“Pasta fazool, Charlie. You gotta say it like those other stupid piece of shit Neapolitans, who walk around talking like monkeys. I’d love to, but I gotta make a couple more stops.” Diamond stood, smoothing the outside of his jacket where he had put the envelope. “Remember, Charlie, make nice nice. Just let me know when this piece of shit is going to show up, and then forget about it. Okay?”
“Ci. Ci.”
Newsroom, New York Post: June 20, 1996 : 10:50 A.M.
The newsroom at the New York Post was in the midst of its usual controlled chaos. Myriad paper strewn desks were oriented toward the Managing Editor’s horseshoe desk on the far side of the huge newsroom. The Managing Editor sat on the inner curve of the horseshoe, with five associate editors in charge of the various news bureaus that would make up the emerging edition, facing him from the outer side of the horseshoe. On top of all this activity was a cacophony of voices, ringing telephones, television monitors, wire service consoles constantly clacking out the latest news from points everywhere.
“You want to go with the same photo of this Hettie Rouse we had on the front page yesterday morning?” one of the Associate Editors asked Ed Barquette, the Managing Editor. Having endured their peripatetic Chief over the years, to the minions of the newsroom, and to all points west, Barquette’s French Canadian name had devolved into the sobriquet, Ed Bark It.
Barquette—bald, wearing his trademark blue button-down Oxford shirt with sleeves rolled back to his forearms, tie pulled down from his neck—glanced at the front page of yesterday’s first edition which lay on the desk to his left.
“Haven’t we got something that makes her look uglier than this? Rotten bitch, even if it was only a little pickaninny, her own, that she killed. Lets her boyfriend fuck the kid first. Christ! I hate stories like this. You got pictures that show how truly ugly this cunt is?”
“She’s in handcuffs, her eyes rolling half out of her head, high on drugs. She looks like a piece of shit. You saying she looks nice?” said Seymour Tucker, the Photo Editor. He studied a copy of the previous day’s front page.
“What the fuck do I know,” rasped Barquette, not looking up from the typed copy of the Bosnia story that was to run on page five. As he read, he circled words, phrases. Sometimes he winced and slashed, muttering epithets. As he finished reading each page, he tossed it to his right, ostensibly to a copy box, but mostly to the floor where a copy boy—or, in this case, a young woman—retrieved them for re-write. “She looks too nice there,” he grumbled without looking at Tucker. “Get another shot, something with her face gnarled up, more ugliness, you know what I mean?”
Tucker looked over to the other editors, shrugging.
“What the fuck are you shrugging for?” grumbled Barquette, not looking up. “Was I right? Did he shrug?” Barquette said to another Associate Editor to his right.” The other Editor chuckled. “You think I’m blind?” Barquette said, reading on, flipping another page toward the copy box.
Tucker silently began to rummage through a folder of photographs.
“Just came in, Chief,” said a young reporter, carrying some pages that had been ripped off a news service teletype. “Can I work on it?”
Barquette looked up. “Hiya, Johnny. How’s that girl of yours? You should see the nice, I mean nice, girl, Johnny has,” Barquette said, glancing toward the other editors. “A real nice girl, you know what I mean? Not one of those hard as nails, everyday pieces of shit that you see every time you walk down the street.” He grunted. “What’s her name, Johnny? Sabrina?”
“Samantha, Chief.”
“Holy shit,” Barquette exclaimed, reading the pages that John Moses had just handed him.
The editors all looked at Barquette.
“Red Hardie, Chairman of the Board of the Brotherhood, turned.” He read on. “Sources close to the United States Attorney’s office—which means their press office—has just revealed that Red Hardie, head of the Brotherhood, drug lord of Harlem and half the United States, has been remanded, put into protective custody—you know what that means, don’t you?” He glanced at the editors—“that means he’s going to cooperate with the Government. Holy Toledo. Tucker, get me some fucking photos of Hardie.”
“Nice ones or ugly ones?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, nice or ugly? He’s a wealthy businessman, not a piece of shit.” Barquette looked up, smiling mischievously. He continued to read the copy. “But he’s still a fucking gorilla, right? If you have nice photos of this fucking gorilla, which I doubt, use ’em.”
Tucker shrugged.
“You’re going to wear your shoulders out with all the fucking shrugging,” Barquette said, reading on. “If you stopped shrugging, you wouldn’t know what to do with half your day.”
Tucker looked confused. He shrugged again.
“See what I mean?” Barquette said, still not looking up.
The other editors laughed. Tucker shrugged again. They laughed louder.
“Tear the front page. Get this story. Johnny, yeah, Johnny, you handle it,” he said to Moses, still standing next to him. “Get on the phone with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Get everything you can on this. Didn’t we have something about his attorney having an accident yesterday or the day before?”
“His lawyer had a nose-bleed,” Moses injected.
“Right. Right. The Judge put in another lawyer, or something.”
“Sandro Luca.”
“Sandro, yeah. What a nice guy. Good lawyer, too. What a lawyer. He’s not in it anymore?”
“The Judge was supposed to put him back in it today. Don’t know what happened with that,” said Moses.
“Yeah, yeah. Get a couple of guys to get Johnny some color, some background,” Barquette told another editor. “Let Johnny run with the ball.”
“I’ve already sent for the folders,” said Moses.
“Yeah, yeah, good, Johnny. Get going. You have twenty minutes.”
“Thanks, Chief.” Moses was off at a trot.
“What a nice kid.” Barquette was immediately back into the Bosnia copy. “Tucker. You got the pictures of the business-man gorilla yet?” he growled into the pages he was reading.
“Not yet, Chief. I sent for the folders.”
“Get off your ass, man.”
Tucker looked incredulously at the Chief. Without looking up, Barquette growled: “Don’t look at me like that. What if your face froze like that?”
The other editors laughed.
“He gave me a shit-eating look, didn’t he?” Barquette said to the editor on his right.
The editor laughed, nodding.
“I know you like a fucking book, Tucker. And you know I read trash.”
All the editors laughed again. Tucker turned slightly pink.
“What about the Hettie Rouse story?” said an Editor when the laughing died down.
“How many stories about gorillas can you run on one front page?” said Barquette.
“You want to kill it?”
“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” thundered Barquette, now looking up. “How the hell are we going to kill a story about a piece of shit that killed her own pickaninny, held her down while her Spic boyfriend keyholed the kid? That’s a hell of a story.”
“I don’t know. You said—”
“I said we run with Hardie as the lead. Put the other gorilla with a sub-head at the top or the bottom of the front page, superimpose a little ugly picture of her, slanti-wise, then run her and the kid on page five. Lots of pictures.”
“What about Bosnia? I thought we were running that on five,” said the International Editor.
“A shortie on page four, and put the rest somewhere else. You should see the nice tits on her.”
“On who?” said the International Editor, looking at his copy of yesterday’s front page.
“Moses’ girl. Nice little handful tits. Built for speed, you know?” Barquette was back into the Bosnia copy again. “Nice little nipples. Sticking out of her sweater just so
.”
Tucker shrugged and shook his head.
“Don’t fuckin’ shrug at me,” said Barquette, circling some copy, handing it to the female copy boy.
The other editors chuckled.
“Chief,” said the copy boy, “there’s somebody who wants to see you, waiting in the reception area.”
“Who’s that? I don’t have any fuckin’—freakin’, sorry, Annie—time to see anybody now. I’m in the middle of an edition.”
“He asked me to give you his card, Chief. Said he only wanted to say hello.” The copy boy handed Barquette a white business card embossed with a large gold shield of the Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration. Beneath the gold badge was printed, “Michael O. Becker, Supervising Agent.”
“Becker’s here?” said Barquette, swiveling his chair to face the copy boy. She nodded and pointed to the area just outside the newsroom.
“Glenn, take the desk for a few minutes, okay? And watch that fucker—sorry, Annie—I meant to say Tucker. Watch he don’t try to pull a fast one.”
The editors laughed.
Criminal Courts Building : June 20, 1996 : 10:55 A.M.
When he left the courthouse after Red Hardie had been remanded, Sandro walked across the street to the M.C.C. (Metropolitan Correction Center) detention facility behind the Federal courthouse, where Hardie was to be taken, to check how long it would be before Red was processed and ready for a visit. The Officer behind the glass panel at the entrance said that it would be several hours, since the inmate had to be processed by the Marshals, fingerprinted, photographed, etc., and then brought for Bureau of Prisons processing at the M.C.C.
Sandro exited from the M.C.C., thinking that he could spend the time more constructively if he went to the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street to visit Hettie Rouse, the woman Red had asked Sandro to help. The first few hours after an arrest are critical, he knew. The D.A. and the police try to talk to the accused, perhaps lure them into making inculpatory statements before they have a lawyer to tell them to keep their mouths shut. Sandro entered one of the elevators inside the Criminal Courts Building. Already inside was Freddie Weisman, a balding, portly lawyer who regularly handled criminal cases.
“Hey, Sandro. What are you working on today?”
“I’m going to talk to that woman accused of killing her child.”
“Hettie Rouse? The one who held her kid down so the boyfriend could rape her? That’s probably a death penalty case. You’ll be lucky they don’t give you a lethal injection just for representing her.”
When the elevator stopped on the 13th floor, the two lawyers exited together, turning into the long corridor that led to Judge Harold Rothwax’s courtroom. “At least she won’t be a recidivist after the Prince of Darkness is through with her,” Freddie added with a smirk.
Sandro smiled tightly. Recidivists are people who continually return to the justice system, crime being their lifelong vocation. Judge Rothwax was occasionally called the Prince of Darkness by lawyers chaffed by his strict courtroom demeanor. They considered him harsh and arrogant. Sandro considered him intelligent, at worst, impatient, and at best, a friend. “You think the Prince will keep the case?”
“Actually, I wish he would,” said Sandro. “He’d keep the thing from becoming an abortion like the Simpson circus.”
“This is New York, Sandro, not Hollywood.”
Camera lights flared on as the gaggle of media people outside Judge Rothwax’s courtroom spied Sandro. Unlike the Federal Courts, where cameras are not allowed inside, the State courts allowed camera people into the hallways, though not inside the courtrooms. “Lots of luck,” said Weissman as he was swallowed into the crowd now converging on Sandro.
“Sandro, Sandro,” said Mike Pearl, the first reporter to reach Sandro. The diminutive Pearl had long been covering the courthouse for the Post. “Rothwax wants to appoint you to the Rouse case. Will you take it?”
“First I heard of any appointment.”
“Look over here, Counselor,” called a camera assistant as flood-lights streamed over Sandro.
“Sandro, can I interview you?” said the handsome Chris Borgen, a former cop, turned reporter. For years, he and Sandro had admired each other’s double-breasted suits.
“Let me talk to you guys later,” Sandro whispered to both Pearl and Borgen. “Not now, gentlemen and ladies,” he said more loudly to the other media people in the crowd. “I have to get inside.”
“You have any comment for us at this time?” said a reporter holding an ABC microphone.
“Not right now,” said Sandro as he opened the courtroom doors, leaving the swirling tempest behind.
In Judge Rothwax’s courtroom, everything was wood-paneled: the Judge’s bench, the Clerk’s and Court Reporter’s desks, the jury box with fourteen seats, upholstered in red leatherette. The Defense table was bolted to the floor, to prevent it being thrown by a defendant wanting to disrupt court proceedings. Above the Judge’s bench was a huge oil painting of an American Dame Justice, wrapped in the American flag, exhorting reason, justice, and even-mindedness. A door to the side, led to the detention cells below the courtroom.
When Hettie Rouse appeared yesterday for arraignment on charges of murder, her case was immediately adjourned for Grand Jury action. Now that a Grand Jury had indicted her—it didn’t take long for the District Attorney’s office to indict a high publicity case—the matter had appeared on Judge Rothwax’s calendar in the Supreme Court this morning. The case had been called earlier. When Rob Quintalian, the Assistant District Attorney in charge of the case, advised Judge Rothwax this was to be the first death penalty case presented in New York County since capital punishment was reinstated, the Judge told the Clerk to second-call the case so he could assign a Capital Defender.
Governor George Pataki had successfully campaigned for the Governor’s Office on the sham platform that he would lessen the crime rate by re-enacting the death penalty. Since ninety-nine percent of crimes, including rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, and drugs, carry no death penalty implication, lessening the crime rate by legislating a death penalty is just a public relations ruse. That fact notwithstanding, shortly after taking office, Pataki did, in fact, have a death penalty bill introduced in the State Legislature. The rest of the politicians, not wanting to appear soft on crime, went along with the gimmick.
Since there hadn’t been an execution in New York State for over thirty years, there were very few practicing lawyers who had any experience representing defendants who faced a death sentence. Thus, together with the capital punishment legislation, a Capital Defender Office had been established to indoctrinate qualified attorneys in the art of defending those accused of capital penalty crimes. Sandro had attended all the indoctrination seminars provided by the Capital Defender Office, and had qualified to be on the Capital Defender list. When Judge Rothwax saw Sandro’s name on the list, he decided to ask Sandro to take on the case. The Judge knew there would be a great deal of public and media scrutiny on this case, which meant, a protracted trial. As long as he was going to be have the Rouse case in front of him for a significant amount of time, the Judge thought, he might as well have counsel before him who could handle the job professionally.
“Good morning, Mr. Luca,” the Judge said to Sandro, who had just entered the courtroom.
“Good morning, Your Honor,” Sandro said as he walked up toward the velvet rope that separated the well of the courtroom from the audience.
“Are you available for an assignment to a capital case?”
“The Rouse case?” asked Sandro.
“The very one.”
“That’s who I’m here to see, Judge.” said Sandro.
“She your client?”
“Not sure yet. Maybe.”
“Excellent. Go in the back and see your client without delay.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” said Sandro.
The Judge wanted the media disorder out of his courtroom as soon as possible. In a
ddition, aware that the media wanted to make their deadlines as soon as possible, the Judge was willing to accommodate them. After all, even judges want the picture editor to select a becoming photograph to run with the story.
Lawyers, seated in the first row of the courtroom, had heard the exchange between the Court and Sandro about the Hettie Rouse case. Now they watched Sandro walk toward the bullpen with a mixture of envy and relief: envious in that they would not be the subject of the media blitz that was sure to follow the case; relieved, for exactly the same reason, they would not have the responsibility of defending someone against the specter of death in the midst of a swirl of media intrusion.
Once Sandro was within the confines of the Correction Department, everything changed from paneled wood to industrial strength steel: stairways, cement floors, steel bars, steel benches, steel tables, stone block walls painted a neutral beige, with the names or initials of the hundreds who had passed through these passageways chipped into the paint; some names were painted over, some were carved out of the new paint. The musty smell of fear mixed with stale breath and body odor, punctuated by the aroma of stacks of skimpy baloney sandwiches on white bread, and paper cups of a diluted fruit punch piled on a cart, filled the atmosphere.
Sandro fished for his Correction Department pass, displaying it to the black female Correction Officer in tight blue uniform pants and shirt at a desk outside the lower holding cells at the bottom of the stairway.
“Who’d you want?” said the officer.
“Rouse.”
The Officer pursed her lips and grunted softly. She pointed overhead with a long fingernail that was lacquered and gold dusted. “She’s housed with the females, at the far end of the main corridor. You know where it is, Counselor.”
Sandro climbed the stairs and began to walk along the corridor, past holding cells filled with caged men, some sitting on benches, some on the floor, leaning against the bars, some completely prone, staring up at the ceiling. In the corner of the large cells were open toilets, separated from the other defendants and the guards by a chest high, 3 sided stainless steel screen.
Condemned Page 20
