I greeted Stan by telling him to get off the car. He didn’t move.
“I want the tape,” he said.
I had spent quite a bit of time by myself in Stern’s club, sorting things out. It’s said that a lawyer who litigates against a friend is likely to end up one friend short. I’d always known that. And I’d never had illusions about Stan’s nature when he was on the job. As had once been joked at the Bar Show, Stan was the true Hobbesian man: nasty, brutish, and short. I didn’t mind that he’d kept Mort’s secret; he was obliged to, having promised him complete confidentiality. And he’d warned me from the start that Robbie was lying, and was thus at his own peril for saying that Mort knew nothing of the payoffs. All of that was rightfully as it should have been. But I knew our friendship was over, nevertheless.
I clicked the remote to open my car. At this hour, close to 9 p.m., the garage was nearly empty. The light was murky from the naked sixty-watt bulbs hanging intermittently from porcelain collars in the concrete abutments overhead. The air was unpleasant with exhaust fumes and the lingering smoke of the tobacco exiles who snuck down here on break.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, George. It’s grand jury day tomorrow, remember? Everybody’s been served. And when Robbie gets in there, I’m asking the jackpot question: Where’s the tape? And don’t think I won’t land on him with both feet if he perjures himself.”
Moving toward the car door, I told Stan I was sick of his threats.
“It’s not a threat, George. I’m advising you of consequences. There’s a difference.”
I had a consequence or two of my own to acquaint him with, I said. Raise the issue of that tape before the grand jury and I’d go straight to the Chief Judge, Moira Winchell, with a motion to suppress.
He sneered. “You can’t make a suppression motion in front of a grand jury.”
But he was wrong about that. There’s a single exception in federal law in the case of an unlawful electronic interception of private communications.
“There was nothing illegal about making that tape.”
No? I asked. Show me the consent form. Show me where Robbie provided the authorization the government needed before it could overhear his conversation with Brendan Tuohey. There was surely no warrant, as there had been with Skolnick.
It was always an odd moment when I outsmarted Stan Sennett. It happened rarely, but he appeared so flummoxed and defenseless at those instants it was hard not to feel sorry for him. But not tonight. Tonight, I had a good time watching him sputter.
“It’s implied. His consent is implied. He turned on the car.”
Only for heat, I answered.
“He had a deal and a duty to cooperate, George. Given all the circumstances, Moira’s going to find his consent was implicit.”
I wasn’t worried about that anymore, I told him. No court would ever find that Robbie’s consent was fully informed—or that he had any further duties under his deal. Not after the U.S. Attorney had engaged in attempted homicide.
“Hom-icide!”
Attempted manslaughter, at least, I said. He had sent Robbie out to the Public Forest believing to a moral certainty someone was going to try to kill him on Brendan Tuohey’s behalf.
Something in Sennett went into retreat. Seated on the hood, he became a narrow, smallish man, unable to still a faint nervous flaring of his nostrils.
“He was completely covered. The surveillance, the protective detail couldn’t have been tighter. And he knew he was at risk, George. He knew what he was getting himself into.”
On the contrary, I answered. The setting was frightening. But as McManis had explained, logic—based on what the rest of us knew—said Tuohey and Kosic wouldn’t share secrets with Robbie at Attitude, only to kill him a week and a half later.
But watching Rollo on Monday, when Robbie displayed the subpoena Evon had served, Stan had finally accepted that Feaver was not going to get close to Tuohey again. And so he’d decided he would have to nab Brendan another way. On Tuesday he’d sent Mort to betray Robbie to Brendan, carrying a message calculated to lead Tuohey to but one conclusion: they had to kill Feaver before he started to talk. And Brendan obliged Stan. Sitting at the table, Tuohey had tied a noose. And then Stan let Robbie go to the Forest to make sure the government had an ironclad case—for conspiracy to murder a federal witness. He might as well have painted a target on Robbie’s back. And Stan had told no one any of that. Not because of need-to-know or his promise to Dinnerstein or any similarly flimsy rationale for manipulation. He’d kept silent because he realized that if anyone else understood his plan, it could falter. Robbie almost certainly wouldn’t have gone out there. Nor would McManis have let him.
“I made judgments,” said Stan. “On the fly. Under pressure. I see how you’re looking at this, George, but these are evil people. Truly evil. They have messed with this city far too long.”
In many respects, I still regard Stan Sennett as a great man. A great public man. He believed in the right things. And if improving the world is the measure of a human’s ultimate worth, he will forever be deemed a better person than I am. His commitment to vanquish wrong and restore justice was as powerful as Superman’s. Yet military strategists will tell you about replication, an inviolate principle which says that organizations which oppose each other tend, over time, to become alike. In that light, it was no surprise that fighting evil, as Stan put it, tempted him to evil. But if self-respect couldn’t restrain his crudest appetites, his zeal and his ambition, when they led him into darkness, why, I asked, didn’t he at least feel some obligation to me? It was a sad conclusion after a couple of decades to find he lacked even a minimal desire to preserve our friendship, especially when it might have preserved his decency as well.
“Georgie, for Godsake. Don’t be histrionic. We’ve had a tough day, you and I. We’ve had them before. Life will go on.”
No, I said. No.
Still on the hood, Stan pondered me over his shoulder in the grimy light. A floor above, tires squealed on the rubberized paint applied to the ramps.
“Revenge, George, personal spite, that’s not a good reason to let someone like Brendan Tuohey walk away. It isn’t and you know it isn’t. What do either one of you get out of that? You or your client?”
I had always yielded to Stan. That was our history. Not that I ever sold a client short or failed to challenge Sennett’s positions in court. Yet I’d long let all matters resolve on the basis that he held the high ground of moral conviction; I swam, as defense lawyers do, in the brackish waters of compromise. I’d decided to represent Robbie Feaver to find out if there were absolutes I could cling to with the same tenacity as Stan, hoping that would provide me some comfort. And it did. At the moment.
I told Stan that whether or not he got that tape had nothing to do with me. Were it my call, I’d probably throw it in the river Kindle. But the decision was Robbie Feaver’s.
You’ll have to ask him for it, I said. You’ll have to ask him, knowing he’s got every legal right to say it should never see the light of day. You’ll have to appeal to him, Stan. Maybe beg him. And I’m glad that’s going to happen. Because it will remind you of something you’ve completely forgotten: what it feels like to be at another person’s mercy.
I got in and started the engine. He scooted off the hood quickly enough to reflect some concern I might damn well drive away with him still on it. I’m not sure Stan had ever been frightened of me before. Needless to mention, the moment provided me with no small measure of satisfaction.
46
THE GRAND JURY ROOM WAS SITUATED IN the new federal building, a floor above the United States Attorney’s Office. The Chief Judge, whose ostensible duty it was to restrain prosecutorial abuse, was a block away, across Federal Square, in the grand old courthouse to which the District Court judges all returned once the new building proved nearly uninhabitable. Built in Augie Bolcarro’s heyday, with subcontracts sprinkled down upon his henchmen like sugar
from a baker’s hands, the new building had heat and air-conditioning systems that were eternally on the blink. The windows, until each one was replaced, frequently popped out in high winds, terrifying pedestrians on several blocks. For years it was commonplace to find a herd of attorneys standing twenty or thirty abreast in half a dozen federal courtrooms, bickering about one of the pieces of complex litigation the new construction had spawned.
The grand jury room’s reception area looked as if it might be attached to a homeless shelter or a cheap motel. The low-grade plasterboard was marred and gouged, and the likes of the foam furniture, soft forms without armrests or separate cushions, had not been seen since the height of the sixties. The pieces had apparently been discovered in the recesses of some government warehouse and offered to various federal agencies at a price they couldn’t refuse in the former Reagan era of suffocating budgetary restraint. Looking at the furnishings, you could just about imagine hippies in beads dropping acid and holding on to their headbands. Instead, for more than a decade, the witnesses awaiting their appearances had perched there, dejectedly hunched like molting birds.
Today there was an extraordinary assemblage. As always, Sennett had acted with cunning and subpoenaed everyone whom Robbie had recorded to any effect at all. Several obscure court clerks and deputies were here, as well as persons far more prominent. Sherm Crowthers sat like a lump of stone beside his lawyer, Jackson Aires, a skillful and obstinate government foe whose analysis of any case, much like Sherman’s, reliably started and ended with race. Jackson had brought a colleague, a cat’s-paw to represent the ravaged-looking Judith McQueevey, who by now had recanted her confession of two evenings before. There were thirteen or fourteen persons subpoenaed in all, and some obvious absences, Pincus Lebovic and Kwan, and, most notably, Barnett Skolnick, all of whom by now had folded and turned. Everyone else who stood in peril of indictment was present, even Walter Wunsch, whose pancreatic cancer left him unlikely to live until even the speediest trial.
The point of this exercise was relatively clear to me and not particularly pretty. To force an appearance, each of the prospective defendants had been served with a subpoena duces tecum, demanding the production of documents or physical objects in their personal possession. Datebooks seemed to be the chief item required, although two of the clerks had been summoned to bring merchandise Robbie had presented as ‘tips.’ Gretchen Souvalek, Gillian Sullivan’s clerk, clutched a Tiffany box containing a set of earrings Robbie had provided for general ingratiation. Walter Wunsch, seated with his attorney, Mel Tooley—who represented a number of those present—had brought not only various court volumes but also the set of expensive graphite-shafted irons which Robbie had presented to him several weeks ago. Walter held the clubs, complete with a snappy black leather carry bag, against his knee, manifesting a state of glum agitation which made it look as if he’d discovered only after arriving here that he had not been invited to play. Following Robbie’s testimony, each person would be called before the grand jury by Sennett or one of the phalanx of Assistant U.S. Attorneys assisting him, and, after various legal gymnastics aimed at skirting the Fifth Amendment, forced to surrender what they’d brought.
This exercise, however, would be largely pageantry. Stan had other motives in dragging his targets down here. He wanted them to confront Feaver, to see for themselves that his cooperation was not simply half-baked media speculation. He wanted them to face each other, familiar figures, silent conspirators, now brought low. Yet even this was ancillary to Stan’s principal purpose. The morning papers had announced that the Petros grand jury was convening today, a result no doubt of one of Sennett’s well-timed leaks. TV crews were downstairs, just outside the building’s doors, and print reporters were stalking the hallways. They could not attend the grand jury sessions, which were secret by law, but they would report who had come and gone from the courthouse. As a result, each of the persons who could not find a comfortable spot on the uncomfortable furniture would be vilified by the end of the day. Still shots and video clips of them would appear in all the media organs. It was no less than a naked march through the streets, during which their presumptive criminality would be displayed like wattles and belly fat to the amusement or horror of every person they knew. That was Sennett’s real aim—to crush them, to deal the first of many hard blows to be borne as the cost of refusing to cooperate, and to show them that most of the esteem they’d held in the eyes of others was already gone. Looking around the room, seeing everyone else similarly devastated, they would know that sooner or later one of them, probably many more, would do the only sensible thing—capitulate, snitch, do time, and move on.
Most of these persons didn’t know me. When I emerged after escorting Robbie to the attorney/witness room down the hall where Evon and McManis were now keeping him company, only one or two of the future defendants cast spiteful looks in my direction. Sherm Crowthers, who sat clutching his sister’s hand, clearly wished me dead. But the enmity that I felt broil me like microwaves came from another source: the lawyers. As the persons charged with protecting their clients from just the kind of savaging Sennett had delivered, the attorneys here—Tooley, Ned Halsey, Jackson Aires, several others—were in a nasty mood.
Tooley came to pal around first. With his silly toupee, like the coat of a shaggy poodle, and his tight Continental tailoring, ill suited to his hogshead physique, Mel was a vision of disingenuousness.
“I’d like to talk to your guy. Down the road, you know. Possible?”
Unlikely.
“Will you get me the answer to a question or two?”
That was more in the realm.
“I’ll call you,” said Mel. “You know,” he said, turning back, “the one with titanium testicles is you. Your guy got squeezed. But nobody was forcing you to help him, George. I hope I don’t have the co-defendant the next time you’re in state court.”
It was advocacy of a kind, the underhanded variety in which Mel specialized. He was suggesting I’d better quickly disassociate myself from the prosecution and help out the defendants if I wanted my practice to survive.
I had already turned heel without comment when, at the stroke of ten, Stan appeared. He was tight as a bowstring and in the happy clutch of the intense precision that sustained him. It had not all worked out as he hoped, but it was still a bright moment for him. He stood among the despised as the man who had vanquished them. He said good morning only to the grand jury clerk. Then, as he reached the door of the grand jury room, he faced me.
“Give me a second,” he said, “to tell the jurors what this is all about.”
“I’ll tell them!” yelled Walter Wunsch. He was closest to the door. “I’ll tell them plenty. American citizens! I fought for this goddamned country and now it’s like Red China with spooks and bugs. Lemme in there.” Walter had risen to his feet, a somewhat pathetic exercise, because he was already wasting. His flesh hung just enough to leave the impression that in the degenerative processes of the cancer his skin was attempting to slough itself from the muscle and bone. Tooley advanced from my side and made his client sit down.
“He’s just tellin it like it is,” said Sherm Crowthers wearily from across the room.
Stan took this in with an indulgent smile. At other moments he would have hated the disorder, but now he knew he’d caused it. He suggested I get Robbie ready.
I returned to the small attorney/witness room down one of the interior corridors. The space was often used for coffee breaks and quick lunches by the court reporter and the clerk. Arriving earlier, I’d nearly reeled from the driving odor of the white onions arising from a half-eaten sandwich that had remained overnight in the drab metal trash bin. Although I’d removed the can, the odor was still strong.
Except for questions about the tape, Robbie’s testimony was predictable. Once he entered the small windowless room where the twenty-three grand jurors waited like the audience in a small theater, a desultory exercise would take place. He would identify his initials on
the dozens of reel-to-reel tapes and computer magazines, and say, ‘Yes, that’s accurate,’ when Evon’s 302s describing various critical events were read to him. When that was over, come what may, Robbie could not change his account of what had happened without risking a conviction for perjury. There was even some chance this would be the last time he testified. Understandably, Stan had never wanted to stake his prosecutions on Robbie’s credibility, and he’d constructed the evidence, especially the recordings, so he could prove his cases without putting Feaver on the stand. If he called him at all it would only be as a show of openhandedness for the juries.
We had brought Robbie in through the back corridor and secreted him in the witness room, but there was only one door to the grand jury room. As Stan had planned it, Robbie would have to run a gauntlet of more than a dozen persons who felt their trust in him had been primitively violated. But the notion that they were all out there seemed to amuse him.
“Curtain call,” he said. His mood was somewhat dislocated. He was clearly too exhausted to be going through this today, but because of his refusal to surrender the tape, I had no ability to appeal to Sennett. At that point, Moses knocked and beckoned us.
“Ready?” I asked.
Feaver wanted one second and motioned for Evon to follow him the other way down the corridor.
“When Stan asks me for that tape,” he said to her, “if I tell him to go scratch, where does that leave me with you?” The cassette was in my briefcase, but I still had no idea what Robbie would do. I didn’t expect Stan to try to coerce Robbie into surrendering the tape before the grand jury, because I had the upper hand on the law. If Sennett forced me to go to Chief Judge Winchell, he stood a good chance of losing the right ever to use the tape against Tuohey. Instead, I anticipated a personal appeal at some point, an apology to Robbie, and a request he give up the tape and sign a form acknowledging, somewhat fictitiously, that he’d consented to the recording. I thought in the end it would come down to whom Robbie hated more, Brendan or Stan, although shame was also a factor: in a way, the tape memorialized Mort’s betrayal. In arriving at a decision, however, Robbie was worried about something else.