CHAPTER 11

THE NEWS OF SOL WACHTLER’S ARREST WAS ON RADIO AND TELEVISION within hours. There was almost no one who heard it who wasn’t stunned, shocked. Wachtler? That embodiment of propriety and judicial rectitude? Wachtler! The people who knew him and had spent time with him recently were the most startled. Matt Crosson, who took on the chore of notifying the state’s administrative judges about what had happened, kept thinking, “It can’t be! It’s bizarre.” Judge Edwin Torres, who had been with Sol at the Tribune Society banquet two nights before, mused, “It’s beyond bizarre. It’s in the realm of the fantastic.” Judge Milton Williams, who had spoken to Sol on Friday morning, reckoned, “It’s an aberration. Maybe he’s got a brain tumor.” Judge Judith Kaye, who had sat on the bench with Sol daily and who would eventually be named chief judge in his stead, speculated, “It’s as if somebody else invaded his body.” And Joe Carlino, who had known Sol ever since he’d gotten out of the Army, surmised, “If ever there was a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this is it.”

Additionally, many of those who knew him thought Joy Silverman and the FBI had overreacted, cried fire when there was only smoke—but they weren’t acquainted with the devastating details of Sol’s calls and letters.

Sol was arraigned in federal district court in Manhattan at bout seven-thirty that night. He had asked Paul Montclare, his daughter Lauren’s husband, to represent him, and Montclare requested that the judge release him on his own recognizance.

Michael Chertoff wanted him detained. Sol was potentially dangerous, he thought. He might try to hurt Joy or Jessica. He might try to kill himself. “Send him to a hospital,” he agreed at last. “But there’s gotta be tight security. Federal marshals guarding him.”

Joan was waiting at the hospital that had been chosen—Long Island Jewish, where for years Sol had been a board member—when her husband arrived. It was around midnight by then, but her son Philip was there, too. And Lauren; she already knew from her husband Montclare some of the details of what Sol had done, and she’d been saying ever since she heard about them, “It’s like one of Daddy’s Bad-Boy George Raft stories. A major George Raft story!”

Joan entered her husband’s room, a windowless nine-by-ten-foot compartment, and immediately Sol began to cry. “I’m sorry,” he wept. “I’ve disgraced you. Disgraced the family. I’m sorry. So sorry.”

Joan began to cry too. Then she put her arms around Sol and hugged him. “I love you,” she said as her arms enfolded him. “I love you very much.” And after that, for the next half hour—that was all the time she could have with him, the marshals had explained—the two of them sat there, crying and hugging, while Sol tried to explain what he’d done to bring him to this spot.

When he told her he’d been in love with Joy, it was like a knife in the heart. But she and Sol had been through a lot. You don’t stay married for forty years without going through a lot. She refused to let his confession crush her. She rallied her ego—she’d always had a strong ego—and said to herself, Joy! How could he have fallen for Joy? I’m prettier than she is, I’m thinner than she is, I’m smarter than she is—and I have more money.

Thinking that way made her feel better. Tougher. And although the marshals were just outside the door and she hated not having privacy, she hugged Sol again.

She was going to stick by him, she’d decided by then. He must have been mentally ill. That had to be the explanation.

When her half hour was up, she said good-bye to Sol without further ado and went outside to assume, resume, her role as matriarch of their now-wounded family. She told the children to take turns going in to see their father, and while they were deciding who should go first, she conferred with Sol’s internist, Dr. Lanman, who had admitted him to the hospital, and with Robert Match, the hospital’s director, about finding a psychiatrist for her husband.

By two A.M., she had chosen one—Dr. Sanford Solomon.

Dr. Solomon was in bed and asleep when he received a call from Dr. Lanman. He didn’t know Sol, and he hadn’t watched TV that night, so he knew nothing about the chief judge’s arrest. Dr. Lanman filled him in. Then she asked if he’d see the famous patient. He said yes, and that he’d be over in the morning.

“Can’t you come sooner?”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You mean you want me to come over now?”

“If you can,” Lanman urged.

Solomon got dressed and into his car, and he was at the hospital by two-thirty A.M. Joan and the children were still there, but they left once he went into Sol’s room to interview his new patient. So did the marshals, who agreed to let him conduct the interview in private.

Sol was dressed—he was wearing a charcoal gray suit—and he was sitting in a chair. But even so, it was difficult for Solomon to imagine the man facing him as the chief of anything, let alone of the state’s judiciary system. The man seemed rolled in a ball, curled up inside himself. And he looked dreadfully sad.

“I’ve done some terrible things,” he said. “I’ve ruined my family.”

Solomon, a genial, compassionate man, a tennis player and an expert in psychosomatic medicine, immediately struck up a rapport with him and soon got him talking about what he’d done. Sol explained that he’d been in love with Joy, who’d jilted him, and that he’d grown depressed and written her threatening letters. But when he talked about the letters he didn’t seem to see—or at least to explain—the logical pattern underlying the threats, nor their slow inexorable escalation over the months. Rather, he spoke confusingly, and confusedly, told things out of sequence, and sounded unsure about when various things had occurred. He’s bewildered, Solomon thought. Completely bewildered.

“What bothers you most?” he asked.

“What I’ve done to my family,” Sol said. “I always told my children that when I died, I wouldn’t be leaving them much money, but that I would be leaving them the Wachtler name. Now they’re going to be ashamed of that name.”

“Did you have any thoughts about what the consequences of your behavior might be?”

“No. I never even thought about it.”

While they were talking, a nurse came in and told Sol to get into his pajamas and go to bed. He did, and they went on with their interview.

“How did you feel when you made the phone calls? Mailed the letters?” Dr. Solomon asked.

“I felt I had to do the things I did,” Sol said. “Like something was driving me to do them. And then afterward, after I did them, I’d feel this great relief.”

“Why did you threaten Joy?”

“I thought that she’d get scared and call on me to help her. Call me back into her life.”

They talked for over an hour, and then a marshal entered the room, grasped Sol’s leg, and chained it to the bed’s metal frame.

Dr. Solomon looked down in discomfort. Was this any way to treat a man who was sick?

He took his leave soon afterward, leaving orders that Sol should be given no medications except Valium, to calm him.

Three days after his interview with the psychiatrist, Sol was released from the hospital and went back to Manhattan’s federal district court for a hearing. He had by then hired an older lawyer with more years of experience than his son-in-law—Charles Stillman, of Stillman, Friedman, and Show. Stillman had been working frantically to cut a deal with Chertoff that would allow Sol to be placed under house arrest.

Sol was dressed, that morning, in his expensive-looking gray suit, the one he’d worn at the hospital, the one he’d been wearing when he was arrested, but he seemed only a shadow of his former self: someone thinner, shorter, less substantial in every way. He walked to the defense table with his eyes cast down and took his seat silently, hands folded.

Stillman tried to distract him. He joked with him, made small talk. Sol smiled and nodded. But his responses seemed automatic. When he was not being spoken to, he kept his eyes fixed motionlessly on the front of the courtroom.

Then, “All rise,” bellowed the court clerk, “The United States versus Sol Wachtler,” and the judge, a woman named Sharon Grubin who had been an admirer of Sol’s when he sat on the other side of justice at his high court of appeals bench, entered the courtroom.

She wanted to know, before she agreed to release Sol to home arrest, whether he was dangerous. Chertoff took the position that he was. “The evidence developed in this case suggests a pretty strong threat,” he said. “We’re obliged to take it seriously, whoever the defendant is.” Nevertheless, he was willing to let Sol stay out of jail, provided that at home he was monitored by security guards—paid for at his own expense—and an electronic bracelet, which would report his movements to the police.

Did he need both these constraints, the judge asked.

“They certainly are not as foolproof as the Metropolitan Corrections Center,” Chertoff said wryly. He was hinting that the judge would be justified if she chose to send the celebrated defendant to jail, and Sol pressed his lips together, as if restraining a cry.

Judge Grubin ended the hearing. She was granting the home arrest, she said. Then she directed a remark to Sol. It was an admiring, even a fawning, remark. “Chief Judge Wachtler,” she said, “if my decision in releasing you reflects even a small amount of the wisdom you have shown on the bench, we will have done right.”

Sol had held himself together until then, but hearing her words of praise, the kind of praise he had heard day in, day out for much of his life, tears flooded his eyes.

He was still, officially, chief judge of New York’s highest court. His fellow judges on the court of appeals had held a meeting and declined to suspend him, and although he himself, shortly after his arrest, had asked his family to issue a statement saying he was temporarily withdrawing from his position, he had subsequently revoked the statement. Now, leaving Judge Grubin’s courtroom, he realized reluctantly that he had no choice but to resign, and as soon as he arrived at his Manhasset home, he telephoned the acting chief of the court of appeals and informed him he was stepping down.

Charles Stillman was known for his skills at working out deals, and over the next few weeks, he began the process of seeking a deal for Sol, one that would keep him out of jail. The scuttlebutt among the press corps was that he would be successful. “When the deal is done,” predicted Newsday’s Jim Dwyer cynically, “[Wachtler] will plead guilty to something that carries the approximate weight of having mailed a letter with an incomplete zipcode.”

Psychiatry was at the core of Stillman’s endeavor. If Wachtler could be shown to have a serious mental condition, perhaps the prosecution would go easy on him.

Two weeks after he was released from Long Island Jewish Hospital, Sol was sent to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for further psychiatric evaluation.

Dr. Frank Miller examined him there. He found Sol’s behavior inappropriate. “For approximately forty-five minutes,” he would later explain, “Mr. Wachtler imitated the David Purdy character. He was so enamored by his creation that he insisted upon demonstrating Purdy’s walk, talk, mannerisms, and gestures. Since Purdy was toothless, Mr. Wachtler instructed me to pay particular attention to the way he positioned his jaw and lips to conceal his teeth. When I realized that I was not able to interrupt this monologue, I asked two other physicians to join us in the hope that their presence in the room would calm him. To my dismay, their presence only served to intensify his display, and I asked them to leave. Although the situation of the interview was sobering and grim, he was not able to appreciate or grasp it.”

In short, Miller saw in Sol many of the characteristics of mania, among them poor judgment and an expansive and grandiose mood, the same characteristics that had marked Sol’s behavior toward Joy.

New York’s former chief judge, Dr. Miller would eventually conclude, had been manic during the period he tormented his ex-lover, and he had been so because he suffered from bipolar, or manic-depressive, illness, precipitated and exacerbated by the many drugs he had been taking.

This was a different diagnosis from the one toward which Dr. Solomon was leaning. He, too, believed Sol to have been manic when he threatened Joy. But he was convinced that his mania had resulted not from an underlying manic-depressive illness, but solely from the drugs he had been taking. Sol’s was a “toxic mania,” Dr. Solomon theorized. The difference might seem slight to a lay person, but it was very significant, for if Sol were a true manic-depressive, his mania was likely to return unless he was treated with lifelong doses of lithium. But if his mania had been caused by drugs alone, he would be all right in the future, provided he avoided medications that made him toxic.

While he was at New York Hospital, Sol was exceedingly depressed, even despairing. “I feel,” he said to one of his nurses, “as though I’m already dead.” But he wasn’t suicidal, he assured her. “I wouldn’t visit that on the good people I’ve already hurt.”

He still thought about Joy a lot, sometimes with an odd, lingering affection. He missed her. Missed her still. Or missed what she had come to represent to him: a Helen, a Beatrice. A fantasy.

But at other times, he thought about her angrily, especially around New Year’s, when he learned that Charles Stillman had received a letter from one of her lawyers demanding that Sol give up his position as trustee of her trust and the trusts of Bruce, Van, and Honey Wolosoff as well, and that he return all commissions paid to him during 1992. “I’d rather go to jail than let her have the money,” he fumed to one of his nurses, “because she would blow it all in one day.”

Joy was on St. Barts. She’d flown down with David Samson, and with Jessica and Evan. She swam and sunned and feasted, and after a while she began to relax, to put aside, however slightly, the ordeal she had endured all year.

A woman editor who met Joy at a party that week found her cheerful and friendly. She’d heard that in New York, Joy had been hiding out, avoiding the glare of publicity, and was pleased to see that, now that she was on St. Barts, she didn’t have to be reclusive.

The two women were on the same flight back to New York, and before the plane took off, they talked some more and their children chatted, clicked. But the two families didn’t have an opportunity to say good-bye. When the plane landed, Joy and her party were whisked through customs by two customs officers.

“Who is she?” the editor overheard one of them say to the other.

“Someone big in the Republican party,” the other man said. “I think Bush wanted her to get special treatment.”

Sol’s immersion in psychiatry was just beginning. Charles Stillman, wanting as much expert opinion as he could get, hired two other psychiatrists—internationally known authorities—to have a look at his client, and Sol, who had once claimed to fear the stigma of the probing profession, saw the doctors willingly, hopefully. Both men, Dr. Donald Klein, one of the country’s leading authorities on psychiatric medications, and Dr. Robert Spitzer, who had written the standard diagnostic manual utilized by virtually all psychiatrists, agreed after examining Sol that most likely he had been suffering from mania—probably a drug-induced mania—when he undertook to frighten Joy.

Next, Sol was examined by the prosecution’s mental-health experts. The first to see him was psychologist Louis B. Schlesinger, who gave him a battery of psychological tests. Early in their first session, which lasted four and a half hours, he was struck by Sol’s extraordinary social skills. This fellow’s got a way of making you feel that you’re the most important person in the world, he thought. But when the session was over and he had had time to reflect, he came to the conclusion that Sol’s interest in others was actually a pose, a mask. He acts as if he cares about you, Schlesinger decided, but at the bottom, his feelings toward others are shallow, manipulative.

By the time he had spent another five hours with Sol, the psychologist had noted many other things about the former chief judge, among them that he was very naive about women and that he had an unusually strong need for attention and admiration. Wachtler, Schlesinger became convinced, was the type of man who is highly vulnerable to rejection, the kind who, when turned down by a woman, feels as if he’s been injured, given in some essential core of himself a veritable wound.

Using these clinical insights and the results of the tests he’d administered, Schlesinger was ultimately to add an astute new diagnosis to those that had already been made of Sol—he felt the former chief judge might have a narcissistic personality disorder. It is a condition marked by feelings of grandiosity, a lack of empathy for others, and a profound sense of entitlement. “It’s not unrelated to psychopathy,” Dr. Schlesinger would one day explain, “and indeed, there’s a clear psychopathic streak to Wachtler.”

Prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Steven S. Simring, who was the next to see Sol, found the famous patient’s only sickness to be “lovesickness.” That was a sickness not listed in the psychiatric diagnostic manual, he would later point out in a report filed with the court, yet it was

no small matter, because individuals who have been spurned by the objects of their love can develop any number of symptoms which look like depression, including loss of appetite, crying, and loss of interest in the outside world. It is certainly not uncommon for people to commit suicide after the failure of an important relationship. [But] the point is that Sol Wachtler’s symptoms were not caused by some mysterious mental illness that was visited upon him, or by the injudicious use of psychotropic medication.…

I do not think that anyone can be unmoved by the misfortune that befell Sol Wachtler.… he had been a good man who led a life of dedication to work and public service. Perhaps the problem was that Sol Wachtler was too dedicated, too much involved in taking care of his responsibilities toward others, while neglecting his own emotional needs.… [He] spent many years in a loveless marriage, accepting it for what it was, essentially denying that he had any emotional needs of his own. When Joy Silverman came along, he was starved for her affection and the passion that she stirred in him.

But, Simring concluded, when Joy broke off the affair, Sol became angry—“perhaps he genuinely did not appreciate how angry he had become”—and sought revenge.

Stalking is a vengeful deed, not an act of love. The letters that Judge Wachtler wrote to Ms. Silverman and the others leave little doubt how enraged he really was.… I can only conclude that he must have found some satisfaction in directly observing the effect on Joy Silverman of his threats and coarse language.

At the time Drs. Schlesinger and Simring interviewed Sol, the former chief judge had not yet been indicted. Chertoff had agreed to wait before indicting him until the results of the medical evaluations were in. If Wachtler had an organic problem severe enough to excuse his conduct, he told Stillman, he might be willing to forgo pressing criminal charges.

But it better be something serious, he told his staff. The defense better show Wachtler has something in his brain that’s pressing right on the part that does right and wrong.

In the middle of January, Chertoff learned the results of the doctors’ examinations and was informed by Stillman that the defense wanted a deal based on the theory that at the time Sol threatened Joy, he’d been suffering from an attack of mania caused by bipolar, or manic-depressive, disease or a toxic reaction to drugs. The former chief judge would plead guilty, Stillman indicated, provided he was indicted on charges that didn’t automatically require jail time.

Chertoff was unimpressed by the offer. He didn’t think Sol was a true manic-depressive. “We know enough about the disease,” he said to Ashrafi one day, “to know that a true manic-depressive can’t control his mania. So if Wachtler was one, he’d have been manic on the bench. He’d have been rattling on, and the people around him would have been talking about it. About him.”

“Which certainly wasn’t the case here,” Ashrafi agreed.

“Yeah,” Chertoff said. “The FBI interviewed scores of people who interacted with him while he was conducting his campaign against Joy, and no one noticed anything unusual about his behavior. Nothing.”

Chertoff had, in general, little patience with psychiatric arguments. By profession and philosophy, he believed there was good and evil in the world—good and evil and right and wrong—and that not every evil act needed to be explained as an illness, something to be treated. Which was how, he sometimes mused, a whole lot of people who put great store by psychiatry viewed things. Besides which, psychiatrists were always stretching. Take those symptoms of mania Wachtler’s doctors had come up with. Like Sol’s having feelings of grandiosity. Yeah, well, if you’re chief judge, you’re going to feel grandiosity, aren’t you?

There was something else Chertoff believed. It was that many crimes got committed by people who were depressed. Or manic. Or under stress. “They’ve lost their jobs,” he explained to a journalist one day. “They’re disappointed in love. But, hey, that’s the human condition. Okay, so life isn’t hunky-dory. But you’re supposed to be able to control yourself. And if you can’t—well, that’s what we’ve got the criminal law for.”

On February 1, Chertoff indicted Sol on five felony counts: one count of making a false statement to the government, namely when Sol had accused the Seales of trying to blackmail Joy; three counts of using the U.S. mail to promote blackmail, namely in the letters Sol had written to Joy, Jessica, and Elaine Samson in which he’d threatened to injure Joy’s reputation; and one count of extortion, based on the many letters and calls in which Sol had posed as Purdy and demanded money in exchange for compromising photographs and audiotapes of Joy and David Samson. The indictment also pointed out that as part of Sol’s “extortion scheme,” he used his power, influence, and resources as chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals to obtain information and promote his plan.

If Sol went to trial and was convicted of all the counts, he could be sentenced to five to sixteen years in prison. If he pled guilty to the charges, he could be sentenced to a year to eighteen months.

Sol was devastated. And he was still upset when, sixteen days later, he appeared at the court to which his case had been assigned, the U.S. District Court in Trenton, New Jersey, to lodge a plea to the indictment. Dr. Solomon, who had been seeing him two times a week ever since he got out of Payne Whitney, had put him on a regimen of lithium, the standard drug for the control of mania, and Prozac, the country’s most widely used antidepressant. He was, presumably, in emotional balance, chemically speaking. But when he entered the courtroom, a paneled hall adorned with gilt-framed portraits of famed, long-dead judges, he looked drawn and shaken, his body hunched, his hands dangling limply in front of him.

Joan was with him. When he parted from her at the velvet rope that led to the defendants’ dock, she kissed him boldly and possessively.

The Honorable Anne Thompson, the judge who would be taking his plea, arrived a moment later. She was a tall, reserved woman, a former prosecutor—the first black woman to serve as a prosecutor in New Jersey—and the state’s first female and first African-American federal judge. She had been a judge for fourteen years, but this was the most high-profile case over which she had presided.

She kept the proceedings brief. She ordered the indictment read, then asked Charles Stillman how his client intended to plead.

“Not guilty,” Stillman said. “Not guilty by virtue of insanity.”

Judge Thompson, never a woman to dawdle, nodded, and set a trial date several months in the future.

But neither she nor Chertoff nor Stillman expected the once-eminent judge looking up at her from the well of the courtroom to go to trial. A trial would be costly. Messy. An embarrassment. Rather, the point of setting a trial date was that now plea negotiations could begin in earnest.

Why should his client plead guilty to extortion? Charles Stillman demanded of Chertoff soon after the indictment. Sol hadn’t extorted money—just threatened to extort it. He’d never picked up the twenty thousand dollars Joy had left for him in the manila envelope, the day of his arrest. Couldn’t the government drop the extortion charge?

“Maybe,” Chertoff said. “But even if we do, Wachtler’s going to have to do jail time.”

“What about letting him serve half the time at home?” Stillman asked. “Or in a halfway house? A work-release program?”

“I don’t know,” Chertoff said.

But in the next few weeks, his position hardened. He examined the federal sentencing guidelines and concluded that he would have to insist that Sol spend the bulk of his sentence in jail.

His feelings toward Sol had also hardened. He had learned that Sol, who was still the trustee of Joy’s trust as well as of other Wolosoff family trusts, had, on the day before entering his not-guilty plea, authorized a payment to himself of $38,665 in trustee commissions and another payment of $20,000 for a lawyer representing him in a suit over the trusts. He was entitled to the money, he’d said. It was due him for work he’d done on the trusts in 1992.

This guy’s unbelievably nervy, Chertoff thought. How can he claim he was insane all that year, and yet that he was doing sound work handling the trust money?

Money—Bibbs’s money—had brought Sol and Joy together, but now it drove a final wedge between them. She wanted him out of her financial affairs—wanted him to return not only the payments he’d just withdrawn but all the money he’d taken in 1992, and she wanted him to resign his trusteeships and let her and her family appoint whomever they wanted to replace him. He wanted to keep the money and to appoint his daughter Lauren as his successor.

Joy felt that no Wachtler, neither Sol nor his daughter, had the right to handle her stepfather’s money. Not after what Sol Wachtler had put her through.

Sol felt he most certainly had the right to handle the money—Bibbs had given that right to him, and to Lauren after him, should he ever have to resign. Bibbs had even said it was their legacy. It had always irritated Sol that Bibbs, for whom he’d done so much, Bibbs, who had made a second fortune on the Florida land Sol’s own father had sold to him, had left him no outright inheritance—but the old man had left him this indirect one, and he didn’t intend to give it up.

In March, the fight over Bibbs’s money intensified, and both Joy and Sol began to sound as if they were convinced that all that lay at the core of the other’s heart was greed. Joy pointed out that Sol had, over the years, collected more than $800,000 as executor of Bibbs’s will and from commissions on the family trusts, and told people that Sol, whose judicial salary was $120,000, had always resented people with real money. Sol pointed out that Bibbs had always accused Joy of being a spendthrift, and told people that he was beginning to think that Joy might have started her relationship with him because he was in charge of her trust. “I wonder whether she ever really cared for me,” he mused one day. “I wonder whether she just said, ‘Look, he controls my money.’”

He had stopped being as tearful as he’d been in the days immediately following his arrest or as shaky as he’d been at the time of his plea. And he had begun to accept that he was going to have to go to prison—he still hoped it would be for only a brief part of his sentence. But he was frightened about being put behind bars. And he was worried about the humiliation that pleading guilty to Chertoff’s charges would bring him. He had spent his life concealing, perhaps even from himself, that his nature contained a dark as well as a bright side, had invested all his energies in being the model son, the overachieving adolescent, the perfect parent, the flawless friend, the principled politician, the peerless deliverer of justice. He had spent his life, more than most people do, in pursuit of reputation, renown, dignity. And now he was going to be humbled, forced to admit to acts that would make everyone who heard his admissions despise and revile him.

Dreading that public shaming, he passed his days seeking concessions from Chertoff—tried to get him to agree to drop the extortion charge as well as the charge that said he’d misused his office, and tried to get him to agree to let him enter into the record a psychiatric diagnosis, something that might soften public opinion about him.

Joy, on the other hand, was freer now than she had been in months, free to move about the city at will, free to stroll her neighborhood without perpetually looking over her shoulder. Moreover, her relationship with David Samson was going well. One day, she ran into the woman who had once criticized her for being overdressed and overjeweled. They met in a Madison Avenue coffee shop early on a Sunday morning. Joy was with David, she was dressed in a sweatsuit, and she was wearing almost no makeup, but her face was aglow with happiness. “Isn’t David wonderful?” she said to the woman. “Isn’t he the sexiest? Isn’t he divine?”

“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” a clerk in Trenton said to Sol on an unseasonably warm Wednesday at the end of March 1993.

“I do,” he replied, his voice loud and firm. He had at last agreed to plead guilty, and while he had won no concessions concerning the amount of time he would probably have to spend in prison, he had won several of the things that were important to him. He wasn’t going to have to plead to extortion or misusing his judicial office—the five counts of the indictment had been boiled down to one: that he had utilized interstate facilities to send kidnap and blackmail threats. And he was going to be allowed to include in his plea an affidavit from Dr. Miller that said that he had been suffering from a major mental illness during the time he had made his threats.

“Have you taken any medication within the last twenty-four hours?” Judge Thompson asked him.

“Yes, Your Honor. Prozac and lithium.”

“What are those drugs?”

“They are for the control of a manic or depressive state.”

“Would that affect in any way your present ability to understand what’s going on, to comprehend and appreciate the circumstances in which you find yourself?”

“No, Your Honor. I have been assured by my physician that I am in balance at the present time and capable of understanding and doing that which has to be done.”

Judge Thompson nodded, but she wanted to be sure that Sol himself thought he was mentally competent. “You are mentally ill but not mentally incompetent?” she asked. “Is that the distinction you make?”

Sol said yes.

A few moments later, Judge Thompson turned to the matter of Sol’s mental health at the time of the crime to which he intended to plead guilty. “I cannot accept your guilty plea,” she said to him, “unless you are prepared to acknowledge here in open court that you committed the crime when you were competent, sane, not disabled by reason of mental illness.”

It was an essential question, one that Sol would have preferred not having to answer in the affirmative. But he had no choice. It was part, a major part, of the plea deal. So assuring the judge that despite the psychiatric report, he would shortly make a statement asserting he’d been mentally competent at the time of his crimes, he began reading from a prepared speech. “I at no time intended to kidnap or harm in the slightest way Ms. Silverman’s daughter,” he read, “and I never wanted to nor did I take any money from Ms. Silverman. The extreme nature of my threats were meant to cause Ms. Silverman to believe that, in fact, there was someone named Purdy, and to be in fear so she would have reason to seek Sol Wachtler’s reassurance.”

As he spoke, his voice grew even stronger, so that he could be heard throughout the courtroom. “At the time I made the threats, I was conscious and aware of my actions and understood the making of such threats was wrong and illegal. I have been told by several psychiatrists that I suffered from a mental illness during that year, but I do not believe this would or should excuse what I did. I was able to appreciate the nature and quality of my acts.”

It was done. He had pled guilty. But there was one more thing he wanted to say. “I know, Your Honor,” he began, and suddenly his voice weakened, became almost inaudible, “that my behavior from late 1991 to late 1992 was foreign to my sixty-two years on earth. I am deeply ashamed and sorry for what I have done to others, to Ms. Silverman, to my wife and children, and to those who entrusted New York State’s court system to my care. I know that I can never make up for these acts, but I want to express my profound sorrow and regret.”

When he was finished, he sat down at the defense table, rubbed at his eyes, and folded his hands together in a prayer-like position.

Chertoff was satisfied. Outside the courtroom, he told the press that the case had been one of the most important of his entire career because it had challenged the very integrity of the court system. “People identified with Wachtler,” he said. “That is, prominent people did. Judges. Lawyers. They went around saying what a terrible thing this was for the defendant, as if we should give him special treatment, take him out of the category of everyone else.”

“Why do you think Wachtler snapped?” a reporter called out.

“There was no snap,” Chertoff said. “That’s the position the government takes, and it’s the one we’ll be taking when it comes to the sentencing. Wachtler’s acts weren’t the product of a severe mental illness. They were the product of anger. Here was a man who, by God’s grace, had the things everybody dreams about, position, honor, an intellectually challenging job—and yet when he was scorned in one area, he simply couldn’t let go. A snap? Mental illness? This was a man capable of going up on the bench and conducting lucid, erudite oral arguments—he wasn’t a man who was staying home in a bathrobe, or going around like a screaming banshee.”

Going around like a screaming banshee? Joan Wachtler, when she read Chertoff’s remarks in The New York Times the next day, was enraged, and for the first time since Sol’s arrest, she stepped forward to defend her husband publicly. “I am a licensed certified social worker who has been practicing in mental health for sixteen years,” she wrote in a letter to the editor of the Times. She continued:

Michael Chertoff’s characterization of a manic-depressive as someone “staying home in a bathrobe or going around like a screaming banshee” destroys the progress made by the medical-psychiatric community and the entire mental health profession in educating the public about mental illness.

Mr. Chertoff with this stereotyped negative bias has made a retrograde contribution to the mental health movement, setting it back many decades to a time before the advent of clinical assessment, diagnosis, and treatment with psychotherapy and medication. He has redrawn the archaic picture of any person with a mental illness as an unproductive citizen—an out-of-control raving maniac.

“Whatsa matter, David? You didn’t like my taste?” Larry Bathgate said to David Samson one day later that spring. Bathgate had just read in the New York Post that David had broken up with Joy. He’d read it in Cindy Adams’s column. “Joy Silverman, the Judge Sol Wachtler fatal attraction,” the gossip columnist had written, “is 0-for-5. Three marriages went poop. The extramarital affair with New York’s former Chief Judge went poop … and now, her subsequently well-publicized romance with Jersey lawyer David Samson pooped. It broke up months ago. He’s hunting for a replacement.”

“Aw, Larry,” David said. “You still believe everything you read in print?”

He insisted that he and Joy were still a couple.

So were Sol and Joan. But it was not easy to pick up the shards of their relationship. As for Joy, Sol was no longer in love with her. Indeed, he had come to feel that he had never really loved her, that he had loved, instead, the fantasy of love. Yet as late as the middle of July, more than nine months after she had effectuated his downfall, he wondered if he would always have a lingering sense of loss about Joy. She had been, for so long, the center around which his whole life had orbited.

Their long-term affair still aroused anger and resentment in Joan—perhaps it always would. One day, when Sol talked about Joy’s having a different, more casual attitude toward sex than did the members of their generation, Joan snapped at him, “Joy’s not that young!” and when he said she had been willing to cheat on Jeffrey, but not on David Samson, because she’d been married to Jeffrey, Joan sniffed, “Quite a standard! She wrote a new book!”

If she ever ran into Joy, she sometimes thought, she’d murder her.

But she was angry at Sol too. When he talked about Joy’s astrologist, she blurted out, “How could someone as intelligent as you fall for that crap?” and when he said Joy’s psychotherapist, Eleanor Sloan, had been a bright woman, she exploded, “Oh, God!”

Sol, placating her, told her he’d never loved Joy as much as he’d loved her, and that the thing he loved most about her was her empathy. “The way you can’t even stand to see a movie where an innocent person gets beaten up. Joy’s exactly the opposite.”

But why, then, had he fallen in love with her? Why had he enjoyed seeing her?

Sol himself sometimes thought that maybe he’d enjoyed seeing someone who could be such a bitch.

Dr. Solomon was still seeing Sol twice a week. When the doctor sat in his small, book-lined office and reflected on his famous patient, he thought that a lot of what had happened to Sol could be traced to his childhood. To the way he’d been such a very good boy. He’d had tremendous needs for approval, so he’d always done everything he could to make the adults around him think well of him. And in a way, he still did. He was on the phone with his mother every day. “Hello, Ma. How are you?” Every day.

That was Sol. He worried about everyone. Took care of their needs. But not his own.

Take all that time when he and Joan weren’t making love, all that time before the affair with Joy started. Other men would have acted a lot differently. But Sol didn’t wander. He was still the good boy.

Of course, the end result was that he was very naive, sexually.

Joy had helped him with that. So in a way, she did good things for him, not just bad. She also told him how handsome he was, how smart. Which he needed. And wasn’t getting from Joan. Joan’s a very loving wife, but she isn’t the type to fawn over a man.

Of course, now they would have to work on their marriage. Both of them. And Sol would have to work on becoming more aware of his feelings. Those headaches he always got? They had to do with his hiding his feelings from himself. Feelings like anger. Like his anger at Joy.

Dr. Solomon had talked to Sol about that. He’d told him that he believed he’d been poisoned by the drugs he’d been taking and that was what made him do the things he’d done to Joy. But was there anger behind it? You bet there was.

On June 29 the trust suit between Sol and Joy was settled. He agreed to give back the money he’d taken in commissions from the Wolosoff family trusts in 1993 and from Joy’s trust in 1992 and to let Joy choose whomever she wanted to succeed him as trustee. She agreed not to challenge his administration of the estate. The last ties between him and Joy were over, severed. The last ties between him and Bibbs too.

Lots of his old ties were being severed. His old friend and chief administrator, Matthew Crosson, was stepping down from the position to which Sol had elevated him. There was going to be a farewell party for him this very night. Crosson had begged him to come, but he’d been reluctant. He hadn’t been to a public event since his arrest, even though, now that he’d pled guilty, he no longer had to wear the electronic bracelet. But then Dr. Solomon told him it would be a good idea for him to get out and about, and Sol decided to go.

He went to the party, which was being held in the glittering Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York’s Central Park, accompanied by Lauren and his son-in-law Paul Montclare. Unsure of the reception he would receive, he stood for several minutes at the entrance to the party room, just feeling nervous and staring at the guests. They were mostly state judges—there must have been two hundred and fifty of them.

Then someone spotted him and, to his surprise, came over and grabbed his hand and said, “Hello, Chief!” And then some of the other judges saw him, and they began mobbing him, shaking his hand and kissing him and calling out, “Hey, Chief!” and, “How are ya, Chief.”

And that wasn’t the end of it. When Crosson got up to speak, he said such flattering things about him that all the judges began clapping and clapping for him. And some even began crying.

What’s the matter with those guys? Chertoff thought when he read the account of Sol’s trip to Tavern on the Green in a newspaper the next day. Don’t they understand that what Wachtler did isn’t simply a case of boys-will-be-boys?

It wasn’t just this crew—judges!—who got it wrong. Ever since the case began, he’d been meeting people who shrugged their shoulders and said, “Well, man-woman stuff. What do you expect?” Didn’t they know that this was a crime of violence? Well, there was no act of violence. But you had to be very inexperienced in the ways of the world not to understand that just by making threats, Sol had effectively done violence to a mother and a daughter.

Chertoff hoped Judge Thompson would understand it and would sentence Sol to the maximum prison time possible under the federal guidelines—eighteen months.

Hoping to influence her, he put together a thick packet of presentencing materials that contained every shred of evidence the government had collected against Sol.

Charles Stillman was hoping Judge Thompson would give Sol only twelve months in prison—the minimum possible sentence—and would allow him to serve as much of that sentence as possible in a halfway house, and he, too, put together a thick packet of materials that might influence her decision.

His packet contained letters attesting to Sol’s good works and character. There was one from New York’s governor, Mario Cuomo. Another from New York City’s mayor, David Dinkins. And there were scores of communications from other, less famous people.

The letters laid out a picture of Sol as a man who had spent his life dedicated to serving just causes. They pointed out that he had formed the New York State Judicial Commission for Minority Concerns to combat racial discrimination, established the Workforce Diversity Program to ensure fair hiring and promotion in the court system, and worked closely with New York’s Task Force on Gender Bias to eliminate the unequal treatment of women.

The letters also reported Sol’s numerous acts of kindness as a friend, and many spoke of him in glowing, admiring terms. “I always found Sol’s great charm,” wrote Vivian Berger, the vice dean of Columbia Law School, “to be backed up by the substance of character and genuine warmth as a human being.”

“He represented for me,” wrote the Reverend Frank N. Johnston, the former rector of the Christ Episcopal Parish in Manhasset, “the highest aspirations of our Judeo-Christian culture.”

Sol was happy about the great outpouring of affection and support in the letters and hopeful that it would indeed influence Judge Thompson to give him a short sentence and a quick release to a halfway house. But he felt there was something more that could be done to make the judge look favorably upon him—and not just the judge but the public too. His story needed to be in the press. His story of mental illness. Told in his own words, and with his own spin on things.

Stillman wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Sol, like many politicians, had been in thrall to the press his entire life, and he believed in its power the way the ancients believed in the power of their gods. More, he was convinced he knew how to manipulate that power, make it work for him. So in the middle of the summer, feeling not unlike his old energetic and politically savvy self, he mounted an enormous publicity campaign, giving lengthy interviews to numerous local newspapers. In his interviews, he talked about his mental illness—the mania that had resulted from bipolar disease or a toxic reaction to medications, or both—and blamed the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey, and Joy for not stopping his campaign of harassment.

It was, he seemed to be saying, he who was the victim. The state’s victim. Joy’s victim. In regard to Joy, his stance resembled the age-old one used by men who have abused women: What I did was her fault, not mine; it would never have happened if she hadn’t gone walking there, if she hadn’t dressed the way she did, if she’d said “No!” and meant it. Sure, he’d done bad things, went his message, but it wasn’t his fault.

Not surprisingly, given the enlightened temper of the times, within a few days the campaign backfired. While several papers presented sympathetic or at least uncritical interviews with him, four days before September 9, the date that had finally been set for his sentencing, The New York Times, the forum that mattered most to him, pointed out in a front-page article that the former chief judge was “seeking leniency in the court of public opinion by impugning those who brought him down.”

As the day of sentencing approached, Sol felt he couldn’t get anything to come out right anymore.

On September 9, a dank and gloomy day, the press turned out in force to record the day’s events, the closure they had been awaiting for nearly a year. Outside the limestone steps of Trenton’s handsome WPA-constructed courthouse, there was a veritable trailer park of television vans, a battalion of cameramen, a phalanx of TV newscasters and newspaper reporters. Many of the journalists covering the story knew Sol Wachtler, had known him back in his palmier days, and felt pangs of pity for him, for he had always been immensely popular with them, a ready source of snappy sound bites and winning one-liners.

“Remember the ham sandwich?” one reporter reminded another. “‘A grand jury’ll indict even a ham sandwich’?”

“Remember ‘the death penalty is the chicken soup of politics’?” another reminisced. “‘A folk remedy that can’t hurt, but hasn’t been proved to do you any good’?”

Wachtler was being memorialized. He was dead—but the burial was yet to come.

Then he arrived and cameras whirred. But court officers swiftly whisked him indoors—him and his entourage, his children and their spouses, his psychiatrist, and three lawyers. There was Stillman, of course. And Theodore Wells, a highly regarded New Jersey lawyer who had been working with Stillman ever since the case began. And Paul Montclare, Lauren’s husband, who had represented Sol when he was first arrested.

Only Joan wasn’t there. Early in the morning, she and Sol had talked things over and decided that no matter what sentence Judge Thompson handed down, the day was bound to be traumatic. “Maybe you should stay home,” Sol had said. And she had given him no argument.

“Mr. Stillman,” Judge Thompson called out as soon as the court came to order. “Mr. Stillman, is there anything you would like to say in mitigation of sentence?”

“I would like to speak to you of Sol Wachtler, the public man,” Stillman replied. “One must consider the nature of the man’s life and the price he has already paid, and will pay, for what he did.”

He then proceeded to spell out many of Sol’s accomplishments and to urge Judge Thompson to consider the punishment he had already received—public disgrace, the loss of his judgeship, and the loss of his law license, which he’d voluntarily given up. “Sol Wachtler’s sixty-two-year path through life,” he asserted, “has been marked by extraordinary contributions and a commitment to the judicial system, which is a critical part of an ordered society. Along the way, he stumbled and fell. Quite simply, he will never fully recover from the injuries he has suffered from that fall. Surely, the dispensation of justice has room to credit Sol Wachtler for all the good he has done.”

Chertoff, listening attentively, thought, I’ve got an answer for that! I’ll turn it around, ask the judge to think about the guy who gets convicted and gives as the excuse for his crime, “I never had anything my entire life.” The guy comes in, he says, “My entire life I was devoid of love, success, prosperity, and health. That’s why I committed the crime. So don’t punish me.” But, hey, we don’t accept that as an excuse for breaking the law—even though in some ways it’s a more powerful argument than “I was rich, I was powerful, I had prestige, an unlimited vista—and I didn’t get something I wanted, so I committed a crime, but don’t punish me. I’ve been punished enough because I lost all my advantages.”

Paul Montclare spoke next. “One should not equate insanity with mental illness,” he declared, and then talked about Sol’s mental troubles and the medications that had exacerbated them. “He was taking amphetamines,” he reminded the judge, “he was taking antidepressants, he was taking steroids for chronic headaches, and he was taking Halcion, a drug that has been banned in England. The cumulative effects of these drugs on a vulnerable person like Mr. Wachtler cannot be underestimated. His judgment was impaired.”

Mental illness? Chertoff thought. It’s like they’re trying to thread a needle with a camel! On the one hand, they’re saying Wachtler had impaired judgment when it came to Joy Silverman and David Samson and all the other people he called while he was conducting his campaign. And on the other hand, they’re saying that in all his capacities as a judge, he had unimpaired judgment. Well, you can’t be a judge on autopilot. And anyway, if his judgment was unimpaired most of the time, how come in those unimpaired moments he didn’t exercise his good judgment to prevent himself from doing what he did? It makes no sense.

By the time Sol’s third lawyer, Theodore Wells, spoke, Chertoff was growing fidgety, his long, lean, Ichabod Crane figure shifting in its chair, his long, lean fingers riffling papers. He listened restlessly while Wells asked for twelve months’ incarceration, to be served at a halfway house or community correction center, and if a halfway house was ruled out, imprisonment in the federal minimum-security prison in Pensacola, Florida. And then finally, Wells was done, and Judge Thompson was saying, “Mr. Chertoff?”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” he began. “It is not a happy day to speak at a sentencing, at any sentencing, still less a sentencing in which a person who once occupied high judicial office confronts the court in the status of a criminal.”

A few moments later, he was reciting the entire litany of Sol’s crimes—the hang-up calls, the dirty cards, the card with the condom in it, the kidnap threats, the extortion letters, the use of court of appeals staff to obtain information about Samson, the attempt to implicate the Seales. “What Joy Silverman should have done, according to Mr. Wachtler,” he flung out, “at least as he recounted to The New York Times last week, is she should have sought a protective order to prevent him from harming her, or she should have gone to the family members so they could seek help for him. Your Honor, it’s the old theme … She should have stopped me.”

When he finished with Sol and Joy, he turned to the question of whether antidepressant medication had caused Sol’s crimes. “Pamelor and Halcion are the principal culprits in Sol’s version of events,” he said, leaving out any reference to Tenuate, the amphetaminelike drug whose use had predated them. “His lawyers say that all his truly aberrant conduct starts after he filled the prescription for these drugs on November 11, 1991. But the actual genesis of his scheme occurred well before he took those two medications. Two weeks before he took them, he called Jeffrey Silverman and, posing as a private investigator, asked Silverman if he was interested in retaining him to look into the activities of his wife. And five or six days before he filled his prescription, he called Elaine Samson and for the first time used the name and identity of David Purdy.”

“Javert!” a famous television newscaster sitting on a front bench whispered loudly, referring to the heartless French detective in Les Misérables who mercilessly hounded poor Jean Valjean. But if Chertoff heard him, he gave no sign. He went on talking.

He talked about the poor man and the rich man, and about threading a needle with a camel, and finally, he said, “This was a crime of violence, even though there was no act of violence.” Then he explained that harassment was a form of violence against women, and declared, “We don’t deal with crimes against women very much in federal court, but the sentence ought to speak to that issue as well as to everything else.”

When he was done, he asked for eighteen months of incarceration and opposed letting Sol serve his time in a halfway house.

Women’s issues? Theodore Wells was on his feet as soon as Chertoff sat down. “Your Honor, could I please have a few minutes of response time? I will not be long.”

Judge Thompson nodded, and he began to speak. “In terms of women’s issues,” he said, “there is another dimension to this case. It involves relationships not just between Joy Silverman and Judge Wachtler, but between Joy Silverman and Lauren Wachtler, her friend, and Joy Silverman and Joan Wachtler, the judge’s wife.” Yes, there was a whole women’s issue surrounding the case, he tried to point out, and it wasn’t the one Chertoff had been talking about. But he didn’t call it by a name. Did he mean Joy’s sexual betrayal of her cousin Joan? With the innuendo left hanging in the stale air of the courtroom, he moved quickly away from the matter, insisting, “There is no attempt to blame Joy Silverman for anything.”

Sol had been listening to the arguments with his head hunched down between his shoulders. Now at last, it was his turn to speak. He rose from the defense table, laid some notes on a podium, and looked searchingly at Judge Thompson, sitting high on her elevated platform, as he used to sit high above the men and women who came before him for justice. Then he started talking. “The last time I appeared before Your Honor,” he said, “I told you of my misdeeds. I told you then I was fully responsible for them. I don’t blame anyone else for those misdeeds. They were my actions.”

The words were coming out smoothly. Making speeches was an art he had been practicing since he was a boy. “I did this,” he went on clearly. “And I apologized then and I apologize now to Mrs. Silverman, to Jessica, to my wife and children, to the court system, to the profession in which I served, to all those people who believed in me who I disappointed by my aberrant behavior—”

But then suddenly, he couldn’t go on. His mouth was dry. His words were choking in his throat.

“Would you like some water?” Judge Thompson asked with concern.

He shook his head. Behind him, several of his children bit their lips. Above him, the painted eyes of New Jersey’s long-dead famous judges stared sightless and impassive at his coughing figure. Then, he swallowed, and regained his composure. “I’m all right,” he assured Judge Thompson, and although he wasn’t, not really, and might never feel altogether all right again, he continued with his prepared speech. “In January of 1991, the New York State Bar Association presented me with its gold medal,” he said. “The highest honor that can ever be given to a lawyer in my state. Yesterday, I received a letter from the president of the New York State Bar Association advising me that my name has been stricken from the membership rolls.”

Several reporters, their heads up, their pens forming sentences as if directed by an autopilot device, sighed. The irony of Wachtler, the gold-medalist, and Wachtler, the outcast, had moved them, or at least arrested them, assured them they’d be leaving with that greatest of necessities, a good quote.

“Mr. Chertoff speaks of responsibility,” Sol was continuing. “How do you manifest the acceptance of responsibility? First of all, by saying you are responsible, and then by showing a sense of responsibility. I have done this. After my arrest, my court convened and would not suspend me, but as soon as I could get to a phone, I called and told them I was resigning. I did not want to bring further or greater disgrace to the institution which I revered.

“More, because of the nature of my offense, I would not be automatically disbarred in the State of New York. Nevertheless, I have voluntarily filed my resignation from the bar. I didn’t want to bring further disgrace to the profession which has nurtured me, and for which I have such high respect.”

The courtroom was as quiet as a tomb. Only the scratching of pastels, as courtroom artists tried to capture his likeness, broke the remarkable stillness.

“My only hope now is to try to put my life back together again,” Sol said into the silence. “To try to make amends for what I have done. And in my punishment, I would just hope that the Court would please consider my forty years of public service.”

Then he sat down.

Judge Thompson had not tipped her hand, had not displayed, throughout the long morning of arguments, any reaction that might indicate what she was thinking, where she stood. Now she herself addressed the waiting defendant, lawyers, and spectators. She remarked that she was convinced that Judge Wachtler had lived an exemplary life—she had read about it in the papers the defense had submitted. She said, too, that she knew that there was a dispute among the psychiatrists who had examined Judge Wachtler, with the defense’s doctors attributing his criminal episode to a major mental illness and the government’s attributing it to no malady, just lovesickness.

But, “The Court cannot resolve the apparent conflict between the highly regarded doctors,” she intoned. “Nor can the Court rationally explain the defendant’s behavior.

“His bizarre acting out of make-believe characters, like David Purdy, the investigator from Houston, complete with cowboy hat and toothless diction, and Theresa O’Connor, the devout parishioner from Linden, New Jersey, seems beyond the norm for lovesickness. His simultaneous conduct as competent, responsible, professional chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York defies logical explanation.”

Where was she going? Which side would she favor? She had given no clue. And then, it came. “In trying to perform the impossible task of understanding the defendant,” she said, “we cannot lose sight of the fact that there were real victims here, people who endured protracted anguish and suffering as a consequence of the defendant’s calculated actions. The defendant’s behavior was not an expression of love. It was an expression of anger, intimidation, and grotesque control.”

She paused, gazed down at Sol, and then delivered the sentence: fifteen months in prison—three more than the defense had wanted, three less than the prosecution had wanted. She had done the Solomonic thing.

She also levied fines against Sol, among them a fine of thirty-one thousand dollars to repay Joy for having had to hire security guards and tutors for Jessica. And while she refused to recommend to the Bureau of Prisons that Sol’s sentence be served in a halfway house, she did agree to suggest to the bureau that he be placed in the minimum-security federal correctional institution in Pensacola, Florida.

He had lost, Sol knew. He had lost almost everything he had been fighting for. A short sentence. A halfway house. But there was still Pensacola to hope for. Standing in the courtroom, his three lawyers surrounding him, he tried to smile, and his lips curled up, but his eyes were misty. A few moments later, he retreated to a room down the corridor with the lawyers, his family, and Dr. Solomon. “It’ll be all right,” he said to his children. “It’s going to be all right.”

Dr. Solomon drew him into a corner of the room. “How’s your head?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Sol said. “I don’t have any headache at all.”

Dr. Solomon was astonished by his answer. “No,” he said. “I mean, your emotions. Your head.”

Sol hadn’t wanted to deal with feelings. Not here. Not now. But Dr. Solomon was standing alongside him saying, “It’s good to cry. You’ve been through a great deal, you should let yourself cry.” And at last, the tears that all morning had been lurking in the corners of his eyes and the back of his throat began to fall.

He grabbed a handkerchief.

In the afternoon, Joy, who had not attended the sentencing or any of the court sessions, came forward as a spokesperson for victims. “With Sol Wachtler’s sentencing today,” she asserted in a statement issued through her lawyers, “a message has been sent that society will not tolerate men who terrorize, stalk, abuse, and victimize women and children.”

The next day, Joan Wachtler told Cindy Adams, “Joy’s an avaricious person whose pathological greed destroyed a gentle and naive man. I’ve known Joy since she was a young girl. All her treasured possessions came from men. Two husbands. Two divorces, plus a third upcoming. And she wanted more, from my husband.”

Sol didn’t have to report to prison for another couple of weeks. Judge Thompson had granted him a grace period because September was the season of the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

He used some of his last moments of freedom to try once again to tell his side of the story. He told it to Cindy Adams, saying, “Joy never knew her father. A psychiatrist told me that she’s been taking it out on men ever since. That she destroys men. One by one.”

He told it to Barbara Walters, adding, “The Talmud teaches us that a person who serves as a judge sits beside God, and I was given that privilege for twenty-five years, and it’s lost to me now.” He told it to newscaster Gabe Pressman. And when Pressman asked him what he might do when he got out of prison, he said he might teach law or become a spokesperson on the subject of mental illness—“educate the public with respect to the implications of it.”

“Teach?” Dick Lavinthol, who worked in Chertoff’s office, said when he heard about Sol’s plans. “Educate the public about mental illness? I’ve got a better idea. Why doesn’t he get out of jail and start a foundation devoted to stopping the harassment of women. The problem’s endemic—but he could have a real impact. He could set up projects that would give men sensitivity training. And he could get grants to teach women how to handle harassment. He’d be a hero again!”

On Sunday, September 26, two days before he was due to report to prison, Sol was informed that the prison he was to report to wasn’t the minimum-security facility in Pensacola, Florida, that he had requested, but the Butner Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in Butner, North Carolina, that had a psychiatric hospital on its grounds.

He told his psychiatrist that he was exceedingly frightened. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “There’ll be murderers there. There’ll be people with grudges against judges.”

But there was no recourse, and on the twenty-eighth, Sol traveled back to North Carolina, one of the states he had lived in as a boy, before he had gone north to prep school, before he had married Joan, before he had gotten to know Bibbs Wolosoff, before he had gone into politics and become a judge. Before he had met Joy.

As he was surrendering himself, photographers caught his picture. He looked young, boyish, his unlined face a Picture-of-Dorian-Gray mask.

Then, he was behind bars.

What had brought him to that pass? What had made him a perfect embodiment of what the ancient Greeks considered the only truly tragic figure—a man like ourselves who falls from a high place as a result not of vice or depravity but of some great error or frailty. There was hubris, of course. He had lived so long in the corridors of power, had opened so many of its doors, and had found himself a room with a seat that, thronelike, put him in command of the lives and fates of millions. He was not just above the law. He was the law. And that had made him vain, overbearingly proud.

Such a man takes it hard when a woman rejects him—especially if he has not often offered himself to a woman. To such a man, rejection is an affront, not a blow to the soul but a slap at dignity. It brings out the urge to punish.

Perhaps, in Sol’s case, that urge might have stayed under control were it not for the inflaming effects of the amphetaminelike drug he began taking some months before he started his campaign against Joy. The drug Tenuate often promotes restlessness, feelings of invulnerability and of grandiosity. The drug did not cause his actions, but it enabled him to take the actions. It disinhibited him. It loosed or let him loose the dogs of wounded pride that gnawed at him.

One thing is certain. He became—there is no other word—demonic. And yet, even as he rode his demons, or they rode him, he never ceased being a fair judge, a fond family man, a loyal friend.

History tells us that from time to time there have been other men like this. Men—and women too. Invariably, they fascinate—but it is difficult to say whether that is because they are different from the rest of humankind or because they are Everybody writ large.