By her twenty-second birthday she had managed to save $6,000, and she departed on a tour that would take her to more than sixty countries in two years.
When she returned home, she decided she was ready for a formal education, and after passing college proficiency exams, she enrolled in New York University’s School Without Walls program. Two years later, in May 1974, she emerged with a bachelor of science degree after studying international affairs, languages, art, and political science.
Sukhreet then spent the summer at Oxford University in England, studying British politics and society. That fall she continued her studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, first in Bologna, Italy, and then in Maryland. She dropped out of Johns Hopkins before earning a master’s degree, however, complaining that the program was too oriented toward international business.
At the same time, she was romantically involved with a handsome young Dutch diplomat, Jan Revis, whom she had met at a party in New York. The romance flowered, and on June 8, 1975, they were married. Two hundred guests attended the reception, which was held in the New York mansion of socialite Marietta Tree, an old friend of Sukhreet’s mother’s. Tulips from Holland were flown in for the occasion. In their wedding picture Sukhreet is slim and beautiful in a flowing white wedding gown.
Thirteen days later Sukhreet and her new husband left for the Dutch Embassy in Suriname in South America, where they lived for two years. “It was hotter than hell,” she recalled, “and it was very hard to be a person from one culture living in the middle of another culture in the midst of another culture.”
Dutch Embassy policy prohibited her from working, so she had little to do other than to visit the local public works projects, entertain other diplomats, and become acquainted with local customs. “I was lonely, alone with my books and no one to talk to. My husband was a very nice man, but dull, very dull.”
By 1977, when her husband was transferred from Suriname to Brussels, Sukhreet was beginning to wonder if her marriage had been a mistake. She had become weary of cocktail parties and playing the role of diplomat’s wife.
To escape the drudgery of her marriage, Sukhreet decided to enroll as a part-time student at the University of Chicago under an arrangement that required her to travel to Chicago to attend classes for one semester each year. Her husband didn’t take kindly to Sukhreet’s decision. “He was very resentful. He was much more jealous than if I had had another man.”
The marriage continued nonetheless, but after moving with her husband to Beirut in 1979, Sukhreet decided to enroll at the University of Chicago that fall as a full-time student to fulfill the requirements for a Ph.D. in sociology. Six months later Sukhreet and Jan were divorced. They split the $34,000 they had in savings, and she used her half to help fund her tuition. Her parents and student loans paid the rest of her bill. “He [Jan Revis] married his former secretary as soon as the ink was dry on the divorce papers,” said Sukhreet. “I married the University of Chicago.”
She concentrated on her studies, taking lots of courses on race relations, and found a new boyfriend, Tony Babinec, a sociology major in his early twenties from a working-class Polish Catholic family. He was taken with this exotic thirty-year-old woman from New York and moved into a condominium she had bought near the university in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood with monetary help from her parents.
The University of Chicago was rigorous, and Sukhreet found herself having to study hard for the first time in her academic career. She did not do as well in her classes as she would have liked and flunked the first series of major exams.
By early 1982 she had decided to leave the university. She said she did not think the Ph.D. was worth another two years writing a dissertation. She was also running out of money from the divorce settlement and was tired of living the life of a graduate student. She expected her academic credentials and her experience living and traveling abroad to enable her to walk into any Fortune 500 company and get a high-paying, glamorous job right away.
But she soon found out she was wrong. She first tried to get a job in Chicago and had no luck, so she returned to New York. At least in New York she could rely on her mother’s connections.
When she returned to New York in early spring of 1982, her mother presented her with a list of contacts. She had helped so many young women get into law schools and climb the judicial ladder over the years that it must have seemed perfectly natural to “network” on behalf of her daughter.
As Sukhreet remembers it, her mother would get on the telephone to her prominent friends and say: “I have an interesting daughter who has just come back from many years abroad and Chicago, and she is looking for some advice as to the future direction of her career and for some help on her résumé. Would you be good enough, Mr. or Ms. whoever, to spend some time, maybe fifteen minutes, with Sukhreet and give her some good advice?”
Then her mother would follow up the phone call with a note, attaching a copy of Sukhreet’s résumé. Among the thirty to forty letters that Judge Gabel sent out were letters to Herb Rickman, special assistant to Mayor Edward I. Koch; Brendan Sexton, the city’s sanitation commissioner; Joseph Christian, then head of the New York City Public Housing Authority; William Passannante, New York state assemblyman; Barbara Cohen, deputy city personnel director; Fabian Palomino, a top aide to Governor Mario Cuomo; Mark Siegel, New York state assemblyman; Edward Costikyan, former Manhattan Democratic leader and a prominent lawyer; and Milton Gould, partner in the large Manhattan law firm of Shea & Gould.
Her mother’s phone calls and letters opened up doors all over New York, and Sukhreet says she was attending up to four or five meetings a day in 1982. But after interviewing for jobs for a year and writing three hundred letters to the presidents of major corporations, job counselors, and headhunters, emphasizing her research skills and international background, she was still without full-time employment. She received only two solid job offers, and she turned both of them down. One job was working as a paralegal at Shea & Gould. The other job was working for the city’s housing authority as a building supervisor in a city housing project. Sukhreet did not see how either job would put her on a career path.
In March of 1983, as she approached the first anniversary of her job search, Sukhreet found herself once again deeply depressed. She had run out of money and was living in a back room in her parents’ apartment. The pressure to find a job, particularly from her father, was overwhelming, she said.
Desperately needing a change of scenery, she got into her 1982 Toyota one morning and headed for Chicago to visit Tony Babinec. They had tried to maintain a long-distance relationship over the past year. By the time she reached Ohio, she had worked herself into such a state that she found herself speeding at ninety miles per hour during a driving rainstorm, hoping for an “unfortunate accident.”
But all she got was a speeding ticket. She arrived safely at the apartment she had shared with Babinec. Any hope she had of finding solace in their relationship was dashed when she found two unwashed wineglasses at the foot of the bed. “He denied it outright,” Sukhreet recalled. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” She spent the next two weeks crying in bed in Chicago and contemplating suicide. Nothing Babinec said or did could console her.
She had known depression all of her life, but never before had she felt such despair. When she returned to New York, she walked into Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic on East 68th Street in Manhattan. A doctor suggested she voluntarily admit herself for examination and review. She said the doctor told her she was suffering from severe clinical depression.
That afternoon she called her parents from the hospital and told them she would be out of town for a few days. She did not want them to know what was happening to her until she felt better.
A week or so later she called her parents again and told them she was at Payne Whitney. Her mother and father immediately came to visit. During the next six weeks her mother visited as often as Sukhreet would permit,
often bringing her flowers and packing a nice lunch for them to share. Tony Babinec flew in from Chicago and also visited with her.
Not long after Sukhreet checked herself out of the hospital, she accompanied Babinec on a business trip to Italy and the Netherlands. Her parents thought a trip to Europe might be good for her. They paid for her trip and all of Babinec’s travel expenses that were unrelated to his business.
Horty and Milton Gabel were hoping that Sukhreet would return from Europe in better spirits and have better luck in finding a job.
25
Seduction
On Wednesday, May 25, 1983, Bess ordered her new city driver to swing by Judge Gabel’s apartment building to pick up the judge for that night’s gala at Gracie Mansion. The affair was a celebration of Bess’s appointment as the city’s new commissioner of cultural affairs, and she had invited Judge Gabel a few days earlier—an invitation that had surprised and flattered the judge, who had not been to Gracie Mansion in years.
Judge Gabel had known Bess for fifteen years, having met her at a Hunter College alumni meeting, but she did not know Bess well. Though they had a mutual friend in Herb Rickman, they almost never socialized together and were little more than acquaintances, running into each other at parties or political gatherings or meetings of the Women’s Forum, an organization of New York’s most prominent women. As Judge Gabel once put it, “We were friendly, rather than friends. We liked each other, but we were not close.”
That’s why Rickman, a special assistant to the mayor, was surprised to see Judge Gabel at Gracie Mansion as Bess’s guest. Rickman had helped organize the gala to introduce Bess to the city’s arts community, and he knew that almost all of the two hundred guests were leaders of the city’s many cultural institutions. Only a few of Bess’s close friends had been asked to attend, including Andy, who had arrived early to help his nephew, Michael, set up the sound system for the party.
The case of Capasso v. Capasso had been in the judge’s hands for three months at the time of the gala. Rickman would later remember that the judge was curious that night about whether Andy was at the party. “Is what’s-his-name here?” Rickman recalled the judge asked him at one point during the night.
“You mean Andy Capasso?” Rickman said.
“Yes,” he said she replied.
He looked around the room to point out Andy but couldn’t spot him at that moment.
Rickman’s recollection would later clash with the judge’s insistence that she didn’t even know that Bess and Andy were a couple at that time.
It was on this festive night of May 25, 1983, federal prosecutors would later allege, that Bess’s seduction of Hortense Gabel began.
The next evening, at Bess’s invitation, Judge Gabel and her husband, Milton, attended the opening of the Department of Cultural Affairs’ art gallery. The two women continued to talk on the phone over the next few weeks as Bess called the judge frequently to seek advice on a Koch proposal to collect property taxes on many cultural institutions—a proposal that was ultimately dropped.
A few weeks later, Sukhreet said she learned for the first time about her mother’s relationship with Bess, when her mother called to ask her if she would attend a dinner party she was throwing on June 17.
“Who’s going to be there?” Sukhreet recalled asking her mother.
“Well, Bess Myerson, for one,” she said her mother replied.
“That’s interesting. Aren’t we coming up in the world? How did you come to be inviting Bess Myerson?”
“I was standing at a cocktail party and ran into my friend Herb Rickman, and Bess was standing next to him, and she rather invited herself,” Sukhreet remembered her mother said. “Well, are you coming?”
“Maybe I’ll be there,” Sukhreet said.
By the time Sukhreet arrived that night, almost all of the ten or twelve guests were present, seated in a circle in the living room. She greeted her parents with a kiss and smiled broadly as they introduced her to Bess, Herb Rickman, and the few other guests she had not met in the past. Seeing her lovely smile and charming manners, no one would have guessed that only a few weeks before Sukhreet had been hospitalized for severe depression.
Most of the guests were old friends of her parents, some of whom she had known since she was a child. Sukhreet was delighted to find herself seated next to Bess, who struck up a friendly conversation, asking all about her studies at the University of Chicago and her experiences as a diplomat’s wife living abroad. Embarrassed about her lack of employment, Sukhreet did not mention that she was looking for a job. “I didn’t want to meet Bess Myerson with my hand out, begging,” she later said. “It seemed that she was holding a social conversation with me, and I didn’t want to talk business, and my business, at that time, was jobs.”
Deeply immersed in conversation, they joined the line at the buffet table, filled their plates, and returned to their chairs, seemingly oblivious of the other guests. Sukhreet was flattered that “a celebrity” was paying her so much attention, particularly since her long job search had left her with little self-confidence. The two talked about how they both enjoyed taking long walks and going to the movies. “She seemed like a very nice person,” Sukhreet said. “I thought that she seemed to have a real interest in me. How refreshing! How very nice!”
As Bess was about to mingle with the other guests, Sukhreet said, Bess asked for her telephone number. “I’ll call you sometime. If you ever feel like getting together, it would be fun,” Sukhreet remembered Bess said at the time.
Judge Gabel was delighted that Bess was paying so much attention to her daughter that night. “Bess told me she liked Sukhreet very much and she would see what she could do for her, and of course I was pleased,” Judge Gabel recalled years later. “She was impressed with Sukhreet’s knowledge of languages and her knowledge of art. Sukhreet is a cultivated woman … more than her mother, I must say, and Bess was impressed. I was tickled pink.”
On Thursday, June 23, 1983, less than a week after Bess met Sukhreet at the dinner party, Judge Gabel signed an order granting Nancy Capasso temporary alimony and child support. With more than eighteen hundred motions passing through her chambers a year, including almost five hundred requests for temporary alimony and child support alone, Judge Gabel could not possibly personally examine every motion. She was assisted by her top aide and law secretary, Howard Leventhal, and a pool of law assistants who wrote most of the decisions. In fact virtually all of the requests for temporary alimony were first reviewed by Leventhal and a law assistant from the pool.
In Capasso v. Capasso the assignment fell to a highly respected law assistant, Les Lowenstein, who, after studying the papers submitted in May by both sides, concluded that Nancy should receive $2,000 a week in temporary alimony and $500 a week in child support from Andy. Lowenstein also believed that Andy should pay the mortgages, maintenance, and household expenses on all of the couple’s properties.
He turned over his recommendation to Howard Leventhal, who agreed with his findings after carefully examining the proposal. Leventhal took the recommendation into Judge Gabel’s chambers and left it on her desk for her review and signature.
A few days later, on June 23, Judge Gabel called Leventhal into her chambers to discuss the proposed $2,000-a-week alimony in the Capasso case. “I think that the award is a little on the high side and that it ought to be reduced somewhat,” Leventhal later recalled Judge Gabel told him.
She crossed out the $2,000-a-week figure and changed it to $1,500. Then she lowered the child support payment from $500 a week to $250.
“Judge, this is support for the children,” Leventhal said. “You have got to give them more money than that. Look at all the money this guy has. He can support his children.”
Judge Gabel crossed out $250 a week and made it $350. Then she signed the order, one of the highest awards for temporary alimony and child support that she had ever approved.
Although Nancy Capasso had originally requested $6,060.13 a we
ek, she was pleased with the judge’s decision granting her $1,500 a week, which totaled $78,000 a year in temporary alimony, plus the $18,200 in child support. The order also specified that Andy pay $5,000 for an accountant to help her untangle his complicated financial dealings so she could determine his net worth before going to trial.
In addition, she no longer had to worry about paying the hefty maintenance and utility bills on the Fifth Avenue apartment. Judge Gabel’s order required that Andy pick up those bills, along with the mortgages, maintenance, taxes, and utilities on their other properties in Palm Beach and Westhampton Beach.
Andy was outraged by the order, calculating that the financial responsibilities imposed by the judge would cost him more than $250,000 a year. “He was angry as all get-out,” recalled Rickman. “He felt he was being taken for every penny by her.”
Before Andy sent his first alimony check, he asked his lawyers to challenge the decision. Within two weeks, on the afternoon of July 5, one of his lawyers, Alton Abramowitz, appeared in Judge Gabel’s chambers on the sixth floor of the courthouse with a formal written request for a temporary restraining order and an opportunity to reargue her decision.
In the court papers Andy’s lawyers contended that Judge Gabel “obviously overlooked and or misapprehended material facts.…” They argued that Andy could not possibly afford to pay Nancy $1,500 a week in temporary alimony and $350 a week in child support along with all of the other expenses. Abramowitz requested that Judge Gabel stop all temporary alimony payments until after Andy’s defense team had been able to make its case.
Howard Leventhal was in the outer office when Abramowitz arrived. Abramowitz handed him the request, and Leventhal quickly read over the court papers. He later said that he told Abramowitz that he doubted the judge would agree to the request to reargue the motion unless Andy agreed to pay some support to Nancy until the judge reconsidered the alimony and child support issue.
Queen Bess Page 26
