Condemned

by John Nicholas Iannuzzi

  So it was, Sandro explained to Tatiana, as a result of Uncle Sal, that he went to law school. After law school, rather than becoming an Assistant U.S. Attorney or District Attorney, or going into the brown shoe world of Wall Street—regardless of color or style of suit, brown shoes and rumpled hat were then de rigueur in Wall Street firms—Sandro moved directly into criminal defense work in the small, independent firm headed by his Uncle Sal’s attorney, Joseph E. Brill.

  Brill had been a unique, “lawyer’s lawyer”, a trial man to whom all manner of cases would be directed, including most lawyers who found themselves in the sights of prosecutors. One of those lawyers was Roy Cohn, of Senator McCarthy fame. Brill had represented Uncle Sal for many years prior to Sandro’s introduction to the august legal world in which Joe Brill strode. Sandro assisted Joe Brill at trials for two years, learning trial technique and style—although Joe Brill repeatedly said that Sandro knew enough to try any type of case from the get go. For this reason, after a few months, Brill recommended to a Supreme Court Judge that Sandro be assigned a homicide case. At that time, two attorneys were assigned to the case of every indigent defendant where there was death penalty potential. One of the lawyers would be the lead counsel, the other, the second-seater, was usually the nephew, brother-in-law, or friend of another of the Supreme Court judges. Each lawyer was paid $1,000.00 by the State. Sandro was appointed as second chair in a murder case. Before that trial progressed very far, Sandro was lead counsel, handling the investigation and trial of a very dark Puerto Rican man charged with shooting a cop in the back with his own revolver. Sandro fought the best of the D.A.’s homicide bureau to a hung jury in that case, despite two alleged confessions made to the police by his client. After that, everyone knew that a new and artful trial attorney had emerged.

  Sandro slowed the Ferrari now as they made their way through the Delaware Water Gap. The scenery was spectacular, and his story was held in abeyance as Tatiana took pictures of the mountains and forests surrounding them. Once back on the monotonous interstate, again headed east on 1-80, Tatiana wanted to know more about Joe Brill and Sandro.

  “There isn’t much more to tell,” said Sandro as the Ferrari devoured miles of New Jersey macadam. “Since that first homicide case—I think, by now, I’ve handled more than a hundred of them for indigents.”

  “What is indig—?”

  “Indigent. Poor people who have no money to pay a lawyer. The state pays me a little something—practically nothing—to represent them.”

  “Why do you handle cases for nothing, when there are so many people who want to pay you?” asked Tatiana.

  “Because it’s a good life,” said Sandro.

  “That makes no sense—because it is a good life? What does that mean?”

  “That means that practicing law has provided me with a very good life—and you with a very good fox coat—and this is my way of giving something back to the public, to society. Sometimes, you see poor defendants and they don’t know what’s going on. They’re like deer, frozen in headlights on the road. That’s the way many defendants are in the front of the justice system—they’re in shock and they don’t understand what’s happening to them. A lot of the lawyers from Legal Aid who are assigned to them are young; they’re there to get experience, and sometimes, they’re as helpless as the defendants.”

  “You help the deer a lot?”

  “About ten cases a year, I take. You know, I’m starting to sound like you when I speak.” They both laughed. Then they were silent again as Sandro worked his way forward through a flock of traffic.

  “The greatest day of my trial life was when Joe Brill told me I had won my spurs as a trial lawyer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “In older days, to become a horse soldier, when you finally learned all there was to learn, you were presented with a pair of special spurs, the metal things that a rider wears on his boots when he rides a horse.” Tatiana nodded. “So, after that first homicide case, Joe Brill told me I had won my spurs. I was so delighted to hear something like that from a lawyer like Joe Brill.” Sandro smiled at the happy thought. Tatiana, too, smiled. She reached for and rubbed Sandro’s hand.

  “Sorry about the race weekend,” he said, watching the road ahead.

  “Nyet problem. We still have a weekend. Different place, that’s all. Besides, I’m not unhappy that you don’t race. It’s dangerous.”

  “Fun, though,” said Sandro.

  They drove silently for a while. Tatiana turned toward Sandro. “How many miles do you drive when you race?” she asked.

  “You mean around the track, how many miles do we usually go?”

  “Yes. In the whole weekend?”

  “I don’t know, two miles and a half around the track, ten laps in the race, is twenty five, and practice, a couple of sessions, that would make fifty more. I don’t know exactly. Between fifty and a hundred.”

  “How fast do you go there?”

  “Around the track?

  “Yes.”

  “It varies. Back straight, about a hundred twenty-five, turns less than that, average, about ninety, ninety-five.”

  “How many miles from that place to home?” she asked, pointing ahead toward New York.

  “Two hundred twenty five.”

  “You go more than a hundred miles an hour from there to here, so you have now more racing than all weekend. And tonight we have a wonderful meal, make love, and have a beautiful weekend in New York. Not bad.”

  “Not bad at all, when you put it that way,” said Sandro.

  The phone on the console rang. Sandro pressed a button, the radio automatically muted. “Hello?” he said.

  “Sandro,” said the deep, resonant voice of Senator Joseph Galiber over the loudspeaker in the dashboard.

  “Hey, Big Joe, how’s it going?”

  “You don’t care,” said the Senator pleasantly. State Senator Galiber was a tall, handsome, light-skinned black man who had graduated law school with Sandro. Years back, the Senator, who now represented a large district that covered about a third of the Bronx, had been the captain of the legendary City College basketball team. From time to time, Sandro helped write legislative bills for the Senator to introduce before the Senate.

  “Of course I care. And don’t say anything dirty, there’s a lovely young woman listening to all of this.”

  “Anybody I know?” said the Senator.

  “Tatiana.”

  “Hi Tatiana,” the Senator said. Sandro and Tatiana had had dinner a couple of times with the Senator and his wife. “Still haven’t found out the real truth about this guy?”

  “Don’t start an international incident,” said Sandro. “This beautiful woman is crazy about me.”

  “How are you, Senator?” said Tatiana.

  “Call me Joe, Tatiana. And if you really cared, Sandro, you wouldn’t leave me here in the salt mines, wondering if you finished polishing that drug bill. I’m supposed to re-submit it Monday. I’ve already scheduled a press conference. A couple of the media people have asked my staff for an advance copy. Is it ready?”

  “You still in Albany?” said Sandro.

  “I’m coming down this afternoon. I had a finance committee meeting this morning. The bill still has to be printed. One of the guys said I could fax it up to him and he’d work over the weekend and get it ready—if you get it to me, that is.”

  “I just have to finish the residency section, something to prevent an influx of people coming into New York State to obtain drugs once they’re legalized.”

  “That’s the current big concern,” said the Senator. “When we introduced the first bill, what was it, four or five years back, the other Senators looked at me like I was crazy. Joe! De-criminalizing drugs? You’ve got to be kidding? They didn’t take it seriously. Now they stop me, and the most asked question is, how are you going to stop junkies from East Cupcake, Montana, or wherever, from flooding into New York State to get drugs?”

  “I’ll get it to
you by tomorrow morning. It’s great that the other Senators are looking at it seriously.”

  “I think the new approach we worked out makes all the difference in the world. The first thing I tell anyone who asks is, you have to understand—just today, one of the Governor’s people asked me about the bill—I told him the same thing, you have to understand there are two separate and distinct drug problems. The first and worst is trafficking in drugs. The other is addiction. This legalization bill is only intended to eliminate trafficking. Afterward, we’ll deal with addiction as a medical problem, like alcoholism. When you separate the problems, they see the light.”

  “Great.”

  “And then I tell them, if you have any questions about how legalization will work, you can answer them yourself. We’ll control drugs in exactly the same way we control alcohol. Whatever way we control alcohol, that’s how we’ll control drugs.”

  “That alcohol reference must put a big crimp in the conversation, especially if the guy is just going out for a couple of shooters,” said Sandro.

  The Senator laughed. “I add in about the rehabilitation package included in the bill, so we can begin working on the addiction problem next. They immediately counter with, ‘where’s all the money going to come from to pay for this’?”

  “And you tell them?”

  “From all the jails that we won’t have to build, and from the reduction of the police forces, the reduction of court personnel; we won’t need as many Corrections people, and the millions that we presently spend interdicting the traffickers, the undercover operations, that won’t be necessary.”

  “You ought to remind them how few people have been prosecuted for bootlegging in our courts after Prohibition was repealed,” said Sandro.

  “They say, you make drugs available, we’ll have more addicts. I tell them, first of all, we already have a big addiction problem—”

  “With many people in the closet that we don’t know about.”

  “I tell them, that’s a different problem. This bill is only intended to eliminate trafficking, which will give us the freedom to deal with addiction as a medical condition.”

  “Anyone tell you there’ll still be trafficking if drugs were legalized?” asked Sandro.

  “Not a one. Once you separate drugs into two separate problems, they just look at me, because it’s obvious that, without question, legalization will eliminate trafficking overnight.”

  “There’ll probably be fewer addicts once the sinful glamour of taking drugs is eliminated through legalization,” said Sandro. “No one drinks illegal booze anymore.”

  “They come back with all kinds of things,” continued the Senator, “like, ‘what drugs will you make available? Heroin? What about controls?’ And I repeat the thing about the controls will be the same as for alcohol. Under 21, can’t have any. Can’t have any if you drive a car. After the first year, when drugs will be free, in hospital facilities, then, they’ll be sold either in state run stores, or controlled private stores. They shake their heads—not because they’re skeptics. A lot of them are not—not anymore. They shake their heads because they can’t believe they’re even thinking seriously that this might be the necessary solution.”

  “Knowing politicians—present company excluded,” said Sandro, “it probably frightens them to think about going out on a limb and telling their constituents they think drugs should be made legal.”

  The Senator laughed softly. “When push comes to shove, the thing they keep coming back to is, what are you going to do about all the people who come from out of state? You’ll flood the state with junkies, like Amsterdam. That’s what we have to work out, Sandro.”

  “It should be introduced in Washington, nationally. Then we wouldn’t have that problem.”

  “We’re just showing Washington the way,” said the Senator. “But you have to make the bill foolproof, work out the residency requirements, constitutionality, all that; otherwise it’ll be sucked down ass-backward. We don’t want to provide the morality lobbyists a hook to pull us down with.”

  “Are there a lot of people lobbying against it?” said Sandro.

  “You bet. Most of them represent law enforcement, D.A.’s, Police, Corrections.”

  “Corrections?”

  “They say they’ll have a problem with the thousands of people who are in for crimes that aren’t going to be crimes any more. They never bother to mention the real reason that they’re concerned: the huge loss of funds currently being poured into correction facilities. They get twisted when I say, okay, we’ll pardon the people in jail for crimes that are no longer crimes.” The Senator laughed. “They come back and say, then you’ll be putting thousands of convicts on the streets.”

  “Sounds like you’re having a lot of fun,” said Sandro.

  “At least we have the vagasites moving. But, nothing’s going to happen if you don’t finish the bill. Your secretary said you’re going to be out of town for the weekend, racing?”

  “What’s the matter with her, telling people where I’ve gone for the weekend.”

  “Don’t be putting me in the position of getting your secretary in trouble because she told me where you were. I told her how important it was, that I needed my bill. She told me because she knows we’re close.”

  “We are?”

  “Just tell me when I can get my hands on the bill.”

  “I’m on my way back in,” said Sandro. He glanced over at Tatiana. She smiled.

  “Back to New York? What happened to your racing weekend?”

  “Merian Ellis happened. She sent a Marshal after me.”

  “Federal Court Merian Ellis?”

  “I hope there aren’t two of them.”

  “What did you do now?”

  “Apparently something happened to Red Hardie’s lawyer,” said Sandro, “and Ellis plans to stick me back into the trial.”

  “Do you have to accept the case?”

  “She can do anything she likes,” said Sandro, “including putting me in jail for contempt if I refuse. But I’m going to appeal to her sense of decency and fairness.”

  “When you tell me that, I know you’re in real trouble, pal,” said the Senator. “I may try and sell her on the de-criminalization bill, that these people shouldn’t be tried for a crime.”

  “Fat chance on that one,” the Senator said. “When will you be in? You want to get together later tonight?”

  The tall towers of the George Washington Bridge, with its network of cables, appeared out of the early evening sky. “Maybe we’ll do something like that,” said Sandro. “I’m just getting to the G.W.B. We were supposed to go out to celebrate Tatiana’s birthday.”

  “And your anniversary,” said Tatiana.

  “She’s right. It’s also my anniversary at the Bar. Maybe we’ll whip something together at my place. I’ll cook. You bring some wine. What do you say?”

  “Probably. That way, maybe we can take a few minutes and finish the bill. I’ll check with Emma. But I think it’ll be okay.”

  “I’ll call a few of the usual suspects,” said Sandro. “About eight-thirty?”

  “I have a couple of fund raisers early in the evening. I’ll tell Emma to come down, and I’ll—rye—anot—aft—”

  “You’re breaking up on me,” said Sandro. He had already paid the toll and was amidst the vast piers and support cables of the bridge.

  “I—abt—” The phone went dead.

  “I’ll call him from the house,” said Sandro. “You mind if we stay in and cook, have a few people over, instead of going out?”

  “Nyet problem.”

  She was a lovely woman, Sandro thought, smiling at Tatiana.

  Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn : July 1, 1929 : 11:30 P.M.

  Vittorio Caiafa feathered his oars, leaning on the handles as he watched Marco Giordano standing on the rear seat of the dinghy, holding a lantern aloft, peering into the darkness.

  “We there?” Caiafa said in Sicilian as the dinghy continued to glide
stem first on the calm, dark water of Sheepshead Bay.

  Giordano’s eyes narrowed. He smiled. “Right in the bull’s ass.” His smile changed quickly. “Whoa,” he called out. “Slow it down, slow it down.” Caiafa stroked in reverse. “Watch out. Grab it.”

  Caiafa cursed as one oar dropped into the water when he reached out to grab the gunnels of the moored Seabright dory. Like most of the fishing boats nearby, the larger boat was entirely open, with a control pedestal in the center aft. Its planks were painted black.

  Once the dinghy was steady next to the larger boat, Giordano climbed into the dory. Hand over hand, Caiafa eased the dinghy toward the bow of the dory—on the way, retrieved the floating oar—took hold on the line secured to the dory’s bow, and pulled himself and the dinghy toward the mooring buoy. He secured the dinghy to the buoy, loosened and pulled the dory toward him until he could climb aboard.

  Giordano was now adjusting something inside the motor hatch beneath the floorboards. When he was finished, he closed the hatch cover, wiped his hands on a cloth, then turned a key on the control pedestal to start the engine.

  When moored, this dory appeared just like many of the nondescript fishing boats bobbing silently nearby. Now, in darkness broken only by the dim lantern, the engine rumbled and echoed a deep, powerful growl. Months ago, Giordano, who had been a mechanic for racing cars in his native Sicily, had removed the standard four cylinder engine that was sufficient to move the ordinary dory to fishing sites, installing in its place, a powerful 12 cylinder Packard. Under full throttle, the dory was capable of slicing through water at more than 35 knots, out-speeding any Prohibition agents that might give chase. Another modification Giordano had made to the dory was four hinged panels just beneath the gunnels along the starboard and port sides. These were just large enough to facilitate jettisoning cases of booze from the dory under full pursuit.