by Neil Gordon
So everyone agreed to that, and everyone agreed that I had to start, and so the problem then became, Where? The day you were born? The day I was born? The day civil war broke out in Spain? I fretted over that for a good few days of Michigan spring rains. And then I thought, the hell with it, we are telling the truth, aren’t we? And trying to tell it in the way it actually happened, aren’t we? Well, if that’s the case, it all really started in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green in June 1996, and it is, therefore, with Billy that I am going to start.
2.
Today you know Billy Cusimano as the owner of a national chain of organic supermarkets that he runs from a loft in SoHo, runs with a vengeance: he’s paying three college tuitions, and still has one more to come. But in 1996, when I became Billy’s lawyer, he was a very different man than he is today.
For one thing, he still had some hair. Not much, but enough for one of those phony little ponytails guys our age wore in those days. For another, he was enormous, with a huge fat belly that stuck out of his T-shirt: at forty-seven, before his first heart attack, Billy had not yet learned it was eat better or die—a phrase, believe it or not, he once tried to adopt as his supermarket’s slogan before his advertising firm told him to lose it, and quick. Last, but not least, in 1996 when he became my client, Billy had either not yet had the brilliant idea of opening Cusimano’s Organic Markets, or America wasn’t ready for them. In either case, he was not a successful and legitimate businessman but a criminal defendant in a federal case. Billy, you could say, came a long way in the past ten years.
Ostensibly, in 1996, he ran a fleet of six small trucks delivering to New York City greenmarkets for a dozen or so Hudson Valley organic farms. In fact, he made his living the way he had since the mid-sixties: by growing pure, hybridized, state-of-the-art marijuana in an underground Sea of Green.
Yes, Isabel, marijuana, a substance to which I’m sure you are an utter stranger, right? Well, as you’re going to see throughout this story, I’m emphatically not, so if that shocks you, just think of it as another way I was a bad parent.
Anyway it was from this career path, you may have guessed, that stemmed Billy’s need for my services as a lawyer.
There are policy mistakes in the world of criminals, and performance ones. Nine times out of ten, surprisingly, what causes a criminal to be caught is not in fact performance, but policy. Billy’s policy mistake happened the autumn before, and consisted of not letting one of his drivers know that under a truckload of sweet corn bound for the Union Square market he was carrying a late summer harvest: thirty kilos of cured, hybridized, hydroponic marijuana, so seedless it could never be reproduced, so resinous that your fingers got dirty rolling a joint, and so strong that a hit had you spending the next three hours staring, ego shattered, at the cat.
The upside of this policy was that the driver could neither rip you off nor turn you in, and besides only cost a fraction of what Billy’s real mules—the ones who moved bud across state lines and who knew the risk they were running—got paid.
The downside was that because he knew nothing about his cargo, the driver was smoking a joint while heading downstate at 80 miles an hour, all the while listening, get this, to the Grateful Dead.
Which, in turn, gave the state police probable cause to shovel the entire load of corn onto the side of the road, where the gophers feasted on it for a week. The joint, I mean. Gave them probable cause. Not the Grateful Dead, who, contrary to what people like your grandfather thinks, were still legal.
Now, despite what a bad parent I was and a bad person I am—you need a refresher course on that, Izzy, hop up to London and my ex-father-in-law will be glad to oblige—the fact that I had even taken on a criminal client like Billy may just seem to you like another of the many lousy things I did that summer. In fact, it did look pretty odd to a lot of people at the time. See, James Marshal Grant did not soil his hands by defending criminals. James Grant, it was well known in the little world of Albany law, worked only for principle.
What you have to understand, though, is that in the summer of 1996 my little moral universe was changing pretty radically, and what was changing it was that I had to earn a living. And to understand that, you have to know that when your mother and I got married, it was clearly understood—check with her, Izzy, she won’t deny it—that I was going to practice law exclusively in the public interest, given that the Montgomery fortune needed some kind of expiation.
It did make sense at the time: we were in love, and the fortune was enormous. Your mother inherited from her grandfather, as you will inherit from yours, and even at the time of our marriage she was so rich that any thought of doing anything other than public-interest work was absurd.
When I left your mother, of course, I also left the Montgomery fortune. The reputation of the most idealistic lawyer between Miami and Montreal, however, remained mine, as did a full docket of pro bono clients, many of whom had no hope of a decent defense except for my services. On the other hand, your grandfather’s lawyers had ensured that I had no income from the family, none at all, despite the fact that I had a little girl to take care of.
Billy Cusimano, in the summer of 1996, therefore looked like a very good client to me: an old hippie with closets full of cash, and in fact he constituted my entire source of income between the winter of 1995, when your mother went into rehab, and the spring of 1996, a year and a half later, when she sued me for custody.
Custody, I mean, of you. Because in the summer of 1996, your mother had just announced her intention of suing me for full custody of our daughter. Bet she didn’t tell you that part, Iz, did she? That she was barely out of rehab, and already her father’s phalanx of high-powered lawyers were starting to bring legal action against me?
Still, Billy would not be so important to my story if not for the fact that, at the worst moment possible, he got his criminal present all mixed up with his political past.
This was on a June afternoon in, as it happened, Billy’s underground Sea of Green itself.
3.
Picture pitch-blackness: an absolutely lightless space, in which the sound of a steady spring rain is hissing endlessly down. It is an all-encompassing noise, and as you listen, you can hear its depth, for it is composed of thousands of tiny little jets of water: When it stops, all of a sudden, the sound that takes its place is that of millions of drops of water falling, dripping, and gathering into little rivulets that, in their turn, run down a distant, hollow storm drain. For a time, the dripping is everything. The air is thick with moisture, nearly tropical, and a loamy smell rises in it. Then, with a sudden electric buzz, a switch is thrown, and a low ceiling of brilliant light floods the room in which a thin concrete border surrounds a lush, thick carpet of tall, lush, glistening cannabis plants, sweating resin, absolutely without seed, hydroponically planted in a sealed basement chamber, blazing with a bank of gro-lights.
For the past three months the room has been sealed, taking in carbon dioxide from canisters, feeding oxygen out into a vent that connects with the furnace burning in the basement, getting twenty-hour days of blazing UV light and four-hour pitch-black nights, all controlled by a computer on a workbench next to the back wall. Juice for the whole thing comes from a Honda generator, off the grid so consumption can’t be detected, held in a concrete bunker so it makes no sound. If you must know, gas for the generator is supplied from Billy’s fleet of trucks, each of which is always full up when returned for the night to Billy, and somewhat less than full when taken out the next morning, a fact disguised from the drivers by a cunningly altered fuel gauge. Entry is provided by a hole in the bricked ceiling—bricked three layers thick with two layers of insulation, to obviate the possibility of airborne heat detection—through which Billy and I have climbed in for this, the single inspection of the four-month growing cycle, and which will duly be bricked in again when we climb out.
When we came in, I took off my jacket and opened my shirt, sweat breaking out on my chest in the moist air, the
n sat back in a vinyl string lawn chair, briefcase in lap, at the side of the Sea of Green while Billy pinched off a hairy bud from one of the plants and dried it in a little toaster oven hardwired—like the computer—into a circuit breaker, and rolled it into a joint. Then Billy joined me in the second deck chair, and we passed the J back and forth while I told him where his criminal case was at.
Now, if you wonder how I remember the conversation that ensued so exactly, it’s not a mystery. The fact is, virtually the entirety of Billy Cusimano’s life was bugged that year—the FBI turned out to know all about the Sea of Green—and virtually every conversation he had—in his car, in his kitchen, in his bed—was recorded. That, for the record, is how Billy was ultimately acquitted: all of the wiretaps were ruled illegal, and made inadmissible the existing evidence. To that extent, the bugs were very useful to us. And they were useful to me again, when I started putting together this story. Which is all by way of saying that my reconstruction, I assure you, is pretty good.
In any case, call it fact or call it fiction, but what you have to picture is the pair of us sitting there and talking to each other, going over business, neither of us with any idea about what was about to happen.
“So, Billy boy, I filed for a continuance Friday, with luck we don’t come up again till Sonny Carver’s in. If not, fuck Evans, that dickhead. We’ll appeal before he’s done ruling, and there’s not a damn thing he can do. The only immediate risk—immediate, right?—you face is sitting right here under these gro-lights, friend. Sign here.”
Signing off on some court documents, Billy answered in one of those tight little voices, holding smoke in his lungs.
“I swear, Jimmy, in three weeks I harvest. This load sells, I’ll even be able to afford you.”
“Get out of this business, boyo, you won’t need me.”
“Hey, counselor, I’m not only sending my four kids to Steiner school, I’m sending your Izzy too. So don’t be in any hurry getting me out of the game.”
It was reasoning that had to make a certain sense to me, I admit. And so, rightly or wrongly, I shrugged off the fact that my client was about to harvest and sell what looked to be twenty keys of marijuana. I drew on the J myself, leafing through some papers, then blew the smoke, a hanging cloud, into the wet air, talking all the while.
“Good God, man, maybe this shit should be illegal. It’s like you hybridized this poor little plant to produce LSD instead of THC.”
That got me a withering look: I was smoking the joint like a cigarette, wastefully, and Billy knew the value of his product. He picked the roach out of my fingers, took a long last hit, and flicked it into the hydroponic bed, exhaling while he spoke. But his pride showed even through his concern. “Know where I’m selling this? California. Hardest market in the country—that’s how good it is. And, by the way, why they aren’t going to catch me. Last place in the world they’d expect me to be shipping East Coast product.”
Then Billy changed the subject, and this—these precise words—was where it all started.
“Hey, Jim? You know who Sharon Solarz is? Or you too young?”
4.
It wasn’t the first time that my lives had, so to speak, met. Once I’d run into Jeff Jones in the Albany State building, I taking a deposition from a state senator, he, in his role as environmental lobbyist, on his way to buttonhole another one. He’d looked at me with that piercing eye, and for a moment my heart tumbled. Then he’d walked on. Other things like that happened. I met Bernardine at a conference on juvenile justice. I ran into Brian Flanagan at a bar. I even once sat in the Bedford Hills visiting room with a client while Kathy Boudin was in there with a visitor. It was inevitable.
Still, in retrospect, Billy’s voice that day is imbued, for me, with the sense of an augury.
I answered, watching him close, “Yes.”
“Yes what?”
That stopped me. “What?”
“Yes, you know who Sharon is? Or yes, you’re too young?”
“Both, of course.”
For a moment we watched each other in confusion. Then, for a long time, and to my surprise, Billy began to laugh—the easy laugh of the stoned, comfortable, happy, like someone who is used to laughing and someone who is used to being stoned, an infectious laugh that even I could not completely resist. And while he laughed, I understood how to respond. Smiling too, I rose.
“You know, I recognize an exit line when I hear it.”
Billy looked up with surprise. “What’s that mean?”
“It means, I got enough problems without taking a walk down memory lane with an aging, fat old hippie.”
“Jimmy. She needs a lawyer to negotiate her surrender. I—”
But I interrupted, speaking in a voice that quieted Billy down right away. “Billy. Call Lenny Weinglass. Or Michael Kennedy. Or Ron Kuby. Or Gillian Morrealle. Call anyone the fuck you like. But anything you know about Sharon Solarz, keep it away from me.”
Billy hesitated, thinking. “Mind telling me why?”
“I do mind, Billy.” I looked at him directly, no longer enjoying being stoned. “I mind because I shouldn’t have to tell you. Christ sake, you know that Julia’s suing me for custody of Izzy.”
“Sure.” Speaking slowly, as if trying to understand. “I also know Julia was a terrible mother before she got into a drug and alcohol problem as big as the Catskill State Park. And I know you’re as good a father and as stand-up a guy as exists in the country. She’s not getting custody of anyone.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to say so, but if you’ll pardon me, you’re a babe in the fucking woods. You think me being a stand-up guy will counterweigh Julia’s father being an ex-U.S. senator and the current ambassador to the Court of St. James? Not to mention that I am supported exclusively by an overweight, unrepentant dope seller, and the Montgomerys have most, if not all, of the money in the world?”
Billy nodded stoned agreement. “I’d say that more or less evens the score. I mean, Julia’s shitty history, on one hand; her father’s money on the other. I think you’re still coming out ahead.”
“Okay.” Sounding like a lawyer now, I went on. “Now, what do you think it does to that balance if I start defending a cop killer who’s been running from the law for twenty-five years?”
There was something cold in Billy’s response. “You tell me, counselor.”
“With pleasure. It gives Montgomery and his lawyer a public relations boost so massive, I might as well just avoid the trauma and send Izzy off to England today. That’s what it does.”
“Jim. So you let Sharon twist in the wind? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“Bill. You’re talking about my daughter. You’re talking about letting Julia Montgomery raise my daughter. Remember? Julia Montgomery’s the one who forgot Izzy in a car overnight while she was smoking crack. On Warren Street. In Hudson. An open convertible.”
I was kind of shouting at this point. But when Billy didn’t answer, I went on in a quieter tone. “Tell Sharon to call Gillian Morrealle at Stockard Dyson, Boston. I’ll give Gilly a call. And forget we ever had this conversation, okay? Ever ever ever.”
Slowly, laboriously, Billy rose. “Okay, man. If you’re sure.” But his voice was quiet—disappointed, in a way that actually hurt. Remember, dope wasn’t a business for people like Billy Cusimano, it was a political cause—one in a spectrum that included Sharon Solarz. And he was silent while he followed me up the ladder and into the kitchen, then out the kitchen door to where two cars and a truck were parked at the top of a dirt road.
See, Isabel? I can’t ever do anything to make myself, in your memory, into a good parent. But I can stop lying. And I can try to ensure that no one else does so, either. If that conversation with Billy had not been tapped by the FBI, everything would have been fine. Sharon would have found a lawyer, I would have defended my custody of you on the grounds of your mother’s addiction, and life would have gone on.
But the FBI did listen to that conversation.
And on the basis of it, before it was even over, they had gotten a warrant on Billy’s premises, and were activating a surveillance plan long since developed. And even worse than that, worst thing of all, they let the story be known outside of their own agency, which meant that, later that night, it would all be told to the press. The press, that is, in the person of one Benjamin Schulberg, a beat reporter at the Albany Times, barely older, then, than you are now.
And Benny, as we’ve all come to expect from him, would proceed neatly and directly to fucking everything—everything—up.
And now I think you see, Isabel, why I started my story, which is your story, that day in the early summer of 1996, when you were seven, in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green.
Date: Saturday, June 1, 2006
From: “Benjamin Schulberg”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 2
That your daddy, Isabel, still retains the ability to accuse anyone else of messing everything up, I admire him. Larger than life, he and his peers. At least in their capacity for self-delusion.
Next: I understand you to be, now, seventeen. In June of 1996, I would like you to know, I was, despite your father’s recollection, twenty-seven. I had been working at the Albany Times for three years, was a beat reporter, had a master’s in journalism from Northwestern, and was soon going to be offered a Porter Fellowship at Yale. So let’s just bear in mind that all parents might be bad parents, but your father, in particular, is also an asshole.
