To be an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York requires commitment to absolute integrity and fair play; to candor and fairness in dealing with adversaries and the courts; to careful preparation, not making any assumptions or leaving anything to chance; and never proceeding in any case unless convinced of the correctness of one’s position or the guilt of the accused.
—certificate presented by U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour to his assistants, 1973; presented to all AUSAs for several years to follow, including AUSA Stuart GraBois
Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it.
—“J’Accuse,” Emile Zola’s open letter to the French president in the newspaper L’Aurore, regarding the Dreyfus Affair, January 13, 1898
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois usually pulled into a parking space at One St. Andrew’s Plaza and placed his government-issue permit onto the dashboard. He was at his desk by 7:30 in the morning, having retrieved his voicemail messages along with his second cup of coffee. He was an early riser anyway, and he liked to start the day before the halls were full. He got his best work done in the morning, although he rarely left the office for the commute home from lower Manhattan before 6:30 in the evening. AUSAs often juggled dozens of cases, and in GraBois’s unit, Major Crimes, they might be interviewing witnesses for a fraud case in the morning and be in court for a bank robbery case in the afternoon, rarely seeing the same faces two days in a row. It was a full plate, but GraBois loved the variety, and he loved the work.
GraBois seemed taller than his six feet, and he cut an imposing figure. Everything about him bespoke a sense of strength. Steely hazel eyes with steel gray hair to match. A big man, not heavy, but solid; an immovable force. He dressed meticulously, in nicely turned-out conservative suits. The dark suits, the ever-ready dark shades, it all said: I am a Federal Prosecutor.
Stu GraBois had been in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for three years, but today was his first full day on the Etan Patz case. The day before his immediate boss, chief of the Major Crimes Unit Barry Bohrer, had given him the assignment. It was late May 1985, the sixth anniversary of the boy’s disappearance. Etan had now been missing almost as long as he’d been living safely at home, and the odds of his recovery were growing longer every day. The Patzes were still fielding requests from all over the country for his photo because of possible sightings, but his beautiful six-year-old portraits couldn’t help much to identify him at age twelve and a half. Although New York artist Nancy Burson had created an experimental computerized age progression of the boy at the FBI’s request, his parents were loath to distribute it. If it turned out not to look like him, searchers would be thrown off track.
Instead, it was the six-year-old image of Etan, measuring eight feet by nine feet, that looked down on Times Square. Chosen by the New York City Police Foundation, his was the first missing child’s portrait to be displayed there on an electronic Diamond Vision billboard. His elfin visage—laughing broadly, head thrown back—blinked on the screen twice an hour that spring, to be replaced after a month by another missing child.
Indeed it seemed as though everywhere you looked there were now pictures of missing children. The previous year, a handful of midwestern dairies had begun featuring them on their waxy milk cartons and the idea had taken off. By the spring of 1985, more than seven hundred independent dairies—almost half the nation’s eighteen hundred—were putting milk on the breakfast kitchen table along with small faces and toll-free hotline numbers. Missing children were showing up on every imaginable blank surface: pizza boxes, grocery bags, gas bills, highway toll tickets. And they yielded highly publicized results. A California runaway called home after her face stared back at her from a milk carton. An eleven-year-old whose mother had abducted her was returned home after an informant saw her picture and tipped off police. Two sisters whose parents were locked in a custody battle eventually turned up in Las Vegas with their father, who had kept them hidden inside his hotel room for fear that the advertising campaign would expose him.
Almost every one of these children, both the ones recovered and all those on the pizza boxes and milk cartons to begin with, were abducted by one parent from another in a vicious custody dispute. Or they were runaways. And while the parents of those recovered children were grateful for the massive public campaign, some were beginning to question the statistics that fueled such an onslaught of what critics called fearmongering hype. Contrary to public perception and these nebulous statistics, only a tiny percentage of missing children were snatched by unknown intruders, although actual studies didn’t confirm that until some years later. Eventually, it would be determined that the figure for annual stranger abductions across the United States was not in the tens of thousands or even thousands, as some feared, but in the low hundreds. Child advocates were undaunted. Try telling a frantic mother whose abusive ex-husband has stolen her child that it’s not kidnapping, they argued. And even if stranger abductions are a small fraction of the numbers, if just one child is returned to his parents unharmed, how can anyone be against taking action?
In fact, when Stuart GraBois took on the Patz investigation, it was the only open missing child case in the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York. Federal authorities had gotten involved back in late 1982, with the NAMBLA bust in Wareham, Massachusetts, which raised the specter of interstate activity. If someone had taken Etan across state lines, they could be charged with the federal crime of kidnapping. As a federal prosecutor GraBois would develop such a case for prosecution, aided by investigators who had already worked the case for some time. By this point his team comprised FBI agent Ken Ruffo, along with two NYPD Missing Persons detectives, Robert Shaw and Owen J. Byrne.
Ruffo came to see GraBois the Friday after Memorial Day. The agent handed the prosecutor a folder of background reports, to introduce GraBois to the major points of the case. “You’ll get the rest of it next week, but this should start you off,” the agent said.
“Okay, I’ll read through it, get familiar with the other material when it comes and then I’ll give you a call.” GraBois took the papers home to read over the weekend. Typically, when he started a case, he’d read the briefing folder meticulously, making detailed notes, to be fully up to speed before adding his own paperwork to it.
The next week, a half-dozen brown cardboard storage cartons arrived in GraBois’s office. Every one of them was full of folders thicker than the one he had already read. He stacked them up against a wall and pulled the first box over to his desk. He leafed through the chronological files to locate the first day, May 25, 1979.
On that day in 1979, Stuart GraBois was not yet an AUSA, but he was already with the Justice Department, as a senior trial attorney in the New York office of their Anti-Trust Division. May 25 happened to be his father’s birthday, and the extended GraBois family would have gathered that weekend to mark it.
There had been another cause to celebrate: the recent birth of Stuart and Bonnie GraBois’s son, Andrew. Arriving ten years after his sister, Melissa, he was a long-hoped-for baby. For the first time three generations of GraBois men would be at the birthday party, all three native New Yorkers.
Stuart GraBois grew up with his younger sister, Marsha, the children of first-generation Jewish-American parents, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Theirs was an insular, close-knit neighborhood, where alliances formed not by religion or ethnicity but by block, even by building. The kids moved easily from apartment to apartment in a large complex that seemed more a small village, and they always felt protected. Everyone watched out for everyone else.
From an early age, GraBois internalized his family’s deep reverence for those who upheld justice and contempt for those who did not, starting with the experience of his paternal grandparents, who had lived in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Before leaving Paris for New York in 1906, GraBois’s grandfather had seen firsthand the damage of France’s infamous “Affaire Dreyfus,” and would often relate to his grandson with deep anger and sadness the decade-long travesty. The elder GraBois vividly recalled the injustice done to Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely convicted of treason and imprisoned for four years on the notorious Devil’s Island off the coast of South America before his name was finally cleared. Dreyfus’s superiors initially had believed he was guilty of passing state secrets to enemy Germany, but later lied and schemed when they discovered their error.
“That’s why we came to America,” Benjamin GraBois would tell his grandson. “Because justice is possible. Here you have a chance to go to school to make sure people get treated fairly.”
The idea of justice by law captivated GraBois. In his middle and high school yearbooks he always wrote the same life goal: to be a lawyer. In his first month at American University’s Washington College of Law he met his wife-to-be, Bonnie, an undergraduate studying political science, and by the time he got his law degree they’d already been married a year.
In 1967, fresh out of law school, GraBois worked as a Legal Aid investigator before taking the bar, using his new legal training to interview witnesses, gather evidence, and hone his persistent style. After admission to the bar, he stayed at Legal Aid and proved himself a feisty litigator with a bulldog reputation, no matter who his opponent might be.
Like most criminal defense attorneys, GraBois’s cases usually ended in plea bargains, moving through the courts with conveyer-belt efficiency. Once, a client of GraBois’s in a double narcotics charge bucked the system, refused the plea, and demanded a trial. The judge involved was renowned for his laziness. He had no interest in suffering through an actual trial, and became contentious when told the defendant wouldn’t plead and planned instead to offer his mother as an alibi.
“That’s ridiculous,” the judge snapped in the court proceeding. “Mother, get up here.”
GraBois watched the elderly black woman stand up and move timidly toward the front of the court.
“Her name is Mrs. Johnson, Your Honor,” GraBois politely asserted.
“Don’t tell me what to say.” The air was getting charged. GraBois was already smarting at the idea that his client might be deprived of his right to trial. He thought the judge’s words were demeaning to this woman, who clearly thought any authority figure was intimidating, let alone a black-robed white man on a raised bench who would probably send her son to prison.
“One more word out of you, Mr. GraBois, and I’ll hold you in contempt of court.”
“Come on, Your Honor, my client…”
“That’s it!” The judge was livid. “Two hundred dollars or five days in jail.”
“Judge, I work for Legal Aid.” GraBois couldn’t believe the man was serious, so he joked back. “I don’t have two hundred dollars.”
“Put him in!” roared the judge, who was nearly apoplectic. As the bailiff moved to lead GraBois away, the judge made him an offer. “If you apologize, I’ll have you released.”
“What am I supposed to apologize for?” GraBois asked.
After several hours behind bars, even the admiration of his fellow inmates wasn’t making his stay any less miserable, but GraBois refused to accede to a man he himself held in contempt. GraBois’s boss at Legal Aid, whom GraBois respected enormously, came to see him and made his own plea.
“Listen, don’t apologize. The man is such an idiot; just say something that sounds good, and he’ll buy it.”
“Your Honor,” GraBois announced in open court after being released from the cell, “I had no intent to be contemptuous of the court’s robes.” The judge seemed to chew on this, so GraBois repeated it.
“I’ll take that as an apology,” the judge finally said. GraBois’s client went to trial and was found guilty, which he clearly was. “That’s not the point,” GraBois liked to say whenever he told that story. “He had a right to a fair trial, and if he wanted to exercise it, you shouldn’t railroad him into a plea, just because you think it’s a waste of time.”
GraBois knew his days as a public defender were coming to an end when he found himself itching to prosecute some of his clients. The final straw came when he was interviewing a client in his cell and the man coldly detailed his physical and sexual abuse of a child. GraBois realized then that he still wanted to be a defender, it was just that he wanted to defend the victims.
When GraBois arrived at the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York in 1982, he knew it was where he’d always wanted to be. By this time, he was older than many of his fellow AUSAs, who often come to the U.S. Attorney’s Office just a few years out of law school, and typically stay long enough to make their bones as litigators before moving on to high-billing private firms. GraBois came into the job not only having had several years’ experience in the trenches as a Legal Aid investigator and defense attorney, but he was the kind of born and bred New Yorker who knew his way around town.
On the seventh floor of One St. Andrew’s Plaza, GraBois’s new office faced the church of the same name. Police bagpipers would practice in the church basement, sometimes preparing for the next funeral of a fallen officer, and the notes would waft up through the window. The poignant strains provided a fitting soundtrack as GraBois prepared cases against drug dealers, counterfeiters, and bank robbers.
But the prosecutor had a special affinity for pursuing criminals who took advantage of the most vulnerable victims—the elderly, women, and children. Maybe there was something of the white knight in his instincts, but all his life GraBois had believed in evening the odds, and, if he did his job right, even reversing them. A fraud scam that bilked senior citizens out of their Social Security checks was not a high crime, but he would picture someone his grandmother’s age who couldn’t buy groceries, and he would push hard for the toughest sentence. His unswerving, never-give-up, even-if-it-ends-in-a-head-on-collision mentality followed him from the Public Defender’s Office, whether it meant facing down the criminals or a power-hungry judge.
At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Stuart GraBois felt that he was among his own. There was an ethos, a real spirit, that permeated the office. Many years before he’d arrived at the Southern District of New York, then U.S. attorney Whitney North Seymour had issued certificates—standards of performance—to each assistant, and the tradition continued beyond Seymour’s tenure.
“To be an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York is a badge of honor that must be earned,” the dictum began, and then demanded a mix of virtues, both professional and personal: integrity, candor, and fairness; precision, thoughtfulness, decency; personal courage and conviction, among others. GraBois knew that some outside the office might think it corny, but he also believed every AUSA lived by those words.
He framed the certificate and hung it on his wall. The powerful words, especially the last sentence, served as a reminder of his grandfather’s passionate defense of Alfred Dreyfus. Never proceed with a case, it cautioned, “unless convinced of the correctness of one’s position, or the guilt of the accused.”
In one of his early cases, agents working with him had wired an informant who then got his target on tape apparently making admissions to a series of armed robberies. The suspect had an extensive record and a history of pleading guilty. Despite the strong evidence, something bothered GraBois—why this one time did the suspect not want to take the plea? Because I didn’t do this one, the man was adamant.
Both the informant and the suspect were Hispanic and spoke Spanish on the tape, which made it harder to ID the voices. GraBois learned that with sophisticated technology, investigators in Washington were able to analyze Spanish-speaking voices, so he decided to go one step further and sent them the tape. The results revealed that the informant had deceived authorities—he’d been talking to someone else on the tape. The news came in late on a Friday night, as GraBois was headed out the door. He figured the judge was gone for the day, and by keeping the perp in for the weekend, he would probably prevent a few more crimes. But that would be wrong. He was surprised and relieved to reach the judge in his chambers, who immediately arranged for the man’s release. It was the kind of thing GraBois knew anyone in his office would have done.
Before GraBois was assigned to the Patz case in 1985, it had been overseen by the AUSA in the next office over. GraBois would watch as agents and detectives filed in to see her from time to time, men he knew from some of his own cases, and he would chat with them after they left. Sometimes they’d stop by beforehand to run a line of investigation by him. “Do you think this has any legs?” they would ask, a dress rehearsal before they’d go onstage next door. When his neighbor left in 1985 for a judgeship, GraBois was eager for the challenge.
The Patz case had always been an enigma, with its crazy patchwork of leads and long list of amorphous suspects. Even with the unlikely prospect of a miraculous breakthrough, the issue of jurisdiction had always lurked beneath the surface. If after months, even years, of exhaustive labor, the investigation finally broke to reveal that Etan had never been taken out of New York, this wouldn’t be the Feds’ case to try. A subsequent prosecution would be turned over to the local district attorney. That would mean all of the work, and then a handoff.
But GraBois didn’t care about any of that. He wanted the Patz case. Maybe it appealed to him as a father. How could a parent survive that? Or maybe there was something about the challenge of a case that had eluded so many before him, that had as much of an impact on him as it did on so many New Yorkers who’d felt violated themselves by this heinous crime. He’d followed the case in the press since he’d first scanned the chilling headlines over Sunday morning coffee in May 1979. He’d often thought of six-year-old Etan, walking alone on his own street for the first time, and how he’d seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth.
But before he could move forward on his new case, GraBois had to sort through its overwhelming history. It wasn’t so much that there were no leads; there were too many leads and all of them frustratingly sketchy. They ran off in twenty different directions, dense paths he had to hack his way through, if only to post a “Dead End” sign. He got a morale boost in the first days when he ran into one of his bosses, the head of the Criminal Division, on the stairwell. The men stopped to chat, the usual talk about baseball and family, before turning to casual office talk.
“What are you working on these days?” Howard Wilson asked him.
“I’m taking over the Patz case,” GraBois replied. “I’m really getting into it. There’s so much there.”
“You’re kidding! C’mon, let’s go upstairs,” Wilson said, “and we’ll tell Rudy.”
U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani’s office was one flight above GraBois’s. His assistants numbered in the hundreds, so they were spread out all over the nine-story building. Giuliani’s presence was keenly felt, though, from the early morning Pavarotti arias coming out of his large corner office with the expansive views of the Brooklyn Bridge, and his agile fielding on first base for the office softball team, to his hard-charging, high-profile attacks on the mob and Wall Street greed. Despite some criticism of his aggressive prosecutions, inside his office he was seen as a crusader with an intense loyalty for those who stood with him on his mission.
When GraBois and Howard Wilson stuck their heads into Giuliani’s office to relay the news, the U.S. attorney brightened.
“That’s terrific,” Giuliani said. “You should know that this office is behind you 100 percent. Do whatever you have to do. I’ll give you anything you need.”
GraBois went back downstairs with the sense he’d just come away with a blessing from on high. He was passionate and eager to dig into this new case, but, looking at all the boxes spread out in front of him, it helped to know the big guns felt that way too.