That July 4th weekend in Westhampton Beach, Nancy was pictured in the newspapers, sipping champagne, celebrating her victory. “I hope that I can start putting the pieces of my life back together,” she said. She talked, too, with Marcia Kramer about her fantasy of going over to the waterfront estate and kicking Bess out. “I know she’s there. But I don’t know what the law allows.… She’s got what’s coming to her. Bess is a very manipulative woman. I feel she was punished for what she did.”
Then, referring to Betty Bienen, a forty-two-year-old former model who was the ex-wife of a handbag manufacturer and had been identified in the New York Post as the other woman Andy had invited to visit him at Allenwood, Nancy said: “Just the fact that there is another woman is almost enough.”
Sukhreet Gabel had not seen a copy of the Tyler report until she read the excerpts in the Village Voice, so she was furious when she read that her father had described her to Tyler as having a history of emotional disturbances and being of “limited talents.” She was also indignant that her mother’s attorney, Philip Schaeffer, had seemingly portrayed her to reporters and to prosecutors as being troubled, thereby suggesting that her testimony was unreliable. She felt he was trying to make a fool out of her to undermine her credibility so that he could protect her mother.
Out of anger Sukhreet called Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lawrence on June 15, five days after the Tyler report became public, and asked him whether she might come down and meet with him. She had previously testified before the grand jury in March and then again in May. “I felt that there were certain things that had not come up in the grand jury sessions, and there were certain details that I had subsequently remembered that I thought might be useful in getting to the truth of this matter,” she said later. Lawrence invited her to meet with him that night.
Sukhreet arrived downtown at around 5:00 P.M. to meet with Lawrence, Lombardi, and Ford as well as other members of the U.S. attorney’s staff. On the telephone Lawrence had told her she was free to bring an attorney to the meeting, but Sukhreet said she wanted to come alone. She told them about her concerns that her mother’s lawyer was trying to hurt her credibility. To Lawrence and other members of the U.S. attorney’s staff, that sounded like a possible violation of federal law, maybe even obstruction of justice.
The next day two FBI agents, along with Lawrence, Ford, and Lombardi, went to Sukhreet’s apartment with her consent to install a device on her telephone to record conversations. The intention was that she get Schaeffer on the telephone so they could eavesdrop on the conversation and determine whether there was anything to Sukhreet’s allegations.
At 8:10 P.M., while the FBI agents and assistant U.S. attorneys stood in her living room and watched, Sukhreet dialed Schaeffer’s office at White and Case, a Manhattan law firm, but he had already gone for the day. She next tried to call him at home, but there was no answer. Then she called her mother to see if Schaeffer was there. Earlier in the day Schaeffer had held a press conference to announce that Judge Gabel would step down from the bench temporarily due to health problems. He told reporters that the judge was suffering from syncope, a sudden fall of blood pressure that can cause fainting or loss of memory, and was unable to fulfill her judicial duties.
When Judge Gabel answered, the tape-recording device continued to run, which Sukhreet did not bother to tell her mother. Judge Gabel told her she thought Schaeffer was out of town. Disappointed, Sukhreet tried to elicit information from her mother about how she had come to know Schaeffer in the first place. She ended the conversation by telling her mother to have Schaeffer give her a call if she heard from him.
Instead of removing the tape-recording device from Sukhreet’s telephone that night, the federal officials decided to leave it on in case Schaeffer returned her call. Tony Lombardi showed her how to use the toggle switch to shut the device off so she would not tape anyone inadvertently. Leaving the tape-recording device with Sukhreet turned out to be what everyone involved in the case later acknowledged was possibly the biggest mistake of the investigation.
Sukhreet apparently did not learn how to operate the toggle switch properly. Over the next few days she taped virtually all of her telephone conversations, including a call to her parents on a Saturday night. Her parents did not say anything incriminating on the tapes, so when the tapes became public, the defense lawyers pointed to them as evidence that the government had tried to turn a child against her parents.
According to transcripts of the telephone conversations, Sukhreet asked her father and mother for a “family conference” so that she could learn what was going on: “I think we should try, the three of us, to cooperate, try to reconstruct the events. And then to figure out what the hell is going on today in terms of Myerson’s strategy and a lot of other things. Because obviously we are her enemies at this time and she is a very rich, very manipulative lady.”
Her mother tried to change the subject, but Sukhreet kept bringing the conversation back to her request for the “family conference.”
Finally, in what sounds like an effort to placate her, Judge Gabel agreed, telling Sukhreet, “We’ve got something to talk about.”
“Of course we do,” Sukhreet said.
“You know I think you are wonderful,” her mother said.
“What do you mean?” asked Sukhreet.
“You’re a wonderful woman. I think you’ve done a lot of good.”
“Well, Mother, I tell you the truth—listen, I have been grievously wronged through no fault of my own, and that makes me ever so much more determined to get to the bottom of this and to redeem myself, as it were, and I think there are an awful lot of people out there who for one reason or another do not want to see that happen, and I want to get to the bottom of it.”
“Okay, honey, we’ll try,” Judge Gabel said.
“And figure out why, and I need your help.”
“I’m at your service, but I gotta hang up,” the judge said.
At their family conference Sukhreet didn’t learn anything new. Yet she continued to try to elicit from her parents information that she could provide to her new friends in the U.S. attorney’s office, whom she fondly referred to as “the boys.”
Sukhreet enjoyed the attention she got from the prosecutors and the press, who called her constantly for interviews. The federal investigation of Bess and her mother was almost like having a full-time job.
Most importantly, Sukhreet believed the federal investigation would finally vindicate her by showing she had been a victim, “a pawn in the chess game,” wronged by Bess Myerson and her mother, rendering her unemployable.
During the first week of August, without the knowledge of the federal prosecutors, Sukhreet helped her mother clean out her closet. When she came across boxes and boxes full of her mother’s files, she asked, “Can’t we get rid of some of this clutter?”
According to Sukhreet, her mother replied, “Dear, I’d be so delighted if you’d help me. That’s wonderful of you.”
Sukhreet spent hours going through the files and found a number of documents that she thought might be of some relevance to the case. They were mostly letters that her mother had written on Sukhreet’s behalf in 1982 and 1983. Sukhreet stuffed the material into four shopping bags and, without her mother’s knowledge or consent, took the documents to the U.S. attorney’s office. After Lawrence said that he admonished Sukhreet for bringing him the documents, Sukhreet said her mother had given her permission to remove the papers. Instead of examining all of the papers, Lawrence told her he would inspect only those documents that Sukhreet wished to show them. He reminded her that she was under no obligation to produce any records at all.
Nevertheless, the image of a daughter testifying against her mother and taking documents out of her mother’s closet and delivering them to the U.S. attorney’s office to be used against her in a federal investigation troubled some members of that office.
Although a former assistant U.S. attorney said he argued against bringing an indi
ctment against Judge Gabel, Giuliani said no one approached him with strong objections to the case.
To Giuliani it was about judicial corruption and an abuse of power, and it involved the one member of the Koch administration who mattered most of all to Mayor Koch.
At eleven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, October 7, almost fifty reporters, photographers, and camera crews crowded into the lobby of the U.S. attorney’s office in lower Manhattan. Rudolph Giuliani had called a press conference to announce an indictment, and everyone in the room expected the subject to be Bess. For days rumors had been circulating around the courthouse and City Hall that his grand jury investigation was coming to a close.
“Is everybody set?” Giuliani asked, looking up at the crews pointing eight television cameras at his podium. Then he began his prepared speech: “Former New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson was charged today with conspiracy, mail fraud, and the use of interstate facilities to further the crime of bribery.…”
The same charges were brought against Andy Capasso and Judge Gabel. An additional charge, obstruction of justice, was filed against Bess for having gone to Sukhreet’s apartment that June night in 1986 and having tried to avert justice.
The six-count indictment contained many of the same findings outlined in the Tyler report. There did not appear to be much evidence other than what the government alleged were “secret meetings” between Bess and Judge Gabel, which began soon after the judge began ruling on preliminary motions in the Capasso divorce case in 1983. The indictment also charged that to conceal her efforts to influence Judge Gabel Bess sometimes used “fictitious names” when leaving messages at the judge’s chambers. It further charged that Bess had deceived the mayor by lying to him in an October 18, 1983, memo about the circumstances surrounding Sukhreet Gabel’s hiring.
“Why this was not the subject of a judicial misconduct proceeding in 1983 and why was the judge found qualified for reappointment is a question the state authorities have to answer,” Giuliani said at the press conference, flanked on one side by the city’s Department of Investigation commissioner Ken Conboy and on the other by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lawrence. “If things were working correctly, they should have led to a vigorous investigation of the conduct of the judge,” Giuliani said. “At a minimum that should have happened.”
Bess remained secluded in her Upper East Side apartment that day. Once again it was her attorney, Fred Hafetz, who released a statement, saying that she “unequivocally asserts her innocence of all of the charges that have been filed against her.”
“After many months of rumors that have circulated in the media of an investigation of her, at long last she welcomes the opportunity to confront these charges in the courtroom,” Hafetz said. “She is confident that she will be vindicated of all charges at trial.”
A few blocks away in the midtown Manhattan offices of the prestigious law firm Shea & Gould, Judge Gabel, wearing a patch over her right eye to protect the eye after a recent bout with glaucoma, used a magnifying glass to read a nine-sentence statement denying any wrongdoing. She spoke slowly, with little emotion, as she sat next to her husband in the law offices of her attorney, Michael Feldberg.
Asked if she was upset, she replied that she was not. “I am totally convinced of the propriety and innocence of my actions,” she said.
Sukhreet was not with her mother that afternoon. She was holding court with the television cameras and reporters in her apartment. “The feeling is absolutely glorious that the truth is finally getting out,” she said. “This is no longer a deep dark secret that I am going to live with the rest of my life.”
She admitted feeling low about the trouble she had caused for her mother. “It is a lousy way for my mother to finish up a forty-six-year career for something that she had no idea was wrong. It was her best way of helping someone who was dear to her. I feel so awfully sorry for her.
“She expected to resign in glory. She expected all the judges would kiss her and hug her when she left. Instead, most of her friends are not calling. The saddest irony is that my mother brought this whole thing down through her own neurotic needs.… I blamed only myself until now. It really destroyed me. It all had to do with politics. It had nothing to do with me.”
The newspapers had a field day with the indictment that had spun right out of the gossip columns. All of the tabloids devoted their front pages to the story. The New York Post’s front page said, “Indicted! Bess Pays the Price of Love … and Nancy Capasso has the last laugh.”
Following the indictment, Bess once again found photographers staked out outside her Upper East Side apartment and camped at the end of the driveway in Westhampton Beach. She was spending weekends at the three-acre waterfront estate until Nancy got the go-ahead from the courts to take possession of it.
Bess managed to elude the press until the morning of October 12, when a New York Post photographer, sitting in his car at the edge of the driveway of Andy’s estate, spotted her coming out of the house.
Dressed in a sweatsuit, without any makeup, she looked drawn and haggard as she loaded boxes and household items into a Lincoln Town Car. After noticing the photographer, she went into the house and later emerged in a fresh set of clothes with her hair tied up in a ponytail. When she drove out of the driveway that afternoon, she attempted to avoid being photographed by draping white towels over the side windows.
The next day Bess appeared in her sweatsuit on the front page of the New York Post, holding a pair of andirons.
When Nancy picked up the paper, she was “absolutely furious.” She told the press that the andirons belonged to her, and she wondered aloud what else Bess might have taken from the house she had been awarded by the courts. “If she’s taking little things like that now, I can only imagine what else she’s taken,” Nancy said at the time. “It’s outrageous for her to get away with that. I want to know what else of mine she has taken.”
The andirons were the least of Bess’s problems that week. On Thursday, October 15, she was to appear with Andy and Judge Gabel for their arraignment on the charges in federal court. Andy had been transferred that week from the federal prison in Pennsylvania to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan for the proceeding. She visited him only once, the day before their joint court appearance. They sat together for about thirty minutes in the crowded visiting room.
The next morning, she made her first public appearance since she had resigned in disgrace. She held her head high, like a queen, as she walked up the courthouse steps into the packed courtroom.
The arraignment lasted only a few minutes. All three defendants, Bess, Judge Gabel, and Andy, pleaded not guilty. Bess and Judge Gabel were released on bail. Andy returned to Allenwood. It would be another year before they would appear in court together again.
30
“Oh, No, Bess!”
It seemed unbelievable to Bess that she had been indicted on federal criminal charges and now had to face trial. “It’s as though it started as a little snowball someplace on the mountain and it just gained speed and it gained dimension and it gained weight and it became distorted and destructive,” she told CBS correspondent Steve Kroft. “And I feel as though I was standing there and this thing hit me, and it’s been a difficult time to keep picking myself up.”
In the months since she had resigned from her city job and Andy had gone to jail, the stress she was under had affected all aspects of her life. She lost her appetite and dropped almost fifteen pounds. She started smoking heavily. At night she would lie awake for hours, sometimes not falling asleep until dawn. Most days, she wouldn’t get out of bed until eleven o’clock or noon, according to close friends. For the first time in her life she had no place to go.
Not having a job seemed to bother Bess most of all, according to some of her close friends. She had worked hard all of her life, and in the past, whenever she went through a difficult period, she had immersed herself in work. She missed heading for an of
fice so badly that one afternoon she called a friend who ran a small business in midtown Manhattan and offered to come down and organize her files.
Fortunately Bess had one project to keep her busy that fall. For almost two years she had been working with writer Susan Dworkin on a book about the year she had spent as the country’s first Jewish Miss America and the difficulties she had faced during her reign. Part cultural history, part biography, Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson’s Own Story, was due out in the bookstores November 9, only a few weeks after Bess’s indictment.
Despite all of the adverse publicity about Bess at that time, Esther Margolis, the president and founder of Newmarket Press, was determined to go ahead and publish the book on schedule. And even though Bess was under indictment, she remained committed to the project and ready to face the media ordeal of a book publicity tour. She was careful not to speak with reporters about her present troubles, however. She would speak only about her past. Recalling her 1945 triumph, she said later, made it possible to deal with her present troubles.
“I couldn’t be happier about the juxtaposition of the book,” she said at the time. “It was a wonderful part of my life, so in a way it takes me away from the present.… When I became Miss America, I was everybody’s daughter. Then, in later years, I became everybody’s sister. And then suddenly I found myself making speeches to women’s groups, and they were all younger than my daughter. I became everybody’s mother.… What is curious, no matter what I spoke about, when they came to questions, I could speak about equal wages [for women], I could speak about legislation on the [Capitol] Hill. I could speak as a consumer advocate. I could speak about consumer complaints and industrial mishaps and so on, and when I opened the hall for questions, the first one was always ‘Why did you go to Atlantic City, and tell us about that year?’ And this was men, women, children, older people. It was just something that was attached to me. Whatever space I occupied, that was on my right or on my left.”
Queen Bess Page 37
