At the same time we were training cops, drafting legislation, going to hospitals, and fighting to keep the funds flowing into my domestic violence unit, Kathleen Durst, a medical student, was being battered by her husband in elite South Salem and was once treated at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, where I had actually given a lecture on domestic violence. She was exactly the kind of woman I was fighting to educate and protect. It’s chilling to think that, if she’d survived to graduate medical school and gone to work at a local hospital, I might have handed her one of our pamphlets about signs to look for in victims. But, of course, she would have known that information already, from personal experience.
MY EFFORTS TO LEVEL the playing field for women were not a feminist crusade. I was just a fighter. I’m not one to get caught up in shades of gray. When it comes to crime, it’s black and white. And you don’t dare tell me the victim asked for it. The “victim precipitated violence” excuse would send me flying. Don’t give me this hogwash about background or growing up in a violent home as an excuse. You did it; you pay for it. I had to fight for that from my earliest days as an ADA to my final days as the DA.
When I first arrived in White Plains in 1975, I was Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. In law school, I was on the Law Review and all that happy horseshit. I’d compare my credentials nicely against any man’s. My dream was to try cases, but the bosses weren’t going to let me near a trial. They tucked me away in the Appeals Bureau, to some an esoteric thinking place to review transcripts of trials, but to me a black hole of paperwork and drudgery.
Not exactly the cup of tea of someone who likes to fight.
I remember one day I went out to grab lunch with a few of my colleagues from the Appeals Bureau—all men, of course. We were walking back to the office carrying our brown bags with our sandwiches when, right in front of us, a police car went flying through a red light and smashed into a station wagon with two women and a bunch of kids inside.
The cops didn’t even get out of the car to see if the women and kids in the wagon were okay. I said, “Oh, my God! Let’s go check on the station wagon.”
The other ADAs scoffed and said they were heading back to the office.
“What?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “The cops blew through a red light. They didn’t even have their siren on. There might be people hurt in there!”
The guys just shrugged and left me standing there. I went over to the women in the station wagon to see if they needed help. I gave them my contact info. “I’m a witness,” I said. “If you need to, call me.”
Coming to the aid of the vulnerable was ingrained in me as a kid. When I was growing up in Elmira, New York, my mom made me go across Catherine Street and wash my elderly neighbor Mrs. Fleming’s hair every Saturday. Afterward, she would give me a piece of freshly made cake to eat as we sat on her big Victorian front porch. I always chose the rocker.
Looking back, I realize so much that didn’t even occur to me then. One, when you get as old as Mrs. Fleming, you can’t lift your arms high enough to wash your hair. Two, Mrs. Fleming may have been a covert operative of the CIA. Should anything need to be divulged from those conversations, Agent Fleming was at the ready to call Esther Ferris—my mom.
Mom and I would also go food shopping for Mrs. LaBert and then put away her groceries. Mrs. LaBert kept her yellow blinds drawn and it was always dark in her apartment.
I asked Mom, “Why is it so dark in here?”
“She’s blind,” Mom said. “We’re her eyes.”
I understood that if we didn’t help, Mrs. Fleming and Mrs. LaBert wouldn’t be able to maintain their dignity, let alone meet their own basic human needs. It was ingrained in me by my mom—who herself had no teacher, whose own parents left her in a foreign land—that it was my obligation and responsibility as their neighbor to do for others. That was the town I grew up in. That was my mom.
Esther was born in New York. Her dad fought in World War II and her mother was American-born as well. But, as the oldest female of four children of a father who wanted sons, she was shipped at the age of five to Lebanon to be raised by relatives along with her sisters. She had no wealth or power, nor anyone to speak for her, and was denied the benefits that America offers its citizens simply because she was a girl. Apparently, Grandpa didn’t know that it was he who determined the sex of his children. I’d like to slap him with that one now. Through no fault of her own, merely because of her gender, Mom started life at a disadvantage.
None of that was lost on me. I realized that the most vulnerable people in our neighborhood, in society at large, were women, children, and the elderly. My mother taught me that through her history and her deeds. I grew up carrying my mother’s baggage, gratefully. It made me strong and gave me a purpose.
Elie Wiesel once said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” I chose to take sides.
As a woman and a lawyer, my career would be speaking for the vulnerable. I decided to take the side of the victim.
I’m very outspoken when I think something is wrong. A cop car slamming into a wagon full of mothers and kids and the cops not even getting out? I wasn’t going to let that slip.
A few days after the incident, I got a call from the secretary of Tom Facelle, the chief assistant, the number-two guy in the district attorney’s office. I was summoned to his office. Facelle, scary to a young ADA by virtue of his title alone, looked like a combination of Edward G. Robinson and Peter Lorre—short, dark, brooding, intense. With a cigarette in his hand and one in the ashtray, he looked me up and down and said, “I received a call from the White Plains police department.”
Oh, boy. Either the women had trumpeted that an assistant district attorney offered to help them against the police, or the police took note of the ADA doing it. He proceeded to ask me what exactly I saw and what my vantage point revealed, and was I sure of what I saw. He was razor sharp and focused, and then he asked why I got involved in the whole thing.
“So you decided to anoint yourself the one to set the moral standard for us,” he said. He had an ever-so-faint smile on his face as he put out his cigarette and said, “Next time, mind your own business.”
Looking back now, I understand the politics and the complaint from the police department: “You want us to help you fight crime and testify on behalf of the victims while one of yours is volunteering to testify against us.”
At the time, I was just doing what I thought was the right thing.
Facelle called me in to size up the female ADA who was outspoken. He got his look, and then he sent me out.
Mind my own business. Like that was going to happen.
Meanwhile, back in the Appeals Bureau, I was given transcripts, transcripts, transcripts. It seemed to be official government policy to keep the little woman out of the courtroom. I remember sitting at my desk, saying to myself, “I’m dying. I need to fight. I need to try cases. I need to get into a courtroom.”
I would go to my supervisor, Carl Lodes, and ask, “When can I get out of here and start trying cases?”
He said, “You should be grateful to have a job.” It seemed to me the more I asked, the longer I stayed there. Guys were moving up quicker than I was. I remember one of my evaluations said I had a bad attitude because of my desire to get out of there. Yep. Apparently, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t apply to my circumstance. It was abundantly clear that I’d have to sneak my way into court.
Whenever I went on a sandwich run with my male counterparts, they often complained about the trials they were working, as in, “Shit, I got local court tonight,” or, “Shit, I got the circuit tonight.” I thought, God, don’t I wish I had local court tonight!
The local night courts, known as “the circuit,” were held after 5:00 p.m., and invariably required travel. Westchester is a large county, and the guys would have to drive for miles to get to Chappaqua or New Castle, and then mi
les back to White Plains or wherever they might live in Westchester. To them, pulling “the circuit” was a huge pain, especially on a Thursday or Friday night, date night to most of them.
Their pain was my golden ticket.
So one day, I asked a male ADA, “Are you trying any cases next week?”
He groaned. “A DWI in Yorktown.” Thirty miles away.
I said, “How ’bout I try it for you.”
He looked at me like I was nuts. “You?”
“I’ve read DWI appeals transcripts so I know what to do. I’ll put your name on the file. I won’t even say I did it.” There were no computers back in the late seventies and not a lot of oversight, either. I could write on the files that Ronald McDonald tried the case, and no one would be the wiser. It was the disposition of the case that mattered.
No work or travel but all the credit? His eyes betrayed his excitement. “Okay, knock yourself out,” he said.
And that was how I tried my first case. I happily traveled to Yorktown in my red Alfa Romeo, even picked the jury—something I’d never seen let alone done before—and I won! I remember the court clerk telling me the judge was actually amused by me and suggested I not stomp my foot when the court ruled against me. Baby steps . . .
As promised, I gave the male ADA credit. He was so pleased with the situation, he bragged about it to the other guys. Soon enough, other ADAs started asking me to try their local cases for them, and I, this little pip-squeak with the frizzy hair and horn-rimmed glasses, started winning misdemeanor cases all over the county.
And then I got another call from Tom Facelle’s (aka Edward G. Robinson’s) office.
“What are you doing?” he yelled when I walked in.
“What ever do you mean?” I asked. I might’ve batted my eyelashes.
“You’re in Appeals. You. Do. Not. Have. Our. Permission. To. Try. These. Cases. What makes you think you even know how to try a case?”
“Well, Mr. Facelle, I learned from the best. When I wasn’t doing appeals, I would go to the library and look for any trial transcript of yours. You were great in the courtroom. I even have notebooks of your best arguments.”
He put the cigarette down in the ashtray. The corner of his mouth turned down to suppress a smile. “You’ll try cases when we want you to try cases.” I was then invited to remove myself from his office.
Tony Morosco, my boss in Appeals, was also livid. But neither one could deny my perfect record. It wasn’t long after that that I was moved out of Appeals and into local courts to try cases to my heart’s content.
Before long, I started trying felony cases. The same male colleagues who loved me for winning their misdemeanor cases and giving them credit now hated my guts. I was a petite, pushy female, stealing cases and glory from the big, bad alphas in polyester three-piece suits. Even after I’d been winning, I heard guys say about me, “What gives this bitch the right to try cases?”
Like most men, they looked at me and didn’t know if they should be pissed off, scared, or turned on.
They were probably all of the above.
So, yes, I did get hit on as well. One guy, an investigator with a lot of attitude and slicked-back hair, sauntered up to me at the Xerox machine. “You’re looking pretty good today, Jeanine,” he said.
I was so naïve. I looked at him through my thick horn-rimmed glasses and chirped, “Oh, thank you!”
“You know, you ought to start getting around a little.”
I suddenly got it. Even though I was prosecuting rapists, I had no idea how to handle myself in a sexual situation. Half the time, I didn’t even get what was happening. I grabbed my photocopies and scurried away.
In the early eighties, my buddy Tom Facelle called me into his office again to tell me that, as a woman, I was exempt from homicide duty. I objected, saying I didn’t understand why. He told me, “Women shouldn’t be ‘rolling’ in the middle of the night on homicide duty. We can’t have our women going out there.”
I then proceeded to take that to the DA, Carl Vergari, and said that I wanted to try homicides. “Women don’t try homicides!” he blurted. “They can’t go for the jugular.”
Homicides were my glass ceiling as an ADA. I couldn’t break through. After years of bashing against it to no avail, I finally elbowed my way into trying a homicide, as the chief of the Domestic Violence Unit. No woman in the history of Westchester County had ever prosecuted a homicide before.
A man named Clarence Barger strangled his wife to death. Incredibly, his sons testified on behalf of their father at the trial. I remember telling the jury that the husband wrapped his hands around the neck of his neglected wife, and squeezed, intending to kill. This was no easy feat. I asked the medical examiner how long it would take to choke the life out of her. He said, “Thirty seconds.” So, in court, I looked at my watch for thirty seconds, so the jury would know just how long Barger throttled her. It was excruciating, and a most effective way to demonstrate his savagery.
I got a conviction in the Barger case and in every felony case after that. My critics have said, “She picked easy cases.” Bullshit. I took only the toughest cases. There was even one time when the boss called to congratulate me after his boys had referred a case to me, thinking it couldn’t be won. It was my passion to bring the jury along with me as I presented the argument, making sure they understood the pain of the victims and the ripple effect the crime had in the lives of the survivors. Prosecuting abusers like Barger isn’t only about locking up the criminals. It’s about bringing justice to the victims and smoothing out the ripples for the families.
After a while, I began to develop a reputation, and it seemed that I was in the paper more than Vergari himself because of cases that I tried or speeches that I gave. I was the consummate professional. I loved my job and I loved being able to settle scores. The men who beat women and thought they could get away with it, the men who killed women, the same men who said they would love and obey their wives, were going to prison because I was determined. Governors were appointing me to committees and I was asked routinely to testify before the NYS legislature and even the U.S. Senate.
Things started to change for me at the office. I thought that publicizing the effectiveness of the Domestic Violence Unit would not only deter batterers, but would bring victims forward. I created brochures for hospitals and police departments advising women as well as some men of their right to prosecute crimes previously hidden behind closed doors. They had my photo on them, giving women a face to relate to, not a male’s.
Then, in the midst of all the successes of my unit, the DA axed us from the budget. It seemed that homicides and assaults involving strangers were more worthy of prosecution than those involving families. Suddenly, there was no money for brochures.
I knew nothing of politics. I didn’t even know who to call. But I knew how to fight. I put together a committee of strong, like-minded individuals who believed not only that domestic violence was a tragedy for the victims, but that the unit was a tool to be used to educate future victims and batterers.
I made an impassioned plea before the county board of legislators who funded the DA’s budget, followed by victims willing to show pictures of themselves after a beating and by religious and mental health personnel. After weeks of imploring every county legislator individually and discussing with the press the importance of our mission, the Domestic Violence Unit was put back into the DA’s budget. Many in the office were none too happy with that success.
If I could do that, I knew I could one day run for DA. Step one was to become the first woman elected to the county court bench. That happened in 1989.
The view from the bench? It looked a lot like it had in the trenches. Most of the male judges wanted nothing to do with me. When I asked one for advice, he simply refused, and the others never invited me to have lunch with them.
On my first day in robes, I remember whispering to my female court clerk, “Where’s the ladies’ room?”
She explained th
at my only choices were the judges’ bathroom, where my male colleagues would be using the urinals, or the public bathroom, where I would find the families of the defendants that I’d just sentenced.
To pee or not to pee? Eventually, I had to make a choice. I used the public restroom, but took off my robe before I walked in there.
To get the cops to listen to me, I gave them coffee. To get in with the ADAs, I gave them credit. To get in with the judges, I gave them lunch. The old adage is true: The fastest way to a man’s heart, including a judge’s, is through his stomach. I wooed them with food. I brought in china plates and a silver coffee urn from home, and I transformed the judges’ dining room in the courthouse into a five-star restaurant. I made pasta, salads, and soups and bought dessert, staying up half the night to prepare the meal. I even threw in some cigars. After that, the judges loved me. They bought me an apron that said “Judge Jeanine.”
Although I grew to love Judge Peter Rosato and Justice Nick Colabella, among others, I didn’t love being a judge. I felt like a referee, making the calls “sustained,” “overruled,” and “sidebar.” It felt wrong to sit up there and moderate. I was a born fighter, and I longed to be back in the trenches, solving cases and convicting scumbags. Trying cases, I was active. I was settling scores. I was in control. On the bench, I was reactive, controlled by precedent. It wasn’t a good fit for me.
After only three years of my ten-year elected term on the bench, I made the decision to give up my robes in 1993. And they were beautiful robes at that. I had them custom made for me in black, navy, and brown, nothing too flashy, and lined with pink so I could turn up the edge and shock myself on a dreary, boring afternoon of testimony. I’m not exaggerating. There were judges who would literally fall asleep on the bench.
He Killed Them All Page 5
