The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  22

  Navigating Racial Lines

  On April 18, 1986, less than six months after Judge H. Lee Sarokin issued his ruling, and long before the endless appeal process was finished and the charges against Rubin and John were dismissed, my receptionist buzzed to see if I wanted to talk to a reporter who had followed the case.

  “Have you heard that John Artis has been arrested on a drug charge?” the reporter asked. My heart sank.

  “Oh Lord,” I said.

  The reporter was considerate.

  “The news must be very upsetting to you,” he said.

  I didn’t want to be quoted in the story, especially not about my feelings, so I mumbled something and asked him to tell me what he knew.

  The police had been tapping the phone of a small-time drug operation run out of a woman’s house in Passaic County, New Jersey. Purely by chance the cops picked up John talking on that line. He had received instructions about where to drop off and pick up small quantities of cocaine. When the police had what they needed, they obtained search warrants and started making arrests. A gun was found in John and Dolly’s apartment, but no drugs. They were both arrested. Dolly was released almost immediately, but John was being held in the Passaic County jail.

  It was a quick phone call. I slumped in my chair and stared out of the window. The news didn’t come as a complete surprise. A few months earlier John had called me to borrow five hundred dollars. He said he had been stopped by the Paterson police while driving Dolly’s car, and needed the money to pay the fine. He was out of work and too embarrassed to ask Dolly for the money.

  I knew that John wasn’t working. He had gotten two or three jobs since his release, and had held one for a relatively long period of time, but when his vasculitis, the disease he got in prison, flared again he had another finger-joint amputation, so he had to quit his job. I had stayed in touch with him, and it was hard not to notice that he seemed worn out, and more depressed each time we talked. So I was worried even before I got the call for money.

  John’s request brought with it additional baggage. Tony Maynard was still hitting me up for cash infusions. I felt like an illustration of the saying about how you become responsible for a man after you save his life. It wasn’t only about the money. It was about the shared indignity of being the giver and the taker in a world that made that necessary, and the way it underscored the contradictions of my life’s work.

  While I did not discuss my feelings with the reporter, I could not push away my irritation. Myron and I had been telling John to get out of Paterson with Dolly.

  “Why haven’t you left that damn city?” I asked John before responding to his request for cash.

  “Because of Dolly’s job, and also my family are here,” he answered.

  “But why take chances?” I persisted. “They’re dying to get you back behind bars. They’re never going to let up.”

  “I know,” John answered, “but can you help me out?”

  John had never asked me for a cent, and had always dealt with me as an equal. It felt as if he’d turned a corner with that phone call, and we were on the road to changing that relationship.

  Like Myron, who was a soft touch for clients he had rescued, I hated the trap of being the white man with money. Worse, I knew that the best part of the relationship could die.

  I called Myron, who thought the world of John. Since his release, they had met from time to time to play jazz together. Myron and I were both worried. We decided to go fifty-fifty on the money. We could hope all we wanted that there was nothing more to it than what John had said, but we both had a hunch that something was very wrong.

  When John came to New York the next day, I was afraid to press him about his story. Perhaps “hesitant” is a better word. I realized that the more I learned about the particulars of his situation, the more I would be sucked into his life, and I knew from prior experiences that was a slippery slope.

  Please let him be okay, I said to myself when John left, money in hand. Months passed. And now this. Myron and I agreed that John would be better off with a New Jersey attorney who had no connections to the murder case. William Perkins, Jr., and Robert Utsey, Jr., two well-respected black criminal lawyers, agreed to take on the job. If the prosecutors treated the case like a run-of-the-mill first offender’s low-level drug offense, John would have a good chance of getting probation.

  “We’ll have to see what happens at court,” Perkins said.

  “They owe him,” I pointed out.

  “That’s not the way they see it,” Perkins replied.

  A few days later John was released on bail on the condition that he enter a drug program. When we talked, he was mortified. He told me the part of the story that Myron and I had wondered about. At first he had started taking drugs to escape the pain in his hands and feet. As a result he developed a habit. To get the money he needed to pay the woman who supplied him, he became her runner. She called him to make pickups and drops, and that was it.

  As for the gun, John had been visiting relatives in Virginia, and they had taken the gun to shoot targets in the woods. When he drove back to New Jersey, he saw the gun in the trunk of his car and brought it into his apartment. “I let Dolly down, and you,” he said. “I’ll never let something like this happen again. I’ll die first.”

  I believed him.

  Almost fifteen months after he was arrested, John pleaded guilty to being involved in a drug conspiracy, and to the possession of the gun. The prosecutor did not challenge his statements as to his role in the drug conspiracy, or the small amounts of drugs and money that were involved, nor was his explanation of how he obtained the gun disputed.

  Superior Court Judge Frank M. Donato held John’s sentencing hearing on August 7, 1987, two weeks before the federal court of appeals upheld Judge Sarokin’s decision that had thrown out the Lafayette bar convictions. Before passing sentence on John, Donato had to apply a New Jersey statute that instructed judges how to determine if either aggravating or mitigating factors should affect the sentence.

  Donato agreed that John’s medical condition was a mitigating factor, as he was seeking drugs to alleviate his pain. Instead of focusing on John’s clean record as another mitigating factor, however, he did just the opposite. Despite Sarokin’s ruling wiping out the Lafayette bar convictions, Donato ignored that John was once again presumed innocent of the 1966 murders. There were going to be appeals, and there could be another trial, the judge noted, as if that speculation had anything to do with the presumption of innocence. Worse, Donato opined that John “was not likely to respond to probation because even his past has not been a deterrent to new criminal activity.” It was like a Kafka novel—completely surreal. Rather than give John the benefit of fifteen years of wrongful imprisonment to reduce his sentence, the Judge pointed to the time John had spent in prison as evidence that he could not be rehabilitated. Yet John’s parole officer stated that he had adjusted positively since entering the drug rehabilitation program. Sentencing John to six years in state prison, Donato also refused to allow him to remain free while he appealed. This was Passaic County justice at its finest, a real tribute to Judge Leopizzi, whose courtroom was down the hall.

  When Perkins and Utsey called me to tell me the news, I was aghast. We would appeal, and Leon and I would write the brief, with Utsey handling the argument.

  On a dreary winter day in early 1988, I accompanied Utsey to Trenton. He emphasized the injustice of using the Lafayette bar murders against John as well as the fact that one of the other coconspirators with three prior drug convictions was given probation. Afterward, Utsey was optimistic. Knowing the appellate division from prior experience, I thought he was living in a fantasy world.

  On April 4, 1988, as I suspected, the judges upheld the sentence.

  Once again Leon and I appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court. We filed our brief on May 2, 1988. A little more than a month later Chief Justice Wilentz signed an order remanding the issue of Artis’s sente
nce to Donato, and instructed him to conduct a “reassessment of defendant’s prior record or lack thereof.” Utsey and I returned to the Paterson courthouse. For the last time I witnessed John brought into a courtroom with a guard gripping him firmly above the elbow. Filled with indignation, Donato lectured the local press that the prosecutors and judges of Passaic County who handled the Carter-Artis case were honorable men and outstanding public servants. They constituted a who’s who of the state bar, and he would never agree that John had no history of prior criminal activity. But Donato understood his marching orders. Sullenly he vacated Artis’ six-year sentence, and placed him on probation.

  “You don’t do well up here,” Donato told John. “Maybe you should consider a change of climate.”

  As I was leaving the courtroom, a reporter asked me for my reaction. “This is Paterson.” I shrugged. “I’m just glad John is free.”

  * * *

  Shortly after his release, John and Dolly moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, where he got a job teaching at-risk youth about the perils of getting caught up into the criminal justice system. Dolly continued to work for the Social Security Administration. Then one day John came to see me. We had gone through so much together that it was difficult for us to make small talk, so there was very little of it before he produced an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me.

  “I want you to have this,” he said as I opened it.

  There were five hundred dollars inside. I looked at John speechless.

  “Taking that money was one of the worst things I have done in my life,” he said. “I could not leave until I paid you back.”

  “This is one of the nicest things that has happened to me,” I told him.

  We held each other by the forearms.

  “You take care,” I said.

  “You too,” he responded, giving me his open John Artis smile.

  I cried after he left.

  * * *

  There are many little rays of light I see as I survey the five decades I’ve spent doing this work. There have been powerful black CEOs—including Time Warner’s Richard Parsons and American Express’s Kenneth Chenault. Oprah Winfrey became a phenomenon unto herself. We’ve seen black chiefs of police and a black United States attorney general followed by a black female United States attorney general. Black mayors have come and gone, and of course a black family resides in the White House.

  Over the years I discussed these milestones of racial progress with Bob Carter. He had moved to the same neighborhood as us, also on the park. We became very close, going to the theater and the opera together, talking about cases that interested us, and keeping up with each other’s families. In the winter Kitty and I would stay for a week at a villa Bob rented in Jamaica.

  In 1972, many years before we started vacationing with Bob, Richard Nixon had appointed him to a U.S. district-court judgeship on the recommendation of New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits. Bob had wanted to be a judge since leaving the NAACP, and gave up a lucrative partnership in a midsize management-oriented firm to take the appointment. I remember Bob telling me that some of the high-powered attorneys who practiced in the federal courts tried to push him around, and there seemed to be an attitude among certain lawyers that a black judge could know nothing about the mysteries of complex litigation. Whether Bob’s belief as to what white lawyers thought was right or wrong, he had no time for anyone who failed to accord him the respect he deserved. Bob ruled his courtroom with an iron hand. No one was exempt from his ire, and even civil rights attorneys complained that he could be harsh. I appeared before him only once. As usual, I had my say. After that, he told me, never again. It was a wise decision.

  Over the years Bob wrote some groundbreaking civil rights decisions and suffered his share of reversals from the far more conservative judges on the court of appeals. He has been hard on those accused of certain crimes, especially when the charges involved conduct that had a serious impact on black communities. He has also had a light touch when he thought he could save certain defendants by keeping them out of prison. Always Bob tried to do what he felt was the right thing, caring little for public opinion. The young law clerks who worked for him often tried to follow in his footsteps.

  Our relationship was hard to categorize. He started as a mentor, but our connection over time became more like a family relationship. I saw him as a great man capable of warmth, kindness, and humor, but also through the lens of a son—critically—and he was indulgent of that dynamic between us. That we were not father and son, however, made it easier, as did the deep affection Kitty and Bob had for each other.

  Our fellow houseguests in Jamaica varied from trip to trip. Sometimes we were with Bob’s sons, David and John, and the latter’s son, Christopher. Law professor and author Derrick Bell and his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, then the communications and public relations director of New York City’s public employees union, District Council 37, were regulars, as was Kenneth Clark, the social psychologist whose studies helped the Supreme Court understand the effects of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Shirley Williams, whose brother was the New York Times literary critic, Anatole Broyard, also visited as did her husband, Franklin, who was a former ambassador to Ghana and a close friend of Bob’s from their early NAACP days. Rhoda Karpatkin, who was the executive director of Consumer Reports and Bob’s dear friend since her late husband worked with him at the NAACP, also visited sporadically, as did Dick Bellman and his artist wife, Bobbie Beck. There were also friends from Bob’s bridge club and Rose Ryder, his former neighbor, close friend, and traveling companion.

  Whatever the combination, conversations about books, politics, theater, opera, family, and the pleasures of eating and travel were our staple. Humor and poking fun alternated with seriousness.

  One year Bob and I walked down the rocky little road from his villa to the nearby Caribbean-hugging tourist hotel. I was wearing my threadbare “Reverse the Arms Race” T-shirt and bathing trunks, and Bob wore a designer shirt and Bermuda shorts. Our destination was the hotel shop, which carried the New York Times. The doorman had allowed me unchallenged access the day before; today he intercepted Bob and questioned him about his destination. The guy was black himself, but he had his orders. Faced with Bob’s show of authority, the doorman backed off and waved us through.

  “Even in Jamaica.” Bob shook his head ruefully.

  “He just recognized the well-dressed man,” I wisecracked.

  “I guess that’s it.” Bob scowled, chuckled, and added, “But just you remember we have a dress code for dinner. And there’s no fooling around about that.”

  Another time we were having a discussion about opera singers, when I made the mistake of mentioning my friend who wrote opera reviews for the New York Times and New York magazine. Bob frowned, saying, “I don’t know about him and his put-downs of Jessye Norman, and for writing all that stuff about Kathleen Battle being difficult to work with.” Bob was friends with Norman and thought she was the greatest. Kitty and I thought she was superb, too.

  “He’s said wonderful things about both of them,” I replied. “He just gets a little critical when the prima donnas start thinking too much of themselves. He said cruel things about Beverly Sills when she sang certain roles well past her prime.”

  “Sills used to call him up and leave irate messages on his answering machine,” Kitty added.

  “Just because he’s your friend,” Bob teased, keeping the conversation playful and serious at the same time, “you come to his defense, but you know as well as I do that he sees black singers as being in a different category.”

  I didn’t think Bob was right, but I knew that discussion would go nowhere. I understood Bob’s concern, however. It’s rare that black people reach the pinnacle of their profession. Once they get there they are all too often shot down or accused of things that whites are suspected of doing all the time. So of course Bob got his back up.

  I remember the time in Jamaica we talked about the R
epublican “Contract with America” rhetoric coming out of Washington, and the O. J. Simpson trial, which had polarized the country. On the former issue we all agreed that America was headed in a frightening direction, and that the Democrats were too spineless to stop it. The OJ trial was more controversial. We got Court TV down there. I remember when the trial was at a standstill because Judge Lance Ito was holding one of his endless hearings. It was all a sideshow. The defense revolved around an allegation of planting evidence by a racist cop, while the prosecution had everything but a videotape of the crime. The whole thing hinged on a predominantly black working-class jury.

  After working on the Carter-Artis case, I knew only too well about juror predispositions. We had a tape recording of the detective in charge telling a hesitant key witness that he should finger Rubin and John because “colored people are only out for themselves,” and not one of the white working-class jurors thought twice about registering a guilty vote. They didn’t seem to care whether the police had planted key evidence.

  As it became clear that OJ stood a good chance of getting off because his jury might buy the very true charges of police racism, white Americans became apprehensive. Poll after poll showed that a large majority of blacks believed that OJ was innocent, while a large majority of whites, including me and Bob’s other white houseguests, thought he was guilty. Bob was more judicious, wanting to watch the trial unfold.

  I hoped the jury verdict would reflect the evidence, but I was guessing Simpson would be acquitted and that whites would ask the same questions Myron and I asked about the Carter-Artis jury: How could they do that? I could hear whites complain about how blacks protected their own. But I wasn’t going to be upset. What goes around, comes around, was pretty much how I saw it.