Before leaving on vacation, Judge Gabel had drawn up a draft of her final decision in the case and had turned it over to her law secretary, Howard Leventhal, telling him to make it more “legalistic.” After looking over the judge’s draft and seeing that the judge had decided to cut Nancy’s alimony from $1,500 a week to $500 a week, he told her that he thought she had reduced it too much.
“Well, this is what I think is appropriate,” he said she replied at the time.
Although Judge Gabel had already drafted a decision in the Capasso case, she asked the lawyers involved to appear in her chambers once again to make their arguments in person. Leventhal later said he thought it strange that the judge was requesting to see the attorneys again, but she told him she wanted to question the lawyers on certain minor points before making her final decision.
That afternoon Judge Gabel asked the lawyers for Nancy and Andy to provide her with additional information on several issues, including how much electricity Nancy used at the Fifth Avenue apartment, so she could figure out how much of the utility bill Andy should be expected to pay. She did not indicate to them that she had drafted an order lowering Andy’s alimony and child support payments.
The next night, on August 30, Judge Gabel walked a few blocks with her husband, Sukhreet, and Sukhreet’s friend Tony Babinec to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate their daughter’s birthday and new job. Bess met them there for dinner and toasted Sukhreet’s future. She picked up the $66 tab, paying for it with Andy’s Diners Club card.
Two weeks later Judge Gabel issued her final decision in the case, slashing Nancy Capasso’s temporary alimony payments from $1,500 a week to $500 a week and the child support payments from $350 a week to $180 a week. The judge also decided not to require Andy to pay $5,000 to Nancy for an accountant to examine his business records. The decision, however, continued to require Andy to pay the mortgages and maintenance on the couple’s properties, although Judge Gabel said he no longer had to pay the more than $300 a month for utilities in the Fifth Avenue apartment.
While the new decision cut Andy’s child support payments, he was still responsible for paying for the children’s tuition, religious education, camp, and clothes. But this provision was never included by the judge in the final court order issued two weeks later.
Not surprisingly, Nancy was unhappy when her lawyers called her with the news. They told her not to worry. They intended to appeal Judge Gabel’s decision, and they were confident it would be overturned.
On the day the judge issued her decision, the New York Post ran another story about Bess and Andy, along with a photograph of them standing together on the steps outside City Hall. Judge Gabel later said that was the first time she knew there was a connection between Bess Myerson and the Capasso v. Capasso divorce matter.
Her secretary, Brenda Shrobe, remembered walking into the judge’s office that morning with a copy of the article. She had taken numerous messages from Bess Myerson on the judge’s private telephone line that summer, and she knew that it was Bess Myerson who had finally hired Sukhreet.
“Did you know anything about this?” she asked angrily.
“No,” Judge Gabel replied.
That weekend Andy and Bess celebrated with champagne and chocolate cake at the estate in Westhampton Beach.
And within a few weeks, Bess’s driver, Nelson Pagan, later said, he was in Bess’s office one afternoon when she asked him to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Judge Gabel. The flowers actually had been sent to Bess, but she inserted a new card, rewrapped them, and sent them off with Pagan, who delivered them to the judge’s apartment building.
Andy’s celebration of the judge’s decision was short-lived, however, because less than two weeks later Nancy renewed her offensive against her husband in court. Her lawyers submitted a motion to the judge asking that Andy be barred from keeping his two children overnight at his Westhampton Beach home while Bess was there. The motion marked the first time that Bess’s name showed up in the Capasso v. Capasso divorce papers.
Gabel asked Howard Leventhal to handle Nancy’s motion. Since there were no allegations that Bess and Andy were engaging in indiscreet conduct while his children were visiting, Leventhal recommended that Nancy’s request be denied.
“Is this a correct decision?” Judge Gabel asked him.
“Yes,” he replied.
26
“Tough Love”
From the moment she took office at the Department of Cultural Affairs, Bess encountered hostility from some members of the senior staff. For one thing, the acting commissioner, Randall Bourscheidt, was bitterly disappointed that he had not been made commissioner. Bourscheidt, a tall, blond, cool-headed administrator, had been at the agency for some time as the former commissioner’s top deputy. According to other high-ranking agency officials, he had a difficult time hiding his disdain for Bess’s cultural credentials.
To many people in the arts community and within the agency, Bess was not considered to be “of the arts.” As one former senior staff member explained, “Maybe she sat on the stage and played the piano at Carnegie Hall, but she wasn’t of the arts. She was of politics.”
Bess’s “tough love” management style also did not endear her to the staff. She shocked some employees when she announced during her first staff meeting that she “knew all about city employees” and that they didn’t like to work. According to one staff member, Bess told of her decision while commissioner of consumer affairs to send an employee to the basement and that that employee was never heard from again.
Soon after she arrived at the agency on April 24, 1983, senior staff members inquired as to whether she intended to hire a special assistant. Bess told them she felt that her secretary could take care of whatever a special assistant might do and that she didn’t need or want an amanuensis. So when Bess announced later that summer that she planned to hire Sukhreet Gabel as a special assistant, some members of her staff were surprised that she had changed her mind. At first no one knew that Sukhreet’s mother was Judge Gabel. “Nobody had a clue about any connection at all,” a senior staff member said.
Sukhreet, however, was not as discreet about her family connections as Bess might have liked her to be. Shortly after she was put on the payroll she mentioned to Judith Gray, a friend of Bess’s who had recently been hired as a publicity director for the agency, that her mother was presiding over the Capasso divorce.
Gray was stunned. She later told investigators that she confronted Bess and asked her how she could hire Sukhreet in light of Judge Gabel’s role in the divorce case. Gray said Bess told her it was not a “big deal” because Sukhreet would fill a role in the agency. She also said that she felt sorry for Sukhreet because she had a difficult relationship with her mother.
“What am I going to do with you?” Sukhreet said Bess asked her when she found out that Sukhreet was telling people in the office that her mother was ruling on the Capasso divorce.
Soon afterward she found herself spending less time in Bess’s company either as her friend or as her special assistant. Bess did not ask her to accompany her to evening performances and board meetings as frequently as she had in the past.
Sukhreet was also assigned to work for other supervisors on a variety of projects, such as distributing Carnegie Hall concert tickets to senior citizens’ organizations and school groups. Other assignments included making a borough-by-borough breakdown of arts groups funded by the agency.
Sukhreet brought all of her research skills to bear on the project. She spent days on it, dramatically expanding the project’s scope as she came up with nearly a dozen variables by which to examine the agency’s programs, including breakdowns of cultural institutions visited by adults versus children, by minority groups versus nonminority groups, by out-of-state versus local visitors. It was an earnest effort, but she missed her deadline. “It did not make a good political impression to do more than what was assigned,” she said later.
By early October, just a little mor
e than a month after she began working full-time, senior staff members were in Bess’s office complaining that Sukhreet’s job performance was unsatisfactory. She was missing the thrust of assignments. She was taking too long to complete projects. She couldn’t seem to focus on her work.
What further annoyed the senior staff members was the way Sukhreet “acted as though the commissioner could not do anything to her because she knew something.” One former cultural affairs staff member said Sukhreet once told her that she was concerned about what might happen “if it ever came out that my mother is a judge and if the papers ever found out.”
The papers did find out. On October 17 Susan Mulcahy, then editor of the New York Post’s “Page Six,” got a tip that Bess had hired the daughter of a judge ruling on her boyfriend’s divorce case. Mulcahy remembered that her source told her that “it was no coincidence.” She assigned reporter Richard Johnson to the story, and he started making phone calls that day.
All inquiries from the press for Bess were directed routinely to her press secretary, Richard Bruno, and Johnson’s was no exception. Bruno took down Johnson’s questions and told him he would get back to him shortly with a response from the commissioner. Bruno went straight into Bess’s office to tell her that the New York Post wanted to know whether Sukhreet was Judge Gabel’s daughter and how she had come to be hired at the agency.
Bess was furious. She was convinced that Nancy Capasso and her lawyers had gone to the press. She told Bruno that Sukhreet was, in fact, the daughter of Judge Gabel, but that everything, except for a few housekeeping matters in the divorce, had been decided before Sukhreet had been hired.
For “damage control,” she instructed Bruno to tell the reporter that she had had nothing to do with Sukhreet’s hiring and that Sukhreet had been referred to the agency by Herbert Rickman of the mayor’s office. Bess also pointedly reminded Bruno that he too had interviewed Sukhreet for the position.
Following Bess’s instructions, Bruno returned Richard Johnson’s call and told him what he later acknowledged was a series of lies and misleading statements about Sukhreet’s hiring that were reported as facts in the next day’s paper.
Minutes after Bruno left her office, Bess walked over to Sukhreet’s desk to ask if she had received a call from Johnson. Sukhreet replied that she just got a message that he had called and she was about to call him back. “Well, Bess at that point was beside herself with anxiety, and she began fluttering around,” Sukhreet said.
Bess instructed her instead to wait until after lunch to return Johnson’s call. The plan was that Bess and Bruno would listen in on the conversation over their extensions. “And whenever Mr. Johnson would ask me a question, I was to pause, and after being fed the appropriate answer, I was to respond,” Sukhreet said.
Resentful of the way she was being treated, Sukhreet returned from lunch five minutes early and called Johnson herself. “I figured, I’m an adult, and I’ll answer these questions as honestly as I can. And I finally said, he’s calling me. He’s calling me, goddamn it. I’m a thirty-four-year-old woman, for goodness’ sake, so stop treating me as though I were seventeen, which some people seem to have this enormous tendency to do.”
She dialed Johnson’s number: “Hello, my name is Sukhreet Gabel, from the Department of Cultural Affairs, and I understand that you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.
“And he said, ‘Yes, Miss Gabel. Is it true that your mother is Judge Gabel?’
“Yes, it is.”
Just then Bess stepped off the elevator and walked past Sukhreet’s desk. Her face darkened when she saw Sukhreet on the phone. “Is that Richard Johnson?” she whispered. Sukhreet nodded. Bess drew a slashing line with her finger across her neck to indicate Sukhreet was to hang up. But Sukhreet ignored her and resumed her conversation, lying to Johnson that she knew nothing about the divorce or Bess’s involvement with Andy.
As soon as she hung up, Bess summoned her into her office and angrily told her that she did not expect her employees to disobey her orders. “Now, what did you tell Mr. Johnson?”
Sukhreet recounted the conversation, expecting Bess to be pleased that she had misled Johnson. But Bess remained cold and distant and sent her back to her desk, where Sukhreet called her mother to see if Johnson had interviewed her as well.
He had, and the judge told Sukhreet that she was worried. “I hope it blows over. I’m really nervous about the press picking it up,” she remembered her mother telling her over the phone.
With a newspaper reporter now on her trail, Sukhreet sat at her desk and began to daydream about being swept up in a public scandal, the object of intense press scrutiny and public curiosity. The image of Megan Marshak, the woman who was with Nelson Rockefeller when he died, popped into her mind: “Do you remember that all of a sudden she would have her picture taken every time she would leave her apartment? Well, I imagined myself as Megan Marshak, another homely photo girl.”
The next morning, across the top of the New York Post’s “Page Six” ran the headline “Small World: Bess hires kin of divorce judge.”
New York is a big city—but it can be a small world. That’s the way the folks at the Department of Cultural Affairs explain the hiring of the daughter of the judge who’s handling the divorce of Bess Myerson’s boyfriend.…
The connection appeared to be a surprise to everyone, including the judge, who told Page Six’s Richard Johnson, “I didn’t even know Bess Myerson was involved in this [divorce case] until I saw a piece on Page Six a few weeks ago.…”
The official word from the department came from Assistant Commissioner Richard Bruno: “I interviewed her [Sukhreet] and I hired her. She was among a number of applicants and she was the outstanding candidate.…”
Judge Gabel picked up a copy of the New York Post on her way into the courthouse that morning and read the article alone in her chambers. She was deeply troubled. She thought that maybe she should recuse herself from the case. “I felt, when I saw the clipping, it seemed to me maybe it might be considered to be in bad taste or wrong somehow for me to represent them,” she said later.
Walking out of her chambers, clutching a copy of the New York Post in her hand, she asked her secretary and top aide, “Did you people see this story? Do you think in view of this article that I should offer to recuse myself from sitting on the Capasso case?”
“I think it would be a good idea, Judge,” Leventhal replied.
By coincidence, the lawyers involved in the Capasso v. Capasso case were scheduled to appear before her that morning on another matter that needed to be resolved right away, before the divorce went to trial: Andy’s request that the court allow him to remove a $192,500 Cy Twombly painting from the living room of the Fifth Avenue apartment so he could sell it and use the proceeds to obtain a bond for a major sewer construction job.
At 11:55 A.M. that day the lawyers and Judge Gabel met in her robing room to discuss the Post article and whether she would continue to preside over the case.
Nancy’s lawyer, Raoul Lionel Felder, insisted that Judge Gabel stay on the case. “I think we have been dealt with squarely here,” said Felder. “I think you win some, you lose some. I have some decisions in this case I am happy with, I have some decisions in this case I am unhappy with. I’d be very surprised if it were otherwise. I am perfectly satisfied. If I have problems, I appeal. I think I got a fair shake, my client got a fair shake here. I have no motions to make.”
“That’s fair,” Judge Gabel replied.
Andy’s lawyer, Alton Abramowitz, said that he was also “perfectly satisfied to keep the case here.”
“I will accept this acknowledgment with considerable appreciation,” Judge Gabel said. “As all of you know, my pride in my reputation for calling the shots as I see them is supported now by the statements that you and Mr. Abramowitz have made, and under the circumstances I shall proceed to hear argument on this pending motion.”
Raoul Lionel Felder would say later that he might have asked Ju
dge Gabel to recuse herself from the case if he had known then about the extent of her relationship with Bess during the spring and summer of 1983 and the circumstances surrounding Sukhreet’s hiring. He said Judge Gabel did not disclose all of the facts to him that afternoon and said nothing to clear up the impression in the New York Post that Bess had had nothing to do with getting Sukhreet her job.
As Herb Rickman read the New York Post that morning in his tiny City Hall office, he was deeply distressed to find his name in “Page Six.” He couldn’t believe the paper had been told that “the official word” from the Department of Cultural Affairs was that he had referred Sukhreet to the agency and that Bess had had nothing to do with Sukhreet’s hiring.
Just a month before the article appeared, Rickman later testified, he had warned both Bess and Judge Gabel that it was a big mistake for Bess to hire Sukhreet Gabel while the judge was presiding over the Capasso divorce case. Hadn’t they considered the blatant appearance of a conflict of interest that her hiring suggested?
But Rickman said Judge Gabel told him she didn’t want to talk about it. And Bess had assured him that Sukhreet’s hiring had been “cleared” through City Hall. For that reason, Rickman said, he did not mention the situation at the time to his longtime friend and boss, Mayor Ed Koch, whose office was just down the corridor from his at City Hall.
But now that his name was being dragged into a mess, Rickman said, he told the mayor that he had had nothing to do with Bess’s decision to hire Sukhreet Gabel. According to Rickman’s recollection, Koch told him not to worry about the “Page Six” article because Bess had called and said she was sending him a letter with a full explanation.
Relieved, Rickman called Richard Bruno and Bess to tell them that he never wanted to hear his name linked with Sukhreet Gabel again.
Queen Bess Page 28
