Unemployed once again, Sukhreet started writing more letters and going to more interviews. Her mother once again joined in the job search, writing on her behalf to Nat Leventhal, the president of Lincoln Center, and also to a theatrical producer she knew.
What made that summer bearable for Sukhreet, however, was a young Englishman, John Levinson, who was working as a consultant for a management consulting firm in Manhattan. They met one warm summer night in August through mutual friends at a concert in Central Park. She fell deeply in love. He was tall, charming, and well educated, having attended Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. And he must have been taken with Sukhreet’s considerable charm and impressed by her international background. Within two months she had moved into his apartment and they were engaged to be married.
That October they planned a trip to England so she could meet his mother before the wedding. On the night before they were supposed to leave, Levinson told her he didn’t want to see her anymore and asked her to move out of his apartment. She said he didn’t explain why he wanted to end the relationship.
Sukhreet was devastated. Not only had she lost her job; she had also lost the first man she had loved since Jan Revis. Once again sadness overwhelmed her and she plunged deeper and deeper into another severe depression that left her unable to get out of bed in the morning.
Out of desperation her father called Tony Babinec, her old boyfriend in Chicago, and asked him to come to New York to visit Sukhreet. “She was in pretty bad straits when I visited in October,” Babinec later said. “When I [lived with] her, she could never sit still and be idle, she was usually shining shoes, polishing shoes, doing things around the house.
“But she didn’t want to deal with the outside world. She just wanted to spend time around the apartment. She had no interest in pounding the pavement for a job. That seemed to last. There was no visible difference for months. In February or March ’85 when we expected her to have shaken all that, she hadn’t really changed. That’s when they started to talk about electroshock for the first time.”
Sukhreet agreed to the electroshock therapy and underwent twelve to fifteen sessions at a doctor’s office before the depression lifted.
She resumed her job search, but she felt that her eleven-month stint in city government was an unexplainable blemish on her résumé. She blamed Bess for her failures and grew angry at what she saw as her mother’s constant meddling in her efforts to find a job. A few years later, her resentment would explode.
27
Capasso v. Capasso
On the scorching-hot summer morning of July 31, 1984, Nancy Capasso waited for the movers to take her belongings out of the two-bedroom condominium in Westhampton Beach and move them into the basement of her mother’s condo in the next town. She was furious that she had to leave and turn over her keys to Andy under the terms of the separation agreement dictated months earlier by Judge Gabel.
It didn’t seem fair to Nancy that she should have to give up the oceanfront condominium every other month when Andy had been granted exclusive use of their nearby $3.5 million waterfront estate. Why did he need a two-bedroom condo at the beach when he had a five bedroom house down the road to entertain Bess, Mayor Koch, and his other new friends? But none of Judge Gabel’s rulings had seemed fair to Nancy ever since she found out Bess had hired the judge’s daughter at the same time the judge cut her substantial alimony and child support payments by more than half.
It seemed to Nancy that virtually every ruling favored her estranged husband. Over Nancy’s strong objections, Judge Gabel had granted Andy permission for Bess to be an overnight guest while the children were visiting. Judge Gabel had granted Andy’s motion to sell the couple’s $192,500 Cy Twombly painting so that he could obtain bonds for his sewer business and improve his cash flow. And Judge Gabel had ignored Nancy’s request that she reconsider her decision after Nancy discovered that Andy had bought a $1.6 million Park Avenue apartment, which indicated that he was hardly suffering financially.
Nancy was surprised that no one else saw, at the very least, an appearance of impropriety with Sukhreet Gabel working for her husband’s girlfriend. She had expected the gossip item in the New York Post to result in city and court officials calling for full-scale investigations. But nothing happened at all. None of the other newspapers had picked it up. No one had bothered to check out Bess’s version of the circumstances surrounding Sukhreet’s hiring.
The city and state investigative bodies, including the state Commission on Judicial Conduct and the state special prosecutor for the court system, failed to pursue it. The city’s own Department of Investigation, which investigates misconduct in city government, did not look into the matter even after department officials received an unsigned letter spelling out further how Sukhreet had been hired.
Not even Nancy’s lawyer, Raoul Lionel Felder, thought the gossip page item offered enough evidence to request that Judge Gabel remove herself from the case.
When she asked him in January 1984 to submit a motion that Judge Gabel recuse herself, Felder responded in a letter, stating that he could not make such a motion “in my professional judgment.” He said he thought the best strategy was to appeal any decision that she did not like to the higher courts. “I have seen absolutely no evidence, nor have I been presented with any evidence, of any impropriety or anything of that nature concerning the judge,” he wrote in the letter. “I hardly think an item in a gossip column qualifies as grounds for making such a serious motion.… Therefore, since as you indicate the making of this motion is of powerful and extreme importance to you, the choices are quite simple: substitute a lawyer who will feel he can make this motion commensurate with his professional responsibility, or continue with this office without the motion having been made.…”
Before hiring another lawyer to represent her, Nancy agreed to wait and see how the Appellate Division would rule on her appeal of Judge Gabel’s decision reducing her temporary alimony payments from $1,500 a week to $500 a week and child support payments from $350 a week to $180 a week.
Felder proved to be right. On March 1, 1984, the Appellate Division voted five to zero to reverse Judge Gabel’s September 30, 1983, order, calling her original decision to grant Nancy $1,500 a week “realistic and just in terms of the financial situation of the parties.…”
The Appellate Division also suggested that if Andy was worried about the hefty alimony payments he now had to pay until the divorce was final, he should cooperate with Nancy by turning over his business records for her lawyers and accountants to review, so they could all “proceed expeditiously to trial.”
Andy was reluctant to have Nancy and her band of lawyers and accountants rummaging through his business records. For one thing, it was his position that Nancy did not have a stake in his sewer and construction business. In his mind, it was not a marital asset to be carved up under the state’s equitable distribution laws.
He also did not want her lawyers examining his checks and receipts, because he knew he had something to hide.
Although she had won on appeal, Nancy decided to change lawyers. She was still unhappy that Felder had not asked Judge Gabel to step down. She hired a new lawyer, Herman Tarnow, to handle her upcoming divorce trial.
To avoid disclosing his business records and paying thousands of dollars in attorney fees at a divorce trial, Andy agreed to meet with Tarnow over breakfast in June 1984 to discuss settling the case out of court. It soon became clear, however, that Andy and Nancy were millions of dollars apart at the bargaining table.
Estimating that Andy’s net worth; including his business, totaled $15 million, Tarnow told Andy that he was looking for $7.5 million for Nancy to settle the case. But Andy insisted that Nanco was not part of the equation and that he didn’t have that kind of money. He offered to give Nancy $1.5 million to $2 million and to sign a judgment for divorce right away.
Nancy turned the offer down. As a real estate broker in Manhattan, she knew what apartments cost on the Upper Eas
t Side, and she did not think that was enough money for her to buy a fancy apartment, furnish it, and live comfortably for the rest of her days. She told him she would take her chances at a trial.
In late June and July Tarnow scheduled depositions with Andy, one of the first steps in gathering information about his finances for trial. A tough-talking, street-smart divorce lawyer who goes for the jugular, Tarnow spent much of his time at the first depositions questioning Andy about how much money he spent on his mistress, Bess. Ostensibly he was trying to determine Andy’s income and expenses during the marriage, but what he was really doing was showing that settling the case on Nancy’s terms might be easier than having to answer his questions and dragging Bess’s name through a divorce trial.
But Tarnow was wrong. His questions only made Andy angrier and more determined not to give in to Tarnow’s demands for $7.5 million.
In July Nancy gave Andy another reason to consider settling the case. From one of Andy’s former employees she had heard that he was involved in a scheme that could get him into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service and possibly put him in jail.
Over the years he had developed a scam that generated $1.5 million in cash for him through the creation of phony liability claims. He randomly selected dozens of people’s names from the Coles directory (which lists people by their street address) who lived near ongoing Nanco construction projects. He made out corporate checks to them, but, of course, none of the individuals named as payees on the checks had ever filed claims against Nanco, nor did they ever receive the proceeds of the checks. Instead Andy directed his employees to endorse the checks fraudulently, cash them at the European American Bank, and then turn the nontaxable cash income over to Andy. It paid for the seaplanes, European vacations, and lavish lifestyle he enjoyed with Bess.
On July 25, 1984, at an all-day pretrial deposition with Tarnow, Andy became worried that Nancy might have found out about his scheme and that she might try to blackmail him into giving her a large divorce settlement. Andy figured that was the only reason Tarnow was pressuring him during the deposition to turn over “insurance claims.”
Tarnow did not know the extent of the scheme, but he sensed that Andy was extremely sensitive about his “insurance claims,” so he pushed him on the issue by requesting that Andy bring copies of the in-house claims with him to the next deposition on August 2.
The request for the in-house insurance claims worried Andy. He tried to call Nancy several times over the next few days but was unable to reach her. Finally he contacted her by phone at the condominium in Westhampton Beach on the morning of July 31. He wanted to ask her to tell Tarnow not to request the insurance claims or ask him any more questions about them. When the telephone rang that morning, Nancy was waiting for the movers to arrive.
As soon as she recognized Andy’s voice, she switched on a tape-recording device that she had bought after Tarnow advised her to tape her conversations with Andy. That way, she could play them back to Tarnow and they could discuss negotiating strategy.
Andy got right to the point. “I want to talk to you about an issue that is obviously rather sensitive, which is this line of questioning which your attorney is on,” he began. “I want to know what you have in your mind.”
“In regards to what?” asked Nancy, playing dumb.
“What are these insurance claims he is asking about and the things he is looking for?” Andy asked.
“I am not quite sure,” Nancy replied.
“You’re not sure?” Andy said in disbelief.
“No.”
“Well, obviously you told him something. You must know something that I did, and you obviously told him, and that is what he is pursuing.”
Nancy paused. “I would rather not talk on the phone. I would rather come and see you over the weekend or next week and we’ll talk.”
“I don’t want to wait until the weekend,” Andy said. “Thursday is the day he intends to ask me these questions, and I want you to tell him not to. If you care to tell him not to and if you don’t care to tell him not to—you know, I would like to know that too.… If you want to take something and go to the authorities with the hopes of having me put in jail, I suppose I’d like to know that.”
“I would never do that,” Nancy insisted. “Okay? I would never do that.… You are the father of my children. I care about you, unfortunately. And I will not ever pursue jail, nor will I ever get you in trouble. You have my word.”
But Andy continued to ask about her intentions and Nancy reiterated her promise, until finally she said she might be interested in a “tradeoff.”
“Tell me what a trade-off means,” Andy said.
“I don’t know. The beauty queen,” she said.
“Who is the beauty queen?” Andy asked.
“I have enough on her.”
“You have enough on who?” Andy asked.
“The beauty queen,” Nancy replied, referring to Bess.
“What does enough mean, that you have enough on her in what regard?” he asked. “In what regard do you have anything on her? Do you think because I bought her a lunch it is in conflict of interest with the city? He wasted four days on lunch and dinner with her and twenty minutes on my financial statement. Your interest is in my financial statement. In case you’re interested, that is where your interest lies, not who I had lunch with.”
“Your lunch comes out of my money,” she said.
“My income isn’t your money,” he said angrily.
Nancy tried to get off the phone, but Andy refused to end the conversation until she promised to tell her lawyer not to ask for the insurance claims.
“I will call you back,” Nancy promised. When she hung up the phone, she realized that his concerns over the insurance claims had dramatically changed the balance of power in their negotiations for a settlement. She decided to play hardball.
That night she called Andy and told him she would instruct her lawyer not to ask any more questions about insurance claims if he agreed to return her jewelry, which she contended he stole from her at the beginning of their divorce action, and if he made her a “fair and generous settlement.” Andy told her that he did not have the $7.5 million that she was looking for, and he again offered to settle the case for $1.5 million to $2 million.
Nancy found that figure unacceptable. But when they tried to negotiate, they both found they could not get past their bitterness. Though Nancy had known about Bess for almost two years now, she could not let go of her anger over being rejected for an older woman. And Andy would not let her forget that she had had him kicked out of their Fifth Avenue apartment.
“You are going to pay,” Andy told her that night on the phone. “You’re going to pay for throwing me out of that apartment. You’re going to pay.”
“We can’t negotiate,” Nancy said finally.
“When I finally settle with you, if the number is twenty dollars, then I am going to say you are going to get nineteen dollars, because the dollar I want for throwing me out of the apartment. Okay? You’re going to pay for throwing me out of that apartment. I’m telling you that now. I told it to Tom. I told it to Felder. And I’m telling it to you. You’re going to pay for throwing me out of that apartment.…”
“And you are going to pay for your girlfriend.”
Finally, after more than an hour on the phone, Nancy again promised to call him back the following day to tell him what she would do about the insurance claims.
Before calling Andy, Nancy told Tarnow how worried Andy had sounded about turning over his insurance claims. They agreed that Tarnow should take over the negotiations.
She called Andy the following morning and told him that she had authorized her attorney to negotiate on her behalf. She also reassured him that she did not want to put him in jail and that she had asked Tarnow not to request the insurance claims until after Andy had proposed a settlement.
After feeling utterly powerless in Judge Gabel’s courtroom, Nancy felt that she now stood a cha
nce to get a fair settlement from her husband. She not only had the insurance claims; she had him on tape virtually admitting that he had committed a crime.
A few days later Andy met with Tarnow to discuss a settlement. According to Andy, Tarnow opened the conversation by calling him an “asshole” and telling him that he had to agree to a $7.5 million settlement or he would be going to “Danbury” (federal prison). Andy said Tarnow also told him, “Bess Myerson goes down the drain next week.”
Andy was disgusted. “You know, like I should shudder and maybe pay 7.5 million dollars for that,” he later told Nancy. He despised people who did not treat him with respect, and he deeply resented anyone who backed him up against a wall.
Unable to negotiate with her lawyer, Andy tried to explain his situation to Nancy. He wanted to sit down with her and show her the numbers, but she declined. She did not want him to confuse her with explanations of his complicated business deals. She just wanted him to come up with a dollar figure close to $7.5 million. And unless he did, she told him, she would just as soon go to court and have a judge determine the worth of their marital assets, including Nanco.
When Andy said that she could never prove in court that Nanco was a marital asset, Nancy exploded in anger. “Don’t worry about what I prove when I go to court,” she yelled into the phone. “Right now you don’t have to worry. Till then you can just run around … and you can flash your lights with your flashy sixty-year-old broad and look like the asshole of New York. Okay? It’s almost embarrassing that you were my husband. Okay? That you look like such an asshole to the world … because she buried bigger and better than you, kiddo, and she’ll bury you too. Or maybe she won’t bother burying you. She’s too old.…”
Andy tried to steer the conversation away from Bess, but it was impossible once Nancy got going.
Queen Bess Page 30
