American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  So now here he was with the respected criminal defense firm of Evseroff, Newman, and Sonenshine and he still always seemed to be dealing with society’s misfits, the little guy with no money and a rap sheet you could stretch from here to Hoboken and back.

  Part of the problem was the Bishop, a man Hochheiser could not say no to. Known as Salvatore Cella to the rest of the world, the Bishop was a seventy-year-old former New York City cop who’d served as Hochheiser’s mentor from his earliest days in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. A veteran of over thirty years on the force who spoke fluent Sicilian, the Bishop had an uncanny knack for coming up with eyewitnesses to crimes. Many times when Hochheiser had needed a corroborating witness, the Bishop would produce some old Italian woman who just happened to be sitting at her front window overlooking the street when the crime took place. Invariably, she would have seen it just the way Hochheiser had hoped she would to benefit his side of the case.

  Now that Hochheiser was in private practice, the Bishop had occasionally called in his chits. That’s how Hochheiser wound up with this latest client, Francis Featherstone. The way he heard it, the Bishop had been asked to help find Featherstone an attorney through one of his in-laws. A barrel-chested, physically imposing man with a kindly manner, the Bishop had told Hochheiser from the start, “Larry, the kid’s a complete loony-bird. There probably ain’t much of a case and God knows there won’t be much money. But you’d be doin’ me a big favor.”

  The young attorney didn’t know much about Featherstone, but he was reasonably certain of one thing: Whatever he got paid, it wasn’t going to be much. And a good portion of that would probably go to the Bishop.

  Hochheiser met Featherstone for the first time in the Tombs in the fall of ’71, nearly one year after the Linwood Willis killing. Mickey had been transferred there from the Fishkill Correctional Facility in upstate New York after being declared “no longer in a state of idiocy”—and therefore fit to stand trial.

  Conditions in the Tombs had recently been deemed inhumane by a U.S. judge for the Southern District of New York, who found the facility to be overcrowded and inadequately supervised. Built thirty years earlier, in 1941, on the same site as Manhattan’s first detention center for men (which had been designed to look like an ancient Egyptian tomb), the current structure sported a decaying institutional look. Prisoners were packed three to a cell, many of the toilets were broken, and recreational areas were breeding grounds for rodents and roaches. In December of ’74, the Tombs would be closed by court order and completely renovated, but right now it was a cesspool.

  When Hochheiser arrived in the prison’s bullpen area to meet with Featherstone, he was slightly taken aback. With Mickey’s military background and violent criminal record, he’d expected to find a loud, physically imposing figure—the toughest kid on the block. Instead, Mickey seemed like exactly the type neighborhood bullies always pick on. He was a nervous, soft-spoken kid who looked a lot younger than he really was. A street urchin.

  The young attorney listened as Featherstone tried to explain what had been happening in his life in recent years. Mickey was still on medication, so he talked in a rambling, colloquial manner that wasn’t entirely coherent. But Hochheiser liked what he heard. He respected the fact that none of Mickey’s crimes were for profit or vengeance. There seemed to be a principle behind Featherstone’s actions, though obviously, thought Hochheiser, somewhere along the line the kid had lost the ability to differentiate a real threat from an imagined one.

  The homicide Hochheiser wanted to hear about was the most recent one, the shooting of Linwood Willis, which would be the first to go to trial. Hochheiser listened as Featherstone gave his version of what happened on September 30, 1970, in front of the Leprechaun Bar. Mickey admitted he’d been drinking that night and had gone without his medication for a few days. The events weren’t very clear in his head. About the only thing he really remembered was that Willis had threatened to “blow his brains out.”

  Hochheiser wasn’t surprised to hear Featherstone say he thought the best way to fight the case would be to plead self-defense, but the attorney knew that wouldn’t wash with a jury. From what he’d heard about Featherstone, Hochheiser knew there was only one way to go.

  “Mickey,” he said, pausing to let the words sink in, “there’s only one way to fight this case, and that’s with an insanity defense.”

  Featherstone eyed Hochheiser with skepticism and anxiety. It was his half-sister’s family who’d found the attorney, so he hadn’t really known what to expect. He didn’t have much experience with lawyers, and those he had dealt with seemed far removed from life on the streets. Mickey had to admit it though, Hochheiser seemed different. For one thing, his unruly mane of curly brown hair, droopy mustache, and cowboy boots made him look kind of wild. And Mickey liked the fact that he spoke in a language any streetwise hustler could understand.

  Eventually, Hochheiser convinced his client. The clincher came when he told Featherstone if they were able to beat this case with an insanity defense, it would lay the foundation for all his future cases. To Mickey, that was good planning.

  What Hochheiser didn’t tell Featherstone was that nobody had beaten a murder rap on an insanity defense in New York County in more than fifteen years. It was definitely a long shot.

  As soon as Hochheiser went to work on The People of New York v. Francis Featherstone, he could see there was a lot more to it than he’d originally anticipated. Granted, since even the Bishop thought the kid was nuts, his expectations had been outrageously low. Yet the more Hochheiser delved into Featherstone’s past, the more he liked what he saw. Yes, there was violence. But there was also pathos. He could work with it.

  The Vietnam War, of course, would have to be a factor. By 1972, the war was reaching its ignominious conclusion, and even many of the hard hats and middle-Americans who had supported it were admitting it had been a mistake. There was a growing awareness of the atrocities some American soldiers had witnessed or taken part in, and a sensitivity to the psychological problems they experienced when they got home. Based on the war stories Mickey had been telling doctors over the last few years—stories that Hochheiser had no reason to believe were untrue—the attorney thought there was a good chance they could find a sympathetic juror or two.

  The war, however, was an abstraction to most people. Hochheiser knew his testimony also had to address more specific issues. Therefore, to explain the nature of Featherstone’s mental instability in technical terms, he would need to call some of the many psychiatrists who’d examined Mickey in recent years. And to describe the kind of person Mickey had become in human terms, he would need to call Featherstone’s family.

  The latter was a risky proposition. There wasn’t a juror alive who would believe the family was objective. If the jury thought Hochheiser was being unduly manipulative, he could lose the case right there. But when the attorney met Featherstone’s mother and father, his brother Henry, and his two half-sisters Doris and Joan, he instinctively knew they had to be subpoenaed. Although none of them had much formal education, when Hochheiser listened to what they had to say about Mickey he was genuinely moved. As a middle-class Jewish kid born and raised on Long Island, Hochheiser was from a different world. But it was obvious that their anguish was real. And in their own way, they articulated their emotions clearly and powerfully.

  Along with getting his witnesses together, Hochheiser spent a good deal of time preparing his client for trial, and it was proving to be a delicate situation. The attorney didn’t doubt for a minute that Mickey was indeed “troubled.” But he knew that Mickey believed it was all a charade, that he had once been crazy but was now better, and that the insanity defense was in fact a scam.

  Hochheiser played along. “Remember, Mickey,” he told Featherstone on one of their many meetings in the visiting room at the Tombs, “you’re supposed to be crazy. When we get into that courtroom, I don’t want you doing anything that might lead the jury to believe otherwise.”
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br />   Often, after these encounters, Hochheiser would shake his head in disbelief. Here he was asking someone he knew was crazy to pretend he was crazy so they could beat a murder rap with an insanity defense. It was a strategy he didn’t recall ever being mentioned in law school.

  Mickey, for his part, was only vaguely aware of what was going on. The prison doctors had him on a high dosage of Thorazine, and he spent most of his days in a nearcomatose state. At times, he would revive himself and take an active interest in the case. He seemed especially fascinated by all the documentation—police, prison, and psychiatric reports—that had been gathered. But he usually didn’t remain clearheaded for long. Throughout the early pre-trial stages of the case, Mickey was just along for the ride, totally dependent on his hip, young, and relatively inexperienced attorney, Larry Hochheiser.

  Most of what Hochheiser had learned about criminal law since he left the Manhattan D.A.’s office had come from Jack Evseroff, the senior partner of Evseroff, Newman, and Sonenshine. Ever since he’d moved into Evseroff’s seedy little office at 186 Joralemon Street in downtown Brooklyn, Hochheiser had been enamored of the wily veteran attorney, who was fifteen years his senior. Tall and lean, with a strong Brooklyn accent, Evseroff was a bit of a dandy. He wouldn’t think twice about going shopping on an afternoon off and dropping $40 on stuff that would make him smell good.

  Underneath Evseroff’s smooth exterior was an equally smooth courtroom instinct; above all, he was known as a masterful cross-examiner. In fact, Jack Evseroff was the most recent lawyer in the New York area to beat a murder charge with an insanity defense. In the late 1960s, in Nassau County out on Long Island, he’d successfully defended a cop who shot his wife and daughter. Evseroff beat the charge by focusing his case on the pressures of police work, and by decimating the prosecution’s “expert” psychiatric witness, who tried to claim the cop was mentally competent.

  It was Evseroff’s handling of the government psychiatrist in that case that most interested Larry Hochheiser. Ever since he’d begun working on the Linwood Willis murder case, Hochheiser had been trying to pin Evseroff down, hoping to glean some of his wisdom. As a relative newcomer to the criminal defense game, Hochheiser didn’t know shit about psychiatry. Evseroff had promised he would give him some pointers on how to cross-examine a psychiatrist. But whenever Hochheiser approached his busy senior associate, he was told, “Not now, not now.”

  In September of ’72, as jury selection began and the trial date approached, Hochheiser felt he could wait no longer. The government had let it be known that they were going to call Dr. Stanley Portnow, a psychiatrist who’d examined Featherstone at Bellevue Hospital. Hochheiser knew that Portnow would be used to refute claims made by other psychiatric witnesses that Featherstone was insane. His cross-examination of Portnow, Hochheiser felt, might be the single most important event of the trial.

  Late one evening, after nearly everyone else had left the normally hectic offices of Evseroff, Newman, and Sonenshine, Hochheiser stopped by Jack Evseroff’s office. Evseroff was seated at his desk, feet up, schmoozing with his girlfriend on the telephone. In the two or three years Hochheiser had known Evseroff, the forty-four-year-old attorney had been through two wives. He always seemed to be in the process of finalizing a divorce while at the same time grooming his latest flame for marriage.

  Hochheiser sat down quietly in a sunken green leather couch across from Evseroff’s desk. As he waited patiently, Evseroff continued whispering sweet nothings into the phone. Finally, Hochheiser loudly cleared his throat. Evseroff looked up, as if noticing Hochheiser for the first time, then put his hand over the receiver.

  “What is it, boobie?” he asked. Evseroff called everyone he knew “boobie.”

  “Jack,” pleaded Hochheiser. “You told me some time ago that you were gonna teach me how to cross-examine a psychiatrist. Now weeks have gone by and I’m gonna have to do this in a matter of days. There really isn’t any more time. I was hoping we could go over this tonight.”

  Evseroff looked mildly annoyed. “Okay, boobie.” Speaking into the mouthpiece, he told his girlfriend, “Honey, can you hold on just a minute?”

  With his hand again over the receiver, Evseroff turned his attention back to Hochheiser. “Alright, boobie, so you wanna know how to cross-examine a psychiatrist.”

  “Right. Exactly.”

  “Alright, you ready?”

  Hochheiser fumbled to get a pen and notepad out of his coat jacket. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  Evseroff furrowed his brow. “Okay, this is it. Listen carefully …

  “Don’t ask him nothin’ about psychiatry.”

  Hochheiser sat in silence for a good four or five seconds, his pen still poised.

  “That’s it, boobie,” said Evseroff, looking at the junior attorney as if he couldn’t understand why he was still there.

  “Uh,” stammered Hochheiser, “I mean … you mean, that’s all?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Goodnight boobie.” Then Evseroff went back to schmoozing with his girlfriend.

  All that night and into the next day Hochheiser pondered Evseroff’s words as if they’d been delivered by some guru on a mountaintop. “Don’t ask him nothin’ about psychiatry,” Hochheiser kept mumbling to himself over and over. He thought it might just be the most brilliant thing he’d ever heard, but he wasn’t sure.

  Eventually, he stored it away in the back of his mind. As with much of the advice Evseroff had given him in recent months, it was one of those statements the meaning of which remained elusive, until it finally made perfect sense weeks later in court, usually in the heat of battle.

  Thoughout 1972, as Hochheiser readied himself for the Linwood Willis murder trial, events outside the courthouse provided an emotional undercurrent to the case. Antiwar protests raged throughout the country that spring and summer. In New York City, on April 30th, twelve Catholic nuns, some wearing white sheets with the legend “One more person dead in Indochina,” lay down in the aisles of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Sunday mass.

  As the presidential election campaigns heated up in October, President Richard M. Nixon promised that “peace with honor” was imminent. Hoping that Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were onto something, American voters were about to resoundingly reject the Democratic challenger, George McGovern. But even with Nixon’s reelection a certainty, the American public had made it clear in the streets and in poll after poll throughout ’72 that the war in Vietnam was never more unpopular.

  With these events as a backdrop, the Willis trial got underway on October 6th, two years and seven days after the shooting actually occurred. The trial took place in the courtroom of Judge John M. Murtaugh in the criminal courts building at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan.

  By the time Hochheiser came forward to present his case, the events surrounding the death of Willis had been thoroughly outlined by the prosecution. Witnesses had been called; charts of the Leprechaun Bar had been displayed; ballistics evidence had been presented. Since Hochheiser was not denying that Featherstone had in fact shot and killed Linwood Willis, he was free to mount a totally separate defense—one that focused not on the act itself, but on whether or not his client, as he would say time and time again, had the capacity to “know and appreciate the nature and quality of his actions.”

  Hochheiser called a number of psychiatrists, including Dr. Stephen Teich, who was in charge of the tenth floor Mental Observation Unit at the Tombs. Among other things, Teich described an incident where Featherstone was found with his wrists cut in what appeared to be a suicide attempt. When Teich talked to Mickey about this, Featherstone told him he’d been hearing voices and having Vietnam flashbacks. “These events have played a major role in his illness,” said the doctor, in reference to Featherstone’s war experiences. “And when these memories come up, or when something brings up the emotions connected with them, his ability to reason and operate in a rational manner is destroyed.”

  After Teich and
the other psychiatrists, it was time for Featherstone’s family to take the stand. As he watched from the defense table, Mickey couldn’t help but feel nervous and uncomfortable. All these doctors talking about how crazy he was had been disturbing enough, but now he would have to sit through his own family’s digging up events from his past. His brother Henry and his father were up first. Then came his mother.

  Over the years, Mickey had developed strong, conflicting emotions about his mother. In his many talks with psychiatrists leading up to the trial, he’d been quick to blame her for his problems. One of the things that bothered him the most was how she never told him about his name. He’d been raised thinking his first name was Matthew, which is how he got the nickname Mickey. But when he went to get his birth certificate to join the service, he found out that his legal name was Francis. Mickey hated Francis; he thought it was a sissy name. When he asked his mother about it, she acted strange and said she didn’t know anything. The hospital must have made a mistake, she said.

  First it was his last name, which was really Boyle, not Featherstone. Now his first name, which was really Francis, not Matthew. Sometimes Mickey felt his mother must have wanted him to have an identity problem.

  There were other things, too—the beatings she gave him as a kid and the fact she always blamed him for her ailments. Mickey could hardly look at her without getting knots in his stomach.

  The courtroom was silent as Dorothy Boyle took the stand. A small, frail woman with an equally frail voice, she described Mickey as a happy, pleasant child. Then he came back from Vietnam and the nightmares started. He would toss and turn and scream out in his sleep.