“I’m a mother, three kids, married to a multimillionaire, and I lose everything. How could a mother lose?” she said. “I’m not a drug addict. I’m not a prostitute. How could you not be suspicious? I knew this judge was not normal.”
The feisty Israeli émigré was convinced her ex-husband had fixed the outcome of their custody case. And she was determined to keep her kids at any cost.
Hanimov, a sociable woman who made friends easily, had already been warned by Levi’s wife, Sigal Levi—who was fighting for her own children before Garson—that rumor had it wealthy men were able to fix their cases before the judgmental jurist. All they had to do was pay off the judge through a middleman, Nissim Elmann—a close associate of Siminovsky, who not so coincidentally had been appointed guardian for at least one of Hanimov’s children.
Elmann, a disheveled businessman who wore a yarmulke and an unbuttoned shirt under his tie, sold wholesale electronics just a few short miles from the courthouse. He worked out of a graffiti-emblazoned warehouse, which served as a front for a second lucrative business: brokering divorces and custody battles in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
A desperate but daring Hanimov—with more verve than the Energizer bunny—walked into the warehouse to see Elmann. At risk were her three priceless jewels: fourteen-yearold Yaniv, ten-year-old Sharon, and five-year-old Natti. She had given up everything in her divorce for them.
“They are my soul,” said Hanimov, who feared she would lose all three to her husband. He had already accused her of beating their eldest son with a belt—an accusation she tearfully denied, and of which she was ultimately cleared.
Elmann was a smooth-talking salesman, and used his shtick to convince men and women that they needed his services to get the upper hand on their soon-to-be exes in Garson’s courtroom.
“He said, ‘This guy is in my pocket,’ and I was like … I was in shock,” Hanimov said.
When Hanimov left Elmann’s electronics business, DVD Trading on Brooklyn Avenue, the not-so-dumb blonde—who had spoken to the shady businessman in Hebrew—knew that the rumors were true: Elmann was selling far more than DVDs and electronic equipment from his warehouse; he was peddling justice in Garson’s courtroom.
After that first visit, a frantic Hanimov called the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Within days, intrigued investigators had the nurse—very pregnant with her fourth child, the first by her second husband—going undercover, wired for sound.
“I was putting one [electronic bug] in my bag, the other one in my pocket, and the other one in my breast, in my bra,” she said.
This amateur sleuth—whom one movie studio has dubbed the Erin Brockovich of Brooklyn—has now been credited with cracking the biggest corruption case to ever rock the Brooklyn courts. The pregnant mother of three wore wires and captured conversations behind closed doors that would shock the public conscience.
Her heart raced as she made her way back into the salesman’s office, the metal gate of the desolate warehouse closing her off to the outside world, including the investigators sitting outside in an unmarked car.
“If he knew I had that device on me, he would shoot me on the spot. I was nine months pregnant,” Hanimov said.
She captured Elmann’s claims on audiotape in October 2002.
“Your husband paid money, a lot of money. And he has the upper hand,” Elmann told her.
“What is the upper hand?” Hanimov asked.
“Like whatever he says, he’ll get, okay? He also doesn’t care about wasting money because he knows that you don’t have money,” Elmann said.
Hanimov knew it was true. Cold hard cash—not motherly love—would win her three kids. She left Elmann’s warehouse crying.
About two weeks later, she met with Elmann and told him she would come up with her own money to win the bidding war for her children.
But, she asked, could he speak to those in control in the meantime?
“There’s no way. It doesn’t work like that,” Elmann told her in no uncertain terms. “Bring them something so that they will start to work. You’ll see something substantive, and you’ll bring the rest.” He added that otherwise, “Garson will destroy you … That’s business.”
They agreed on a $5,000 to $10,000 price tag.
Ever the salesman, Elmann then offered Hanimov a TV on the cheap. “A television like this, that I give you now for one hundred and fifty, costs three hundred in a store,” he said.
But Hanimov remained focused on the far greater commodity. Could Elmann really deliver?
He showed her Garson’s telephone number in his cell phone, and files of others he claimed to have helped. And the businessman reassured her in broken English, “He [Garson] will do everything for me. The problem is here, how much you can to sacrifice.”
Two weeks later, the investigation intensified, and a frightened Hanimov returned to the warehouse.
“If I scream, ‘Help,’ please help,” she told investigators who were listening to her over the wire from outside.
“Okay,” Detective Investigator George Terra reassured her.
Waddling with the weight of the baby she was carrying, she knew that once that metal gate closed behind her, she could be a goner.
“Even if they [the investigators] wanted to get to me, they couldn’t,” Hanimov said. “It’s [a] huge warehouse where they gotta find me.”
She made her way to Elmann’s office—with a $500 down payment.
Elmann told her that Siminovsky was in the warehouse. The lawyer’s Volvo was in open view outside. But the boorish barrister, who wouldn’t give her the time of day in court, was nowhere to be found.
“Why doesn’t he want to see me?” Hanimov asked Elmann.
“It’s dangerous, you know. It’s really dangerous,” he replied.
A week later, Hanimov arrived with more cash. And the electronics salesman gave her a lesson in law.
“What is ‘chamber’?” she asked.
“Chamber [is] where they talk, they arrange things before they come to court,” Elmann said. “And afterwards, they put on a show for you.”
Hanimov gave Elmann $3,000 in marked $100 bills, provided by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, to get Garson to perform for her.
Although pleased with her progress, Hanimov left the warehouse angry. As the metal gate lifted to let her out, she uttered a single word caught on her body wire: “Bastard!”
She gave Elmann $9,000 in total during the course of the five-month investigation, and noted that Garson and Siminovsky immediately began treating her with civility.
Throughout her visits with Elmann, Hanimov repeatedly insisted on listening in on a conversation between the businessman and the judge. “I am begging,” she said.
But the fast-talking fixer who boasted that he called the shots in Garson’s courtroom (although evidence shows the only one he had a direct link to was Siminovsky) wormed his way out of it.
“There is no reason for you to, I cannot let you hear such words,” he told Hanimov. “What do you want, that he [Garson] go to jail?”
By late November 2002, Hanimov had gathered enough evidence to give prosecutors probable cause to tap both Elmann and Siminovsky’s phone lines, and to plant a bug in the ceiling of Garson’s chambers.
Evidence tapes show that the two tangential targets were tight. They embraced when they bid each other goodbye one cold dark night outside the warehouse. Like close friends, they also reassured one another when things weren’t going well. When Elmann was uneasy about which way his client Levi’s case was going to go, Siminovsky, who was representing Levi, assured him of a win.
“I was getting Garson, I was getting Garson drunk for two hours. He’ll do what I want …” a cocky and confident Siminovsky said.
In January 2003, prosecutors decided to “tweak the wire”—to create an incident that would cause their suspects to engage in a flurry of phone calls. They sent their secret weapon, Hanimov, to bribe Siminovsky directly with $1,000.
“Siminovsky freaks out and goes crazy,” Assistant D.A. Noel Downey recalled.
Griping to Elmann the next day, Siminovsky said, “I thought she just flipped out and I thought she knew something …”
But Elmann reassured him, “No, she don’t know shit.”
Siminovsky, sounding a bit like his mentor Garson, boasted that he could have demanded sexual favors from Hanimov in exchange for helping her get her kids back. “You know what I could have told her? … I could have said to her, ‘You want your kids? Get on all fours and suck my dick,’” Siminovsky said. “You know what she would have done? She would have done it.”
Mother Nature was as cold as those words on the clear February morning when Siminovsky spied flashing lights in the rearview mirror of his Volvo—and pulled over not far from his house in Whitestone, Queens.
The probers worked quickly. They wanted to flip Siminovsky into cooperating with them against Garson before anyone noticed they had picked him up.
They took a scared Siminovsky to the austere Fort Hamilton army base in Bay Ridge for questioning. Once inside the prison-like complex, enclosed by barbed wire, they entered a cold room in a bare brick building and read Siminovsky his rights—but he didn’t want a lawyer. Confronted with the evidence against him, the father of two, wringing his hands and rubbing his head, asked to call his wife. Then, with the promise of a misdemeanor conviction and no time behind bars, the big-bellied barrister agreed to help investigators nail Garson.
“He flips in like fifteen or twenty minutes,” Downey said. “He folded like a house of cards.”
During the interrogation, Siminovsky’s cell phone kept ringing. It was none other than the judge himself.
“He wanted to go to lunch,” Assistant D.A. Michael Vecchione, head of the Brooklyn D.A.’s Rackets Division, said, laughing.
A week later, Siminovsky was in Garson’s chambers and gave the judge a box of cigars. “I feel like Groucho,” Garson said as he chomped on a stogie.
The turncoat lawyer put the carton in the top drawer of the judge’s desk. Siminovsky said he got the cigars from a client, but in actuality investigators bought the box, spending upwards of $200.
The action was captured in grainy black-and-white images by the eye of the camera above.
“Romeo y Julieta. Warning: Cigars are not a safe alternative to cigarettes …” the judge read from the carton, commenting, “They are not a safe alternative to sex neither … but what are we going to do about it?’’
He then took the box from his top drawer and put it in the lower one as if to hide it in a safer place. Minutes later, the plotting protégé Siminovsky thanked Garson for all his help, and asked for more guidance regarding the Levi divorce.
“Because you have my head together. You know, you gave me little pointers. Now you just have to tell me what to write in the memo and then we’ll be okay,” Siminovsky said.
The judge helped Siminovsky draft the memo, seeming disinterested as he gave dictation.
“The only evidence in the case is … whatever the hell it was by stipulation or blah, blah …” he said. Then he gave a bit of unsolicited advice to Siminovsky. He wanted his boy to cash in on the extra work they were doing. “I am telling you, charge for it … This is extra … this was not contemplated … The judge made me do it … Fucking squeeze the guy …” Garson said.
Less than a week later, Siminovsky slipped an envelope containing ten marked $100 bills to the judge, as thanks for referring a client to him. The judge stuffed the envelope into his pants pocket, even though he was prohibited from taking referral fees. It was only after Siminovsky left that the judge, alone in chambers, opened the envelope and counted the cash. He panicked, and summoned Siminovsky back.
“Yeah, ah, Paul, this is, ah, Garson, do me a favor, ah, why don … ah, if you can get back here I’d appreciate it,” he told the lawyer by phone.
When Siminovsky returned, the judge said, “This is a lot of money for whatever you call it …”
He gave back the bills, but Siminovsky told him, “Don’t worry about it,” and threw the envelope on the judge’s desk.
Garson picked it up and half-heartedly tried to hand it to Siminovsky again—there was at least three feet between the far edge of the envelope and the tips of the lawyer’s fingers—and then put it in his desk drawer.
After a little more back and forth between the two, Garson finally said, “I appreciate it.”
Earlier that same day the judge had made a remark to Siminovsky about his work that would prove prophetic: “One of the greatest things about this job is I don’t know what the fuck I have tomorrow until I get here. I don’t give a shit either, you know.”
Two days later, the judge got the shock of his life, before he got to work. Investigators picked him up outside his Upper East Side apartment and took him to the same army barracks in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge where they’d brought Siminovsky.
Garson was carrying the marked $100 bills—and insisted on a lawyer (not Siminovsky).
Once the attorney arrived, the judge refused to cooperate. That was when investigators asked if they could speak to him alone.
They fed Garson a little detail: The candy dish Siminovsky regularly reached into on the judge’s desk had broken recently—and had to be replaced.
That seemingly harmless anecdote got the judge’s attention. How could anyone know it unless the place was bugged? Then a peek at the cigar video had the judge singing a tune far different than his raunchy renditions in chambers.
A fidgety Garson—who took long pauses between sentences as if to catch his breath—offered to help prosecutors nail Brooklyn Democratic Party bigwig Clarence Norman. And as if getting pledged into Siminovsky’s new fraternity, Garson agreed to wear a wire. He maintained he could prove that on sale in Kings County was far more than the justice that prosecutors suspected, but whole judgeships.
Despite the try, Garson turned up nothing. However, prosecutors have credited the judge with providing information that led to Norman’s subsequent indictment on unrelated corruption charges.
On April 23, 2003, Garson traded his robes for handcuffs. He turned himself in—a stogie in his mouth, curl of smoke swirling upward—under the lights of TV and newspaper cameras, so his fingerprints and mug shot could be taken.
“When I asked him, ‘Why did you do this with Siminovsky? Why did you take care of him? Why did you accept that?’ he said, ‘I like him and he kind of reminded me of myself,’” Vecchione said.
Siminovsky has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of giving unlawful gratuities for wining and dining the judge in exchange for receiving lucrative guardianship jobs. Prosecutors have asked that he be spared jail time, but he could be sentenced to up to one year behind bars.
Having resigned from the bar and having promised never to practice law again in New York State, Siminovsky is doing manual labor in a warehouse to help support his wife and two kids. He’s a key witness in Garson’s upcoming trial.
Also busted were Elmann, Levi, and others, including a court clerk and court officer accused of steering cases to Garson’s courtroom for cash and cameras—bypassing the computerized random-selection process aimed at stemming corruption.
Among the others were a rabbi and his daughter, who greased Elmann’s palms in an attempt to get Garson to rule in their favor.
While most wore frowns as they looked forward and then to the side for the mug shots, Garson sported a smirk across his lips and a steely glint in his eyes.
Suspended without pay from his $136,700-a-year job and later retired, Garson maintains his innocence. He is awaiting trial on charges of receiving bribes in the form of drinks and dinners from Siminovsky. He is not charged with fixing cases for cash.
Garson claimed he was on his way to report Siminovsky to authorities when he was intercepted by investigators.
“I regret very much not turning in Mr. Siminovsky immediately,” he told CBS News as the media storm continued.
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His lawyer, Ron Fischetti, has maintained the judge was set up. He has convinced a judge to throw out many of the charges. While Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes is appealing, left are one felony and two misdemeanors.
“It’s an extremely weak case and I think he’ll be acquitted,” Fischetti said.
Elmann—the mysterious electronics salesman—has pleaded guilty to thirteen counts, including seven felonies of bribery, bribe-receiving, and conspiracy. He’s throwing himself on the mercy of the court at sentencing and could get anywhere from probation to twenty-eight years. There is no evidence he knew Garson personally.
“You see, I bullshit these people left and right just for [them] to come up with money,” he once told Siminovsky. “… I don’t give a shit about them.”
Levi, fifty-one, has pleaded guilty to giving Elmann $10,000 to fix his case. There is no direct evidence that Garson ever received a dime.
Rabbi Ezra Zifrani, sixty-seven, and his daughter, Esther Weitzner, thirty-seven, each pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor conspiracy charge in exchange for 210 hours of community service and three years of probation. They made it clear in court the only person they knew was Elmann.
Court Officer Louis Salerno—caught on videotape taking from Siminovsky a bag prosecutors say contained a VCR and DVD player outside the courthouse for steering cases to Garson—was convicted at trial of two felonies: taking a bribe and receiving a reward for official misconduct. Salerno, fiftytwo, faces up to seven years behind bars.
Retired Court Clerk Paul Sarnell, fifty-eight, has been acquitted of bribe-receiving.
Hanimov’s husband was never charged with any wrongdoing. There was no evidence to support Elmann’s claim that he had tried to buy the custody of his children.
Hanimov has landed herself a $200,000 movie contract with Warner Brothers for the rights to her story, heads a support group for women, and is looking forward to the final reallife scene of the saga, testifying against Garson.
“One of the happiest days in my life was when Judge Garson got arrested,” she said. “He destroyed many, many, many lives.”
Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (Akashic Noir) Page 18
