I looked at my briefcase beside me. Some of the paper assets were negotiable, and there was a cool million in cash. The Brazilians didn’t ask many questions when you deposited a million U.S. in the bank, except maybe what color checks you wanted.
I looked at my watch. They were probably at Foley Square by now, but the booking process, even if it was speeded up, still had to be done according to law; there would be a body search, fingerprinting, photographs, a personal history taken, and forms to fill out. Only then would they haul Bellarosa in front of a waiting judge. So it was possible for me to charge into the courthouse, find out where Bellarosa was to be arraigned, and get into the courtroom on time. It was possible.
I remember I had a house closing in Oyster Bay once, and my car broke down . . . but maybe that’s not a good comparison.
Well, but what could I do? I took down the license plate numbers of our escorts, stared back at them, then picked up a newspaper lying on the seat. The Mets had beaten Montreal and were two games out of first place now. I said to my friends up front, “Hey, how ’bout them Mets?”
Vinnie said, “Yeah, you see that last night?”
We did baseball chatter awhile. I knew we had to have something in common besides the same boss and the fear of our lives.
There was a car phone in the rear, and I could have called Susan, but I had no desire to. The next time she heard anything of me would be on the afternoon news. But then I remembered she didn’t read, hear, or watch the news. But maybe she’d make an exception in this case. Thanks for the challenge, Susan.
We approached the tunnel tolls, and I looked at my watch. This was going to be very close.
We lost our escort at the Midtown Tunnel and got on the FDR Drive. Lenny turned out to be a better driver than a conversationalist, which is saying very little, and he got us quickly into and through the narrow, crowded streets of lower Manhattan. But the closer we got to Foley Square, the slower the traffic was moving. I looked at my watch. It was nine-forty, and I estimated that Mancuso and Bellarosa could have been at Foley Square for as long as thirty minutes. The wheels of criminal justice move slowly, but they’re capable of a quick grind if someone such as Alphonse Ferragamo is standing there squirting oil on them.
But the wheels of the Cadillac were not moving fast at all. In fact, we were stalled in traffic near City Hall Park, and the first arraignments would begin at ten
A
.
M
.
Damn it.
I grabbed my briefcase and opened the door.
“Where you goin’?’’ asked Vinnie.
“Rio.’’ I exited the car before he could process that.
It was hot and humid outside the air-conditioned Cadillac, and it’s not easy to run in wing-tip shoes despite their name, but all lawyers have done this at one time or another, and I headed up Centre Street toward Foley Square at a good clip. On the way, I practiced my lines. “Your Honor! Don’t bang that gavel! I got money!”
The streets and sidewalks were crowded, and many of the people in this section of town were civil servants of the city, state, or federal government who, by nature, were in no particular hurry. However, there were a few other Brooks Brothers runners whom I took to be attorneys on missions similar to mine. I fell in behind a good broken-field runner, and within ten minutes I was at Foley Square, covered with sweat, my arms aching from the weight of the briefcase. I’m in pretty good shape, but running through Manhattan heat and carbon monoxide in a suit is equivalent to about three sets of tough tennis at the club.
I paused at the bottom of the forty or fifty courthouse steps and contemplated the summit a moment, then took a deep breath and charged toward the colossal columned portico. I had a mental image of my passing out and of good samaritans crowding around me, loosening my Hermès tie, and relieving me of my five-million-dollar burden. Then I’d have to hitchhike to Rio.
But the next thing I knew, I was inside the cooler lobby of the Federal Courthouse, walking purposefully across the elegant ivory-colored marble floor, then through a metal detector, which didn’t go off. But a U.S. Marshal, obviously intrigued by my disheveled appearance and huge briefcase, asked me to put the briefcase on a long table and open it. So, there I was, in this massive lobby amid the hustle and bustle of a courthouse at ten
A
.
M
., opening a briefcase stuffed with wads of money. If you’ve ever emptied a bag of dirty underwear at Customs, you know the feeling.
The marshal, an older man who probably thought all marshals should look and act like Wyatt Earp, stood there with his thumbs hooked in his belt, chewing a wad of something. Despite his cowboy pose, he was not wearing boots or spurs or anything like that. Instead, he was dressed in the standard marshal’s courthouse uniform, which consisted of gray slacks, white shirt, red tie, and a blue blazer with the U.S. Marshal’s service patch on the breast pocket. His shoes were penny loafers, and his six-gun was not strapped around his waist, but was somewhere else, probably in a shoulder holster. I was very disappointed in this outfit, but chose not to remark on it. Wyatt Earp inquired, “What’s that?”
It’s money, you stupid ass.
“It’s bail money, Marshal.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yup. I have a client being arraigned this morning.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. And in fact, I don’t want to miss it, so—”
“Why’re you all sweaty?”
“I was actually running so as not to be late for the arraignment.”
“You nervous about something?”
“No. I was running.”
“Yeah? You got some kind of identification?”
“I believe I do.’’ I pulled my wallet out and showed him my driver’s license with my photo, and my bar association card. A few other marshals were standing around now, watching me and the money. Wyatt Earp passed my driver’s license around and everyone took a look. Needless to say, a crowd was gathering, enchanted by the green stuff, so I closed the briefcase.
After my license made the rounds, including, I think, a passing janitor, I got my ID back. Earp asked me, “Who’s your client, Counselor?”
I hesitated, then replied, “Bellarosa, Frank.”
The marshal’s eyebrows arched. “Yeah? They got that sucker? When?”
“He was arrested this morning. I really want to get to the courtroom before he comes before the judge.”
“Take it easy. He’ll be lucky if he sees a judge by lunchtime. You new around here?”
“Sort of.’’ I added, “I need to speak with my client before the arraignment. So I’ll just be on my way.’’ And I was.
“Wait!”
I stopped. The marshal moseyed over to me, sort of bowlegged as if he’d been on a horse all morning, or maybe he had hemorrhoids. He said, “You know where the lockup is?”
“Actually, no.”
“Well, I’ll tell ya. You go to the third floor—”
“Thanks.”
“Hold on. The lockup is between the marshal’s area where your guy is going to be fingerprinted and photographed, and . . .’’ He stopped talking and moved closer to me. “You gotta go to the bathroom or something?”
I guess I seemed a little fidgety, and Wyatt could see it. He looked suspicious again, so I took the bull by the horns. “Look, Marshal, my client is going to be processed very quickly because of who he is. In fact, he’s already processed. I do not want to miss the arraignment because if I do, he will not be happy with me.’’ I almost added, “
Capisce
?’’ but the guy looked Irish.
He grinned. “Yeah, you don’t want to miss that arraignment, Counselor. You know where to go?”
“Third floor?”
“Right you are. Your guy been indicted and arrested, or just arrested and waiting indictment?”
“Indicted and arrested.”
“Okay, then you don’t want the Magistrate, you want the District Judge, Part One.”
Mamma mia
, this guy was going to give me a course in the federal court system. In truth, I didn’t know any of this, but neither did I care. I just wanted to get to the third floor before it was too late. However, I didn’t want to look panicky, which would only cause him to be more helpful or more suspicious. I smiled. “Part One. Right.”
“Yeah. Part One. Third floor.’’ He looked at his watch. “Hey, it’s after ten. You better get a move on.”
“Yes, I’d better.’’ I walked, not ran, toward the elevators. I heard him call after me, “I hope you got enough money there.”
I hope I have enough time, Wyatt. I took the elevators up to the third floor.
As bad luck would have it, the elevator stopped outside the Magistrate’s Court, not Part One, so I was already lost. I picked a direction and walked. There were dozens of handcuffed prisoners in the corridors of justice with their arresting officers, U.S. Marshals, FBI men, attorneys for the government, attorneys for the accused, witnesses, and all sorts of people, none of whom looked happy to be there. There is something uniquely depressing about the hallways in any criminal court; the prisoners, the guards, the visible evidence of human frailty, misery, and evil.
I picked a corridor and went down it. The federal courts are distinctly different from state or municipal courts in many respects. For one thing, you usually get a higher-quality criminal, such as Wall Street types and other white-collar rip-off artists who were stupid enough to use the U.S. mails for their schemes or to branch out across state lines. Occasionally, you get a spy or traitor, and now and then (but not often enough) you get a congressman or member of the Cabinet. But I’d heard, and now I saw with my own eyes, that with the increase in federal drug cases, the quality of federal defendants was somewhat lower than in years past. In fact, I saw men who looked as if they were definitely part of the international pharmaceutical trade, and I could see why Frank Bellarosa, tough guy that he was, would just as soon avoid trouble with these new guys.
In fact, I didn’t even want to be in the same hallway as these dangerous felons, even if they
were
cuffed. For one thing, they smelled, and the stink was overpowering. I had smelled that odor in state criminal court once and knew it; it was the smell of the junkie, a sort of sugary-sweet smell at first whiff, but underlying it was a stench like a rotting animal. I almost gagged as I walked down the corridor. John Sutter, what are you doing here? Get back to Wall Street where you belong. No, damn it, see it through. Where’re your balls, you finicky twit? Push on.
I pushed on, through the stinking corridor of Magistrate Court, and found Part One, where the defendants were uncuffed and smelled better.
I asked a deputy marshal, “Has Frank Bellarosa come before a judge yet?”
“Bellarosa? The Mafia guy? I didn’t even know he was here.”
“He’s supposed to be here. I’m his attorney. Could he have been arraigned already?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Judge Rosen’s been doing arraignments for a while.”
“Where is his courtroom?”
“Her. Judge Rosen’s a woman.”
“How many judges are arraigning this morning?”
“One, same as every morning. You new here?”
“I guess so. Where is Judge Rosen’s courtroom?”
He told me and added, “She’s a bitch on bail, especially for wiseguy types.”
So, with that encouraging news, I walked quickly but with no outward signs of the anxiety that was growing inside me to the door of the courtroom marked
JUDGE SARAH ROSEN
and opened it.
Indeed, the court was in session, and two marshals eyed me as I entered. Sitting in the benches where spectators normally sit at a trial were about thirty people, mostly men, and almost all, I suspected, were defense attorneys, though there might be some arresting officers as well, and perhaps a few defendants who were deemed not dangerous and thus were uncuffed. I looked for my client’s blue suit and for Mancuso’s distinctive pate among the heads and shoulders but did not see either.
There was an arraignment in progress. A defendant and his attorney stood in front of Judge Sarah Rosen. To the right of the defendant was a young assistant U.S. Attorney, a woman of about twenty-five. She was in profile, and for some reason, she reminded me of my daughter, Carolyn. The courtroom was quiet, yet everyone up front was speaking so softly that I could catch only a word or two. The only thing I heard clearly was the defendant, a middle-aged, well-dressed man, say, “Not guilty,’’ as if he meant it and believed it.
The criminal justice system in America is basically an eighteenth-century morality play that the actors try to adapt to twentieth-century society. The whole concept of arraignments, for instance, the public reading of the charges, the haggling over bail in open court, is somewhat archaic, I think. But I suppose it’s better than other systems where justice is done in dark, private places.
One of the marshals was motioning me to sit down, so I sat.
The arraignment in progress was finished, and the defendant was led away in cuffs, bail denied. Not good.