* * *
William Anthony Maynard, Jr., was a fixture in Greenwich Village at the time that Kroll was killed. He and his brother-in-law, Michael Quinn, were partners in a soon-to-fail fancy Village clothing store. Tony was thirty-two years old, stood six feet one inch tall, had lean, movie-star features, and looked nothing like Martin Luther King, Jr.
Many months later, when he was arrested in Germany, charged with Kroll’s homicide, and extradited back to New York, the newspapers referred to Tony as a theatrical agent and an actor. But Tony was more of an all-around-type guy who related to, and sometimes got things done for, people he thought mattered—a list that included James Baldwin, the author of The Fire Next Time; the jazz legend Charlie Mingus; and William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was published the same year that Kroll was killed. An aloof man, Tony was held in high regard by the people he deemed worthwhile—mostly people in the arts—to whom he was a helpful presence. The hoi polloi didn’t exist for Tony. “He treated everyone not within his immediate entourage,” Baldwin wrote, “with a bored, patient contempt.” He was both street wise and worldly. He was well traveled and could get by in several different languages. He carried himself with the air of someone to the manner born. Tony had been in the army and done a short stint at the post office. He had also worked as “bodyguard and chauffeur and man Friday” for Baldwin, as the latter would write many years later in No Name in the Street. That’s how he met Styron. The idea that Tony would have talked to a drunken sailor, let alone cared that he had harassed another black man on the street, much less carried an “inelegant weapon” like a sawed-off shotgun, was completely ludicrous to anyone who knew him.
Maynard’s associations with jazz musicians and well-known authors, of course, had nothing to do with his becoming a suspect in the Kroll killing. And certainly he did not fit the description of a five-foot-eight-inch black man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, who looked like Martin Luther King, Jr.
Maybe being seen in the area with Michael Quinn, his white brother-in-law, as well as a beautiful white woman, had something to do with it. But Michael was never questioned or charged as an accomplice. And no one had even given the cops a description of the killer’s white companion. It was as if the police did not care. They had a black guy and a couple of creepy Village late-night characters willing to finger him, and that was enough to satisfy them as well as the mayor. Probably the most obvious reason the cops focused on Maynard was his beautiful white wife, Mary Quinn, a model, who also worked in Tony’s and her brother Michael’s clothing store. Although Mary was in the process of divorcing Tony, as she had grown tired of his wandering ways, she still modeled in the store, and he still visited the Quinns in their Woodside, Queens, home, to which Mary had returned.
While New York City and particularly the Village were far more permissive than the rest of the country, interracial couples still turned heads, especially if the woman was beautiful. As a result it is inconceivable that the local cops had not seen the couple together on the streets and in the cafés.
As Baldwin wrote, Tony’s “aggressively virile good looks” made him “particularly unattractive to the NYPD.” Worse, Mary was Irish, as were many of the cops.
Arrested at the end of October in Germany, where he had traveled with a group of jazz musicians, Tony was held at Hamburg’s Holstenglacis prison. There he wrote a letter to William Styron explaining his circumstances. Baldwin moved around a lot, and Tony knew it would be easier for Styron to get word to his former employer of the dire straits in which he found himself. Notified, Baldwin immediately traveled to Germany and pulled some strings through his publisher there to get in to see Tony.
The cops and district attorney’s office would accuse Tony of running off to Europe to avoid prosecution. But like the false “stranger” eyewitness identifications by two unsavory street people who had never seen the killer before, which the police procured from witnesses who were in need of their goodwill when it came to their own activities, the flight claim was equally absurd, as Tony had gone to the American consulate in Hamburg, using his own name, to obtain a new passport.
After he was extradited to New York to stand trial, Tony was incarcerated in the Tombs, the vermin-infested, windowless jail attached to Manhattan’s criminal courthouse. Assistant District Attorney Gino Gallina of the Manhattan DA’s office was assigned to the case. Baldwin hired two defense attorneys who were well-known habitués of the New York criminal courts, first S. J. Seigel and then Selig Lenefsky, to represent Tony. Seigel and Lenefsky were typical lawyers who made their livings in the city’s criminal courts—chummy with everyone and knowledgeable about how to game the system for the best possible plea bargain. Because the lawyers were looking for a plea, which was their usual practice, even though Tony said he would never take one, little in the way of actual lawyering took place. Both men had a reputation for doing things in a seat-of-the-pants manner, and Baldwin’s retelling of his meetings with Tony’s sister Valerie and the eighty-year-old cigar-chomping Seigel creates the feeling of their totally superficial defense.
Baldwin describes Seigel’s song and dance upon learning that the trial had been postponed. “This might be all to the good,” the aging lawyer explained, “because it meant that Judge So-and-So instead of Judge What-not would be sitting. He, Seigel, was on friendly terms with Judge What-not, he’d call him in the evening.” The reality was simple. Tony was just another modestly-paying client in a world where the big spenders got the best shot at a fair trial.
“What in the world were we to say to this terrifying old man?,” Baldwin wrote about Seigel. “How could we ever know whether he had spoken to a single person, or made the remotest phone call on Tony’s behalf?”
Meanwhile, Tony’s alibi witnesses—his ex-brother-in-law Michael Quinn and Mary, as well as their brother, Patrick, and Mama Quinn—were being strong-armed into disavowing their recollection of Tony in the Quinn apartment at the time of the crime. To achieve that result Gallina had Michael and his wife thrown in jail as material witnesses, and threatened to have the latter deported, as she had overstayed her visa. And just like that, Tony’s alibi was running on empty.
With even a little engagement Tony’s first lawyers could have fought to protect the Quinns and their testimony. Instead they allowed the Quinns’ alibi testimony to evaporate.
And that was just the beginning of what Tony’s lawyers did not do. They made no effort to track down any of the witnesses who were on the Village streets the night Kroll was shot. Nor did they obtain a lighting expert to explain why an eyewitness identification, especially by strangers who had been out in the streets all night (more than likely drinking, buying or selling dope, or cruising for a pickup like Barnhardt), was virtually impossible, especially given where the witnesses said they were located and where the lighting was coming from. That said, Gallina still could not get a conviction. One juror held out and saved Tony—at least temporarily, as the whole trial would have to be done all over again.
With a new trial on the horizon, Seigel was out of the picture, and Lenefsky, who had handled the first trial, had no interest unless he got paid handsomely to do it. Shortly afterward Gallina, who had left the DA’s office, became Lenefsky’s partner. Years later I would learn that Gallina represented mobsters—specifically the Genovese family—which was strongly suggested by the gangland-style way he died—shot seven times on a Greenwich Village street.
To represent Tony, the court appointed Gussie Kleinman, a lawyer who was famous for making plea deals, and getting good ones because she was on cozy terms with the judge who assigned the case to her. With Gussie known for her inability to try cases, Tony saw the disaster coming and threw her off the case, deciding that he was better off representing himself. Once the second trial started, however, he thought better of that decision. When he informed the judge that he would not be able to represent himself adequately, the result was a mistrial.
A few weeks before his third trial was to begin, Tony’s sister Valerie was still looking for a new attorney to represent her brother. Baldwin had been unreachable since the end of the first trial and was, according to Valerie, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A struggling artist without any funds for a fee, she was at her wits’ end.
Valerie came to our little office below Canal Street on Broadway and asked me to become Tony’s unpaid attorney. After being turned down by a dozen criminal lawyers, she found our law firm because Hank diSuvero, also as a pro bono attorney, was representing the prisoners involved in an uprising in the Tombs. Hank told her he couldn’t take on any more clients and referred her to me. Valerie told me the story of her brother’s arrest and the struggle to free him. Interested, I went to see Tony in the Tombs. It was a hot summer day, and the jail still seethed with tension from the recent uprising. I waited for at least an hour in a large, cubicle-lined room for lawyers and their clients. Prisoners were released into the room one at a time amid the slamming of steel-barred gates and barked commands. Most prisoners slunk in, slovenly dressed, shoulders hunched, with angry or sullen looks on their faces. Because of the uprising, all razors had been forbidden, so they were unshaven and looked the worse for wear. Not so with Tony Maynard, despite the shaving ban. Striding through the gate, he stood erect, well dressed, and sharp-eyed, looking for me—the lawyer his sister had sent him.
Brought up for many years by a doting, status-conscious grandmother, who was a churchwoman and allowed him to run free much of the time in Florida, Tony seemed like the last person who would commit such a street crime. His father had been many things, including a New York City police officer, a bartender, and a jack of all trades. Like his dad, Tony did not like to be tied down. He came across as his own man, and had traveled with Baldwin and participated in the civil rights demonstrations with him. Tony had also spent time in Europe and North Africa with jazz musicians, as sort of a manager and guide. He had returned to New York only a year or so before Kroll was shot, but managed to get situated as a student of one of New York City’s more prominent acting coaches and had been cast in a black-exploitation movie, according to a trade-paper clipping he showed me.
As Tony talked about his life, I puzzled over how much was puffery and how much real, and what he had really done to keep himself so well turned out. As improbable as some of his story seemed, I tended to think that most of what he told me was true. Whatever he did to further his own ambitions or feed his fanciful illusions, there was something genuine about him. As Baldwin later wrote, Tony seemed like the last person in the world to walk the streets with a sawed-off shotgun stuffed under his jacket.
The more Tony talked, the more he pulled me in. I was the one who could come and go; he was confined, but he seemed to exude a kind of freedom that was both unfamiliar to me—and attractive. As much as clothes and outer appearances mattered to him, he appeared to be a man who could live within the confines of his own mind. By contrast, I couldn’t have cared less about the way I dressed, but I needed to prove myself and gain approval. I think he intuited there would be nothing seat-of-the-pants about my efforts on his behalf, and that I was the right lawyer to defend him. For my part, Tony came into my life not long after Bill Rutherford died. He spoke Bill’s perfect English and had a similar sort of proud bearing. That said, Bill didn’t come to mind when I met Tony. It wasn’t until much later that the possible connection suggested itself, perhaps to answer the question of why I was so willing to give over a part of my life—hundreds of hours—to Tony after just an hour or two of talking.
Thinking about the two men, I saw Bill as a person who had been trapped in a job he couldn’t easily quit, and a life that forced him to say, “Anything you say, sir.” For his part, Tony was trapped in a criminal court system run by white men who cared no more about his guilt or innocence than Major Warner cared about what Bill truly felt. But there was something else. Like Bill, Tony did not seem to have that deep well of anger I had come to recognize in some black men who had been exposed to the endless discrimination heaped upon them by whites all through their lives. Perhaps, as I would later learn, that had to do with Tony’s family’s West Indian island past. Then again, it was possible that both Tony and Bill had developed the ability to suppress outward expressions of anger when it was in their interest to do so. Thinking about us, I felt that Tony and I seemed to share similar impulses related to our pasts. Although we came from completely different backgrounds, we were the same age, and both of us appeared to be seeking a measure of freedom from our beginnings. I had veered off the accepted pathways accorded to the progeny of the wealthier classes, and Tony had disdained the working-class life that awaited black men of his generation. Our tangents closed the distance between us and allowed us to relate to each other in the Tombs as we sat together talking about the effort it would require to set him free.
The more I came to believe in Tony’s innocence, and felt myself developing a bond with him, the more I worried about taking his case. I had spent my career fighting cases that would, if won, change lives in a long-term way, but it was only recently that I found myself working in the criminal court system, where decisions had such an immediate concrete effect on my clients’ lives. Concerned, I told Tony that I had never handled a murder trial.
“That woman Gussie is a joke,” he said handing me an article that ridiculed Kleinman. “I know you will do your best.”
* * *
Tony’s case was a crash course in the difference between criminal and civil trials. At the NAACP my trials rarely lasted a week. Certainly they were intense and all-consuming as long as they lasted, but as an NAACP lawyer I was always on the attack. My job was to put public officials on trial for breaking the law. In virtually all my cases, judges rather than jurors were the deciders. And no matter how resistant this or that judge was to the arguments I made, the jurists before whom I tried cases accorded me a reasonable level of civility. Win or lose, my NAACP clients had their day in court and were generally appreciative. They would sit next to me or in the front row of the courtroom. There were no corrections officers standing right behind them with handcuffs at the ready. There were no prison bars a door away from the proceedings, and no possibility of a life sentence.
By contrast, criminal trials were often marathons that lasted weeks or months in hostile settings, with judges smiling benignly at the jurors, all the while ruling time and time again in favor of prosecutors who enjoyed every advantage of their office and a staff of detectives with whom to obtain convictions. In a poorly funded criminal defense, preparation for the next day took place late at night, and it took endless adrenaline to stave off exhaustion and remain ready to take on whatever the prosecutor threw at you in court. A skilled criminal lawyer, or even one like me, who was adapting his style from a civil-oriented practice, could attack with his cross-examination. But even there he was hampered by his inability to investigate his case fully, and he had to be careful. Jurors were predisposed to believe cops, who protected them from the very people a criminal lawyer was defending.
Then there was the theater of the thing. Challenge the prosecutor or the judge too much and you risked turning off the jury. If you challenged them too little, you got steamrollered. Day after day you had to walk that line, always in an atmosphere that presumed your client was guilty and that you were just some slick lawyer trying to trick the jury by feeding them stories designed to confuse or clutter what would otherwise be clear and straightforward, all in the service of getting an acquittal by spouting spurious paeans about the presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt.
Advised by an experienced colleague before the trial began to ask the new assistant district attorney assigned to the case, Stephen Sawyer, not to choose Irwin Davidson as the trial judge—as he was what defense lawyers called a hanging judge—I did that. In those days the prosecutor could choose the trial judge in a murder trial, so I spoke to Sawyer and told him I thought there was a strong possibility Maynard mi
ght not be guilty. Sawyer, however, must have taken that as a signal I would fight hard to gain an acquittal. So he promptly placed the Kroll homicide before Davidson.
My experienced colleague was right with regard to Davidson. As James Wechsler would later write of Tony’s trial, “There were too many crucial interludes in the trial when it seemed impossible to differentiate the presiding judge—Irwin D. Davidson—from the prosecutor.”
Showing his colors immediately when I asked for more time to prepare, Davidson paid no heed to my total inexperience in representing a defendant accused of murder. When another outbreak of prisoner discontent in the Tombs once again stopped deliveries of razors and clean clothes to prisoners, Davidson made Maynard, looking rumpled and unshaven, appear in front of the jury we had started to choose. It wasn’t until my partner, Danny Meyers, filed a federal lawsuit shaming the district attorney’s office that Davidson allowed Tony to shave and change clothes in a holding cell behind the courtroom.
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