by Paul Batista
To everyone else in the courtroom—and there were at least two hundred people crowding it, since everyone wanted to learn the surprise story about the football-player-turned-lawyer and the government’s chief witness against Congressman Danny Fonseca—the huddled group of Judge Feigley, the lawyers, and the struggling P A U L B A T I S T A
court reporter looked bizarre, laughable, a parody of the picture on a Dutch Masters cigar box.
“You’re killing my case, Judge,” Sorrentino whispered in the huddle.
No reaction from Judge Feigley. She stared at him. He continued, “There is no way that what Hutchinson said to Perini is covered by the attorney-client privilege. Hutchinson’s lawyer was Mr. Cerf. And what Hutchinson said to Perini is vital. What if he told Perini that Danny Fonseca was clean as snow, chaste as ice?
That would totally undercut what he’s saying now.”
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Neil Steinman had the urge to speak. Judge Feigley sensed that and raised her hand toward him, signaling silence. “Now, now, Mr. Sorrentino, I’m not gonna let you satisfy every whim you have. You’ve been at this witness for days. I’ve given you broad latitude, broad latitude indeed. These jurors will wither on the vine unless we move this case forward.”
Vincent Sorrentino went back at her. “Just so the record is clear, Your Honor, you’re telling me I can’t ask this witness questions about Mr. Perini because that’s covered by the attorney-client privilege or because the jurors are going to turn into raisins?”
Passive-faced, Judge Feigley didn’t respond. Steinman rolled his eyes and gave a quick, derisive laugh. He was convinced that Sorrentino’s ego and temper were so touchy that he had once again antagonized this prideful judge.
Wanting to end the silence, recognizing his mistake, Sorrentino said quickly, “There’s more to it, Judge. What if my friend Mr. Steinman here knew that his star witness had spilled his guts to Mr. Perini? What if Mr. Steinman knew that? Mr. Steinman must have known that. In all those hours he’s spent with this witness, that subject must have come up. He had an obligation to come forward and tell us that, because that could be information useful to the defense—it could tend to show that the Congressman was not guilty.”
Judge Feigley was speaking in her low, murmurous voice even before Sorrentino had finished. “You are flailing all around, Mr.
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Sorrentino. Flailing. And it’s not a pretty sight. All these what ifs, what if that, what if this. One of my problems with you is what I’ll call your seat of the pants. You improvise as you go along. You don’t do your homework. Mr. Perini was with you for weeks. You could have found out from him what he knew about this witness.
You could have hired investigators, you could have probed. You could have put some flesh on these what ifs—”
“Excuse me, Your Honor, are you seriously telling me that I should have had the vision to ask Mr. Perini, out of the blue, whether he had met Mr. Hutchinson? Or hired an investigator to 79
do that?”
Quietly she said, “Don’t interrupt me, Mr. Sorrentino. I think you’ve made your record so that the ladies and gentlemen upstairs can know what your grievance with me is on the day you have to take your appeal.” She paused. “If that day ever comes.”
“I don’t want an appeal. I want an acquittal,” Vincent Sorrentino said.
“We all like manna to fall from heaven, Mr. Sorrentino. But more often all you get is rain. Why don’t you move on to some other area with this witness. If you have another area.”
She rose, massively, and returned to her chair at the center of the bench. As if the trial had been in suspended animation, she announced vigorously into the microphone, her voice resonating in the courtroom, “The objection is sustained.”
As he walked back to the podium and glanced at the crowd of spectators, Sorrentino saw a group of reporters, intense surprise on their faces, leave the courtroom. Even the jurors, Sorrentino felt, usually unreadable, appeared surprised, disappointed that they would not hear what went on between Hutchinson and Tom Perini.
10.
Every Wednesday morning in the spring, summer, and fall for the last ten years, Selig Klein drove from his split-level, thirteen-room house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to the Shinnecock Canal in Southampton. At four in the morning—always dark, no matter what season—only one or two other cars also sped east along the Long Island Expressway. For Klein, his Mercedes-Benz was a powerful pleasure machine as it consumed the road and the distance. He felt its balance and force as he drove the eighty miles in slightly more than an hour, the vast country fields of the East End gradually opening up, beautiful, still, and misty, as dawn came.
Selig Klein was on his boat, the Mack II, by five-thirty on those Wednesday mornings. The man he called Captain Kidd—a forty-five-year-old Montauk native named Bill Driscoll—was always there before Klein. Mack II was a seventy-foot-long yacht with room enough to sleep twelve people, sleek, and meticulously crafted. It was the love of Klein’s life. He needed Captain Kidd to pilot it, although over the last ten years Klein had learned the esoteric craft of sailing. But Captain Kidd was the expert and Klein not only liked him but liked the idea of having a captain on his payroll.
Captain Kidd cost about as much on a one-day basis as a union truck driver. Besides, Klein was able to fish and pay attention to the friends he invited for his weekly excursions into the Atlantic beyond sight of the Long Island shoreline. Sometimes he and Captain Kidd sailed alone, but not often.
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Early morning, as they eased gradually through the Shinnecock Canal south to the Atlantic, was the part of the day Klein loved, the water widening, dawn broadening, the bracing smell of the salt water. Even the heady odor of the diesel fuel, dispersing swiftly in the ocean air, pleased him. And so did the enormous power of the faultless engine. The engine and the boat were his, more than anything else, more than the two hundred trucks and trailers he owned, more than the fancy offices his thirty-eight-year-old, noisy daughter had designed for him on the Hudson River pier where his company operated its main business, more 81
than his annoying family. The boat separated him from those things he wanted to put at a distance, his seventy-three-year-old wife, brassy as their daughter, and his marijuana-smoking adult sons who had offices at the pier and were the running joke of the hundreds of people who worked for him.
The Mack II not only separated Klein from all those annoying, distracting people and daily events, it also put him in touch with the people he did like. Captain Kidd was only one of them, and only a recent addition at that. Klein had friends, despised by his wife Naomi, who had been in his life for years, back to the early fifties when he was still driving trucks out of Manhattan for the long-defunct Yale and Hemingway trucking companies. Among them were other drivers from that era, some of whom later worked for Klein in no-show office jobs, union shop stewards who later became “secretary-treasurers” for the Teamster and Long-shoremen’s locals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and former cooks who later owned diners and restaurants. He tried to have at least two or three of these friends with him on the boat each Wednesday as guests.
But not every Wednesday. There were many Wednesdays when he wanted a girl with him. “Nice girls,” as he called them.
Decades earlier, when he was still driving trucks himself in Eisen-hower’s hypocritical years, girls of any kind were hard to come by. He worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, had Naomi and three kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and, despite the fact that he P A U L B A T I S T A
made good money, had a hard time finding nice girls and an even harder time taking them anywhere. In that era the girls who worked in the front offices were snooty and stingy. He had no doubt they were more generous with his bosses than they were with him.
Then, miraculously, everything changed. Girls changed. And so did Klein. By 1959 he managed to buy two used trucks. He knew the printing companies that needed paper delivered and he k
new that the way to keep his trucks moving all the time, day and night, every day, was to pay cash to the executives who worked 82
for the printing companies. Klein’s company grew. By the early sixties he had eighteen trucks, two depots, and a network of routes and customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The more cash he had to spread around the more money he made. Cash was fer-tilizer on seeds.
It was not just that the girls came with the money, although Klein knew to a dead certainty that the money helped. It always had, everywhere, and always would. It was also true that the times had changed. The stingy girls in the front office were transformed, by 1966, to married, divorced, or separated women who wanted sex and good times. He was already in his late thirties by then, overwhelmed by his good luck. He binged on women, young, middle-aged, Jewish, black, Italian, any variety. He no longer even made a pretense of keeping secrets from Naomi. She found out, called him a “dirty fuck,” and continued buying anything she wanted—clothes, furniture for their new house in Bay Ridge and the apartment in West Palm Beach. She actually treated him better than in the past because she ignored him, rather than badg-ered him. Cash helped with her, too, Klein saw.
In 1976, Klein bought his first boat, which he kept moored in a marina not far from LaGuardia Airport and used infrequently.
Later, he bought Mack II for almost two million dollars and decided to moor it in Shinnecock, where there was more space and greater access to the sea. Through the late seventies, the eighties, and the nineties, the spread of herpes and then AIDS, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
not age, had restrained him. But the elegant boat he owned seemed to attract women who were more sophisticated, more daring in some ways than the women who had earlier converged on his life. Something about the yacht made the women he invited more attentive, more sensual. And Viagra restored him at the right times to the reliable, potent passions of his twenties and thirties. There were Wednesdays on the boat, after a day of sea, fishing, drinking, and sex, when Klein loved life so much that, as the Mack II cruised slowly back into the Shinnecock locks, the summer air darkening, he’d say aloud, “This shit is too fuckin’
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good.”
Over the years Klein had learned, to his pleasure and surprise, that many women, no matter who they were, said yes when he asked them to the boat. Klein thought in terms of high-class broads, low-class broads, or just girls. No matter what the class, you never got anywhere unless you asked, and most answered.
You don’t win the lottery without buying a ticket. And you don’t get laid without asking.
So why not try Julie Perini?
After all, she’d been calling him. At first, he had not recognized her name on the message sheet left for him at his office, because he was almost illiterate and read the handwritten name as “Junie Purina,” which meant nothing to him other than the name of a brand of dog food, and he had ignored the message.
Two days later, another message with her name was handed to him. As he stared at it he recognized that it could be Tom Perini’s beautiful wife, whom he had met one night at Perini’s office before the trial started. When he made the connection between the name and the person, he tossed the message slip into the waste basket. Why the hell would he want to talk to her? Did she want money?
But she persisted. “I’m trying to reach Mr. Klein,” she said when Klein took a random call one morning after the girl at the switchboard let one of the lines ring at least seven times without answering.
P A U L B A T I S T A
“You got Mr. Klein.”
“Mr. Klein, this is Julie Perini. Tom’s wife?”
“Yeah, how you doing?”
“Not that bad.”
“Look, I should’ve called you before. I liked your husband.
Good kid. I’m real sorry about what happened to him.”
“Thanks,” she responded and then hesitated.
In the awkward interval, Klein focused on the fact that he had come to fear and despise the telephone. For years he had said everything to everybody over the telephone but he had learned 84
that telephones were a minefield. His business and home telephone lines, as well as his cell phones, had wiretaps on them for eighteen months before he was indicted. A tap had also been secretly placed inside his Mercedes to record his conversations with people in the car. By the end, the government had eight hundred hours of his conversations on tape. Many of those tapes were being played now at Fonseca’s trial.
“Actually, Mr. Klein,” Julie finally said, “I wanted to talk to you about Tom.”
“Oh yeah, what about?”
“Nothing much. You knew him. You were with him a lot. I thought you might be able to help.”
“Help with what?”
“Help me.”
“To do what?”
“To find out something.”
Klein knew enough about women to know that this one had something specific on her mind but was playing an inevitable game of coyness and indirection. He also knew enough about telephones. “Listen, honey, you gotta be straight with me. And I gotta be straight with you. I’m not sure I want to talk about Tom.
But I am sure that whatever we got to talk about we ain’t gonna talk about on the phone.”
“Why not?”
“The phone’s got ears. Ears that remember.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“Oh. Then can I come see you? To talk about Tom?”
“You can come see me anytime, but I’m not so certain I want to talk about Tom.”
With a tone of hurt in her voice, she asked him to think about it and left her home and work telephone numbers with him, as well as her cell phone number.
At first he decided to ignore her. But she was persistent, leaving messages with him several times in the next week. Her persistence intrigued him. As he recalled, she was good-looking, a dark-eyed, perfectly balanced face, the slim body, the outline of 85
her breasts he recalled as gorgeous, the smart voice. Sy Klein had not spent much time with that kind of woman—a type that was almost an icy ideal for him. And here was this woman, her husband dead, alone, sounding like a lost girl. Who knew why she was calling, really? Stranger things had happened to him with women. You never know what kind of shit you’re gonna step in unless you step.
In several calls Klein told her that he was still thinking, that he wanted to help her, but that he wasn’t certain. Christ, he even thought at one point, the Feds could be behind her, trying to set me up, pin me with killing this kid. He told her again there was “no way”
he’d speak about anything important on any phone. Julie suggested lunch. He had decided that he didn’t simply want to have lunch with her. Lunch would lead nowhere. He deflected her. “I don’t eat lunches anymore.” She suggested meeting him at his office. He said no. There were eavesdropping bugs all over his office, he said, and “besides, a pier’s no place to bring a lady.” She had let that pass.
Finally, when he suggested the boat and a day at sea, she didn’t reject the idea. “That sounds like a big deal. I don’t want to impose that much,” she reacted initially. “I don’t know.”
“It’s the only place I feel safe talking. Out in the open on the deck. On the water with the wind blowing.”
“I can’t imagine anyone but me would be interested in what I’m interested in.”
P A U L B A T I S T A
“Listen, Julie, listen. I’m surprised every day by how interested my friends in the government are in everything I’ve ever said.”
“Well, I have my baby, my job. A whole day, that’s a lot.”
“I’ll have a car and driver pick you up and drive you out to the Island. Listen, I can tell you haven’t been too happy lately, I bet you’ve been miserable. Think about a day outside on the water, fishing. Give yourself a break. Have you ever gone deep-sea fishing?”
“Sy, I really do want to talk with you.”
That was the first time she had ever used his fir
st name.
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“Listen, Julie, I don’t bite. The only place I’m gonna talk to you is on a deck chair on my boat, out in the open. In bathing suits. There’s gonna be other people on board. I always have friends. I’ve even got a real live captain. You can relax, we can talk, you might even meet some new people, might even enjoy yourself.”
“I’ll have to think about it.” She paused. “Tom always told me that you were sweet, generous.”
“That was real nice of him.”
“We’ll talk.”
“Sure, Julie.”
A week later, as he cruised off Montauk, he used his cellular telephone—a magnificent, invisible net that he could throw, mag-ically, over the whole world—and learned that Julie had left a message at his office. Standing on the gleaming fiberglass-and-wood prow of Mack II he tapped out the number she left, and then he pressed the Send button. The Atlantic was dazzling at noon. The shoreline was at the farthest edge of the north horizon; to the far south, two distant freighters sailed toward Europe, toward the Caribbean, wherever…
“NBC.”
It was her work number. He had forgotten she was with a television station. As with telephones and government agents, he’d developed a hatred for newspapers, radio and television stations, and magazines, and the supercilious people who worked for D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
them. He genuinely hated the sight of his name in print or its sound on television or radio: he was always described, in those blunt descriptive phrases, as the “waterfront trucking magnate,”
the “trucker for organized crime,” or the “benefactor of accused Bronx Congressman Danny Fonseca.”