CHAPTER 10

CARRIE BRZEZINSKI, SPECIAL AGENT OF THE FBI’S NEWARK, New Jersey, office, didn’t think she was going to like Joy Silverman the day she and her partner, Bill Fleming, were assigned to meet her and look over those ominous letters and cards she’d been receiving. It was a Friday, the day after Joy went to Washington to speak with William Sessions, who had sent the case to Brzezinski’s office because many of the letters Joy had received had been postmarked from New Jersey. “My expectation,” Brzezinski remembered, “was someone—well, all I knew was she lived on Park Avenue, and you have your expectations, and mine was, she’s going to be someone hard to deal with, or who’ll demand a lot.” So Brzezinski, who hailed from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and hadn’t lived long in the metropolitan area, wasn’t all that eager when she went down to the lobby of the FBI building to get Joy and bring her upstairs to the office. Then, the first thing that happened was that she forgot Joy’s last name. “I felt like an idiot! But I remembered her first name, so I said, ‘Joy?’ like I knew her, and she goes, ‘Yeah.’ She was very nice. She wasn’t turned off by it. She wasn’t, you know, uppity about it.”

They went up to the office, and Brzezinski introduced Joy to her partner. Joy brought out the documents and the three of them looked them over and talked. “Joy was very scared,” Brzezinski noticed. “And that showed. She broke down and she was crying.”

“Who do you think is doing this?” her partner Fleming asked. “Is there anybody who might be angry with you for any reason?”

Joy told them about Sol, but Brzezinski and Fleming were reluctant to focus solely on him.

It could be Wachtler, Brzezinski thought. Or it could be someone trying to set him up. Or then again, it could be someone else. She’s going through a divorce. It could be the husband. She’s got a boyfriend. It could be the ex-wife. She’s got doormen at her building. You never know what doormen might be involved in. Plus she’s a wealthy woman. She’s got a staff of people who aren’t so wealthy. Did any of them have a grudge against her?

Getting Joy to tell her and Fleming about anyone and everyone who might have reason to harass her, she drew up what the FBI calls a “universe” of suspects. Then, she and Fleming sent the cards and letters Joy had brought in with her down to the FBI’s Washington headquarters so that the handwriting could be analyzed, the paper examined for fingerprints, and the typing compared with that on other typewritten threats and extortion notes in the bureau’s capacious files. They also asked the FBI’s Houston office to check on whether there was a private investigator anywhere in Texas with the name David Purdy.

On Monday, the two agents met with Michael Chertoff, the United States attorney for the District of New Jersey. Chertoff, a gaunt and balding man who looked far older than his thirty-nine years, was known for his brilliance, tenacity, and fierce intensity. He could get so focused on a case that, as he himself once admitted, “You could set a bomb off in the courtroom and I might not know it.”

Chertoff already had a glancing familiarity with the fact that Joy was receiving extortion threats. He had been supposed to try Arthur Seale, who had just pled guilty to kidnapping and killing Sidney Reso, and back in the summer, when his office had received Sol’s anonymous letter warning that the Seales were scheming to blackmail David Samson and Joy Silverman, Chertoff had questioned Seale’s wife, Irene, about the allegation. But she had said she knew nothing about it, and the matter had been put on a back burner.

Today, looking over the cards and letters Joy had received, Chertoff once again thought about Seale. Joy’s cards and letters weren’t so different from the kinds of notes Seale had written. Those, just like these, were intricate and protracted. And Seale, just like this Purdy character who was claiming to be a security expert, had boasted of his surveillance ability. More, Seale had demanded that Exxon get a special telephone number and put it in a newspaper ad headlined “Florida Cattle Ranch.” And here was Purdy demanding Joy get a special telephone number and place an ad under the not altogether dissimilar heading “LOST Texas Bulldog.” Was it possible, Chertoff wondered, that Seale was running the operation against Joy from jail, and that he’d never told his wife about it? Or was it a better bet to guess that Joy’s extortionist wasn’t Seale, but someone with a great familiarity with Seale’s methods?

Well, they’d know soon enough, Chertoff decided. Turning to his deputy, Victor Ashrafi, he said, “Let’s take the ad.”

“Right,” Ashrafi said. “We’ll get a dedicated phone line, and we’ll trap and trace the calls.”

Brzezinski and Fleming had already begun following up on some of the leads they’d gotten from the cards and letters. They’d spoken briefly on the telephone to David Samson and learned that his wife, Elaine, had received cards and phone calls from a man purporting to be David Purdy. They’d driven out to Short Hills, interviewed Elaine, and taken away with them the cards she’d received. They’d gone to Linden to the Church of the Holy Family and spoken with Father German. Now they drove into Manhattan and talked to Joy’s doorman and the doorman at David Samson’s apartment building to see if they could get a description of David Purdy. Both doormen remembered him well. He was a fat man, they said. An older guy, wearing western regalia. And there was something funny about his mouth or his teeth.

When they got back to their office, there was word from Houston. Yes, there was a licensed private investigator named Purdy.

Fleming was excited, sure they’d be able to crack the case right away. He got on the phone with Houston at once. “What does Purdy look like?” he asked his counterpart there.

“He’s a young guy,” the Houston agent said.

“How young?”

“In his twenties.”

So the Texas Purdy wasn’t their man. But who was?

“LOST Texas Bulldog. Answers to name David. Please call 212-555-2169,” said the ad that the Newark FBI placed in the Lost and Found section of the out-of-state edition of The New York Times on September 30. From that day on, Brzezinski and Fleming began “sitting on the location,” spending their time almost solely in Joy’s apartment. Their job was to watch over her and to coach her about what to say if someone called the number listed in the ad. They wanted certain things from that conversation. They wanted her to keep the caller on the phone as long as possible. They wanted her to tell the caller she didn’t understand him, so that he’d repeat himself. And they wanted her to get him to say exactly what was going to happen to her if she didn’t pay him the money. Was he going to hurt her? Take her daughter? “We wanted to get his threats very specifically on the tape,” Fleming remembered, “so that there wouldn’t be any room for interpretation later on.”

Joy listened to the instructions carefully and promised to stay cool, so that she wouldn’t frighten off the caller by becoming tearful or angry.

The first call came on Saturday, October 3. The caller hung up, but the court-ordered trap-and-trace device that the FBI had installed in Joy’s apartment tracked the number instantly. It was a number assigned to Sol Wachtler’s car phone.

Still, Brzezinski and Fleming, even after learning the results of the trace, weren’t sure the caller was Sol. It could be someone who had access to his car, they speculated. It could be a driver. An employee.

They continued to tutor Joy. “You gotta get him to talk to you,” they said. “And keep him on the line.”

Sol called again on Sunday, October 4. This time, he dialed Joy from a pay phone in a Laundromat in Glen Oaks, New York, not far from his Manhasset home, and, using a voice-disguising device he’d bought at a spying-equipment shop, said he was calling on behalf of David Purdy, who’d be phoning himself from out of town next week.

Joy had learned her lessons well. “Pardon me?” she asked politely, as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Purdy’ll be calling you collect from out of town next week,” Sol reiterated.

Joy tried her luck again. “You’ll have to repeat that,” she said. “I can’t understand you.”

Sol seemed to grasp that the call was being taped. “I know you’re recording this,” he said. But he continued to repeat that Purdy would be calling next week, and then he brazened ahead, “The price is twenty thousand dollars.”

Sol used the voice disguiser again on Monday, October 5; Wednesday, October 7; and Friday, October 9. That was the day he called Joy while attending a judicial conference in Reno, made the bizarre claim “I’m wearing a diaper,” and responded to Joy’s question about what he was threatening to do to her daughter with, “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?”

In New York, a few days after that call had been traced, Chertoff sat down with Ashrafi and the FBI people to discuss what to do next. “This chief judge is either crazy or criminal,” he said. “We can’t have him running the court system of New York.”

“We could go to him privately,” someone suggested. “Confront him with the evidence. Make him resign.”

Chertoff was skeptical. “We don’t have a locked case,” he said. “What do we do if we go to Wachtler and he says, ‘This is bullshit. This is ridiculous. A setup.’ I can see it now. He kicks us out of his office, and we’re left sitting around with our knowledge. That’s not an acceptable way to leave things.”

“Let’s arrest him,” someone else suggested. Chertoff didn’t want that, either. The evidence so far was all circumstantial. If they went to court, they’d probably lose. “We need more,” he said. “We need an overwhelming case. Not just calls, but proof that it’s him making the calls. Solid observation or, better yet, a fingerprint.”

Esposito agreed. He’d have his agents tail Wachtler, he said. “But in a loose way,” he cautioned. “We don’t want to scare him off.”

Chertoff nodded. “But we don’t arrest him right when we see him making a call,” he warned. “Because you never know until later if the recording is working properly. Or if maybe he’s just saying something innocuous. We have to have gotten the recording and listened to it. And we have to have a fingerprint. Only after we’ve got all that, would I agree to arrest him.”

Sol was up in Albany, where increasingly he was behaving in a grandiose and scattered fashion. His clerks noticed that he barely listened to them when they tried to talk to him about complex issues, that he refused to make changes in documents once they’d written a draft, and that he no longer called them together for the traditional evening briefings at which they customarily prepared him for the next day’s arguments. One day, his clerks insisted on a briefing. Sol said he couldn’t be bothered, because he had to have a haircut. Then he thought better of what he’d said and backtracked. “Okay,” he told them, “if you want to brief me, come with me.” The clerks piled into his car, and talked to him as he sped through traffic and then raced on foot through a mall to reach his barbershop.

He was hasty and distracted with family members too, so much so that his daughters found themselves competing for an iota of his attention.

“How long were you on the phone with Daddy?” Lauren asked one of her sisters one day.

“Twenty seconds,” her sister answered. “How about you?”

“Twenty-one!”

I won this little bout of sibling rivalry, Lauren comforted herself. But it’s little consolation, considering all the things I wanted to discuss with Daddy.

After that, she began writing down the matters she wanted to talk to her father about, so that she’d be sure to get them all in before he said, “Okay, gotta go.”

Sol wasn’t frenzied when he was on the bench. On October 22, he heard his last case of the early autumn session of the court of appeals, a case involving environmental issues. “The legislature wants something done, but you say that, because there’s no single municipality or agency or group to do it, it shouldn’t be done?” he said to a lawyer opposing environmental restrictions. “Why doesn’t the county itself undertake [setting policy]?” he said to a lawyer in favor of the restrictions. “That would be a magnificent gesture.”

Mike Trainor, one of Sol’s clerks, was present in the courtroom. Sol’s asking good questions, he noticed. Running things smoothly. Just like he always does.

Brzezinski and Fleming were still spending most of their time in Joy’s apartment. There had been no further communications from “Purdy,” no opportunity to trace a call and send agents to try to get a fingerprint from the phone, or to actually observe who was making the call. But on October 27, Sol decided to call Joy again.

He was at the Harmonie Club that night, where he and Matt Crosson had called a meeting of prominent civic leaders to catch them up on developments in the state’s judicial system over the past year. Sol filled the assembled guests in about the court system in general and about his now-resolved lawsuit against Cuomo. But he kept scrambling dates and statistical information.

“You screwed it up to a fare-thee-well,” Crosson said to him when the meeting was over and the two of them had settled down in the club’s sedate dining room to have a drink and dinner together.

“I did?”

“Yeah,” Crosson said. But the chief seemed distracted and restless, so Crosson didn’t dwell on his mistakes. He talked to him instead about the upcoming presidential election, and when he had finished eating, said good-bye and left the club.

As soon as he was gone, Sol went into a lobby phone booth and dialed Joy’s number.

“Is Mrs. Silverman there, please?” he said to a maid who answered the phone.

“Who’s calling, please?” she inquired.

“This is David. Is she there?”

“What David?”

“David,” was all he’d tell her. “Is she there? Where is she?”

“Let me see,” the maid said. “David Baker?”

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“She went out.”

“When will she be back?”

“I don’t know.”

Frustrated, he said good-bye and hung up. But he wanted to find Joy badly, and early the next morning he called David Samson, looking for her.

“Is Joy Silverman there?” he asked, speaking to Samson from a phone booth at the Long Island Jewish Hospital.

Samson said nothing.

“Put Joy Silverman on the phone!”

Again, Samson said nothing.

“Can you hear me?” Sol asked.

But when Samson again made no reply, he said, “That’s all,” and hung up.

For a few hours, he put Joy out of his mind. He drove into the city, where he was scheduled to be the moderator for a lunchtime seminar on mediation at the headquarters of the New York County Lawyers Association. When he walked in, he spotted his old friend and onetime competitor for the chief judgeship, Milton Mollen. “Do you think I should take the mike and go down into the audience, Phil Donahue style?” he asked Mollen.

“By all means, do it,” Mollen said. “The audience will love it.”

Sol did, handling the discussion in what was, Mollen would later recall, “his usual warm and witty way.”

But that night, he again tried to reach Joy, dialing her from a pay phone outside a Boy Scout camp in a countrified area of Roslyn, New York, eight-tenths of a mile from his home. This time, she was home.

“Are we all set for November seventh?” he asked as soon as she answered.

“I can’t hear you,” she said.

“Are we all set for November seventh?”

“Well, I don’t understand one thing,” she challenged him, attempting to stretch out their conversation so that he’d stay on the phone. “How do I know that this is all going to be over on November seventh. You haven’t left me any package. You expect me to just leave twenty thousand dollars without getting something back?”

“I’ll tell you what you’re getting back, lady,” he said. “If you don’t do it, if you fuck me up at all, I promise you it will cost you two hundred thousand dollars to get your daughter back. How does that suit ya?”

Joy tried to keep him on the phone, but he had hung up.

Joy was jumpy after this call. Brzezinski and Fleming had already gone home to New Jersey for the night, but she wanted to speak to them, wanted to let them know about this latest, more substantial threat. She dialed Brzezinski at her apartment. “I got another call,” she said.

“What’d he say?”

Joy summarized the conversation, and as soon as she was done, Brzezinski leaped into activity. She called the FBI’s contact person at the telephone company to find out where the call had come from, learned it was Roslyn, New York, and telephoned Fleming.

He wanted to go out there. “Let’s take the phone,” he said. “Let’s get out as fast as we can and take it.”

“What if we do and he comes by and notices it’s missing?” Brzezinski asked. “What if it tips him off?”

“He won’t come back. He’s never used the same phone twice.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“Yeah, but if we hit a home run, if we get his prints, we’ll put this thing over the top.”

They decided to go. And a few minutes later, Brzezinski picked up Fleming in her white Mustang. It was late, around eleven P.M., but there was still a lot of traffic on the roads. “Damn,” Fleming said. “By the time we get there, who knows if the prints will be recoverable.”

“Yeah,” Brzezinski said. “Dozens of people could have used that phone booth after our guy did.”

They worried about it the whole time they were driving, but when, after nearly two hours, they reached Roslyn and arrived at the location of the phone booth, they relaxed. The booth was alongside a road, but it was on a dark corner, with nothing but trees and bushes around it. “Not many people would want to make a call from a spot like this,” Fleming said.

“Not at night,” Brzezinski said.

Unless they’re nuts, Fleming thought. Or up to no good.

He slipped out of the car and into the phone booth. Brzezinski stood guard. “It’s okay. It’s okay now,” she whispered when a stream of cars had sped by and the road was dark once again. He pulled out his crime-scene kit, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, grabbed a pair of bolt cutters, and snipped the telephone cord.

The handset swung free.

Stuffing it into a plastic evidence bag, Fleming hurried back to the car, and he and Brzezinski drove to FBI headquarters in Newark.

“I’d like to make an appointment,” Sol said over a different phone a few days later—it was just before Halloween—to the receptionist at a beauty salon. The salon was a few doors away from the laundry shop at which he’d directed Joy to leave him twenty thousand dollars on November 7. “My name is Samson. David Samson,” he went on. “But I can’t make the appointment now.” Then he asked the woman with whom he was speaking what her name was.

“Yesim Oklu,” she said.

He promised her he’d call back soon for his appointment.

“Wachtler used that phone outside the Boy Scout camp,” an expert from the latent-fingerprint section of the FBI’s Washington headquarters notified the Newark office several days after Sol called the beauty salon. “His print was on it.” The handset Fleming and Brzezinski had retrieved had been sent from Newark to Washington, where the identification division had used laser equipment to lift off every fingerprint and then matched them against a set of Sol’s prints that had been taken years before, when he had joined the Army.

The FBI had the two things Chertoff had said he wanted—a clear recording of a specific extortion threat from Wachtler, and proof that he’d been in the phone booth from which the threat had been issued.

But now, Chertoff changed his mind about arresting Wachtler and decided to wait a few more days. It was nearly November 7. Why not see if he was really going to go through with his plan to extort money from Joy, and if he was, catch him in the act? Why not watch him closely and find out if he was in this alone or had some coconspirators. Convinced this was the best plan, on November 3, Chertoff requested the FBI to put Wachtler under close, not loose, surveillance. From now on, there’d be agents following his every move.

The day Chertoff decided to ask the FBI to start closer surveillance, Sol attended a high-powered political luncheon in Mineola. It was the annual luncheon of The Has Beens, a group of influential Republicans all of whom had once held political office. One of them was Sol’s old friend Joe Carlino.

For some time now, Carlino had been touting Sol for governor in 1994. “With this guy’s family,” he’d been saying to various and sundry rainmakers, “if we can get him to take this thing, this will be one of the best-funded elections the Republicans have ever had. Plus, we got a product with him. A good product.”

Today, Carlino’s buttonholing seemed to have paid off. Throughout the luncheon, many of the still-powerful Has Beens came over to Sol and told him he ought to run. Carlino, sitting alongside Sol, joined in with them. “You have no obligation to Cuomo,” he said to Sol. “He’s done some bad things.”

Sol nodded.

“You’ve been on the court a good long time,” Carlino went on. “Whadda ya going to do? Sit there till retirement? There’s more to life than that.”

Carlino was pretty certain Sol was in agreement. So, “Ya oughta announce now,” he told him. “You’re king of the walk today.”

“We’ve got time,” Sol replied. “I want to wait a year or so. Because if I announce now, I’ll have to step down as chief judge. I’m going to wait, and when it’s closer, I may do it.”

Carlino was pleased with the answer. It seemed to him that at long last, Sol was ready to make the run they’d been talking about for years.

At about two-thirty or three o’clock, Sol got up to go. He was flying to Louisville, Kentucky, he explained. He was going to be making a speech there.

He said a fond good-bye to Carlino and drove to the airport. There, he called Joy again, and once more pretended to be Purdy. He told her he was in an airport, but said he was on his way to New York. And then he asked, “Are we in business?”

Joy, thinking fast, parried. “I said to you when you called me before that I want to know what I’m getting back, and when I’m getting it back, and I’m not just going to leave money there, just leave it and not have anything back in return.”

“Now listen here! I’m trusting you. I’m trusting you not to put me on to the police, right?”

“I didn’t call the police. But I’m not gonna just leave twenty thousand dollars for you as a present.”

“I’m trusting you,” Sol repeated. “But look. Listen to me. If I don’t come back with that twenty thousand dollars, I’m gonna stay in New York and snatch your kid. Now, I mean that.”

Joy had decided to be as tough as her tormentor. “Well, let me tell you something,” she said, and began challenging him with the bravado of a detective-novel moll. “I’m not dropping off twenty thousand dollars only to have you come back to me two weeks from now and ask for another twenty thousand dollars.”

“I’m not gonna do that,” Sol said.

“No? You want to make a deal with me? Look, I want this over with, okay? I don’t like what’s going on. I want my life back, but I’m not about to have you come up on my behind two weeks from now—”

“If you want your life back, leave the goddamn money.”

They continued to argue, each of them playing a role, until Sol hung up and caught his plane to Kentucky. When he arrived there, he called Joy from the Louisville airport, and this time claimed to be in New York. “Now listen carefully, girl,” he said. “Listen good. You get twenty thousand dollars to [your doorman] Ramon. He will drop it off at ten-fifteen. At one o’clock in the afternoon, I’m gonna give you all the papers you want. Also, I’ll give you the name of the fat pig who brought me into your life. You understand that?”

“Where are you going to put it?” Joy asked.

“They’re going to be dropped off,” Sol said. “They will be given to your doorman.” Then he made a stronger threat than any he had made before. “If you don’t do it,” he said, “I’m gonna spend the rest of this year making your life a nightmare, and you’ll end up spending ten times the twenty thousand to get your girl back. Now, do you understand what I’m saying? I’m gonna give you thirty seconds to tell me what you’re gonna do.”

Joy said she just didn’t get it and began demanding that “Purdy” drop off the pictures and tapes he had for her at the same time he picked up the money.

Sol laughed. “You think I’m some kind of fool, girl? They would arrest me on the spot. Okay, now are you gonna do it?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Joy begged him. “Wait.”

“No, I’m not gonna wait. You’re gonna get everything you want at one o’clock in the afternoon, and then I’m taking the evening plane back to San Antonio. Okay, is that a deal? Are we on? I’ll give you ten more seconds.”

Joy continued to ask for guarantees, and Sol got uneasy. “You’re tracing this goddamn call,” he said. “I’m getting off!”

“I’m not tracing anything,” Joy lied. “I just want this over with, and I want some kind of guarantee that you’re going to be out of my life. What guarantee do I have that I’ll never hear your voice again?”

“You’ll never hear my voice again,” Sol said. “You’ll never hear from me again.”

“How do I know that?”

But Sol was tired of Joy’s temporizing. “You just give the twenty thousand dollars to Ramón,” he said. “I’m gonna be there ten-fifteen at the Shanley.” Then he hung up and took a taxi to his Louisville hotel.

The morning after Sol arrived in Louisville, a surveillance team of five FBI agents in five separate cars was assigned to follow him as closely as possible. They were part of what was increasingly becoming a major FBI operation—eventually there would be some eighty agents working on Sol’s case.

The Louisville agents saw nothing untoward at first. Sol was picked up at his hotel by Donald Burnett, the dean of the University of Louisville’s law school, driven to the campus, and given a short tour. Then he gave a lecture to the dean’s constitutional law class. Afterward, he attended a luncheon at the University Club, gave an interview about himself and the New York court system to the campus radio station, and talked about the law with a group of select students. By then it was five o’clock, and he repaired to his hotel room to dress for the trip’s main event, a banquet at which he would be addressing a group of eminent Kentucky lawyers and judges.

At the banquet, which was held in his hotel, Sol spoke as eloquently as ever. The chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court found his speech insightful. Dean Burnett thought it intelligent and knowledgeable.

But afterward, Sol didn’t linger in the banquet hall—he was catching an early plane to New York the next morning, he explained, and he retired to his room, where he remained through the night.

At dawn he checked out of the hotel. He took a cab to the airport. But he directed the cabdriver to take him, first, to a shop at which he might buy some pornographic items. The driver stopped outside a shop called the Blue Movie Adult Bookstore.

Sol went in, made a purchase, then got back into his cab and headed for the airport.

The FBI surveillance team had been tailing him. Conferring by radio, the agents decided some of them ought to go into the shop and see what he’d bought. Was it something he planned to use in his plot to extort money from Joy? Three agents followed Sol to the airport, while two went into the adult bookstore, where, identifying themselves, they asked the salesman what his previous customer had purchased.

“Two porn flicks,” he said.

“Which ones?” one of the agents asked.

The salesman shook his head. “I don’t remember. We got so many of ’em.”

“He buy anything else?”

“Yeah. Cards.” He gestured toward a display of pornographic playing cards. “Two decks of Raunch-O-Rama.”

“You got any more of those?”

“Sure.”

The salesman showed them the cards, and the agents said they’d take two decks too.

While they were making their purchase, Sol reached the airport.

That night, back in New York, Sol attended a dinner being held in the Bronx by the Tribune Society, an organization of nonjudicial court workers. The society was giving an award to Matt Crosson, and they’d asked Sol to present it. He rose from the dais in the chandeliered banquet hall, strode to the podium, and began telling jokes. His timing was perfect, and his deadpan impeccable. He delivered a stream of punchy one-liners and amusing anecdotes, and then, saying Crosson was “a man of unexpected abilities,” he used that bit of praise to tell one of his favorite jokes.

It was the story about the variety show emcee who auditions potential contestants only to find yet another one who says he does bird imitations. “So the emcee says, ‘Bird imitations? We’re not interested,’” Sol bantered. “Whereupon”—and here he raised his arms and flapped them—“the contestant turned around and flew away.”

It brought the house down. Sol’s in top form, the novelist and judge Edwin Torres thought. Ebullient. Hilarious. Beautiful.

The next day, November 6, Sol worked in his Mineola chambers in the morning. He went over papers, did some reading, made some telephone calls. One of the people he spoke to was Milton Williams, the deputy chief administrative judge of New York City. Sol had proposed to Long Island University that they give Williams an honorary degree, and he’d just gotten word that the arrangements were underway. “I’m delighted,” he told Williams.

“Me too,” Williams said, and came away thinking, Sol Wachtler’s a super person. Always going out of his way for other people.

In the afternoon, Sol drove up to Albany. He went to his house, the house where he had first made love to Joy and where, that first day, he’d wondered guiltily if she’d ruin his life by pursuing him, “fatal attraction” style. There, he dialed Elaine Samson and, pretending to be David Purdy, offered again to sell her pictures of Joy and her husband.

Elaine declined, and shortly thereafter, Sol drove to the New York State Bar Association, where he was scheduled to attend a dinner.

His colleagues were pleased to see him, and some of them prevailed on him to address the gathering. He did, making a forty-five-minute impromptu speech. It was a lively speech. “Vintage Sol Wachtler,” John Bracken, the president of the association, thought.

After dinner, Sol asked his driver to take him to his chambers at the court of appeals. En route, he gave an interview over his car phone to Fred Dicker, a reporter for the New York Post. What did he think of Senator Al D’Amato’s surprising victory in last Tuesday’s election? Dicker wanted to know. What did he think were Cuomo’s chances of getting appointed to the Supreme Court? And what was happening with his own political career?

He answered Dicker’s questions so cooperatively and at such length, commenting as he talked on New York’s many problems, that the interview wasn’t finished when he arrived at the court of appeals, so he promised the reporter he’d continue talking to him once he was upstairs in his chambers. Dicker called him there, and they talked some more. He sounded, the reporter would later say, “happy, decidedly upbeat, and politically engaged,” albeit “slightly manic—overly excited.”

When he was finished speaking to Dicker, Sol leaned forward on his leather-topped desk that had once belonged to Benjamin Cardozo and began writing letters, scribbling his thoughts onto scraps of paper, then copying them out both in bold black hand-printing and on his typewriter. Tomorrow it would be exactly twenty years since he had first sat at that desk. No matter. Concentrating on the future rather than the past, he wrote a letter to the New York tax authorities in which he made anonymous allegations against David Samson. And then he wrote a letter to Joy, a letter he could deliver to her tomorrow if she left him the twenty thousand dollars that “Purdy” had been demanding.

It was a long letter, and he sat late into the night in the nearly deserted building composing it. “You expected me to give you everything I’ve collected and learned for $20,000?” he wrote. “Are you stupid or do you think I’m stupid? I may be a shitkicker but I’m not a dumb shitkicker.”

The letter continued:

It took me a year and over 1,000 miles in a rented car going between the Big Apple and New Jersey. I spent days in flea bag motels, and a hundred hours parked in New York City watching your comings and goings. I made over 100 phone calls to track you and make a record of your habits.

I got into Val’s house on Rosewood Lane, and spent over three days parked in front of the Sutter house waiting for the two of you to be there alone during the day because you didn’t leave on enough lights at night when you were screwing. And then I had to rig up a remote camera in the house because I couldn’t take pictures from the outside because you kept the fucking blinds drawn. And I had to wait until you came back without the kids.

Did Purdy sound sorry for himself? Well, why shouldn’t he? He was supposed to be dying. His creative imagination afire, Sol continued with the litany of the detective’s efforts.

I had to buy expensive recording equipment. And climb through backyards to tape you at your house (When I was at Rosewood a jogger questioned me—when I was in your backyard one of your gardeners spoke to me—I had to con my way out of both situations). I spent over ten days on Long Island living like a hobo. I think that’s what got my diabetes kicked up (I was out of commission for most of June and July. I guess you thought I was out of business.)

I had to buy expensive bug transmitters and bribe my way into your boyfriend’s apartment. I was there twice (once the cleaning lady Maria caught me coming out but I conned her too). I got great audio. Your boyfriend has a good sense of humor but he also has a lot of gas. (You saw me once when you were waiting in the lobby, but you were too busy looking in the mirror).

I went to your hotel twice (I couldn’t get into your room but one of your doormans [sic] brought me into your lobby and was going to let me talk to your young lady—as he called her). I left notes for you on both my visits and tipped your doormans [sic] pretty good. I told Ramon that I was going to be walking Jessica home from school afternoons when she got back and when he noticed I had no teeth and a big gut (water from the diabetes), I promised I’d have false teeth and would lose the gut so as not to embarrass her.

Do you think I went through all of this for a shitty $20,000? I saw how and where you shopped. $20,000 is loose change to you. When I need more, I’ll be back, if I don’t croak. At least your $20,000 bought you some quiet. If I hadn’t got it, everyone you know and everyone your husband knows and every member of every board you belong to would have received wonderful material like this. And I would be going back on some future date with $200,000 or Jessica. You were smart to pay the $20,000.

He’d written so much, but the letter wasn’t done. It needed a picture, the kind of picture he’d been telling Joy all along that he had of her. Something shocking and pornographic. Taking out his pack of Raunch-O-Rama cards, he chose one that showed a woman masturbating a man, photocopied it, and attached it to the letter. Then he added:

I know you don’t think this picture is of you. But it is. His hand is on your head and you are holding his wad. (He’s definitely not from Texas.) The next picture in the series, you’re putting his wad in your gobbler.

I’ve got two others where he’s mounting you. You look pretty good in all except one. I took a lot of pictures but only four are recognizable. Next time I’ll give you the stuff, but it will cost you more than another $20,000. You see, I was paid a little by someone else, but like this letter tells you, I put in a lot of work and I’m very sick.

The photostat is lousy—you look better in the picture.

Now he was done. He signed the letter with the loopy signature he had once copied from David Samson’s bar application.

But what if she didn’t leave him the money tomorrow? What should he say to her then? Remaining in his chambers, he composed yet another letter to cover that possibility.

This one was shorter and more brutal than the first. “You stupid lousy cunt,” he wrote. “I’m going back to Texas now. You better hope I die soon because if I don’t you’ll wish you were dead. You better kiss your daughter good night every night.”

Then, at last, he was finished.

Michael Chertoff drove from New Jersey to Manhattan early the next morning. He knew that Sol had instructed Joy to put twenty thousand dollars in used hundreds and fifties in the manila envelope he’d sent her from Reno, and that he’d insisted she have her doorman Ramon put the envelope in the cellar entrance to Shanley’s laundry shop today at precisely ten-fifteen. He knew, too, that the FBI had arranged to have all of that take place this morning. So he was hopeful that sometime after ten-fifteen, Wachtler—or possibly an accomplice of his—would pick up the money. If and when that happened, they would have Wachtler. They would have him not just making threats but actually completing an act of extortion.

In Manhattan, Chertoff reported to the New York FBI’s command center. The FBI had launched a massive operation to track Wachtler that day. Forty agents would be keeping him under surveillance out in the field, some of them in cars stationed near Wachtler’s home in Albany or Joy’s home in Manhattan, others on foot—there was a fellow in jeans and a casual jacket who was standing near Shanley’s laundry, and another biding his time at a table in a nearby pizzeria. In addition, numerous FBI officials would be monitoring and directing the field from their headquarters, the command center, a tiered room equipped with the latest in expensive technology.

Chertoff, when he entered, saw glittering and futuristic technology—communications-control panels, TV monitors, walkie-talkies, two-way FM radios that would encode every word transmitted from the field agents to the command center, giant screens on which the progress of today’s manhunt would be projected, and banks and banks of telephones. He had never seen so many phones in one room. But only two of them seemed to be in use, he noticed. At least, virtually everyone in sight was crowding around only two phones, the ones with open lines to the field agents. At one of them, Ronald Mahaffey, the New York FBI’s coordinator for violent crimes, was calling out the most important reports coming in from the agents.

Chertoff joined the tight cluster of men listening to Mahaffey and greeted those he knew, among them James Esposito, New Jersey’s top FBI man; Jim Fox, the head of New York’s FBI; and Manhattan’s U.S. attorney, Otto Obermeier.

One of the first reports Chertoff heard as he joined the group threw him for a loop. The agent stationed near Shanley’s was radioing that there was someone dressed in western regalia parked nearby. “A cowboy!” he was shouting. “There’s a cowboy out here in a disabled car!”

Chertoff did a double take. Was there really a David Purdy after all? But the cowboy, a man in a Stetson hat, proved to be merely a tourist, an unfortunate fellow whose car had broken down. A tow-truck operator soon towed him and his car away.

About a half hour later, Wachtler was spotted coming out of his house in Albany. “He’s in his car,” an agent parked on the roadway just outside his property radioed. “He’s driving himself. He’s heading south.”

There was a long downtime after that, as Wachtler drove toward the city. Chertoff, trying to relax, shot the breeze with the FBI men, drank coffee, chewed a bagel.

Joy was hearing the radioed reports too. She was sitting in her living room with Brzezinski and Fleming, and they were explaining to her what the agents were doing and what some of their lingo meant.

Fleming thought she seemed wonderfully calm. In part it was because things were coming to an end, he figured, so soon she’d be getting some relief from the anxiety that had plagued her for months. But in part it was because there was no more for her to do. Everything was out of her hands. It was as if she was an outsider now, a spectator watching events play out.

At ten o’clock, her doorman, Ramón, set out for the cellar entrance to Shanley’s, two blocks away.

Ramón reached Shanley’s in just a few minutes. He looked around him, then nervously set down on the cellar stairway the manila envelope with its twenty thousand dollars in used bills. The agent on the street radioed Mahaffey that the envelope was in place, and Mahaffey tersely relayed the message to Chertoff and the others. Just then, an agent who had been following Wachtler down the New York State Thruway from Albany called in. Wachtler, he reported, had pulled over to a rest stop in Ramapo, New York, about a fifty-minute drive from Manhattan.

“He’s sitting in his car,” Mahaffey relayed. “He’s getting out of the car. He’s going to a pay phone. He’s dialing a number.”

Suddenly, there was a call from an agent monitoring the beauty salon near the spot where the money had been dropped. “The receptionist at the hair salon is coming out,” he radioed. “She’s picking up the envelope. She’s going back into the shop.”

Up in Ramapo, at the rest station, the agent who was watching Wachtler provided a counterpoint. “Wachtler’s pacing up and down next to his car,” he radioed. Then, “He’s going back to the phone.”

The agent outside the beauty salon saw the receptionist reenter the shop. Then he saw her walk to a wall phone. “She’s talking on the phone,” he called in. Then, “She’s disappearing into the back of the shop with the envelope.”

Was she an accomplice? Chertoff wondered. He wanted the FBI to let the receptionist go about her business, to see if she and Wachtler were going to meet somewhere. But Esposito had a different view. “Maybe the woman’s just a dupe,” he suggested. “But anyway, we’d better follow the money. It could get split up back there. It could disappear. Let’s have an agent go in and get the package.”

“It’ll blow the set,” Chertoff argued. “If anyone was going to come in and get the money, they won’t do it if there’s an agent inside.”

But Esposito’s view prevailed, and shortly an agent went into the shop, retrieved the money, and interviewed the woman who had gone out to get it. Soon, he was radioing in her story. The receptionist hadn’t known the caller, he radioed. But the caller knew her. “Is this Yesim Oklu?” he’d asked when she’d first picked up the phone. Then, he’d told her he was Mr. Samson and that his car had broken down on the highway, just when he was due into the city to pick up a package. He’d asked if she could get it for him and promised that if she did, he’d give her a big tip when next he came in. That’s why she’d gone out and gotten the package. Then when she brought it back, he’d asked her to open it. That’s when she’d gone to the back of the shop to ask the shop’s owner whether she should follow the caller’s instructions. But he’d said she shouldn’t, and she’d told the caller this, and he’d said okay, he’d send someone else, a “Miss Heather,” to pick up the envelope shortly.

Chertoff, hearing her tale, realized that she hadn’t been in league with Wachtler. She’d been an innocent—a helpful—bystander. But he was still worried that Wachtler might have an accomplice.

Now an agent following Wachtler on the thruway saw him stop at an A&P in Scarsdale, not far from his daughter Lauren’s house. “He’s tearing up some paper,” the agent radioed. “He’s throwing it in a trash can.”

“Get it!” “Get it!” several people in the headquarters shouted, and Mahaffey directed the on-site agent to do so. A moment later Mahaffey was reporting that the pieced-together scraps of paper said, “You stupid lousy cunt. I’m going back to Texas now. You better hope I die soon because if I don’t you’ll wish you were dead. You better kiss your daughter good night every night.”

Chertoff breathed a sigh of relief. The evidence that Wachtler had been writing the notes to Joy was now overwhelming.

“What’s bothering you? You seem very blue,” Lauren Wachtler said to Sol only a few minutes after the agent at the A&P read the contents of the torn letter to Mahaffey. Sol had driven from the supermarket to Lauren’s house.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“Something’s bothering you,” Lauren said. “Do you have a headache?”

“No.”

But Lauren was sure there was something wrong with her father. He’d arrived with presents for her daughter, and he’d sat down with a children’s book to read the little girl a story, but no sooner had he gotten a few sentences out than he’d jumped up and begun walking around the room. And then he’d sat down and started reading again. And then jumped up again. She’d never seen him so distracted. Though, if she stopped to think about it, he’d been distracted and scattered for some time now. Always going from one thing to another, with no real continuity.

Lauren didn’t spend the whole time of her father’s visit in his company. A friend of hers, a decorator, was over at the house too, and at one point she and the decorator left the room. “Your father’s so good-looking,” her friend said when they were alone. “And so wonderful with your daughter. He’s terrific!”

Lauren shook her head. “There’s something bothering him. I don’t know what it is.”

Sol didn’t stay at her house long. After three-quarters of an hour, he said he had to go into the city. And by twelve-fifteen, he was in his car again.

Lauren, who had an errand to do, got into her car too and drove as far as the highway, with him following her, and then he headed down the road to New York.

Was Lauren “Miss Heather”? Chertoff wondered for a moment. But no, he decided. She’d driven off in a different direction.

At one o’clock, he heard that Wachtler, who had reached the city, was parking at Second Avenue and 88th Street. Then, “He’s getting out of his car,” an agent radioed Mahaffey. “He’s putting on a cowboy hat.”

“Are you sure?” Chertoff heard Mahaffey ask the agent who was radioing in his observations.

“Yes,” the agent said.

“What’s he doing now?” Chertoff heard Mahaffey ask.

“Putting on an overcoat,” the agent radioed. “And a string tie.”

“He’s putting on a what?” Fleming said to Brzezinski. “A string tie?” He and Brzezinski had been ordered to leave Joy and go downstairs once Wachtler had started heading for the city, and they were sitting with two other agents in a car parked a block from Joy’s house, avidly listening to the radioed reports. “He’s dressing up as Purdy!” Brzezinski cheered. Fleming began to whoop and give the other agents high fives. “He’s gonna do something now, for sure,” he said. “Maybe he’s gonna come for the money!”

Eager to know what was going to happen next, the carful of agents kept their ears glued to the blow-by-blow radio bulletins coming from uptown. Wachtler was taking an envelope out of his car, they heard. Wachtler was flagging down a taxi. Wachtler was leaning into the cab and engaging the driver in conversation.

“What’s that all about?” Fleming said.

“Beats me,” Brzezinski said.

A moment later, they heard, “Wachtler’s giving the cab-driver the envelope and a ten-dollar bill. Hey, the taxi’s taking off.”

As soon as he heard that, Fleming knew what Wachtler was up to. “That envelope’s going to Joy!” he exclaimed.

Brzezinski knew too. “I’m going for it,” she said, and was out the door of the car before Fleming heard from uptown that Wachtler had gotten back into his car and removed the cowboy hat and tie.

Brzezinski, dodging pedestrians now, raced to Joy’s building. She arrived seconds after the cabdriver dropped off the envelope with the doorman. “I’ll take that,” she said in her most authoritative tone, and flashed her identification. But the doorman was new. Someone she hadn’t met before. He refused to hand it over.

They didn’t have doormen back home in Milwaukee, but Brzezinski hadn’t been spending her days on Park Avenue for nothing. She’d learned a few things about dealing with doormen, and she said in a commanding tone, “This isn’t a matter for discussion!”

He gave her the envelope.

Back at the command post, attention had momentarily coalesced around the cabdriver. After dropping off the envelope, he’d pulled away from Joy’s building and picked up a passenger.

“Let’s pull him down,” one agent said.

“No,” Chertoff said. “Let’s wait and see what he does. He could be an accomplice.” He was almost positive Wachtler had an accomplice. For one thing, during one of the phone calls Wachtler had made as Purdy, the FBI had thought they’d heard a woman’s voice in the background. For another, his letters had come from places he hadn’t been. Like that letter from San Antonio. Chertoff, not knowing about the helpful stewardess in the Denver airport, pleaded with the agents to hold off on stopping the cabdriver.

But a moment later, the cabdriver dropped off his passenger and picked up another one. Chertoff realized it was unlikely he was an accomplice. Not if he was just going about his business.

Fox directed an agent to stop the driver.

But now the tension in the room increased, grew virtually palpable. Word had just come in that Wachtler, who had stopped for a while at a gas station, was heading out on the FDR Drive and onto the Triborough Bridge toward Long Island.

So he isn’t going to pick up the money now, Chertoff thought. Maybe he’s planning to come back later. Or send someone else. Or maybe he’s not going to get the money at all. If he doesn’t, do we have enough to prosecute him?

All around him, the FBI men were saying they did, and that it was time to arrest Wachtler. But although a part of Chertoff thought they might be right and knew that if they arrested Wachtler now, they’d have a strong case, a practically unbeatable case, another part of him wanted to keep the surveillance going. Wanted to see what Wachtler was going to do next. Wanted to know for certain whether he had accomplices.

Unsure, he withdrew into a small conference room with Fox and Esposito and some of the other top men to confer. What to do next?

“This is the strongest case I’ve seen in twenty-four years with the bureau,” Mahaffey assured him.

Fox agreed. “Let’s arrest him now,” he said. “While he’s on the expressway.”

“Yeah, he may be heading home,” Esposito said. “And you never know what’s gonna happen if you wait to arrest a guy till he’s home. There could be weapons around. Or people. Someone could get hurt.”

But Chertoff wasn’t ready. I’m the one who has to make the decision, he thought. I’m the one who has to move this thing along once we get to court. “I need to know what’s in that last letter,” he said. “If it says thanks for the money, have a nice life, I’m inclined to sit on things, so we can do more surveillance. If he’s left the threat open—then okay. But I need to hear that last note.”

Esposito raced out of the conference room, grabbed a phone, and telephoned Fleming and Brzezinski, who had gone back upstairs to Joy’s apartment. Fleming answered the call, and as soon as he did, Esposito thrust the receiver at Chertoff and switched on the speaker box. “What’s in the letter?” Chertoff said. “Read us the letter.”

Fleming opened the envelope and began glancing at the densely packed paragraphs.

“Quickly!” Chertoff demanded.

Fleming’s eyes raced down the page, and he summarized what he saw. Purdy’s efforts. His self-pity. Then, “He says, ‘Do you think I went through all of this for a shitty twenty thousand dollars?’” he read. “He says, ‘Next time it’ll cost you more than another twenty thousand dollars.’”

Chertoff’s eyes hardened. The threat was still open. The scheme was still on.

Slamming down the phone, he gave up on the idea of waiting for an accomplice—though he never gave up wondering if there was one. “Unless anyone has any objections,” he said, “let’s take him down!”

Sol was nearly home. He had just called Joan to ask if she wanted bagels. And he was planning to stop for them in a shop near his house when suddenly, just as he was leaving the Long Island Expressway, three cars sped up out of nowhere and surrounded him. They forced him to the side of the road.

He pulled over and five men jumped out of the three cars and forced him out of his. They were rough. They were terrifying. They slammed him against a fender.

What was happening, he wondered, scared, and who were these men? Terrorists, he decided. Yes, terrorists, come to kidnap him because they knew he was an important personage.

But within seconds the men, saying they were from the FBI, were cuffing his hands behind his back.

“What did I do?” he asked. “What is this all about?”

“Extortion,” one of them said.

For a moment Sol Wachtler relaxed. It must have to do with one of the cases I’ve heard, he thought. Probably someone who didn’t like the way a decision went has accused me of taking a bribe. Well, I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t have a thing to worry about.

He didn’t even think about Joy Silverman, or so he would eventually say, until much later.

To the agents who arrested him, however, he seemed aware of the charges against him right from the beginning. He had made a tragic mistake, he told them several times after they’d put him in a bureau car and started driving him back toward New York and federal court.

“Do you know what the worst part is?” he asked. “The judges! What will all the judges think? They looked up to me.” Then he told the agents that it had recently been decided he was going to be the Republican candidate for governor in 1994, and that because of his mistake, his great political career would come to an end.

“Oh, my God,” he said several times. Then, “Oh, my God. I could have been governor.”