had handled herself.

  Recounting the history of the rulings in the Capasso divorce case, Leventhal told the jury that the first alimony decision Judge Gabel had signed in June of 1983 granted Nancy $1,500 a week in alimony payments. By September, he said, the judge had reduced those payments by two-thirds, to $500 a week.

  When Abrams asked Leventhal if he had agreed with Judge Gabel’s decision to lower the payments, he replied, “No.”

  Since the government had no tape recordings of secret phone conversations or witnesses who could testify that they had overheard Bess and Judge Gabel striking a deal, Abrams attempted to suggest that the quid pro quo might have occurred during telephone conversations between Bess and the judge that summer. He had Leventhal tell the jurors about Bess leaving the phony names.

  Leventhal then told the jury about the repercussions that had ensued after he attended a Christmas party that year at the office of Nancy Capasso’s divorce lawyers, Raoul and Myrna Felder. While there, he saw one of Andy’s divorce lawyers. About a week later, he testified, Judge Gabel called him into her chambers and said apologetically, “Bess heard that you were at Felder’s party, and she was livid. So let’s not go to any more parties at his place.”

  On Leventhal’s cross-examination Judge Gabel’s attorney, Michael Feldberg, set out to show that the judge’s handling of the Capasso case had not been out of the ordinary and that the reduction in Nancy’s alimony had been justified.

  Feldberg got Leventhal to agree that it was “not unusual” for him and the judge to disagree about an award, that it had been “proper” for Judge Gabel to give Andy Capasso a rehearing, and that there had been “nothing unusual” about the judge’s changing her first decision.

  Jay Goldberg then took his turn. Goldberg had no intention of putting his client on the witness stand or calling character witnesses on Andy’s behalf. Doing so would have enabled the prosecutors to question them about what they knew of Andy’s tax evasion conviction and whether they had heard stories of his associating with reputed mobsters. To solve that problem Goldberg made Howard Leventhal into a surrogate character witness for Andy. He asked Leventhal to read from the three-inch-thick pile of Capasso divorce papers and affidavits that described Andy as a wonderful father and provider for his family.

  From one affidavit written by Nancy’s attorneys to show that she should receive substantial alimony payments, Leventhal read how Andy was so generous to his own two children and the three children from her previous marriage that they had lived in “a state of royalty.”

  “He fed, clothed, housed, educated, and loved those children in every way a father could do, and then some,” Leventhal read, quoting Nancy from the affidavit.

  Then Goldberg asked Leventhal to turn to the page in the affidavit in which Nancy described her life on Fifth Avenue in her $6 million apartment—a life of unlimited charge accounts, chauffeured limousines, eight telephones, and nine fur coats.

  “Did she sound, as you read this, to be impoverished?” Goldberg asked incredulously, throwing his arms out pointedly.

  “No, sir,” Leventhal said.

  “By the way,” Goldberg went on, “did you ever make a statement that you believed that Nancy Capasso, from the papers that you read, was more interested in getting a Mercedes for herself than support for the children?”

  “Yes, sir,” Leventhal answered.

  With Leventhal finished on the witness stand, the time had arrived for the prosecution to call on its star witness—a tag that seemed particularly appropriate for Sukhreet Gabel. In the weeks preceding the trial Sukhreet had readily consented to numerous newspaper, television, and radio interviews to address good-naturedly the question of how she could turn on her mother and testify against her in court. A few days before she was to appear on the stand she had flown out to San Francisco to appear on a talk show called “People Are Talking.” Sukhreet’s quirky charm, engaging personality, willingness to testify against her mother, and volubility with the press had made her the talk of New York.

  As she explained shortly before the trial, “My role is neither to prosecute nor to defend. As a witness, my job is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Still, many wondered about her motive and her insatiable appetite for publicity.

  For the prosecution Sukhreet was a high-risk witness. Lawrence worried that jurors would be repulsed by th
e image of Sukhreet secretly taping her telephone conversations with her mother and surreptitiously turning over her mother’s papers to the prosecutors.

  The prosecutors also worried about whether she would be able to stand up against the furious assault they expected from the lawyers for the defense, some of the best money could buy. The defense had already interviewed the chatty Sukhreet extensively and had reviewed thousands of pages of grand jury testimony and statements to prosecutors to prepare for their attack.

  But David Lawrence was hoping that Sukhreet would cut both ways with the jury. Lawrence thought that the jury would see that Sukhreet’s eccentric personality had made it difficult for her to find a job and therefore would conclude that there had been no reason for Bess to hire Sukhreet except as part of a secret bargain to fix Andy’s divorce. The prosecutors were willing to allow Sukhreet to destroy herself on the stand.

  Sukhreet, furthermore, was the only person who could provide evidence that Bess had sought to obstruct justice by visiting her at her apartment in June 1986 and warning her to keep her “big mouth shut.” The prosecution intended to argue that, by doing so, Bess had attempted to obstruct a federal grand jury investigation. The basis for the charge rested solely on Sukhreet’s testimony.

  Sukhreet was led into the courtroom by Tony Lombardi, one of the federal investigators and her favorite among “the boys.” She smiled sweetly at her mother as she stepped up to the witness stand. Her mother, leaning forward with her arms resting on the defense table, smiled back. Publicly and privately supportive of her daughter, the inscrutable Judge Gabel had kept the two red roses her daughter had given her a few days ago in a plastic cup on the defense table. The roses had already begun to droop when Sukhreet took the stand.

  With her flawless complexion and her brown eyes tinted green by contact lenses, Sukhreet looked much younger than her thirty-nine years. She was calm and composed and was dressed as if she were on a job interview, in a conservative gray wool striped dress that hung neatly over her ample figure. She reluctantly had abided by the prosecutor’s request that she not come to court with her “animals”—the brightly colored dresses and blouses emblazoned with huge silk-screened prints of zebras, lions, and bears that she tended to favor.

  The only thing odd about her appearance was the bright red wig that she was wearing parted in the middle and hanging neatly to her shoulders. Reporters chalked up the wig to Sukhreet’s penchant for flamboyance. But no one, including her parents and the prosecutors, knew that she had recently lost clumps of her short blond hair due to chemotherapy. Four months before the trial, Sukhreet had undergone chemotherapy and surgery after her doctor discovered a lump in her breast.

  Unaware of this fact, the defense lawyers would taunt Sukhreet unmercifully on cross-examination for using her parents’ money to undergo what they had read in the newspapers to be liposuction surgery to remove fat cells from her upper body so that she could improve her appearance for the trial. Each time they asked her about the liposuction, she refused to tell them about the cancer. She felt that her mother was under enough stress and didn’t want to add her health problems to the judge’s worries.

  Lawrence began by questioning Sukhreet about her job history and academic credentials. Sitting with her hands folded neatly in front of her on the witness stand’s gunmetal-gray table, Sukhreet recited her long academic career in a perfectly modulated voice, nodding and smiling for the jurors. She reveled unabashedly in being the center of attention. “It was like dancing with Fred Astaire,” she would tell WABC-TV’s Doug Johnson after that first day on the witness stand.

  At one point Judge Gabel turned to Feldberg and complained that she couldn’t hear what her daughter was saying. He rose from his chair and asked, “Could you ask if Ms. Gabel could possibly speak into the microphone a bit so Justice Gabel can hear her testimony?”

  “Mother? Is that better?” Sukhreet asked as she adjusted the microphone.

  Her mother nodded and smiled.

  A couple of jurors exchanged glances and appeared to be uneasy about the drama that was about to unfold before them. One veteran court marshal whispered to a reporter, “I’ve never seen blood testify against blood.”

  Lawrence seemed to sense the reaction as well and moved quickly to the most unpleasant aspects of her testimony. He asked Sukhreet to explain the secret tape recordings, the shopping bags full of documents, and her decision to cooperate with the government and testify against her mother. By having Sukhreet explain that she saw herself as only “a witness” who cooperated with her mother’s and Bess’s lawyers, as well as the prosecution, he was hoping to soften the impact of the defense team’s attempts to paint Sukhreet as a troubled woman full of hate and revenge.

  Lawrence next asked Sukhreet to tell the jurors about her futile fifteen-month job search after returning home from the University of Chicago in 1982. Sukhreet dutifully explained how her mother had devoted herself to helping her find a job. Then she described how she had met Bess at her parents’ apartment. Over the next day of testimony Sukhreet related how Bess had “swooped down” on her that summer by inviting her to dinner, to the movies, and finally, that August, to Andy’s estate in Westhampton Beach.

  Offering a colorful, humorous, and detailed account of Bess’s courting of her that summer, Sukhreet even mentioned the time that Bess showed her a drawer full of Nancy’s bikinis. The courtroom’s spectators’ section and jury box erupted into laughter. Judge Keenan, however, was not amused. A look of disgust crossed his face. “Let’s get away from the bikinis,” he said sternly. “I don’t think there’s anything amusing about it.”

  Up to this point Bess had been listening impassively. Now she was visibly annoyed and, leaning forward in her chair with her jaw tightened, she glared at Sukhreet while clasping and unclasping her hands.

  Bess continued to stare at Sukhreet as the star witness described the rest of her Westhampton Beach weekend. As she was about to testify that she also learned that weekend from Andy’s maid, Shirley Harrod, that her mother was presiding over Andy’s divorce, Bess’s attorney jumped up to object. Fred Hafetz argued that the federal rules of evidence do not permit a witness to testify about a conversation with someone who is not a defendant in the case.

  Since the judge needed to determine whether Sukhreet’s conversation with the maid and her subsequent conversations with her parents were admissible, he asked that she recount them away from the jury.

  With the jury out of the courtroom, Sukhreet turned to the judge and told him that she had called her parents upon learning from the maid that her mother was involved in Andy’s divorce. She said her father answered the phone and told her to “keep her nose out of it” and “keep looking for a job.”

  When Lawrence asked her if she had discussed the matter with her mother around the same time, Sukhreet paused. Shortly before the trial had begun, she had told prosecutors that she had recently remembered talking about the case with her mother. On the witness stand she frowned and seemed to turn the question over in her mind, appearing not to want to answer. In numerous interviews with reporters and investigators in the past, she had mentioned only a conversation with her father, never with her mother. Were she to testify that she had told her mother in August that Bess and Andy were romantically involved, she would directly contradict her mother, who had contended that she didn’t know about Bess and Andy until after she had lowered Andy’s alimony payments on September 14, 1983. It was a turning point for Sukhreet, who had long maintained that she wasn’t testifying against her mother.

  Now, on the witness stand, she was suggesting that she had discussed the divorce case with her mother before that date. “I just don’t remember the words she used,” Sukhreet testified. “She said it really wasn’t very important and that it wasn’t worth worrying about, just to ignore it, to forget it.”

  The next day Judge Keenan ruled in favor of the prosecution and agreed to allow Sukhreet’s testimony about her phone conversation with her father.
She related the conversation in a dramatic tone of voice and almost exactly as she had the day before.

  But when she got to the conversation with her mother, her recollection was different from what she had related the previous day. While she still contradicted her mother’s contention that the conversation never took place, it was as if, overnight, she had decided that she could go only so far in placing her mother at the center of the conspiracy. “What I remember is a very vague response on my mother’s part, which I think involved a shrug of the shoulders,” Sukhreet said as she imitated her mother by elaborately raising both hands in a gesture that seemed to say “Who knows?” Then she said quietly, “She had a very sad expression on her face.”

  On her third day on the stand Lawrence had just one final story for Sukhreet to tell the jury, and it was this testimony that many expected to be the most damaging to Bess. It was Sukhreet’s story about Bess’s having called her at home after the federal investigation had begun and suggesting that they go for a walk around the block. During that walk, Sukhreet contended, Bess tried to persuade her not to talk with the authorities about the circumstances of her hiring at the Department of Cultural Affairs.

  As Sukhreet began testifying about that night, Bess sat at the defense table with her chin held high, looking haughty and disbelieving. A slight smile played around her lips, as if to say to the jury, “Isn’t this ridiculous?”

  “We’ve got to get our stories straight,” Sukhreet quoted Bess to the jury. “The trouble with you is that you remember too much. You have got to learn to forget more. I have forgotten more than you have ever, ever known.”

  To reinforce the public’s perception of her as a witness in the case, and not exclusively a tool of the prosecution, Sukhreet had agreed to extensive interviews with her mother’s and Bess’s attorneys during the summer before the trial.