Focusing his gaze on the prosecutor, Stuart Abrams, Rickman began in a shaky but resonant voice by telling the jury that he was special assistant to the mayor of the city of New York. His voice grew steadier as he testified about first meeting Andy Capasso when they were both visiting Bess Myerson at Lenox Hill Hospital after she had suffered a stroke. Of the years of his friendship with Bess, he said, “I held her in great affection.”
Hoping to elicit testimony that might establish a motive for Andy to want to fix the divorce, Abrams asked Rickman about Andy’s divorce. Rickman described Andy as a “bitter man” who complained that “he was being taken for every penny” by his wife. “Throughout 1983 there was a lot of upset over the ongoing proceedings,” Rickman recalled, “and invariably it would produce friction, unhappiness. It was not a particularly good time for Mr. Capasso. He was not feeling well. He was showing great strain, and obviously that strain affected Ms. Myerson as well.”
Then he told the jury that he knew Judge Gabel because they were both involved in “liberal Democratic circles.” He said that for years they used to get together for lunch every six or eight weeks. In 1983, he said, the judge frequently talked about Sukhreet’s job search. He said that he met Sukhreet one afternoon for lunch and suggested that she find a job in the Office of Economic Development, but it never came to pass.
Then Rickman dropped a bombshell. Stuart Abrams asked him about the reception for Bess Myerson at Gracie Mansion on May 25, 1983, to celebrate her new appointment as cultural affairs commissioner. He recounted for the jury that he had seen Judge Gabel sitting down at the reception and that he had walked over to her to say hello.
“She asked me, ‘Is what’s-his-name here?’ … I knew she meant Bess’s friend, and I said, ‘You mean Andy Capasso?’ and she said yes.”
There was suddenly a motion from one end of the defense table to the other as the defendants conferred with their attorneys. Rickman’s account surprised Judge Gabel’s attorney, Michael Feldberg. It directly contradicted Judge Gabel’s long-standing position that she did not know until five months later that Bess was romantically involved with Andy and that that was why she had made no move to disqualify herself from the Capasso divorce case before reducing the alimony.
Then Rickman told the jury that, around Labor Day of 1983, Bess Myerson told him she had hired Sukhreet Gabel.
“What, if anything, did you say to Ms. Myerson at that point?” Abrams asked.
“That’s a mistake!” Rickman replied. A day or two later, Rickman said, he talked to Bess again on the telephone: “I asked Ms. Myerson why she had hired Sukhreet Gabel. She replied it was a merit appointment, Sukhreet was found ably qualified at every level of the agency, that she had been interviewed by a number of people. It was a low-level position. She said it was cleared at City Hall. And I also believe she said that the major decisions in the case were already over.”
On September 23, 1983, he said he had lunch with Horty Gabel at Hunan Garden. “When I got there, I said, ‘Horty, we don’t talk about law, I haven’t practiced law, we don’t talk about cases, but I have some concerns about Sukhreet’s ability to survive at the Department of Cultural Affairs. I am concerned on a parallel track about the possible appearance of it. Are you concerned, Horty?’”
“What, if anything, did Judge Gabel say at that point?” Abrams asked.
“Judge Gabel got rather irate with me,” Rickman said. “She told me immediately that it had been a merit appointment and for all intents and purposes told me it was none of my concern.”
Judge Gabel later said that she had become angry not because Rickman had suggested an appearance of impropriety but because she thought Rickman was suggesting that her daughter was incapable of handling the job.
As Rickman had anticipated, Bess’s lawyer, Fred Hafetz, came at him hard. But Rickman counterattacked. He shouted back at Hafetz and pointed at Bess in front of the jury, calling her “that woman” over and over again, yelling “No, no, no,” and repeatedly telling the jury that Bess had been a lousy administrator whose poor management skills had left the city’s cultural affairs agency in chaos.
“Mr. Rickman, isn’t it a fact that you have lied in your testimony that you had a conversation with Bess Myerson in the early part of September 1983 regarding the employment of Sukhreet Gabel as you testified about yesterday?”
“Mr. Hafetz, that is a disgusting lie on your part,” Rickman said snidely, leaning into the microphone. “It demeans you in every way, shape, or form. You have no right to insinuate that. That conversation took place. You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Hafetz.”
Hafetz was undeterred. “Mr. Rickman,” he began, his voice surly again, “isn’t it a fact, sir, that the reason you have invented this story is because of the fact, sir, that during the summer of 1983 you not only knew that Bess Myerson was considering hiring Sukhreet Gabel, but indeed, you had suggested that she hire Judge Gabel’s daughter? Am I right, sir?”
“No,” Rickman yelled, his voice booming across the room.
“Mr. Rickman, isn’t it a fact that after the October 18, 1983, Post article came out, you knew you were in an embarrassing situation, because the mayor of the city of New York knew that you had a close relationship with Bess Myerson and you were concerned that someone might say you had a role in the hiring of the daughter? Am I right, sir?”
“Absolutely wrong,” Rickman said disgustedly. “Absolutely wrong again, Mr. Hafetz.”
“And in fact, Mr. Rickman, isn’t it a fact that you decided after the embarrassing events became—the public embarrassment of October 18, 1983, you, Herb Rickman, decided to invent a story to place yourself as far away from the knowledge of the hiring of Sukhreet Gabel as you possibly could, even if it meant lying against your dear friends Bess Myerson and Judge Gabel? Isn’t that correct, sir?”
At the defense table Bess nodded her head at Hafetz’s question and then turned to Rickman to listen to his response.
“Mr. Hafetz,” Rickman shouted back, his face distorted with rage, “not only is there not a scintilla of truth in anything you have said, but you have just done everything to damage twenty-two years of noble public service. And I hope you earn your thirty pieces of silver for that.”
Bess shook her head. Herb Rickman was giving Sukhreet Gabel heavy competition for putting on the best show in town.
Hafetz pressed him, too, on a question that every reporter in New York had been asking Mayor Koch and Rickman since the Tyler report first described in detail the circumstances surrounding Sukhreet’s hiring in 1983: what did the mayor know and when did he know it? Did Rickman tell the mayor, four years before Sukhreet’s hiring exploded into a full-blown scandal, that Bess had been courting the daughter of a judge ruling on Andy’s divorce and had given her a city job?
“Yes or no?” Hafetz demanded.
“I went to the mayor of the city of New York—”
Hafetz interrupted him. “Yes or no, Mr. Rickman?” he insisted.
Finally Judge Keenan leaned across the bench toward Rickman to give it a try. “Did you tell Mayor Koch, ‘I said to Bess Myerson that I am concerned about this, and she said to me ‘I cleared it [at City Hall]’?”
“No, I did not,” Rickman replied. He explained that after the New York Post article suggested that he had played a role in the hiring of Sukhreet he had approached Koch and told him that he hadn’t had anything to do with Sukhreet’s getting the job. “When I walked in and the mayor saw my rage, the mayor said, ‘Stop. We received a letter or a letter is on its way [from Bess]. Be calm. She’s reassured us about the hiring, and she says the hiring is okay.’
“That was it as far as I was concerned,” Rickman stated.
Leaning back in her chair, Bess folded her arms across her chest and fixed her gaze on her once-close friend. She looked at Rickman as if she had the power to turn him to stone.
And that’s how it went for hours, Fred Hafetz hammering away at Herb Rickman. During a brief recess Bess, enraged at Ric
kman’s testimony, furious that he had repeatedly referred to her in his testimony as “that woman,” walked up to a reporter, lit a Marlboro, and spewed forth. “We were like brother and sister,” she said rapidly, her face hard with anger. “I never had a brother. He never had a sister. Do you know what he used to call me in Yiddish? Little sister! Do you think that he would speak to a man like that if I were a man?”
Then, suddenly realizing she was talking to a reporter, she abruptly walked away.
After the recess Hafetz resumed his attack by trying to get Rickman to say that Koch had committed perjury.
“Mr. Rickman,” he began, “the reason that you are fighting on the dates and acknowledging your role in the hiring of Ms. Gabel is because you, sir, as a high-level Koch administration person, would have to acknowledge that he committed perjury and you would be out on your derriere, isn’t that right, sir?”
“That’s a lie,” Rickman yelled. Hafetz tried to ask his next question, but Rickman continued to yell back at him. Finally Judge Keenan intervened.
“Now wait,” Keenan lectured Rickman. “You answered the question quite vehemently. You made your point. Next question.”
“Your honor, if I may—” Rickman said, turning to face the judge.
“No, next question. Just stop.”
“I am being badgered here over and over,” he complained. His voice suddenly took on a whining tone.
“No,” Keenan insisted. “I said stop it. Don’t be a baby. Stop it.”
But the two men didn’t stop, and finally Keenan sent the jury out of the room and delivered a lecture to the witness and the lawyer.
Jay Goldberg joined in. “Judge,” he said, “this witness makes personal comments with respects to Mr. Hafetz’s state of mind which I find to be supremely improper—”
Keenan just stared at him. “Did you ever hear of a two-edged sword?”
“Yes.”
“Might cut both ways. The jury may think he is protesting too much. The jury may think he is too defensive.”
Michael Feldberg began his cross-examination of Rickman by getting him to confirm that he thought Horty Gabel was a “heroine” and that she had “incredible integrity” and that he had testified during the investigation that “in no way do I believe the judge would ever have allowed, you know, the daughter, the daughter’s hiring or employment in government to have in any way influenced her decision making.”
Then Feldberg moved to the most important point he sought to make: that Rickman had spoken to law enforcement officials on eighteen occasions but had never before recalled the conversation he claimed he had had with Judge Gabel on May 25, 1983, at Gracie Mansion.
“That’s correct,” Rickman said quietly.
The next witness was Walter Canter, a tall, thin, soft-spoken man in his sixties who had worked for Bess Myerson from 1968 to 1983, writing speeches and magazine articles for her and helping her to produce consumer reports while she worked as a reporter for WCBS-TV.
When she was named cultural affairs commissioner in April 1983, she brought him into the department. A former assistant cultural affairs commissioner recalled, “She sat us all down and said, ‘I want to tell you about Walter. He’s very important to me. I worked with him for twenty years. I want you all to try your best and be nice to Walter. I care a lot about Walter.’”
Then, just a few months later, the assistant commissioner got a call from Bess, asking him to fire Canter for her. “I don’t think that’s fair,” he told her at the time. “I didn’t bring him in.”
Bess asked him if she could fire him by sending him a letter. “Well, legally, yes,” he told her. “But I don’t think it’s very nice.”
But that’s exactly what Bess did in October 1983. She wrote a letter to Canter dismissing him.
What the prosecutor, Stuart Abrams, wanted to suggest to the jurors was that Bess had forced out her loyal old friend to make room for the judge’s daughter.
Then, at the end of the direct testimony, Abrams surprised the defense lawyers by asking Canter, “After leaving the Department of Cultural Affairs, did you have any further dealings with Bess Myerson after that time?”
“No,” Canter replied, “except for a telephone call which I received about two or three weeks ago.”
“Could you please describe for the jury what was said during the course of that telephone call?”
Jay Goldberg jumped to his feet. “Judge, could we have a side bar on this?”
Keenan told the jurors they could take their morning break. The government and defense lawyers approached the bench and talked in whispers so that reporters or spectators could not hear them.
Abrams was telling the judge that if Canter were allowed to answer the question he would say that Bess called him to ask him to talk about hostility against her within the Department of Cultural Affairs. This would help her lawyer describe future witnesses from the cultural affairs agency called to testify against her as disgruntled. “At the end of the conversation,” Abrams said in a low voice to the judge, “she said to him that she was thinking of starting a foundation and that he would be a good person to head the foundation.”
Keenan asked if Abrams intended to draw the inference that Bess was “trying to buy him off by offering him something at a foundation.”
“I think that is a fair inference,” Abrams said, adding that Canter “did not take it particularly seriously.”
Keenan refused to allow Canter to testify about the telephone call, ruling that the testimony would be ambiguous and unfair to the other defendants.
The defense attorneys were pleased with the judge’s ruling and expected to hear nothing more about it. But late that afternoon Paul Moses, who covered the courts for New York Newsday, picked up a copy of the court transcript of that day’s proceeding to check it against his notes and to read what the lawyers had discussed in whispers at the side bar conference about Bess’s phone call to Canter.
The next morning the front page of New York Newsday carried a large color photograph of Bess and a bold headline: “Myerson Prosecutor: Bess Tried to Buy Off Witness.”
When Hafetz lost his temper over the headline in the courtroom, Judge Keenan reminded him that he had told the jurors not to read the newspapers. They wouldn’t know anything about it.
It was two days before Thanksgiving when Mayor Edward I. Koch finally took the witness stand. His only appearance as a witness in a criminal case was billed on all the local radio and television shows that morning with the one-line lead “Mayor Koch testifies today in first corruption trial.”
The press section was packed with City Hall reporters, out-of-town correspondents, and virtually every newspaper columnist in town. Members of the public, who had been attending the highly publicized murder trial of Joel Steinberg, accused of killing his six-year-old adopted daughter, left the Manhattan Criminal Court building and crowded into the spectator’s section of Bess’s trial in federal court. In the front row were Mayor Koch’s three lawyers, his press secretary, George Arzt, and his closest adviser and friend, Dan Wolf.
Ever since Mayor Koch had first learned from the television news in January 1987 that Bess was caught up in a federal investigation and had taken the Fifth Amendment, his advisers had worried that this case would be the final blow to his administration. For all of the city officials who resigned or went to jail in the wake of the city’s municipal corruption scandals, none of them were as closely tied to him in the eyes of the public as Bess Myerson, the woman who had held his hand at rallies during his first mayoral campaign. His political future was at stake. There were rumors that Giuliani was considering running for mayor.
Over the past two years Koch’s advisers had been carefully trying to get out the message that this was a case of a troubled woman who happened to be a city commissioner and not another example of city corruption. By now, two months into the highly publicized trial, it seemed as if the public had begun to see it as just that.
Koch had two concerns as
he took the witness stand. He did not want to come across as a man out to betray an old friend, and he did not want to testify to anything that he had not said before.
When he stepped up to the witness stand at 10:35 A.M., Koch was not his normal ebullient, irrepressible self. Subdued and appearing uneasy, Koch sat slumped in his chair, staring straight ahead and avoiding eye contact with Bess.
From her seat at the defense table Bess looked perfectly composed. She put on her glasses to look at him across the room as she waited for Lawrence to begin asking questions of her old friend. She watched him steadily until Lawrence asked Koch to identify her. He looked over to Bess for the first time. She lowered her eyes. Fred Hafetz jumped up during that awkward moment, telling the court, “We will acknowledge the identity.”
Then Lawrence got to why he wanted Mayor Koch in the courtroom: to dramatize to the jury that Bess had lied to him in October 1983, following the publication of the New York Post article about Sukhreet’s hiring. He was hoping Koch’s testimony would leave the jury with the impression that Bess was conscious of her own guilt.
Koch, responding dutifully to Lawrence’s questions, told the jury that the first time he heard about Sukhreet’s hiring was when he returned from a trip to Puerto Rico and saw a copy of the New York Post, accompanied by a letter from Bess about the article. Then he explained that he had “no other information” about Sukhreet’s hiring other than what was contained in the article and the letter. But the federal rules of evidence prevented Lawrence from further dramatizing the matter by asking Koch how he felt four years later when he learned that the letter had been a lie and that he had been betrayed.
One of Koch’s lawyers, Henry White, had slipped into the back of the courtroom one afternoon while Herb Rickman was on the stand under cross-examination. White reported back to City Hall that the best tack for the mayor to take while under Hafetz’s tough cross-examination was to answer the questions quietly, with a simple yes or no.
Queen Bess Page 44
