“My daughter will never forgive me. I don’t know why I did this,” Hill recalled Bess said as she paced back and forth in the room. “What’s the matter with me? I should kill myself. Please pray for me. Can’t I please just pay for the stuff?”
The stolen goods totaled $44.07. Bess had $160 in cash in her pocket.
Hill declined to drop the charges. Police chief William Smith was already on his way over to the store to make the arrest.
“You don’t understand. I’m already in so much trouble, and I have to go to federal court,” Bess pleaded. “I don’t understand why I did it. I’m sick about it.…”
“Hold me, I need to touch someone,” Bess said, turning to another employee, Linda Wolfe, who followed them into the conference room to assist Hill. Bess pulled out a photograph of her daughter and her granddaughter.
“She said her daughter would not forgive her and she would be ruined for life,” Wolfe recalled. “She also repeated several times that she did not know why she did what she did.”
While Hill and Wolfe waited for Chief Smith to arrive to arrest Bess, Hill offered Bess a glass of water. “Please pray for me,” Bess beseeched her again.
“I kept telling her not to think about killing herself and that I would pray for her,” Hill said later.
When Chief Smith arrived, he issued Bess a citation and told her that she would have to be arraigned on the charges in front of a local district judge because she was from out of state. She followed him outside to his patrol car, and they drove over to Borough Hall, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. She begged both Smith and Nancy Hill not to tell the press about the incident.
But the word of her arrest had already reached the city room of the local Williamsport Sun-Gazette. When Bess arrived at her arraignment at about one o’clock that afternoon, a reporter, Rick Walker, was standing outside.
She brushed past him, refusing to answer any of his questions, and went upstairs to the tiny courtroom on the second floor of a building next to a submarine sandwich shop. Walker followed her and stood in the back of the courtroom. As soon as the proceedings began, she asked District Justice John McDermott to remove the reporter. McDermott declined her request, saying that he would not bar anyone from a public proceeding.
“So be it,” she said, throwing up her hands.
McDermott, who didn’t recognize the famous former Miss America standing in front of him at first, set bail at $150 after Bess told him that she had never been arrested for shoplifting in Pennsylvania before. She counted out $150 to him in small bills and told him she did not intend to return to fight the charges and would plead guilty “under protest.”
Visibly upset, she walked out of the building with Chief Smith. He took her back to her car, which was parked five miles away in the Hill’s store parking lot.
Within an hour the story had spread around the country over the Associated Press wires. Newspaper and television reporters from New York descended on South Williamsport. Bess’s arrest made the network news that night. Life magazine sent a reporter to buy the same nail polish, earrings, batteries, and sandals that she had attempted to steal so that it could photograph them for a story about shoplifting the magazine was planning for the August issue.
The New York Post’s front-page headline the next day read “Oh, No, Bess!”
Bess went into seclusion. Her lawyer, Fred Hafetz, issued a statement saying that Bess, distracted by her pending trial, had mistakenly walked out of the store with the merchandise so that she could lock her car.
Some of Bess’s friends, though, dismissed the distraction theory. They believed that Bess wanted to get caught. “It was a cry for help,” insisted one woman who has known Bess for more than ten years.
Although Bess was worth at least $16 million that spring of 1988, another friend speculated that Bess had never been able to overcome growing up in the Bronx during the Depression and simply stole the items because she did not like to spend money. “Even though she’s rich, she still feels poor,” the friend said. “She is incredibly cheap.”
But most psychologists and psychiatrists maintain that shoplifters like Bess, who walked into Hill’s discount store with $160 in cash and could easily have paid for the items, commit their crimes because they feel “emotionally deprived.” In a twisted way they feel that shoplifting is a reward.
Others say that shoplifting reflects the attitude “If you don’t give it to me, I’ll take it.” The stolen item represents what the shoplifter really wants: love, affection, or sex.
Still others say that shoplifting is a sport for those who believe they are above the law.
Fred Hafetz did not want Bess returning to South Williamsport to face trial on the shoplifting charges that summer of 1988 when her federal trial on the bribery charges was to open in September. He appealed to the top county judge there to postpone Bess’s shoplifting trial until after her federal trial, but the judge refused.
Bess never returned to South Williamsport for a hearing. On July 16 she pleaded guilty through the mail. Judge McDermott fined her $100 and ordered her to pay $48.50 in court costs.
Within days after Bess’s shoplifting arrest in South Williamsport, federal investigators started checking with security directors at New York department stores to see if they had picked Bess up for shoplifting in the past. It was part of an effort to gather as much information as possible against her. A federal grand jury was also continuing to hear testimony about her multimillion-dollar financial dealings. If any of Andy’s money from his tax evasion scheme could be traced to Bess, that might be the basis for a federal tax evasion case against her. Bess had come to believe it was all an attempt to pressure her to plead guilty to the bribery charges so that Giuliani’s office would not have to bring its weak bribery case to trial.
The prosecutors did not have a strong case against Bess, Andy, or Judge Gabel. To prove there was a conspiracy they would have to show that there was an actual agreement among the defendants. And they did not have a single piece of direct evidence that they could point to as proof that any agreement existed whereby Judge Gabel would lower Andy’s alimony payments in exchange for Bess’s giving Sukhreet a job. They did not have it in writing, they did not have it on a tape recording, and they did not have an eyewitness who could remember any one of the defendants acknowledging that a conspiracy existed. They did not have what lawyers call “the smoking gun.”
Instead what they intended to present to the jury was what they believed to be a strong circumstantial case. By introducing scores of documents and calling more than a dozen witnesses to the stand, they hoped to weave together enough testimony and details to create a scenario suggesting that what had happened during Andy’s 1983 divorce proceedings was a federal crime.
From the very beginning of the case the prosecution had been plagued by problems.
Within days after Bess’s arraignment on October 15, 1987, Rudolph Giuliani had attempted to persuade the federal judge assigned to the case, U.S. district judge Kevin Thomas Duffy, to remove himself. Giuliani contended that Judge Duffy and his wife were friends of Judge Gabel’s. He also charged that Judge Duffy’s wife had been appointed as a judge in the state’s family court with the help of attorney Milton Gould, whose law firm was representing Judge Gabel.
Duffy adamantly denied Giuliani’s charges and refused to remove himself from the case. He was convinced that Giuliani wanted him out of the case because of his “long-established and oft-stated belief that cases should be tried in the courtroom and not in the newspapers.” But after Giuliani submitted a formal motion on December 31 requesting that Duffy step down, Duffy decided to give up the case. He could no longer be impartial in the face of the prosecutor’s allegations. “I resent the unsupported assertions of the United States attorney and his tactics in attempting to disqualify me,” said Duffy. “They apparently arise from a belief that my understanding of the law and the proper conduct of an attorney for the government would hamper the way he wants to pr
osecute this case. I doubt that I can any longer maintain that impartiality and the appearance of impartiality which are necessary to the proper administration of justice.”
In January 1989 another federal court judge, U.S. district judge Constance Baker Motley, was assigned, but she removed herself from the case because she had known Judge Gabel and Bess for years. The wheel was spun again, and U.S. district judge John Keenan’s name came up.
As it turned out, Keenan also knew almost all of the parties involved in the case. Before becoming a federal judge, he had worked in the Koch administration as the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator. He was still with the Koch administration in 1983 when Bess joined the administration as commissioner of cultural affairs and when the alleged conspiracy occurred.
Even after her mother had been indicted, Sukhreet Gabel continued to cooperate with the federal government. Just five days after she accompanied her parents to the federal courthouse for her mother’s October 15, 1987, arraignment, she made copies of her father’s financial and tax records and handed them over to the prosecutors. She also gave them her mother’s Rolodex, hoping they would find names and telephone numbers that might be useful to their case.
By the time of the indictment Sukhreet had completely convinced herself that she was on a quest for the truth. “I am so concerned with getting to the bottom of this,” she said at the time. “If it results in my mother going to jail, so be it. This is as much my trial as it is my mother’s.”
She ignored the advice of close friends, including her roommate, Ken Chase, who counseled her to stop cooperating with the prosecutors and not to testify voluntarily against her mother. Sukhreet and Ken had met one afternoon in late 1983 at a coffee shop near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They became such good friends that he eventually moved in with her. Sukhreet appreciated his companionship and his contribution to the rent. Over the years he had come to know Sukhreet’s parents well. “Parental loyalty should come before the truth,” Chase had told her, but Sukhreet disagreed. “This may very well release me of my guilty finding at the kangaroo court several years ago,” she explained matter-of-factly, referring to her firing at the Commission on Human Rights.
Her regular visits to the U.S. attorney’s office also gave her feelings of self-importance. She recalls telling one of the federal prosecutors that she thought her case showed “an incredible pattern of corruption” and the prosecutor agreeing that she was “absolutely right.” She often insisted that the prosecutors and investigators involved in the case see her whenever she wanted to see them. At one point during the investigation, when they had not called her for several weeks and had declined to meet with her at her request, she became so angry that she threatened “to blow their entire case.”
The case became her entire life. She agreed to meet with her mother’s lawyers as well. She thought it would help support her contention that she was not motivated by revenge. She told them virtually anything they wanted to know that would help them prepare a defense for her mother.
Her mother’s chief lawyer, Michael Feldberg, remained convinced that Sukhreet was acting out of revenge, however. A thirty-seven-year-old, Harvard-educated former assistant U.S. attorney, Feldberg was a partner at Shea & Gould. He intended to present Sukhreet to the jury as an unhappy, troubled young woman whose testimony against her mother was motivated by deep resentment over her unhappy childhood and her mother’s success. He intended to point out that she not only taped her mother’s telephone conversations gleefully but also took documents from her parents’ apartment and carried them in shopping bags to the prosecutor’s office. He tried unsuccessfully to block the prosecutors from using the documents that Sukhreet had taken from her mother’s apartment, charging in a motion that she “conducted this illegal search and seizure as a government agent.”
Sukhreet met with Feldberg and his associate, Steve Gersten, on several occasions, each time giving them more ammunition that they would later use to destroy her credibility as a witness at trial.
During extensive interviews with Feldberg, Sukhreet described a lonely and painful childhood in which she was “cruelly misunderstood by two parents who had different skills and talents and didn’t care about me.” She told him that she felt unloved and that her parents had no interest in her at all. “No one ever paid attention to me,” she said. “No one ever believed me.”
As a child, she said she believed that her father was disappointed in her because she was not a natural athlete, as he was. She remembered struggling so hard one day to learn how to jump rope that she broke her foot. She claimed that her parents did not believe at first that she had injured herself and it took her hours to convince them to take her to a hospital.
She openly acknowledged that she did not like her mother very much. “She is excruciatingly lazy,” she told her mother’s lawyer. “I don’t find her a pleasant human being.”
She said that her mother was always pushing her to succeed and giving her “insincere compliments.” Instead of being grateful that her mother tried to help her find a job, she said that she felt humiliated, degraded, and insulted.
She then told Feldberg of one incident from her childhood in which she had experienced hallucinations that Feldberg declined to bring up at trial. When she was sixteen or seventeen years old, she recalled, as she was sitting in the bathtub she saw a figure in a long, black robe with a white powdered face, stabbing her repeatedly with a dagger. She was so paralyzed by fear that she remained in the bathtub for forty-five minutes.
She told Feldberg that the figure in her hallucination had been her mother.
By late June of 1988 the U.S. attorney’s office must have begun to worry about the inherent problem of having a daughter testify against her mother. The office had also heard from Sukhreet and others that Judge Gabel had not been in the best of health in recent months. One friend of Judge Gabel’s had told the office that the judge had experienced fainting spells. The U.S. attorney’s office expressed concern to U.S. district judge John Keenan about whether Judge Gabel was capable of assisting with her own defense. But her attorney, Michael Feldberg, assured the court that she was competent to stand trial and “wanted very much to fight the charges.”
On September 23, the day that jury selection was completed in the case, the prosecution raised the issue again. In a six-page letter to Keenan, the prosecutors, requesting a private hearing, wrote that “if it were determined that the physical or mental conditions were degenerative in nature or not likely to improve, the government would agree to dismiss its case against Judge Gabel in the interest of justice.”
At the hearing in Keenan’s chambers on Friday, September 30, just four days before testimony in the trial was to begin, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lawrence asked Keenan to sever Judge Gabel from the case or to grant them an adjournment. “The government is prepared to dismiss the case against Judge Gabel in the interest of justice based upon her medical condition,” Lawrence said at the hearing.
For the charges to be dismissed, however, Keenan would have to conclude that Judge Gabel was mentally incompetent to stand trial. The law mandated that he would then have to commit Judge Gabel for hospitalization. For the prosecution, it was the only way to get Judge Gabel out of the courtroom without dismissing the charges against her and still save face.
Feldberg vigorously opposed the application. “These are very serious charges that have been lodged against an extraordinarily distinguished citizen of our community,” he argued. “She wants to fight them. If the government has an application to dismiss the charges, that’s fine; they can do it for any reason they want. But to put her in the position where she loses the opportunity to fight them and gets put into some kind of suspense for some indeterminate period of time is grossly unfair to her. It is unconscionable of the government to ask it. She deserves an opportunity to fight these horrible charges and prove that there is no proof to support them.… We’re either going to have a trial or we’re not. We either want a dismissal or we
want to have a chance to fight the charges.”
Keenan decided to look at the law more closely before making up his mind. He asked that both sides return to his chambers on Monday—the day before testimony was to begin—for another hearing. “I seriously urge the government to reconsider the application for a severance and to amend it to be an application to dismiss in the interest of justice.”
David Lawrence, Kevin Ford, and Stuart Abrams, another assistant U.S. attorney who had recently joined the government’s team, met with Rudolph Giuliani that afternoon and talked over what they should do. They decided that the government could not dismiss the charges against Judge Gabel without a reason. What would the public think? For almost a year the elderly judge had had a federal indictment hanging over her head.
Instead they decided once again to argue before Keenan that the charges should be dismissed against Judge Gabel based on her “neurological condition, and possibly also her physical condition.” They also intended to ask Keenan to consider removing Gabel from the case until further neurologic tests could be done.
At 3:15 P.M. on Monday, October 3, Keenan agreed to hear the government on this issue once again in a private meeting in his chambers. Feldberg was there, along with Judge Gabel and her husband. Keenan also called Bess and Andy’s lawyer into the hearing.
Opposing the government’s motion for further tests, Feldberg argued that Judge Gabel did not want a dismissal of the charges based on a finding that she was mentally incompetent. Then he told Keenan that Judge Gabel was eager to respond to the question of undergoing further examination.
“If it’s an examination for neurological condition, I have no objection to that,” Judge Gabel said. “But if it’s an examination to ascertain whether I am mentally competent to stand trial, I would take grave exception to this. I believe that my judgment, my ability to understand the issues, my experience as a criminal judge …”
Queen Bess Page 39
