Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  Goldberg was on the mark with his old trial-lawyer trick. Sukhreet’s presence in the courtroom was a powerful weapon for his cause. Other jurors later said that Lucy Gray was shaken when she saw Sukhreet. She told them back in the jury room that seeing Sukhreet reminded her of how much she didn’t like her and how much of the government’s case depended on her testimony.

  Gray’s position was beginning to waver, but she was not yet convinced that an acquittal was proper.

  Berardi tried a new approach to win Gray over. She called for an unofficial tally of how many of her colleagues thought the defendants were guilty but that the government had failed to prove the case against them. Nine of the jurors, including Berardi, raised their hands. “I think most of us felt there might have been a conspiracy there,” said Sheila Adler. “We all felt that something happened. But in no way did the prosecution prove it.”

  Berardi had hoped that this poll would illustrate to Gray that it was possible to find Bess and the others not guilty even if there was doubt about their innocence. Gray was still unmoved. She said that there might have to be a hung jury.

  Determined to return a verdict, Berardi suggested they request the judge to repeat his instructions on the issue of the presumption of innocence.

  At about 7:25 P.M. the jurors filed back into the courtroom to listen to Keenan define presumption of innocence for them once again. As he explained that the burden of proof rested with the government, beyond a reasonable doubt, Berardi nodded her head in approval. The judge had just validated the argument she had been making to Gray in the jury room.

  As the jurors slowly filed back into the jury room, Lucy Gray pulled Linda Berardi aside. Raising her arm slightly, Gray looked at Berardi and said softly, “Linda, I’m ready to vote now.” Berardi smiled, and as soon as everyone had returned to the jury room she called for another vote. A look of surprise crossed many of the jurors’ faces. After Gray raised her hand with them, voting not guilty on all counts, the jurors let out a cheer.

  “There’s a verdict.”

  A hush fell over the courtroom as everyone hurried to take a seat. Bess’s best friend, Sandy Stern, began to sob uncontrollably. Andy, who had sat through the whole trial with his lawyer carefully placed between him and Bess, took a seat next to her for the first time. Then Bess took her place in her chair, sitting, as she had sat every day of the trial, with her back straight and her chin held high, her arms folded in her lap. She looked more composed than her noticeably nervous friends.

  Judge Gabel looked frightened as her attorney escorted her toward her seat at the defense table, with her husband behind her. Sukhreet took a seat in the back of the press section.

  It was 8:02 P.M. by the courtroom clock when the judge and the jury returned and took their seats. The judge’s clerk stood up at her desk in front of the defendants and asked Linda Berardi to rise. Then the clerk began going down the list of the sixteen counts in the case, asking Berardi the verdict on each count. Each time Berardi’s crisp, clear voice rang loudly through the courtroom as she replied, “Not guilty.”

  When Berardi recited “not guilty” for the thirteenth of the sixteen counts, Bess reached up and took off her oversized glasses and wiped a tear from one eye. She turned to Andy and touched his arm, then turned back to listen. The last count was the obstruction of justice charge that had been lodged only against her. Berardi considered pausing long enough to make Bess sweat. (“I wanted Bess to squirm for the last one,” she said later.)

  Finally Berardi said “not guilty” one last time, and for the first time in the nearly four months of the court proceedings Bess abandoned her proud posture. She lay down her head, stretched her arms out on the defense table before her, and began to cry.

  Andy pulled her next to him and kissed her on the cheek. Then she hugged her attorney and got out of her chair and walked over to the other end of the defense table to the Gabels. She embraced Dr. Gabel and put her hand on Judge Gabel’s shoulder.

  Returning to her seat, Bess started sobbing. Andy wrapped his arms around her and put her head on his shoulder. He whispered something in her ear and rubbed her back. She quickly became composed again while the judge thanked the jurors and they filed out of the room.

  Bess’s friends crowded into the well of the court to embrace her. Andy hugged his son and then lit a cigarette, his hand shaking. When asked how he felt, he replied with a big smile, “Outstanding.”

  Sukhreet made her way through the crowd, pushing her way gently, hesitantly toward her mother and father in the front of the courtroom. Her mother grabbed her arm as soon as she spotted her and smiled. “She told the truth all the way,” Judge Gabel said. “I’m proud that she stood by me the whole way.” When reporters asked what she thought of the verdict, Sukhreet replied with a tight smile, “Justice has been done.”

  Bess kissed Andy one last time and tenderly touched his arm before the court marshals led him away to his holding cell for his return to prison. Surrounded by friends, Bess turned and headed for the ladies’ room to put on lipstick and smooth her hair before facing the huge crowd of television cameras and photographers waiting for her on the courthouse steps.

  “Do you have any comment, Bess?” one of the dozen or so reporters asked, following her into the corridor.

  “No,” she said, still smiling, as if she were floating on air.

  When she emerged from the ladies’ room, she was wearing a colorful silk scarf tied around her neck. She was now ready for the cameras. Still smiling, she stepped into the crowded elevator and rode down to the lobby with her friends and attorneys.

  Sukhreet was a few feet ahead of them, walking behind her parents, who were surrounded by reporters and friends. “C’mon, Sukhreet,” her father said, turning to her.

  “I don’t go where I am not wanted,” she snapped. She felt shunned as her parents’ friends surrounded Judge Gabel to wish her congratulations. Then she walked over to a bench in the courthouse’s lobby, sat down, and opened a book. Her parents continued on to the courthouse portico.

  The Gabels were the first to step outside the revolving door and into the throng of reporters and camera crews waiting on the courthouse steps.

  Bess paused for a moment before following them out the door.

  “Wait,” she told her friend, Sandy Stern. “How does my scarf look?”

  “Just fine,” Stern said. “Just fine.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Bess pushed open the doors and stood on the top of the courthouse steps, the same steps that she had first walked up more than a year ago on that October day to answer the criminal charges at her arraignment.

  “Bess!” “Bess!” “How does it feel?”

  She waded through the crowd, still smiling, a frozen smile, until she reached a bank of microphones set up at the bottom of the stairs. Speaking in a firm and deliberate voice and beaming happily before the cameras, she said, “I’m grateful for the American judicial system, and I thank the jury for exonerating me.” Having made her statement, she stepped away from the microphones and moved slowly, as if in a daze, through the crowd of reporters and spectators toward a waiting cab. The reporters continued to shout questions at her.

  “Were you always hopeful it would happen, Miss Myerson?”

  “Did the delay have you somewhat worried there?”

  “Bess, did you have some rough moments during the week?”

  “Turn around, Bess.”

  “Any message for Ed Koch? Should this prosecution have been brought?”

  “What about the allegations of the job to Sukhreet, the coincidences of the phone calls, the cuts in Capasso’s alimony?”

  “It’s over,” Bess replied, a frown crossing her face. “It’s over.”

  Then a photographer shouted for her to give the crowd a victory sign.

  Turning her head to face the cameras, she flashed her dazzling smile once again and held up her fingers in a V before climbing into her cab and speeding away.
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br />   Image Gallery

  The Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx today.

  Bess at the Birchwood Camp in Brandon, Vermont, where she worked as a camp counselor during the summer of 1945. Louise Sugarman

  Bess playing the piano during the Miss New York City contest in August 1945. New York Post

  Moments after Bess is crowned Miss America in 1945. AP/Wide World Photos

  The contestants in their Catalina swimsuits line up on the bleachers during the Miss America contest in September 1945. Bess is in the top row, center. AP/Wide World Photos

  Bess and her two sisters, Helen (left) and Sylvia, the day after she won the title. AP/Wide World Photos

  Bess signs autographs for students at a Philadelphia high school, where she spoke out against bigotry and hate for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith during her Miss America reign. Philadelphia Bulletin, Temple University

  Bess as the “Lady in Mink” on “The Big Payoff.” Philadelphia Bulletin, Temple University

  Bess and Allen Wayne leave the courthouse with their nine-year-old daughter Barbara, during a custody battle in 1956. New York Journal American, University of Texas Archives

  A publicity shot of Bess distributed in 1959 after she joined the panel of “I’ve Got a Secret.” Philadelphia Bulletin, Temple University

  Bess as hostess of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Philadelphia Bulletin, Temple University

  While consumer affairs commissioner, Bess drops in at a New York City supermarket and uses her own weights to check a scale. AP/Wide World Photos

  Ed Koch kisses Bess Myerson, his campaign chairperson, on September 19, 1977, the night he won the Democratic nomination for mayor. UPI/Bettman Archives

  At a debate during the 1980 Democratic primary for the United States Senate, Bess is seated next to John Santucci, Elizabeth Holtzman, and John Lindsay. AP/Wide World Photos

  Bess at her swearing-in ceremony in 1983 at New York City’s commissioner of cultural affairs. AP/Wide World Photos

  Bess and Andy Capasso post at Maxim’s December 1986. AP/Wide World Photos

  Nancy Capasso reads about the indictment in the New York Daily News. Aubrey Reuben

  Sukhreet Gabel and retired state supreme court judge Hortense Gabel today. New York Daily News

  Bess removes andirons from Andy Capasso’s Westhampton Beach estate in October 1987. After the photo appeared on the front page of the New York Post, Nancy accused Bess of stealing the andirons. Michael Norcia, New York Post

  Bess leaves the district magistrate’s office in May 1988, where she was released on $150 bail after being arrested for shoplifting nail polish, earrings, and batteries from a Hill’s department store in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Tony Jerome, New York Post

  Outside of the federal courthouse on December 22, 1988, after Bess learns the jury has acquitted her of all charges. AP/Wide World Photos

  Afterword

  Rudolph Giuliani was about to walk out of his office to buy a Christmas present for his wife when he got the call about the verdict. The acquittal of all three defendants ranked as one of the biggest—if not the biggest—embarrassments of his otherwise impressive tenure as U.S. attorney. The case, two years in the works, had collapsed under its star prosecution witness, whose testimony in court and antics outside the courtroom had made her a citywide joke. It was not the outcome Giuliani had hoped for as he considered entering the 1989 mayoral race.

  An hour after Bess walked down the courthouse steps, a calm and composed Giuliani met with reporters in his office and explained that he had “never argued with a jury’s verdict and I will not do so here. The jury concluded there was insufficient evidence.” But he stood by his decision to bring the case into court: “This case was a case that should have been brought to a jury. Obviously we are disappointed with the result.… I made the decision to go forward because of the corruption that was involved here. It was serious.”

  Without a doubt Giuliani’s aggressive prosecution of corrupt city officials and Wall Street executives had helped change the moral climate of New York dramatically. When the circumstances of Sukhreet Gabel’s hiring were first revealed on the New York Post’s gossip page in 1983, no one in journalism or law enforcement bothered to follow it up. It was not until 1986, after Giuliani had begun to delve into charges of municipal corruption, that the old Post story finally attracted the attention of investigators and led to the federal charges against Bess.

  However, while the allegations were serious—a high-ranking member of the Koch administration bribing a state judge to fix a case—Giuliani’s decision to prosecute Bess raises questions about his political ambition and also underscores his critics’ most frequent complaint: that he brought high-profile cases to draw attention to himself and his office.

  The Tyler report, prepared at the request of Mayor Koch, convicted Bess in the court of public opinion. But the standard of proof is much higher in a court of law. And this is where prosecutorial discretion became important.

  Considering all of the law enforcement problems in New York, it seems now, in hindsight, a waste of limited resources to prosecute a public official and an elderly judge who had already stepped down from their public offices in disgrace. And looking at the case now, the problems of prosecuting Bess seem formidable and should have been apparent to a prosecutor of Giuliani’s skill and experience.

  Giuliani and his team of prosecutors should have anticipated how disturbing it would be for a jury to watch a daughter testify against her elderly and nearly blind mother; to hear testimony that she taped her mother’s telephone conversation; to listen to her as she recounted carting shopping bags filled with her mother’s private papers to federal investigators. They should not have used a woman with a long history of depression to testify against her mother.

  On Tuesday, January 11, two weeks after the verdict, Giuliani, then forty-four years old, announced his resignation as U.S. attorney of the Southern District. Three months later he formally announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for mayor of New York and run on an anticorruption platform. Although he easily won the Republican nomination, he was unable to make the transition from effective federal prosecutor to successful mayoral candidate in the general election. He lost to Democrat David Dinkins, who became the city’s first black mayor, ending Koch’s twelve-year reign over New York.

  Sukhreet Gabel had mixed feelings about the verdict. While she insists that she did not want to see her mother convicted, she says that she would have liked to see Bess found guilty. She still blames Bess for the unhappiness and the difficulties she faced finding a job after she left the Department of Cultural Affairs and the city’s Commission on Human Rights in 1983. She had hoped that the trial testimony would show that it wasn’t her fault that she had lost both of her city jobs.

  The days after the verdict were filled with more media appearances for Sukhreet. She showed up on news programs and interview shows all over town, including another appearance on “People Are Talking.” The Gabels declined to appear as guests but could be seen by viewers in the audience, applauding and smiling as Sukhreet defended her decision to testify against her mother. It was a sad, pathetic sight. They had gone to the television studio to show support for Sukhreet, but they might have helped her more if they had stayed at home and insisted that she do the same.

  Sukhreet’s behavior was not unexpected because by the midpoint of the trial she had already become a sideshow act. While her mother was sitting in court, Sukhreet was making the rounds of the city’s television and radio stations, candidly answering questions about her chronic depression and electroshock therapy. She believed her appearances would show the public that she was a “real person” and allow them to judge whether she was, in her own words, “crazy” or sane. She ignored advice from friends who told her that she was being made a fool of. She didn’t seem to care. She was basking in the attention. After seven years of looking for a job, she had a full-fledged career in he
r newfound celebrity.

  In the months following the trial she posed topless with a snake draped around her shoulders for a gay lifestyle magazine. She worked on an album that included one song titled “Who Am I to Judge?” and accepted singing engagements at downtown Manhattan nightclubs and Greenwich Village bars, hiring Tiny Tim’s agent to represent her. Then there was her line of greeting cards, called “Sukhreet’s Sassy Tips,” featuring her in an assortment of odd or revealing costumes. One card shows her in a broad-brimmed hat and a matronly dress with one hand raised and one hand on a Bible. A blindfolded and bare-chested young man in a white toga stands in the background holding the scale of justice. “Witnesses claim you’re such an ol’ prude,” the front of the card says. Inside the message continues: “You can’t even get off on a well-hung jury! Happy Birthday.”

  In the end Sukhreet may have found what she was looking for when she first made Bess Myerson’s acquaintance in the summer of 1983: a little attention and a career.

  As for her relationship with her mother, Sukhreet claims that the ordeal of the trial actually brought them closer together and that they are the best of friends. For Mother’s Day the judge was in the audience at a Greenwich Village cabaret where Sukhreet was singing. For her mother she sang “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime.” Sukhreet is hoping her celebrity will help her get more singing engagements and possibly launch her on the lecture circuit.

  Nancy Capasso was packing for a Caribbean vacation when she got word of the verdict. Even though she had been preparing herself for an acquittal in the wake of Sukhreet’s testimony, she was disappointed, as she explained that night on the telephone, “that Bess did not get it.” For the sake of her children Nancy had hoped that Andy would be acquitted. But Bess was a different matter entirely. Nancy blamed Bess for tearing her family apart and uprooting her from her palatial Fifth Avenue co-op to a $5,000-a-month rental on Third Avenue on the Upper East Side.