“Yes, I probably have,” Sukhreet said calmly.
“You have. Now you have said you had a love-hate relationship with Bess Myerson. By May of 1987, you told that to these learned gentlemen, right?”
Goldberg walked behind the prosecutor’s table.
“And did there come a time when you prepared for the prosecutors a self-diagnosis of what you are suffering from mentally?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
Then Goldberg began to read from a statement that she had written for the prosecutors describing her depression and her mistreatment as a child.
“Did you ever inform the government that your mother had viewed you as mad—M-A-D?”
“Yes.”
“And I take it the word mad didn’t mean angry, did it?”
“Meaning mad crazy,” she quickly said.
“Crazy!” Goldberg threw his arms in the air. “And that didn’t please you that your mother had viewed you that way, did it?”
“It didn’t please me,” Sukhreet said curtly. She was glaring at Goldberg as he continued to question her.
“Your father, on the other hand, felt that you were lazy, isn’t that so?”
“That is correct.” She smiled.
Now the jurors appeared to be riveted by Goldberg’s questioning. Their eyes followed him as he approached Sukhreet on the witness stand, where he had noticed her arm was resting on a book, a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association that she had brought along with her to court after noticing that Goldberg had a copy of his own on the defense table.
“You want to be prepared?” he asked sarcastically.
“That is correct,” she replied, beaming.
“Okay. By the way, are you familiar with a term, as you looked through the book, called narcissism?”
“Yes, I am.”
“A narcissist is someone, as far as you understand, who had grandiose ideas, grandiose visions of oneself, isn’t that correct?”
Lawrence stood up and objected to the question, but once again he was overruled.
“My answer is that’s my lay understanding of the term,” Sukhreet replied, narrowing her eyes.
Then Goldberg set the dramatic scene of Sukhreet coming to her mother’s arraignment on October 15, 1987.
“It was you, the loving daughter, who escorted her up the stairs, is that right?” he asked softly.
“That is correct.”
“I see. You held her arm? … As you walked up the steps for her public humiliation.… You sat right over there, do you remember that day? Because as a matter of fact you want to see not only your mother undergo humiliation but Bess Myerson, isn’t that a fair statement?”
“No, I would not say that,” Sukhreet snapped.
“You would not say that?” Goldberg asked incredulously.
“No,” Sukhreet replied.
“Madam, your presence at the arraignment of … Justice Hortense Gabel and Bess Myerson was something that gave you pleasure because it brought them down, as far as you could glean, to your level, isn’t that a fair statement?”
“No.”
“It was a culmination, was it not, of a long-standing, deep-seated hatred of both your mother and your father, isn’t that so?”
“No.”
Goldberg was pacing furiously around the room, throwing his arms up in the air, yelling at Sukhreet. “And there came a point in time when you even considered the possibility of a book, isn’t that so?”
“I have considered it.”
“Have you thought of a title such as ‘Daughter Dearest’?”
“No, not that particular title,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Goldberg, for your suggestion.”
Then he took the shot he had been saving for last.
“You live, do you not, on the support that your mother and father give you, isn’t that so?”
“Yes, I do. Yes, it is.”
Goldberg had Sukhreet tell the jury that she was receiving $1,775 a month from her parents for living expenses and that, in April of 1988, she was threatened with eviction because she had not paid $6,981 in rent.
“You took the money, and you used it for some other purpose, isn’t that so?” he yelled. “Yes or no! You didn’t pay the rent, did you? …”
Sukhreet was furious. Judge Gabel looked as if she were finally going to physically restrain Goldberg.
“Because you used that money to buy yourself a wardrobe, isn’t that so?”
“No, that’s not correct.”
“You used that money to do some cosmetic surgery, some liposuction, right?”
“That’s incorrect,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ear.
“But you did have liposuction, correct?”
“That’s incorrect.”
Then Sukhreet told him she had spent the money on something else to help battle her depression. “I bought drugs,” Sukhreet said. Her voice was low and angry. A hush fell over the courtroom.
Suddenly another voice called out from across the courtroom. It was Judge Gabel, trying to make sure that no one misunderstood.
“Medical drugs,” she piped up softly.
32
The Verdict
On the day that Sukhreet Gabel finally left the witness stand Bess was completely relaxed for the first time since the trial had begun. Her attorney had told her that Sukhreet’s performance had been so disastrous for the prosecution that he no longer thought it would be necessary to put her on the stand to defend herself. Bess was ready and willing to testify, but Hafetz’s reassurances were a big relief. Now it looked as if it was at least possible that she might be vindicated with an acquittal.
That Friday afternoon, October 28, after everyone else had departed for the weekend, Bess sat on a hard oak bench outside the courtroom with a reporter and a friend who had stopped by the trial to lend support. She was feeling so upbeat that she speculated about what she would tell the waiting throng of reporters and television cameramen on the courthouse steps on the day that she was found innocent.
“Do you know what I think I might do?” she said with a sly smile. “I’m going to walk out the door and keep on walking. I’m not going to say anything for the cameras. Fuck ’em. I don’t need the press. I don’t need to say anything at all.”
Bess was going home that night to Andy’s Park Avenue apartment to spend “three long hours” soaking in the tub. She talked to her daughter, Barra, in California, on the telephone most evenings. Barra had not come east for her mother’s trial because she was working on the television show “Dirty Dancing,” which she was helping to write and produce. Bess did not seem to mind that her daughter’s work had kept her from being with her.
On most nights Bess made sure she was home and off the phone by ten o’clock. That was when Andy called from prison. She told friends that she had to see the movie Madame Sousatzka three times during the trial because she had to keep leaving the Baronet movie theater on Third Avenue to get home in time for his call. Andy, she said, didn’t like it when he got the answering machine.
From their demeanor in the courtroom, it was difficult to discern the nature of Bess and Andy’s relationship that fall. They exchanged glances and whispers and wrote each other notes during the testimony. She brought him the latest photographs of her daughter and granddaughter. During the court’s fifteen-minute recesses she would step outside into the corridor, smoke a Marlboro, and then hurry back to the defense table to be with him. Andy would often put his hand on her back, and she would slip an arm around him, but they did not look like lovers. They looked instead as if they were supporting each other, almost like business partners caught in a terrible mess.
Bess rarely left the courthouse to join her attorneys for lunch in a restaurant. She had arranged for the cafeteria manager to fix her a salad, which she usually carried back with her to the courtroom to eat with Andy. She would often bring him big pastrami sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli for lunch and a snack of M&Ms so
he wouldn’t have to eat the prison food. Bess occasionally wrapped up Andy’s prison sandwiches and took them home for herself so the food wouldn’t “go to waste.”
Even some of their closest friends were unable to figure out what was going on between Andy and Bess during the trial. At times there seemed to be tremendous tension between them. Before he had gone to prison, Andy had been seen around town with several women much younger than Bess, although he was no longer receiving visits from the former model, Betty Bienen. Sitting next to his lawyer’s wife, Rema Goldberg, at the defense table, Andy would occasionally nudge her and ask her if she knew of any women he could meet. He once told a friend that he might be interested in having a few flings when he got out of jail and wondered whether it could be arranged for Bess to be sentenced to prison. “Can’t she get a year and a day?” he asked jokingly.
Bess, herself, didn’t seem to know what to make of their relationship. “We are very supportive of each other,” she told a reporter. “I’m not sure that is love. I’m not sure what it is.”
Despite the enormous setback for the prosecution caused by Sukhreet’s disastrous appearance on the witness stand, David Lawrence was hopeful that his next witness would corroborate most of her testimony and thus buttress her tale. By the time the jurors began deliberations, Lawrence was hoping, the image of Sukhreet cheerfully testifying against her mother would have dulled in their minds.
But Sukhreet, to the exasperation of prosecutors and the delight of some members of the defense team, was determined to extend her “fifteen minutes” of fame. On Tuesday, November 1, the first day of testimony after she left the stand, Sukhreet showed up in court as a spectator, outfitted in a canary-yellow dress and matching velvet slippers. Not content to be in the background, Sukhreet took a seat in the front row of the spectators’ section.
With her testimony over, she was now able to sit in on the rest of the trial, a situation that put Lawrence and the other prosecutors in a bind. They feared that if they asked the court to remove her, she might retaliate against them in some way. But it turned out that they wouldn’t have to worry about it. Bess did not want to spend the rest of the trial trying to avoid Sukhreet in the ladies’ room and the cafeteria, so her attorney, Fred Hafetz, asked Keenan to exclude Sukhreet from the courtroom. Hafetz told the judge that Sukhreet was “really a diversion from the trial.”
Keenan called Sukhreet up to his bench that morning and asked her to leave. She walked out quietly, trailed by about twenty reporters. Outside the courtroom she held an impromptu news conference in the hallway, angrily telling reporters that she wanted to attend the rest of the trial because she “didn’t believe in hit-and-run justice.” She also wanted to be there, she said, to give her mother “moral and physical support.”
With Sukhreet out of the courtroom the prosecution turned toward rebuilding its case. The next witness called to testify was every wealthy person’s worst nightmare: the maid under oath.
A spirited woman with curly white hair, a long narrow face, and a lantern jaw, Shirley Harrod, along with her husband, Ray, had worked as a live-in servant for Andy at his Westhampton Beach estate during the summer of 1983. Her husband was fired after only five months because of an argument he got into with Bess’s son-in-law. Shirley Harrod was fired seven months later, she said, for “disobeying” Andy by leaving the house to take her son to visit a friend.
Bess and Andy were visibly annoyed that the woman who had made their bed, cleaned their bathrooms, and cooked their meals was now in court to testify against them.
Before Harrod took the stand, Jay Goldberg asked during a conference with the judge for assurance that Harrod’s testimony would be limited in scope. He didn’t want her mentioning that Donald Manes and Stanley Friedman had been guests at the Westhampton Beach house. The government agreed. Goldberg also received assurances that Harrod would not tell the jury about the time Andy Capasso took an attractive young real estate broker into his bedroom.
There were a couple of important points that the prosecution needed Harrod to make for the jury.
First, under the questioning of prosecutor Stuart Abrams, Harrod corroborated Sukhreet’s testimony that she had first discovered from Harrod that her mother was presiding over the Capasso divorce case. Then Abrams moved on to the main reason the government had put Shirley Harrod on the witness stand—to set the scene of the beginning of the alleged conspiracy. He had her tell the jury in her nasal voice and thick cockney accent about the day in June or July when Andy and Bess were sitting around the dining room table, looking at the divorce papers. “Mr. Capasso threw the papers on the table,” she testified, “and said, ‘Isn’t there something you can do about this?’”
The prosecution wished that Harrod had stayed in the dining room to hear what Bess Myerson said in reply.
Jay Goldberg took the first real crack at Harrod by returning to his theme of Nancy Capasso as the “villainess.” From the investigative reports that the prosecution was required to hand over to him on each witness he had discovered that Nancy Capasso had called federal investigators to introduce them to Harrod in her home.
Goldberg tried to throw Harrod off balance by shouting a series of quick questions and suggesting that she was testifying only because she and her husband had been fired by Andy Capasso and that she was doing Nancy Capasso’s bidding.
Harrod remained unruffled. She leaned into the microphone with a bemused expression on her face, laughing as he tried to rile her, talking back to him in her distinctive voice, ending a phrase with a high screech as if to say, “Of course not!” Even when he called her a “domestic,” drawing out the syllables with just the right amount of condescension in his voice, she refused to rise to the bait. When he kept repeating the fact that she had been “fired,” she cut him off and said, “You like that word, don’t you?”
She had almost everyone in the courtroom laughing with her. Bess, however, was not laughing. Goldberg finally asked Harrod to stop smiling when she answered his questions. But it seemed to have little effect, because everyone was having so much fun watching her best him.
Fred Hafetz’s manner with Harrod was much more effective. His grating voice and serious tone quickly wiped the smile off her face and stopped the laughter in the courtroom. Repeatedly calling her “ma’am,” he wanted the jurors to believe that Shirley Harrod was a woman they could not trust. He needed to cast doubt on the damaging testimony she had given about watching Andy throw down the divorce papers at the dining room table and ask Bess for help. Hafetz didn’t stop hammering Harrod with questions until he got the answer that he wanted. Finally she gave it to him.
“And how far away were you from Mr. Capasso at that time, approximately?”
“Six feet maybe.”
“But you could see the papers he held up, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And what papers did you see, ma’am?”
“They were the divorce papers.”
“They were the divorce papers,” he repeated, mimicking her. He slowly walked over to the defense table and began to shuffle papers. “Mrs. Harrod,” he said, holding up what had been marked 3524 B, “were these the papers that you saw?”
“Similar to that, yes,” she nodded.
“I see. And what are these papers, ma’am? Are these divorce papers?”
“I don’t know,” she said matter-of-factly. “You are not close enough to see.”
“And I’m standing approximately six feet from you, ma’am,” he announced triumphantly.
“I didn’t have to see them to know what they were,” she snapped.
Hafetz’s hard face softened into a smile. The damage had been done.
Herb Rickman was trembling when he walked into the courtroom. Small beads of sweat formed on his forehead. He was nervous, so nervous that he had brought close to a dozen friends with him to sit in the front row of the spectators’ section for support.
For more than two years now, since federal investigators f
irst questioned him about this case, Rickman, a special assistant to Mayor Koch, had been working at City Hall under a cloud, knowing that Bess was intending to use him as a fall guy at her trial.
From the beginning Bess had insisted that Rickman had played a role in the hiring of Sukhreet. When a New York Post reporter called her in October 1983 to ask how Sukhreet came to be hired as her special assistant, Bess had replied that Herb Rickman had “sent” her over.
Then, after the Tyler report became public in June 1987, one of Bess’s closest friends, Allen Funt’s ex-wife, Marilyn Funt, told reporters that Rickman was denying his role in hiring Sukhreet because he was frightened that he might lose his big job at City Hall.
Funt also said at the time that after Rickman found out about the federal investigation he left a message in Yiddish on Bess’s answering machine, telling her to meet him right away at a nearby coffee shop. The accusations against Rickman became newspaper stories. “Bess Blames City Hall,” read one newspaper’s front-page headline, which was accompanied by a large photograph of Rickman, sitting at his City Hall desk, located just a few yards from Mayor Koch’s office. Reporters wanted to know what he knew, when he knew it, and, most importantly, when he told Mayor Koch what he knew about Sukhreet’s hiring.
Rickman had also complained publicly that he would get anonymous late-night phone calls warning him to keep his mouth shut.
Rickman, who had convinced the federal prosecutors and investigators in the case that he was telling the truth, had over the past two years developed his own theory of why Bess and Andy had entertained him so lavishly that summer of 1983 out in Westhampton Beach. They both knew that he had been close friends with Judge Gabel for years. Rickman believed that perhaps Andy and Bess’s invitations to him were all part of a plan to set him up, to make it look as if he was the one who had suggested that Bess hire Sukhreet.
On the witness stand Rickman stared straight ahead, away from Bess, who was sitting on the opposite side of the room at the defense table, glaring at him. For the first time since the beginning of the trial, Andy looked truly enraged. Here was a man whom he had generously entertained at his home, a man he had considered a close friend, now betraying him.
Queen Bess Page 43
