The defenders seemed even more zestfully exuberant when winning cases for defendants who were obviously guilty. If only the prosecution could recruit lawyers with such passion and zeal.
I always knew when a case, somehow bumbled and about to embarrass the state attorney’s office, was to be called—and lost. Some persuasive young prosecutor would seek me out, urgently suggesting that we go somewhere quiet to chat over coffee, a decoy sent in an attempt to divert me from the courtroom where the debacle was about to occur.
The ploy never worked. There were always too many people eager to spill the beans: court clerks, bailiffs, corrections officers, angry witnesses, opposing lawyers, irate cops and civilian-court watchers, usually senior citizens who enjoyed watching real-life drama more than TV soap opera.
There was never a dull moment on the beat. It was always chaos in the courts—frequent escape attempts, suicides and hysterics. Defendants collapsed, killed themselves or ran. One prisoner bolted out of a courtroom, pursued by a stampede of police, witnesses, jailers and his screaming family and friends, who had come to root for him at his trial. The escapee charged up a down escalator, then vaulted over the side. He knocked down several secretaries from the public defender’s office, who were then trampled by pursuing police. Miami Police Officer Robert Weatherhoit finally dropped him with a flying tackle off the escalator. They landed in a heap at the feet of State Attorney Gerstein, who called the cop’s tackle “worthy of the NFL.” The escape attempt was the third that week. A prosecutor had dropkicked another escaping defendant off the escalator, and a third had leaped out a third-floor window.
Crisis was the rule, not the exception. It was always something: the speedy-trial-rule crisis, the probation-department crisis, the jury-selection crisis, the ever-simmering jail crisis and the visiting-judge crisis. Backlogged calendars created a state of emergency and visiting and interim judges were appointed to help reduce the caseload. One of them was the courtly, Tennessee-born Judge George Holt, a controversial former state representative. Years earlier he had been the target of Florida’s first impeachment proceedings against a judge and had barely weathered the storm. A senate vote necessary to remove him from office came up two ballots short. Now, age sixty-eight and frisky, he was summoned from his South Carolina retirement to help ease the crisis in Miami’s courts—out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Holt was good-humored, plain-talking, and colorful to say the least. Assigned to speed things up in the court system, he did so, to the horror of the prosecution. He tossed out charges against an embezzlement suspect, saying, “I’m not going to hear any three-dollar case.” In a fit of pique, he dismissed a day’s entire calendar of armed robbers and drug suspects, throwing out their cases, after clashing with a prosecutor.
A SWAT team could not have pried me from his courtroom.
The judge was about to conduct the jury trial of a notorious defendant facing two counts of robbery when a set of briefs caught his eye. They were not of the legal variety—they were suede and looked hot. An attractive woman wearing short pants and boots was among prospective jurors thronged in the corridor when he arrived to pursue justice and impanel a jury. Judge Holt did a double take.
“What’s her number?”—her juror number, he asked the clerk, in front of the entire courtroom. The clerk had no idea.
“Find out,” His Honor ordered.
A dutiful deputy marched out and pretended to be checking subpoenas. He returned and reported in a stage whisper, “She’s number nineteen.”
“Call number nineteen,” the judge ordered.
The dark-haired woman, in her fringed boots, stepped to the jury box, unaware of the conspiracy. Public defender Tom Morgan and prosecutor Sky Smith promptly accepted her. Both young lawyers were eager to keep the judge happy.
“I knew she was being called out of order,” Smith would say later, “but she was acceptable. Even if she hadn’t been, I would have been hesitant to excuse her in view of the judge’s preference.”
During routine questioning, the woman was asked if she would follow Holt’s instructions during the trial. “I’ll do anything the judge tells me,” she cooed.
The judge beamed. “Hear that?” He nudged a bailiff. “I think she likes me.”
The trial got under way as the victims, a Coconut Grove couple, testified to a night of terror, awakened in the dark by a figure at the foot of their bed. The intruder’s face was grotesquely distorted by a stocking mask. He held a flickering candle high in one hand, a sawed-off shotgun in the other. He fired a blast into their mattress. The husband leaped up and grappled with the gunman, who battered them both with the weapon before he dropped it and fled. The intruder also left his jacket behind.
Police said the jacket belonged to the defendant. A shell matching those in the shotgun was found in his closet. Scratches on his leg were consistent with the struggle. The public defender was morose. The prosecution had an airtight case.
The judge enlivened the proceedings with country-boy jokes and wisecracks and ordered miniskirted women to sit where he could see their legs. Leaving the other jurors locked up, he summoned number nineteen from the jury room to request her telephone number. She flirted back as they discussed the bestselling book The Sensuous Woman.
“You won’t need any book, honey, when you’re out with me,” the judge told her from the bench.
The prosecutor finally protested, “Judge, I’m shocked.”
He seemed to be the only one. Peals of laughter rang out from the jury room, where members were playing Concentration.
On his way back from lunch. Judge Holt confided to me that he intended to hand the defendant two ninety-nine-year terms.
Sounded right to me.
The jury did not deliberate long at all.
Not guilty.
The stunned prosecutor and I pursued the jurors outside. “I’m sorry,” one apologized, “but we were just having too much fun to send anybody to jail.”
I wrote about the case, then had occasion to write about it again two months later, after the wife of an ice-cream vendor was shot to death, the latest victim in a series of Coconut Grove robbery-murders.
They arrested the killer, the same man acquitted in Judge George Holt’s courtroom.
Some things are worse than a clogged calendar.
Take Judge Murray Goodman, insecure and fearful of criticism from the press, who would refuse to call any newsworthy or controversial case if a reporter was present. I took to lurking outside his courtroom, peeping in from time to time. When an interesting case was called, I would slip inside and take a seat. The judge would look up in horror, call a recess and flee the bench.
In a muddled attempt to keep track of what calendar page he was on, Judge Goodman had devised his own method, using a child’s numbered building blocks.
Daniel Fritchie, a defendant in Goodman’s court, was penniless on the street when a Miamian offered him a place to stay. During the night, Fritchie slammed his sleeping benefactor over the head with a heavy frying pan and slit his throat. The killer called police. His confession was detailed. “I am mentally unstable and need to be confined,” he said. Judge Goodman found Fritchie not guilty of murder by reason of insanity and ordered him committed. Released as no longer dangerous less than three months later, Fritchie traveled to Los Angeles. He was penniless on the street when a man offered him a place to stay. During the night he slammed his benefactor over the head with a statue of St. Francis and slit his throat. He explained to Los Angeles police: “I’m a danger to myself and others. I tried to tell them that in Miami, but they let me go.”
When I sought his comment for my story, Judge Goodman said he could not recall the case. I believed him.
Then there was defendant Sherry Ann Gray, eighteen, one of Dade County’s busiest burglars. “She’s been in more houses than Santa Claus,” an investigator told me. Police attributed more than 400 burglaries to this blue-eyed teenager, a heroin addi
ct since age sixteen. She led detectives to the scenes of 150 crimes that she recalled.
I interviewed her in a cell. Slim and pretty, she smiled a lot and wore the word LOVE on her left arm—burned into the flesh with matches. She told me about the burglaries. “I did three to five a day. I had a hundred-and-fifty-dollar habit. I was high most of the time. I lost all fear. I didn’t care if the people were home and shot me when I broke in.”
Cellmates insisted she should have been a con artist, not a burglar. Officials agreed that she was 90 percent con. A trace of the little girl remained, however. She had been jailed since March—this was May. “I’ve never been away from my mother so long.”
Sherry the junkie-thief stole a $26,000 diamond ring and sold it for four $10 bags of heroin. Stronger than she looked, she once outran pursuing cops while carrying a stolen nineteen-inch color portable. She stole a gun and sold it to a man in a bar. He used it to commit murder twenty-four hours later. She had been questioned in the killing of a Miami police officer, and federal agents wanted her before a grand jury. They were looking for the counterfeiting plates she had stolen in a burglary.
Sherry the little girl said she was twelve when her father’s death and her rape by a family friend took place three months apart. When her stepfather was killed in a brawl with a cousin, the family moved from South Carolina to Florida.
“I tried sniffing Carbona when I was fifteen. It was on a rag in a bag. It blew my mind. I started looking for myself in the bag. The first day of ninth grade I skipped school. My girlfriend told me she smoked pot and saw peanut butter and jelly sandwiches hanging on a tree. I said, ‘Man, I have to try that!’ I didn’t see any peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I just kept laughing. Next day my jaws were sore from laughing so much. We all started smoking pot. We could get it anytime.”
Then she met some boys at a carnival. “They had these tabs, like sugar, and said it was LSD. I had the worst trip. It lasted twenty-seven hours; I thought I would never be normal again. The boy I was with was chewing gum. I felt like I was the piece of gum. I could feel him chewing me. I thought he was killing me. I was screaming. Everybody was so ugly. They took me home. The cat was lying near the door; I thought it was a lion. They had to hold it, so I could walk by.”
Her bad trip did not deter Sherry and her friends. LSD was available at one of Miami’s first psychedelic shops. “We tripped every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday,” she said.
Soon she was using hard drugs and associating with two boys who broke into houses. A Miami doctor wrote them prescriptions in exchange for new television sets. One boy later went to prison, the other died of an overdose.
“When you need a bag of dope you’ve got to think fast,” Sherry explained. A man “used to give me five bags of heroin to sell for fifty dollars. He’d give me two bags for selling it. I’d sell them milk sugar. I’d beat the bags I sold to people and do their dope too. I used to make up aluminum-foil dummy bags that looked like his. I’d tell him people out in the car wanted to buy but had to see the dope first. I’d give him back the dummy bags of milk sugar, go home and get off. He never caught me.”
A friend fronted her four hundred dollars to buy some dope and go into business for herself. She planned to cut it, three to one, and deal, but she got ripped off. “The contact I went to sold me milk sugar and quinine mixed with a little Tuinal. It would gum up in the cooker. It was awful! I got so mad I just cried.” She went back to demand a refund, but he kept putting her off. One day she went back and he wasn’t home. “I just took the jalousies out. I took his two color TVs, stereo tape player, and his .45-caliber gun. I was just trying to get my four hundred dollars back.”
That was her first burglary. “I’d ride down the street. If there was no car in the driveway and it was a nice house, I’d go knock on the door. If somebody answered, I asked for a phony name. I can get in any jalousie door. Rollup windows are easy too. I used to cut myself a lot. One time I cut myself pretty bad, bled all over the place. Later, when the detectives took me back to the house, the woman just stood there and cried because I was so young.
“I took mainly cash, coins and guns. I found out all about guns. I know every model. My connections gave me three or four bags for them. I had an old man who gave me three dollars apiece for silver dollars. A guy who runs a gas station used to buy any jewelry I got. I broke into one house when it was raining. My mascara was running so I went in the bathroom and was using the woman’s cold cream to take it off when I felt something in the cold cream jar. A hundred-dollar bill wrapped in aluminum foil. Another time I found twenty-four tabs of LSD, nineteen tabs of THC, three of mescaline and eight ounces of grass in a refrigerator. I took the stereo and some out-of-sight tapes too. I bet they were surprised.”
She never wore gloves. Metro Detective Robert Rossman thought he knew why: that she wanted to be caught, that she was begging for help.
A Boy Scout copied the tag number of a car she used in a burglary, and she became Miami’s most wanted woman. Sergeant Rossman, a father of five, tracked her, missing her many times by minutes. “We kept finding her fingerprints,” he said. Because of her wholesome appearance, the pretty teenager could blend right into residential neighborhoods.
His search ended in a staked-out trailer park, when Sherry arrived with a full day’s loot. A judge agreed to release her in her mother’s custody if she would help close burglary cases, recover stolen property and lead police to one of her friends who was wanted for shooting a policeman. She never did the latter.
“She was in withdrawal and ran us in circles,” Rossman said. “She did help us though. She took us to pushers.”
Sherry grew to trust the veteran detective. “She called me every day,” Rossman said. “That was one of the rules. She kept her word and I kept mine. We had a mutual understanding.” Working with him, she divulged information and helped track down stolen valuables. But after a routine meeting one night, she was stopped by a waiting Opa-Locka detective, who handcuffed and arrested her on a months-old case.
She swore Rossman had betrayed her.
He said he did not. “I treated Sherry like I’d want one of my children treated,” he told me. “The third time we arrested her she was barefoot. My wife gave her a pair of slippers and a sweater”—but the bond was broken.
“I dropped a tab of acid. All I saw was jail, and every man looked like a cop.” She fled to New Mexico, a trip financed by stolen credit cards, and was arrested in Arizona. Rossman drew fire from his superiors and Sherry’s victims.
“She let me down,” he said. “I don’t think she’s got enough moral character to stay off the junk. If she can’t, there’s only one way she can support it.”
“Sherry is a classic case,” said her matinee-idol lawyer, Steve Mechanic. “Take a basically nice girl with looks, intelligence and a parent who cares—string her out on drugs and the next fix is her only reality.”
Mechanic negotiated guilty pleas on twenty-two burglary counts. Judge Murray Goodman sentenced her to six months to five years, then said he might give her a break.
Everybody involved advised against it—strongly.
The judge talked to Sherry the con artist alone in his chambers and decided they were all wrong. He sent her to a drug rehabilitation program at Concept House. This was her last chance, he told her. She promised not to let him down. Sherry went to Concept House, announced she was stepping out to do her laundry and disappeared. The program’s director suggested she might experience a change of heart and come back.
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” said her parole and probation investigator.
“I wish I had been wrong,” said Detective Rossman. “Without willpower you can’t make it. I’m sorry. I was rooting for her.”
“Sherry must have a reason for this,” insisted Steve Mechanic, her staunch public defender. “It may not be a good reason, but she must have one.”
Judge Goodman expressed his keen disappointment—and emb
arrassment.
Sherry traded her last chance for eight days of freedom. Police spotted her in a Cadillac with an ex-convict. She saw them, slammed her foot over the driver’s on the gas pedal, and tried to outrun them. She had a gun in the waistband of her red slacks. The three policemen it took to subdue her said she tried to pull the weapon on them.
This time Sherry Ann Gray went to prison.
When a 315-pound woman was hauled before him accused of assaulting a police officer with a knife, Murray Goodman sentenced her to a diet: Lose three pounds a week or go to jail. He ordered her to weigh in weekly and bring proof of her weight until she reached a svelte 250 pounds, which she claimed to be her normal weight.
Sounded right to Goodman, who was overweight himself.
Another time Judge Goodman kept a robbery suspect who kept pleading for a hearing and protesting his innocence in jail for five weeks. When Goodman went on vacation, Judge Alfonso C. Sepe scheduled a hearing and instructed the state to have the victim present. The victim appeared and identified the defendant—as the wrong man.
Judge Sepe seemed at the opposite end of the spectrum from these other judges. He had innovative ideas and gave unforgettable sentencing speeches. He used both his heart and his brain to create meaningful sentencing.
He gave two-year prison terms to two young robbers who terrorized three old ladies, then reduced the sentences to ten years of tightly structured probation. Both defendants were to start college and earn four-year degrees, with their grades regularly submitted to the court. They were to observe a curfew, attend regular religious services and abstain from alcoholic beverages and association with anyone using drugs or weapons. Each was to write letters of apology to the victims. Since the defendants’ attorneys and emotional parents had called the crime a childish prank, and they had admittedly behaved like children, the judge ordered each to write I shall not disobey the law ten thousand times and deliver it to him within thirty days.
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 27