No One Can Stand a Toss (eBook)

Barry A. Schwartz (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
516 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-7582-8 (ISBN)

Infos

A candid, gritty, and often poignant look at criminal justice in New York City by a former trial and appellate prosecutor who rose to Chief Assistant District Attorney of Queens County, was a criminal defense lawyer and a Supreme Court Justice. Schwartz provides penetrating insight into the world of serial killers, cop killers, murderers for hire, hero cops, psycho cops, child killers, mafia beatdowns, corrupt politicians, and an imperfect legal system that usually gets it right, but sometimes gets it very wrong. His engaging and personal style makes the criminal justice world he knows so well come alive in this fast-moving, revealing, and exciting memoir.

Textauszug

1. BEGINNINGS

I did not grow up daydreaming about becoming a DA or a defense lawyer or a lawyer at all. My childhood ambition was to play the outfield for the New York Giants beside Willie Mays. When that dream died nothing replaced it.

School and I were mortal enemies. The word “underachiever” regularly was thrown around at parent-teacher meetings. My parents did their best with me, but I was a hard case.

Me when a student at Penn State

I went to college because not to have done so would have created a family bloodbath that still would be reverberating from my father’s grave. So why bother not to? Penn State seemed like a good choice --- mostly because the idea of being around a big-time football program sounded like fun. And it was. Mediocre academic performance (do as little as possible; show up as infrequently as I could get away with) continued.

The decision to go to law school was equally uninspired. It was a way to postpone figuring out what to do with the adult part of my life. I must have done well enough on the LSAT’s to get into St.John’s because there was nothing else I did at PSU that warranted their attention. I began law school in September 1967.

Six months into my predictably moribund law school career, the most important happy accident in my life occurred. While I was lolling around the house during intersession, my father came up with the bright idea that we should attend a meeting of the Queens Valley Homeowners Association where Tom Mackell (then the District Attorney of Queens County) was scheduled to speak. Meeting him, my father reasoned, would be “good” for me. As I was unaccustomed to doing anything that was “good” for me, I resisted his suggestion. But since it was obvious from my lolling that I had absolutely nothing else to do – and since the meeting was at my old elementary school a half a block from our house,1 I really had no ammo to turn him down. So we went.

Tom Mackell

Tom Mackell was an Irish politician straight out of Central Casting: a red, jowly face, white eyebrows in need of a trim below a shock of white hair, and a body comfortably 50 pounds overweight. Tom had a lovely Irish tenor voice, which he regularly used to sing the same three staples. O Solo Mio, My Yiddishe Mama, and, of course, Danny Boy. At political rackets, he would add When My Leader Smiles at Me.2

Another staple of Mackell’s routine was to look around the audience and greet by name people he knew. My father’s connection with Tom was thin. He knew a former law partner of Tom’s and, through him, had met Tom socially on a couple of occasions years ago. That was it. But it was enough for Tom to do his thing. My father and to my amazement, me, both were singled out and greeted by Tom as “old friends.” Years later, Tom told me that he had taught himself to memorize the name of everyone he met, using a mnemonic to fix it in his mind.

Me and Gene Cimini at Giants Stadium

It worked. Long after Tom had fallen from grace, my law partner Gene Cimini and I ran into him while walking to court. Before I had a chance to introduce Gene, Tom turned to him, gave him a warm, two handed handshake and said, “Gene, it’s so good to see you.” Gene was amazed and totally flattered. He spent the next several minutes trying for the life of him to figure out if he ever had met Tom. The personal touch: There was nothing quite like it and Gene --- and I’m sure a million other people --- never forgot it.

When the speech at that historic Homeowners’ Association meeting was over, my father said, “Let’s go meet the DA.” This, too, went completely against the negative, snarling, barely- out-of-adolescence me but, once again, I was sort of stuck with my father’s program that night. When we buttonholed Tom, he asked what I was doing.

“Nothing, really,” I replied. “Just finished my first set of finals at St. John’s Law. I’m really not doing anything now.”

“Is that right?” Tom said. “Well, you come in and see me. Be at my office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll put you to work.”

I was caught flatfooted and, well, after all, he was the District Attorney. So 9 o’clock the next day, I showed up to be ushered into his office. Tom gave me a brief and hearty “Welcome aboard!” and then turned me over to Bob Nahman, who one day would become the Surrogate of Queens County. Back then, he was a stuttering, prematurely bald, enthusiastic proselytizer of Tom and Mike Drucker, the man for whom I would work for the next six months. Insiders called Bob Nahman “the Shark,” but that nickname was more a recognition of Nahman’s utter worship of Drucker, the true Shark. Bob learned to be calculating from Mike, but he was hardly in Mike’s weight class. Mike was a whirling dervish, a top-notch political operative who had engineered Tom Mackell’s ascension to the DA’s post a few years before.

Mike’s major mission when I met him in 1968 was to make Tom New York’s governor. To accomplish this goal, Mike employed his remarkable energy, drive, and nimbleness of thought to manage God-knows-how-many-projects simultaneously. The pace around him was exhilarating as he barked out orders to whomever wandered into his office --- all the while fielding and making phone calls, dictating memos, and (almost as a sideline) running the DA’s office for Tom. This latter responsibility was all the more amazing because --- unlike everyone else at the top of the pecking order in the Queens DA’s office --- Mike did not have a law degree. and was not even an ADA. This was, after all, a law office. Everyone else was an ADA. Mike held the rather unglamorous and non-descriptive title of Executive Secretary. There was a Chief Assistant District Attorney, but nobody who knew anything about that office had any doubt as to where the real power resided.

Bob Nahman escorted me into Mike’s office. Mike barely looked up and, with zero introductory schmooze, handed me a sheaf of papers and said, “Set up a meeting for Tom on February 15th at 10 am in the conference room with all the heads of security for the airlines.”

“A meeting?” asked I. “About what?”

“Cargo theft,” said Mike, as he turned to take a phone Call even idiot me realized that Mike had invented the subject of the meeting on the spot. I was barely 22 years old and utterly clueless as to what to do next. One thing was certain: I was not gonna get even the slightest hint from Mike. Nahman made me understand that my fifteen seconds with Mike was over and guided me out of the man’s presence and into the secretarial suite. He then disappeared into his own cubby-hole to do whatever he was supposed to do.

L-r: me and Bob Nahman; Mike Drucker and Clarissa Gilbert Weiss. Like the photo of Nahman and me, some of the pictures in this book were taken many years after the events being recounted

I stood in front of a thin, well-coiffed, always in a suit, middle-aged woman named Lil Bachman, who was Mike’s principal secretary. She smiled sympathetically, with the look of someone who had seen this routine before. Within seconds, a brassy young woman came in and, with a great big smile, joyously crowed, “You’ve been Druckerized!” Then Clarissa Gilbert began my education as a member of Mike’s world.

Clarissa’s tutorial was heavily sprinkled with observations about what a bastard Mike was -– although it was obvious that she and everyone around him absolutely loved him --- and I soon learned that nothing pleased Mike more than when Clarissa or any one of us called him a bastard.

The drill was that Mike would fire out orders with no guidance, as he had done with me. If the job got done, the only way you knew that he was pleased with your work was that he would give you more work. “Good job” or “Thanks” were not part of the drill. Nor was small talk. It worked. The gratification came when you measured up to the breakneck pace that Mike set for all of us.

Setting up the cargo theft meeting turned out to be far easier than I anticipated. I was an unpaid part time volunteer on my first day on the job, sitting in an empty office with a desk, a phone, a bunch of boxes, and a Yellow Pages directory (remember them?). I contacted the heads of security of the airlines that flew in and out of JFK --- which was every major airline in the world. I telephoned KLM or Varig or TWA and ask for the head of security. I told everyone that I was calling on behalf of Queens DA Tom Mackell. The magic words. No one asked why I was calling. No one foisted me onto some lesser light. Just about everyone was available for this meeting about cargo theft. And just about everyone came.

The cargo theft meeting was a complete success. Its purpose was totally political and all...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.11.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-7582-5 / 1667875825
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-7582-8 / 9781667875828