Double Life. The Shattering Affair between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy...

247 Pages·2014·1.45 MB·English

by  Linda Wolfe

Double Life
The Shattering Affair between Chief Judge Sol
Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman
Linda Wolfe
For R. S. B.
Both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I
laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the
eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and
suffering.… I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial
discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is
not truly one, but truly two.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
P
ROLOGUE
ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1992, HANDSOME, YOUTHFUL SOL Wachtler, chief judge
of New York’s highest court, parked his distinctive Lincoln Town Car in front of
a gas station a few miles from his home, attached a voice-altering device to the
receiver of the station’s pay phone, and placed a call to a woman named Joy
Silverman. But just as she came on the line, Sol realized that his voice disguiser
had slipped off the receiver. Quickly, he hung up, got back in his car, and drove
away.
Two days later, with the voice device functioning properly, he phoned the
woman again, this time making the call from a hospital less than a mile from his
home.
“Mrs. Silverman? Don’t you dare hang up on me,” he warned gruffly when
she answered his ring. “And don’t you record this call. You hear me?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand you,” Joy stalled for time.
“Yeah, I know you can’t understand me,” Sol growled. He was hoping to
make Joy think he was not himself but a private detective named David Purdy.
“Well, goddamn, you better understand me. You’re gonna get a letter from me,
and you better listen to every word of it, and do what it tells you to do, or you’re
gonna be in serious deep trouble, and you’re not gonna see your daughter again.
You hear me? I’m a sick and desperate man. I need the money. And you’ll be
hearing from me.”
“What is it that you want?” Joy asked.
“Twenty thousand in hundreds and fifties,” Sol said. “The instructions will be
given to you. The delivery will be made November seventh.”
Joy attempted to prolong the conversation. She’d told the FBI she’d been
receiving ominous phone calls, and they’d instructed her to keep her caller on
the line as long as possible so they could trace his calls. “What assurances do I
have after this, that this is over?” she asked.
“You’ll know that it will be over because I need the money and I’m a sick
man,” Sol said.
“Well, what are you giving me for this?” Joy asked. “What am I going to get
for this?”
“Right after you give me the money, you’ll get the photographs. You’ll get the
tapes. You’ll get information that will blow your mind. Do you hear me? I’m
gettin’ off now, because I think you might be tracing this.”
She didn’t want him to know she was. “Well—ahh,” she said, but couldn’t
quickly enough think of anything else to say.
“You’ll be hearing from me,” Sol cut her off. “You’ll be hearing from me.”
“Well, I, what kind of—I don’t understand,” Joy stammered. “What
assurances do I—”
But the phone had gone dead. Sol had hung up.
“Remember the Silverman case?” Victor Ashrafi, chief of the criminal
division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey, said on the phone later that
day to his boss, Michael Chertoff, who was home with the flu.
“Yeah,” Chertoff snuffled.
“You’ll never believe who the caller is.”
“Who?”
“Sol Wachtler.”
Chertoff was incredulous. “Victor, you’re kidding me!”
“No,” Ashrafi said. “The FBI’s got evidence. They’ll lay it out for you when
you come in. There’s a call from his car. There are calls from places he could
easily have been.”
Chertoff grimaced. Could have been! Garbage. Hanging up, he phoned Jere
Doyle, the acting head of New Jersey’s FBI. “Jere,” he expostulated, “if you
traced the call back to Chief Justice Rehnquist, it couldn’t be more ridiculous.”
Judge Wachtler had been asked to address a judicial conference in Reno, and
on Thursday, October 8, he flew from his home in New York to Nevada. He
checked into Harrah’s Hotel and Casino and spent the evening catching up with
friends he hadn’t seen for a while. In the morning, before going to one of the
conference’s panels, he found a pay phone in an isolated corridor of the hotel
and, attaching his voice disguiser to the phone, once again called Joy. “You’re
not tracing this call?” he asked her at the start of the conversation. “You’re not
going to trace this call, are you?”
Joy said no, and he decided to accept her denial. “All right,” he said. “You
deserve an answer to your question about how you can trust me—can you hear
me now?”
“Yes, I can. Just talk slowly.”
“I was hired a year ago. To shake you down. I thought the fat pig who hired
me was from New Jersey.”
“The what? The who?” Joy interrupted him.
“The fat pig. A fat pig hired me.”
“A fat pig?”
“Yes, hired me, and I thought she was from New Jersey.”
“Right,” Joy said. “Did she give you a name?”
“I know her name, but I’m not giving it to you,” Sol said. “She gave me a lot
of shit about toxic waste and your boyfriend.”
“Right.”
“And she paid me to find out the rest, and I started calling you a year ago to
track you.”
“Talk more slowly,” Joy demanded, in order to keep him on the phone. “It’s
hard for me to understand. I don’t want to make you impatient. I’m just trying to
understand you and to hear you.”
Sol found talking to her slow going. She asked him to speak more slowly or
more loudly after virtually every sentence he uttered. He had to struggle to
convey what he wanted to say. But after a while he managed, telling her about
his compromising pictures and tapes. “Now, when you see and hear what I got,”
he said, “it’s gonna blow your mind.”
“Why is it going to blow my mind?”
“Because you know you thought I was a big fuckin’ joke. You don’t know
shit. You understand me? You don’t know shit.”
On her end of the phone, Joy was shaking. But she tried to keep her voice
steady and, remembering that the FBI had told her to try to get her caller to be
specific about any harm he planned to inflict on her or her fourteen-year-old
daughter, Jessica, led the conversation to the subject of menace. “Why are you
threatening my child?” she asked.
Sol wasn’t ready for the question. He wanted to tell her the sort of man David
Purdy was. “Now, listen to me,” he directed her. “I got diabetes, all right. I lost
one kidney and I’m losing another one. That’s why you didn’t hear from me, and
that’s why I didn’t visit Jessica this summer—you understand that? Yeah. Now,
listen to me. I’m wearing a diaper.”
“You’re what?” Joy said. “You’re wearing what?”
Sol made her be still and went on limning Purdy, his imaginary private eye
from Texas, making him sound like a grotesque straight out of the fantasies of
movie director David Lynch. “I’m wearing a diaper now. I’ve lost my teeth. I
weigh over two hundred pounds.” Then, at last, he told her what he wanted. “I
want only twenty thousand dollars. I’m not asking for a hell of a lot from you.”
“And what will you do to me, what will you do to me and my child, if I don’t
give it to you?” Joy persisted dutifully.
“If you don’t give me, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do,” he answered. “The
first thing I’m gonna do is, Jessica is going to spend Thanksgiving with me.
Okay? That’s only one thing I’m going to do to you. Number two, what I’m
going to do to you is, I’m going to take the material that I have and I’m gonna
send it to people that—I’m gonna send it all over creation. You understand that?
You won’t be able to walk down the street, lady. You understand?”
Joy had been so well coached that she didn’t express any emotion when she
heard “Purdy” threaten her with exposure. She just asked again what specifically
he had in mind doing to her child.
But Sol wouldn’t answer that question. “I’m sending you instructions out
now,” he said, changing the subject. “November seventh is the date. You
understand that? Now, listen. I’m a desperate man. I told your doorman I was
going to get new teeth. I can’t get new teeth because my gums are—I can hardly
walk now. I’m dying. I’m dying.”
Joy kept on trying to find out just what he was planning to do if she didn’t
comply. “I wanna know what you are threatening me with my child,” she said.
Sol turned ugly. “Why don’t you fucking find out, lady? Why don’t you just
fucking find out? Why don’t you just not pay me, and see what goddamn
happens?”
“To whom?” Joy, still following her instructions, asked.
But once again, Sol terminated their conversation. He hung up the phone and
began circulating among the judges and lawyers who were attending the
conference. He was, some of them would later remember, affable, friendly,
charming.
“There’s been another call,” Victor Ashrafi said to Michael Chertoff the next
day. “It was from Reno.”
“Where’s Wachtler?” Chertoff asked.
“In Reno. Giving a speech.”
“Anyone from his staff go out there with him?” Chertoff asked.
Ashrafi shook his head.
“It still could be someone trying to set him up,” Chertoff said. But he knew
that if asked to put money down on who was calling Joy, he’d have to bet
Wachtler.
He and Victor, he decided, had best meet with James Esposito, the new head
of New Jersey’s FBI. And with Doyle too. And Brzezinski and Fleming and
their supervisor, Garey Chin. They’d all better put their heads together and
decide what they were going to do about arresting the chief judge of the Court of
Appeals of the State of New York.
That same day, Sol Wachtler headed home from Reno on a flight that required
changing planes in Denver. When he boarded his plane, he had with him a small,
stamped packet. In it were instructions about when and where Joy was to drop
off the twenty thousand dollars “Purdy” wanted from her and a manila envelope
in which she was to place the money.
When he landed in Denver, he walked to a gate where there was a flight
departing for San Antonio. At the gate was a stewardess who would be assisting
on the flight. “Would you mind mailing this for me from San Antonio?” he
asked her. “It’s a gift for a friend. A handkerchief.” He was ingratiating,
seductive. He wanted, he explained, to have the woman to whom he was sending
the gift think he’d purchased it in San Antonio. He’d promised to send her
something from there.
The stewardess was accommodating. She took the packet, and when she got to
San Antonio, she mailed it for him.
She had no idea that inside it was a letter that said,
Even my assistant, a two bit hore [sic] from Queens, knew she was being
recorded last Sunday. Don’t try that on me or all bets are off.
This is the deal—if you do anything to queer it you will regret it for
the rest of your life. Tell the police or put your keystone P.I.’s on it and
you’ll be sorry. They may be good at deactivating bugs but they’ll not
outsmart me in this operation. And you can’t take a chance that you will
beat me. You will lose.
There is a laundry shop called Shanley located at 184 East 84th
between Park and Lexington Avenues. Right next door is a cellar
entrance. Have your doorman Ramón put the manila envelope which I
am enclosing in that cellar entrance stairway. The envelope is to contain
$20,000 (twenty thousand in used 100’s and 50’s).
One month later, on the morning of November 7, 1992, Joan Wachtler, blond,
slim, and unabatedly beautiful, despite her sixty years, went to Saks Fifth
Avenue to pick up some clothes she had ordered. She’d chosen a variety of
items, dresses and skirts and tops, but everything was black—she was partial to
black because it set off her pale complexion becomingly—and each of the
knitted tops could be worn with any of the knitted skirts, some short, some long.
She’d put a lot of thought into these purchases, choosing items that not only
were interchangeable but would travel well, because this was a terribly special
wardrobe. A campaign wardrobe. Her husband, Sol, was gearing up to run for
governor in the 1994 election and had asked her to accompany him to the
requisite statewide public appearances. She didn’t really want him to run—had,
in fact, begged him not to run—but he’d had his heart set on it, and at last she’d
given in and said she’d do as he asked.
Sol didn’t know about the clothes yet. When he came home this afternoon, she
was going to surprise him by showing him her purchases and telling him they
were her gift to him, the embodiment of her decision to participate in his
campaign. But she was going to tell him, too, that if he won and moved up to the
state capital in Albany, she wasn’t going to leave Long Island, where they lived.
She had a job, children and grandchildren, a home, a life of her own, here on the
Island.
She heard from him at about one in the afternoon. “Want me to bring some
bagels?” he asked, calling her on his car phone. She told him yes, and he said
he’d pick them up and be home around two.
Two o’clock came and went, and she was beginning to worry a little about
why Sol wasn’t home yet, when the phone rang again. But it wasn’t Sol. It was
some man whose voice she didn’t recognize. He didn’t know hers, either. “Are
you Mrs. Wachtler?” he asked.
She said yes, and he said, “This is the FBI.”
She thought it was one of those nuisance phone calls, someone trying to scare
her or a kid playing a puerile joke. “Who are you?” she said sternly, hoping to
challenge the caller out of his game. But the man on the phone went on insisting
he was with the FBI. Unsure, and wanting to check, she said, “Give me your
number. I’ll call you back.”
He gave her the number, and she dialed it, and it was the FBI, and this time
when the agent got on the phone, he said, “Mrs. Wachtler? We’ve arrested your
husband.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. She’d just spoken to Sol. Surely he would be