CHAPTER 18
The Prosecutor
Over the course of Joel J. Seidemann’s nearly thirty years at the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, he had tried twenty-two homicide cases by late 2009. Of those, twenty had ended in convictions. Law.com once called Seidemann’s style a “take-no-prisoners advocacy” that’s “pugnacious, unrelenting and highly effective.”
“Emotion is the key to getting convictions,” Seidemann told Law.com in an October 2009 interview. “You can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but if no one was hurt, the jury will just say ‘so what.’ It’s easier to prove a murder than a shoplifting.”
In Seidemann’s book Guilty By Reason of Stupidity, published in 2008, he wrote about dozens of cases, but he didn’t include the George Kogan homicide—the one he’d spent, by that time, nearly eighteen years on.
Even so, to his peers, Seidemann lists Manuel Martinez among his biggest cases. Seidemann also handled the prosecution of cabbie Ronald Popadich, who is serving a sentence of up to twenty-five years after pleading guilty to killing a neighbor. Popadich was accused of running down twenty-five New Yorkers in Midtown and shooting a cabbie during a three-day crime spree.
According to defense attorney Barry Levin, Barbara Kogan’s was the one case Seidemann wanted to see end in a conviction. “The Barbara Kogan case is the case of Seidemann’s career,” Levin said. “He wants to retire with a conviction. He’s obsessed with the case.”
Obsessed or not, Seidemann, then in his late fifties, was determined in his efforts to close the book on the George Kogan murder. For him, Manuel Martinez was peripheral. Nabbing, or even identifying the gunman seemed unlikely. Most of all, Seidemann wanted Barbara.
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Joel Jonathan Seidemann joined the New York Bar Association in 1980 after getting his juris doctorate from George Washington University. Before that, he’d earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.
For three years before joining the district attorney’s office in 1982, he was an associate in the trusts and estates and corporate banking departments of Shearman & Sterling. Then he moved from Midtown to 100 Centre Street in the Criminal Courts Building shared with the Manhattan Criminal Court and the Office of the District Attorney, among other agencies.
Seidemann’s second book, Guilty by Reason of Stupidity, was named “Best Book of 2008” by National Jurist, a magazine for law students. The publisher, Andrews McMeel, in its description of the author, said, “Joel J. Seidemann is a district attorney who has seen his share of courtroom stupidity during his twenty-five years of practice.” His first book, In the Interest of Justice: Great Opening and Closing Arguments of the Last 100 Years, published in 2005, was more serious, highlighting dramatic summations.
Vanity Fair quoted Seidemann in a sentencing statement he gave at a December 2009 hearing in the Brooke Astor case. Seidemann, describing Tony Marshall’s scheme to separate the Alzheimer’s-addled Mrs. Astor from her $187 million fortune, told the court, “He had the help of a crooked lawyer and the support of his wife. Grand theft Astor was a team effort.”
Writer Meryl Gordon took notice of Seidemann’s colorful statement. “If he puts out a new edition, the Astor trial might well merit a new chapter,” Gordon wrote in her Vanity Fair piece.
In his book’s acknowledgments, he called the Manhattan DA’s office “the most prestigious prosecutor’s office in the country.”
Since 1989, Seidemann has been senior trial counsel responsible for trying murder cases and other serious and complex crimes. His appointment was right in time for the George Kogan case when, on October 23, 1990, Seidemann was on homicide call at the DA’s office the morning Kogan was gunned down. “Back then,” he would later say, “I was a lot thinner.” But not much else had changed in the two decades of Seidemann’s time on the case. He was still as zealous about solving the Kogan murder and bringing the perpetrators to justice as he was on that fall morning so long ago when he arrived on the scene at East Sixty-ninth.