Depraved Indifference

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Yeah, sure, Warren, what you got? Sports Illustrated?” Karp asked amiably.

  “Sure thing,” said the man, reaching down for a magazine. He handed Karp a three-month-old Sports Illustrated. Karp gave him a couple of quarters.

  “See you later, Warren,” he said, moving away.

  Warren smiled. “Thanks, you big asshole,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “And go fuck yourself!”

  Karp had a warm spot in his heart for the man everybody called Dirty Warren. Although he realized that life was no picnic for him (Warren did not have many repeat customers, and occasionally picked up lumps from those unfamiliar with the brain malfunction called Tourette’s syndrome), he believed the home of the criminal justice system required the presence of someone with an uncontrollable urge to shout obscenities. And Warren was at least physically presentable, which could not be said of many of the other Calcutta regulars, the Scab Man, for example, or the Walking Booger.

  Karp’s office was on the fourth floor. Since he was the Deputy Director of the Criminal Courts Bureau, he rated an enclosed office with a real window. The bureau director, a Bloom crony named Melvyn Pelso, was an elegant slug, whose main functions were lunching with the great, going to meetings, and spying on Karp for Bloom. On the good side, he rarely arrived before ten and often skipped Mondays altogether, which meant that Karp could use his vastly larger office for meetings of Karp’s Team.

  Karp believed devoutly in rules, in Due Process, and Criminal Procedure, and the Rules of Evidence, and Probable Cause, in the Presumption of Innocence and the Punishment of the Guilty. That the management of the District Attorney’s Office was truly interested in none of these things made his life more difficult, but neither depressed him nor drove him into comfortable cynicism. It just made it necessary for him to organize, unofficially, and under the table, a Team of his own.

  The members of the unofficial team had gathered, as they did every Monday morning, in the bureau’s outer office: a dozen young and a couple of middle-aged attorneys drinking bad coffee out of styrofoam cups and munching danishes paid for by Karp and brought in by Connie Trask, the bureau secretary.

  He swung breezily in, waved, snagged a coffee and the last prune danish. “Give me five minutes,” he said.

  Karp went into his own office and did bureaucracy. He grabbed a thick sheaf of paper out of his brimming in-basket and threw away anything not marked “special” or “urgent.” He read the survivors quickly, threw half of them away, and scribbled notes to Connie on the rest. Then he signed a group of documents having to do with promotions, requisitions of staff, expense reimbursements and supplies. They had all been initialed by his secretary, so he scrawled his signature across them. Connie never made mistakes in procedure.

  Leaving his office, he dumped the finished work on Connie’s desk, and went into the bureau chief’s office to pursue his real job, which was making the criminal justice system produce some criminal justice, against all odds and the will of its masters.

  At the long, shiny oak table the other lawyers had left a place for him. They were sitting at the table or on chairs dragged from other parts of the room. Marlene Ciampi was sitting behind Pelso’s desk, swinging gently back and forth in a massive black leather judge’s chair.

  Karp sat and looked around the room. A few Old Guards—Ciampi, Roland Hrcany, V.T. Newbury—and the rest babies in their first or second year in the DA’s office. Karp recruited the best of the annual intake into the Criminal Courts Bureau, and tried to keep them sane and productive. Even so, the turnover was ferocious.

  “OK, let’s get started,” he said. “You first, George. What’ve you got?”

  George Sobel stood up, opened a brown manila folder, and began talking about the robbery and stabbing of a Korean convenience store proprietor in quiet, careful sentences, like a man describing symptoms to a physician. Sobel was a good lawyer, but unprepossessing. His auburn hair was badly combed, and he was dressed in a dusty blue suit flecked with dandruff. Karp made a mental note to speak to him about his appearance.

  Sobel went quickly through the details of the crime. It was not a very interesting crime, about as unusual as the arrival of the Times Square shuttle at Grand Central, and Karp wondered what the point of the case would be. In fact he was having a hard time concentrating on what Sobel was saying. He was still trying to put together the hijack case, which was becoming entirely too complex. Why was the real bomb in the locker and the fake one on the plane? Surely the other way around made more sense. Or did it?

  “… Kim was taken to Bellevue by ambulance at twelve-thirty on the morning of the fifteenth. After surgery, he gave a good description of the assailant to police—”

  Hrcany, who had been leaning his chair against the wall, pushed off and brought the front legs down with a bang. A powerfully built man, he sported a fierce blond cavalry mustache and had a dark tan that he boosted with a sun lamp in his office. He looked like a refugee from Muscle Beach, slow-witted and brutal, an impression that was only half correct. “Hang on there, George, I think you lost me,” he rumbled. “What does Manhattan Homicide have to do with it? I thought you said this Kim didn’t die. So we’re talking robbery and assault with a deadly weapon?”

  “No, my Kim didn’t die. My Kim is Sun Kim. The other Kim, Nam Kim, was murdered on the third of August, and Kun Park, another owner, the week after. It’s a pattern. That’s the point. This guy Hornreade is going around knocking off Korean convenience stores and stabbing the owners.”

  “How do we know this, George? And if we do, why aren’t we going for homicide?”

  Sobel took a deep breath. Hrcany was well known for his merciless badgering of younger attorneys. “We know, but there’s no case on the murders. There was an eye on one of them: Park’s wife was in the store. But the mutt was in and out in a couple of minutes. She was in the back and didn’t get a real good look, and then when she saw what he did to her old man she went crazy. Ripped his belly open—same cut he used on both Kims. My Kim was lucky. Also, she doesn’t speak English.”

  “The cops have hit the neighborhood?” Hrcany asked. “No other witnesses? Evidence? Prints? There must have been a lot of blood—”

  “Yeah, we got prints on the register in the Park case, but they’re crappy, same as usual. Blood on Hornreade’s shoes; maybe it’s Park’s, maybe it’s Kim’s. The one who survived. That’s pretty thin, but—”

  “It’s garbage for murder two,” Hrcany said grumpily.

  “That’s what I thought, but the robbery assault is golden. Maybe attempted murder. We can blitz him on it.”

  Karp nodded. This was, of course, the reason for these meetings. The complex system that adjusted the punishment to the crime had long since eroded. To replace it, Karp and a few of his peers had erected a form of rough justice. Everybody knew who the real bad guys were. If you couldn’t nail them for what they did, you nailed them when you could. Capone, after all, had died in prison on a charge of tax evasion. By carefully concentrating his resources, especially that rarest commodity, the attention of the police, and by cooking the figures when he dared, Karp could meet his clearance quotas and at the same time put a fair number of bastards behind bars for significant periods.

  “Good thinking, George,” he said. “Who’s on defense?”

  “Carcano.”

  “He’s chicken shit. Wave the murders in his face, hint you got more than you do, and go for the max. Don’t roll. Get Judge Maldonado or Kapperstein. If you can’t, let me know. And let me know the hearing date, I’ll goose the judge before. OK, next case. Tony?”

  Tony Harris was the pick of the litter in Karp’s opinion, a tall, rangy kid from St. John’s with long, unruly hair. He was bright, a beaver for work, and could hit to either field. He played third base for Karp’s Softball team.

  “This could be a Spectacular,” Harris began. A chorus of groans came from the room. Spectaculars were politically sensitive but largely pointless cases that took up too much time, got pl
astered across the front page of the Daily News, and invoked the personal attention of the district attorney himself.

  Harris grinned pleasantly, showing an assortment of large, crooked teeth. “The facts of the case are briefly told,” he said. “On September 11, Jerold Weaver, male Caucasian, an unemployed pipe fitter from Long Island City, got his load on at the White Rose on Eighth and Forty-fifth, during which time he was heard loudly complaining about, if I may quote, ‘these goddam rich nigger pimps’ unquote. At around eleven that night, Weaver was seen in an altercation with a well-dressed Negro male, named Milton C. Weems, who was in the company of a female Caucasian named Molly Frumpton. Weaver was pushed violently to the pavement by Weems, after which Weems and Frumpton entered a 1976 white Cadillac convertible owned by Weems and drove off.

  “Weaver then entered his ’64 Dodge pickup, pursued Weems up Seventh Avenue to 56th Street. Weems stopped for a light, Weaver got out of his truck, shot Weems five times in the head with a .38 caliber revolver, got back in his car, drove off down 56th Street, ran a light, and collided with a garbage truck. The cops picked him up unconscious, with the gun on his lap.” Harris then spent fifteen minutes detailing the case, its evidentiary basis, and the state of the depositions from witnesses.

  Karp said, “Good presentation, Tony. Any questions, gang?”

  Hrcany laughed. “I’ll bite. What’s the punch line, Tony? A citizen blowing away a pimp is a Spectacular? A celebration maybe, but …”

  Harris grinned again. “Yeah, we wish. It turns out that Milton C. Weems was—you ready for this?—a deacon at Ebenezer Baptist, the owner of a sizable dry-cleaning business, and father of four. Miss Frumpton was his secretary of many years.”

  More groans. Karp cut in. “What do we do with it, Tony?”

  Somebody cracked, “Send him to pimp recognition classes and get him another box of shells.” Everybody laughed, a thin, callous laughter with no joy in it.

  “Straight murder two as the top count,” Harris said. “Defense is a Public D., name of Rafferty. He’s talking extreme emotional as the affirmative defense, the guy was drunk and so on.”

  “Which is bullshit. He hated pimps so much it made him crazy? He was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing, but he followed a car, parked, aimed, and shot?”

  “Don’t blame me, Butch, I’m just telling it. Of course, I understand the big question is, what’s the deacon doing with his lily-white secretary in Sleazeville late Saturday night?”

  There was an odd tone to Harris’s comment, and Karp shot back quickly, “You ‘understand’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, Wharton called me to—how did he put it? —fill me in on the political ramifications. And to remind me we had nearly six hundred homicides pending trial. And that maybe Mr. Weems was not all he was cracked up to be in the morality department. He was pretty subtle, but the message was that there was no point in, quote, stimulating racial tensions unnecessarily, and that the district attorney would not lose any sleep if we accepted manslaughter one on this.”

  “What! What is this, fucking Alabama?” Karp said loudly to the room at large. Conrad Wharton was Bloom’s administrative bureau chief and hatchet man. He was the one who kept the clearance numbers and enforced them.

  “Tony,” he said, controlling his anger, speaking in a tired, precise voice, “Section 125.25 of the New York State Penal Code is written in English. It’s very short. Even Wharton could read it. Somebody sticks a gun in a guy’s face and pulls the trigger is either intending to cause that person’s death, section one, or, section two, evincing depraved indifference to human life. So let’s get a Form Two indictment upstairs, huh? And let Mr. Rafferty worry about the defense for a change instead of the district attorney.”

  Karp could see in the faces of the younger attorneys that he had given them something valuable, probably the only thing he could give them, since they certainly weren’t going to get promoted hanging around him. He knew he could expect a nasty, exhausting phone call twenty minutes after the indictment hit Bloom’s desk.

  He caught Marlene’s eye, as tired as his own felt. He forced a weak smile and said, “OK, Marlene, case of the week. Let’s have it.”

  Marlene began briskly, flipping through the large index cards she used for case notes, cards covered with her small, elegant handwriting. She now wore huge, round tortoise-shell spectacles for reading, to prevent the deterioration of her good eye.

  She had done a good job on the Doyle case. She called it that, rather than the terrorist case or the Croatian case or the hijack case, which was what the papers were calling it. Marlene was emphasizing that the dead cop was the fixed star around which the increasingly bizarre case revolved.

  She concluded with an analysis of the gravamen of the crime: the placing of a booby-trapped bomb in a public locker constituted depraved indifference to human life under the statute, and then went on to the indictment strategy.

  “We intend to indict all five participants for second-degree murder under 125.25, section two. Since Doyle was a police officer killed in L.O.D., we could go for murder one, under 125.27. That might be supported by the fact that the terrorists called the police and so might reasonably be held to suppose that the victim of the booby trap would be a police officer. On the other hand, it could be a tricky proof—it’s not like a mutt gunning down a blue suit. Also, we want to sweep them all in under the felony murder clause of 125.25, which is why murder two is a better bet.

  “Our position is that the crime is a direct result of a conspiracy to draw attention to a political cause by violent action. That assumes they were all in it; they all knew about the locker bomb; they’re all culpable in the murder. As I said, we would also indict under section three, felony murder in connection with kidnapping, since we can construe the bombing as being in furtherance of the lesser included offense.”

  As she stacked her cards and resumed her seat, half a dozen people began to talk at once. Karp banged his knuckles on the table to restore order, and nodded at Roland Hrcany, who said, “It still doesn’t hold up, Marlene. How do we know who planted the bomb? How do we know one of these bozos wasn’t playing a solo?”

  “We don’t. The point of the group indictment is to keep the pressure up. They’re hanging together now. They may start coming apart once it occurs to them that they’re looking at going up for murder. If it was a solo, and unless they’re a lot less flaky than they appear, one of them should deliver the trigger man.”

  “What about the affirmative defense on the felony murder?” asked Hank Schneerman, one of the junior ADAs. “They could each claim ignorance of the real bomb. They could say they thought it was going to be a phony, like the one in the plane.”

  “Yeah, they could. They could say the devil made them do it, too. But the job right now is to show the arraigning magistrate and the grand jury that a crime took place and that the suspects did it. And to do it in a way that will put the maximum pressure on them to improve their individual positions at their buddies’ expense, which I think this strategy does.”

  “Butch, are we really going all the way on this one?”

  All eyes turned to V.T. Newbury. He rarely spoke at these meetings, except to exercise his acerbic wit. He was a short, slightly built man with a chiseled profile and the kind of huge, luminous blue eyes that John Singleton Copley depicted in portraits of eighteenth-century gentlemen.

  “What do you mean, V.T.?” Karp asked irritably. He was not getting the enthusiastic support he expected on this case.

  “I mean that this is potentially an incredibly complex case. If we push for trial on this, I have the sense that you and Marlene both are going to be investing a huge proportion of your personal time in it. I’m asking whether it’s worth it.”

  “Worth it? Shit, Newbury, they killed a cop! Worth it, my ass! What do you think these meetings are for? How come all of a sudden you’re talking ‘worth it’?”

  “Calm down, Butch. Your virginity is safe with me. I
know what we’re doing here. We nail the shitheads who think they’re getting away with major crimes. OK, I’m just asking if these guys are in that class. Sure, they have to be put away. But a dickhead fresh out of South Orange Law is going to go for a plea on this. The point is, do we push for the top count or not? Or is there something else going on?”

  Karp was, characteristically, about to say something nasty to his best friend, who had, also characteristically, been so unwise as to stand between the wolf and its prey, when the door flung open and a rumpled, barrel-shaped man with the face of a frenzied orangutan rolled into the room. A chorus of boos and cheers burst from the assemblage. Ray Guma, the Mad Dog of Centre Street, grinned broadly and waved. “Hey, gang, stand by! I got a great case—”

  “Guma, goddamn! You got a helluva nerve coming in here an hour late looking like shit,” said Karp, relieved to have a less tricky outlet for his annoyance.

  Guma’s face fell and he looked down at his outfit. His suit was unpressed, his tie untied, his shirt unbuttoned, a day’s growth of beard stood out on his swarthy face, and his curly black hair stuck out in oily disorder. “Shit? Hey, it’s Monday, I had a great weekend. Give me a break.” Everybody knew that after twenty minutes in the men’s room he would emerge, as always, a reasonably presentable greasy Italian lawyer.

  Karp looked at his watch. It was almost time to dismiss the meeting and let the ADAs go off to court. Karp was not anxious to pursue the Doyle case in greater detail, given the reception it had already received. He waved his hand, yielding the floor to Guma. “OK, Goom,” he said. “Spit it out. And make it snappy.”

  Guma paused to tuck in a shirttail and pull up the zipper on his fly before plunging into a rapid-fire outline of his case. He spoke, as always, without notes, in a Brooklyn accent that Fordham Law had done little to improve. Guma’s memory was legendary; he never forgot a face, name, or citation.