My Beloved World Part 23

Later, when we said good-bye after the trial, Mrs. Solomon turned back to me as she left my office and added, "Miss Sonia"-she couldn't manage my last name-"there's something very special about you. You've been blessed. I'm glad we met." She was gone before I could answer, but I thought: Mrs. Solomon, there's something very special about you too. I am humbled and honored to have known you. There are people who make me believe, in ways that I can't fully explain, that I have something important to accomplish in this life. Sometimes it's a seemingly random encounter. The inscrutable words of a stranger that somehow say to me: Sonia, you have work to do. Get on with it.

THE LAST OF the really tough cases that I perceived as Bob Morgenthau's challenge to me carried a different stench of evil. Nancy and Dawn were both concerned about how it would affect me. "Can you handle it?" they asked. I knew I could, though I would surprise even myself with the ferocity of determination this one provoked, a steelier side of me than I'd ever known.

I was working late one night when I reached my limit for the day. I turned off the projector, flipped the lights on, took a deep breath, and tried to will away the nausea. Could I show these films to a jury? Of course they were prejudicial; the defense attorneys would fight me over this. But until a person has seen this stuff, it remains abstract. You can understand that child p.o.r.nography is abominable, you can appreciate the harm that's done to the children used to make it and to the morals of a society, but you can't begin to imagine the depth of revulsion you'll feel. You can't antic.i.p.ate pity will be so overwhelming that you yourself feel violated. I had to get the films admitted. But there remained the question of strategy. I always remembered Warren Murray's advice about persuading the jury of the moral necessity of a conviction. Some crimes, however, are so heinous that they can't fail to stir outrage. In such cases, hammering the point can even prove counterproductive. So I decided I would let the films themselves do the emotional work and put my own energy into building the most crushing argument for guilt, a logical structure that was impervious to denial.

There were two defendants. Scott Hyman was small-fry, the retail front end who'd sold a few films to an undercover cop and was supposed to connect him with the wholesaler for the big purchase. He was young, even vulnerable looking, showing up for court every day with the same oversized sweater hanging on his scrawny frame. When I learned that his own parents had run an adult bookstore, I wondered what kind of a childhood he'd had. His partner Clemente D'Alessio cut a much less sympathetic figure, stocky with slicked-back hair and a pockmarked face, a garish gold crucifix hanging on his chest. If he wasn't the brains of a bigger operation, he was at least smart enough to stay out of sight. Everything we had on him was circ.u.mstantial and hinged on identifying his voice in a single recorded phone call. My plan was to implicate them both in the same transaction, focusing on the link between retail and wholesale.

The case had its weaknesses. The wholesale deal-selling up to three hundred films to the undercover agent-was never consummated, because the police couldn't come up with the cash fast enough. They tried to stall, but D'Alessio got spooked and backed off. Then it took them six months before they got around to arresting him. They hadn't made my job easy. In a case where police credibility was essential, where so much rested on the testimony of the undercover cop, a lot had actually been bungled. Even the crucial phone call-Hyman calling D'Alessio on tape-was arguably tainted, the call having been placed minutes after Hyman was in custody, before he'd had access to counsel. On the other hand, the sloppiness of the investigation didn't mean those guys weren't guilty, only that I would have to work that much harder. Fortunately, I got plenty of able help from my second seat, Karen Greve Milton, and it was a relief to share the emotional weight of the case as well as the workload.

The first day and opening arguments were more nerve-racking than any I had experienced in a while. I remembered how a bureau chief had advised another female ADA. "Handle it like a man," he told her. "Go to the bathroom and throw up." The laugh was sufficient to quell my stomach. I've since accepted that all trial lawyers get nervous, even some judges, and the day you find being in court routine enough that you feel relaxed will probably be a day you'll regret.

D'Alessio's attorney was a high-priced criminal defense lawyer with more than twenty years of trial experience, often on high-profile cases. A large man with surprisingly quick reflexes and a nose for publicity, he was intimidating on many levels. He poured on his rhetoric liberally and dripped condescension. Condescending to the prosecutor might be a tactic, but he was sloppy with it, and it sloshed onto the jury sometimes, which can be very damaging. I made a mental note to be extra polite to the panel and acknowledge the inconvenience we were putting them through.

The defense might have argued entrapment, but they chose not to. Instead, Hyman's attorney went for "diminished capability." Apparently, Hyman was addicted to quaaludes, and in exchange for them he supplied a pharmacist with child p.o.r.nography. It was the pharmacist who, after the police had picked him up for another crime, turned informant, initially setting up Hyman with the undercover cop. The defense contended that Hyman only supplied the p.o.r.n to keep the drugs flowing, and the drugs had in turn impaired his judgment.

Diminished capability is always a flimsy argument at best. It has no legal standing, and I could see maybe five different ways to knock it down. But the attorney dragged it out into an endless distraction, ordering the federal prescription records and bringing the pharmacist in to testify. As it happened, the pharmacist was under federal indictment on so many other charges that he had trouble keeping track of what his immunity covered. He couldn't say much at all. Another witness the defense had lined up was arrested on a completely separate charge while waiting outside the courtroom. It was hard to imagine a sleazier bunch of characters.

D'Alessio's attorney decided on a mistaken-ident.i.ty strategy: there was another Clem who worked in the same building, and he, the defense claimed, was obviously the one Hyman was speaking to in the incriminating phone call. So D'Alessio had found a way to remain invisible, even as he sat there at the defense table. I would have to find a way of using to our advantage that cloak of secrecy he'd wrapped around himself. That he'd evidently taken such pains to keep his hands clean despite a mountain of circ.u.mstantial evidence was entirely in keeping with our view that we had netted quite a big fish.

I presented my evidence over six long, methodical, painstaking days. There was so much stuff-piles of films, tapes, doc.u.ments-that we had to wheel it into the courtroom on carts. I mapped the locations in detail, painting a scene of seedy storefronts with names like Peep-In, Show Palace, the Roxy Burlesque Theatre. This wasn't just atmosphere. I needed the territory laid out clearly so as to lead the jury along the disjointed trail of evidence that came from the surveillance teams: Hyman coming and going between D'Alessio's office and the vault where the films were kept; the brown paper bag seen here, seen there, seen going in and not coming out; the locations where conversations were caught on hidden mics ...

Was I pushing the jurors too far by subjecting them to the tedium of listening to the undercover cops' recordings? They had to suffer through long silences, incongruous music from the car radio while the clock hand swept slowly, and wait for a few d.a.m.ning words. But the tapes left no doubt about the nature of what was happening. You could hear Hyman boasting about other sales he'd made, about the quality of the films he was offering, and explaining how films with younger kids, "kiddie p.o.r.n," were easier to come by; older kids got wise to the business and wanted their cut. He also talked about the wholesaler's concern for secrecy. And then, finally, we get the link between Hyman and D'Alessio: "Just like the last time, yeah, same guy."

The films were the very last piece of the puzzle I was helping the jury put together before I could rest my case. They were scratchy and grainy, the colors having shifted from having been copied too many times. They were silent: no sound, no dialogue, no plot. A bare bedroom was the set. The children appeared to be as young as seven or eight, no older than ten or eleven. Their little limbs were scrawny, bruised, and grimy. The lens zoomed in ruthlessly on genitals, probing and thrusting. Though you never saw or heard an adult presence, the awkward unmotivated action left no doubt about the ghost that gave orders from behind the camera.

I had thirteen films screened in all, each around ten or fifteen minutes. As the previous one rewound, the police officer would recite the litany of identification for the next one, and we all braced ourselves. Midway through the screenings, I noticed the journalist who had been sitting in the gallery every day, following the case for a book she was writing. She had taken off her gla.s.ses in a quiet refusal to see more and was staring sadly into s.p.a.ce. The members of the jury didn't have that choice.

My summation didn't need rhetoric. The facts were d.a.m.ning enough. All I needed to do was to show how they were connected with relentless logic, step-by-step, leaving no piece out. I tried to put myself in the jurors' shoes and antic.i.p.ate any possible misgiving or misunderstanding. Would they balk at the circ.u.mstantial nature of the evidence against D'Alessio? Words like "circ.u.mstantial" carry an exaggerated load when you consider the degree to which most of us live our lives by inference. Keep it simple, straightforward, I reminded myself. This was a panel of citizens, not legal scholars. Having exposed them to enough horror, I addressed them with a bit of humor. How did your mother know it was you whenever you raided the cookie jar? I asked them. Only one of her kids was too short to reach it without the stepladder. And say you forgot to put the stepladder away, left it out there covered with cookie crumbs-it was a pretty safe bet the culprit was you and not one of your bigger siblings.

My closing ran two and a half hours. The judge took another two hours to charge the jury, reviewing all the elements of the law. It was early evening by the time they began their deliberations. But by the end of the next day, the jury forewoman was reading the verdict, p.r.o.nouncing "guilty" eighty-six times-forty-three counts for each defendant. Hyman and D'Alessio had expected this; they had bail on hand.

But there remained the matter of the sentencing. I had seen cases in which defendants found guilty on all counts had evaded the full weight of justice because a single jurist was, for one reason or another, unwilling to impose it. In the conversations we had taped, when Hyman bragged about other crimes-drug deals and credit card scams-he said he never worried about getting caught. When it came time for sentencing, he said, you just had to keep postponing until you got the right judge. I could not let that happen. When we reconvened a month later, I pressed for the maximum. And when D'Alessio's attorney offered a profoundly offensive a.n.a.logy-the maximum here, he said, would be like twenty years for possession of a single joint-my answer came with a fury so controlled that I doubt it registered as fury, but I felt it.

"In those films you see children about the age of seven and eight engaged in activities which are normally reserved for an adult bedroom," I said, hoping now to make the moral case that I had the films make for me to the jury. "But it was more than that, Your Honor. There was an eight-year-old girl in one of the films, a small girl depersonalized to the extent that we don't even know her name or who she is, but she is a human being. An eight-year-old girl on a film was directed offstage to engage in acts which I am not sure she fully understood. That young girl was robbed and she was raped. She was raped of her virginity and her innocence by the individuals who produced those films. In a sense, her innocence was murdered ... That is not the equivalent, when we request our sentence, of selling a stick of marijuana. When you sell a stick of marijuana, the buyer and the seller can make free choices. The children could not."

D'Alessio got three and a half to seven years; Hyman got two to six.

Earlier, Bob Morgenthau had offered me a promotion to head the Juvenile Office. My work on this trial had got him thinking that this might be a specialty area for me and asking himself whether the office needed a dedicated unit for child p.o.r.nography. My refusal of his offer was instantaneous, an instinctive gesture of self-preservation. I knew I couldn't witness that much sorrow and depravity without drowning in it. It was time for me to move on.

WHEN THE CHILD p.o.r.nOGRAPHY CASE was wrapped up, I took a brief vacation in Puerto Rico, but my mind was back in New York, and in particular on my cousin Nelson, who had reentered my life. After disappearing for about eight years through the worst of his addiction, he had somehow managed to join the military and clean up. There would still be ups and downs, but he didn't lose touch with the family again, and so gradually we had been able to reestablish our connection. The worst had seemed long past when he married Pamela. She had a daughter that he cherished as his own. They had just learned that a second child was on the way when Nelson was diagnosed with AIDS. His was one of the very first cases linked to needle use, just before awareness of the disease exploded in the public consciousness.

Nelson, like me, had had a special connection with Abuelita, and it didn't end when she died. His old premonitions of an early death were haunting him now. He told me he could hear ghostly trumpets. "Abuelita is calling me, and I'm telling her I'm not ready. I want to live to see my child born." He would, but not much longer than that, the end coming before his thirtieth birthday. In his last weeks, we would have many talks for hours at a stretch, slipping into the transparent ease we'd had in childhood, as if making up for lost time. I hadn't understood until then that one could be addicted to drugs and yet function normally in the world, holding a job and supporting a family. Nelson wasn't robbing people to get his fix; he wasn't shooting up in stairwells. He managed his addiction like a chronic disease, not unlike my diabetes.

I told him how I had been dazzled by his brilliance and his limitless curiosity about how the world works. And how I despaired of ever matching up to him. He looked at me and shook his head. "You really don't understand, do you? I've always been in awe of you. There was nothing you couldn't learn if you set your mind to it. You would just study until you figured it out. I can't do that; I never could. That's why I couldn't finish college, why I couldn't stick with a job. I didn't have the will. That determination that you have is special. It's a different kind of intelligence."

One day after little Nelson had arrived, we talked about his happiness at his son's birth and his sadness at the prospect of not being there for his children. We talked as well about the time a couple of months earlier, before his condition had gotten really bad, when he'd asked me to give him a ride to run an errand. He could no longer get around easily, and there was someone he needed to see, just for a little while. He asked me to wait, and so I sat in the car, parked outside the run-down tenement in Hunts Point, just a few blocks from where Abuelita used to live. I figured this was an old friend to whom he wanted to say his good-byes while he still could. But as he now confessed, inside he'd been scoring heroin. I wanted to kick myself-how could anyone, let alone an a.s.sistant district attorney who'd seen everything I'd seen, be so naive? I recited that essential lesson of Papi's, simplistic but also simply true: Good people can do bad things, make bad choices. It doesn't make them bad people.

As he begged me to forgive him, there was a hint of delirium fueling the shame and sadness in his voice. But I knew forgiveness was beside the point. I myself was carrying a load of survivor's guilt. Who was going to forgive me? Why was I not lying in that hospital bed? How was it I had escaped when my soul's twin, my smarter half, once joined to me at the hip, had not? His request only made the load heavier. My G.o.d, what a waste.

JULY 1983, I'm at the house on Fire Island. I wake very early from a deep sleep. It's still dark out, but I'm completely alert, even though I was up late last night. The clock says four thirty. I throw on jeans and a T-shirt and walk out to the bay. I sit on the dock and watch the deep blue draining from the sky in the early dawn. The sun is still hidden behind the island. It's probably just breaking the edge of the Atlantic. Nelson is here, I can feel him. He's come to say good-bye. Morning erases the last stars and dissolves the remaining night.

I walked back to the house to find the phone ringing: Nelson's dad. "Sonia, it's Benny," he started. I knew how difficult it was for him to make this call.

"Yo ya se. I already know. I'll be on the first ferry home."

CHAPTER Twenty-Six

IF I TRY TO understand in my heart how it could happen that two children so closely matched could meet such different fates, I enter a subterranean world of nightmares-the sudden panic when Nelson's hand slips from mine in the press of the crowd, the monster I evade but he cannot.

Reason seems a better defense against the pain. Let me understand in my logical way what made the difference between two children who began almost as twins, inseparable and, in our own eyes, virtually identical. Almost but not quite: he was smarter; he had the father I wished for, though we shared Abuelita's special blessing. Why did I endure, even thrive, where he failed, consumed by the same dangers that had surrounded me?

Some of it can be laid at the door of machismo, the culture that pushes boys out onto the streets while protecting girls, but there's more. Nelson had mentioned it that day at the hospital: the one thing I had that he lacked. Call it what you like: discipline, determination, perseverance, the force of will. Even apart from his saying so, I knew that it had made all the difference in my life. If only I could bottle it, I'd share it with every kid in America. But where does it come from?

Good habits and hard work matter, but they are only the expressions of it, an effect rather than the cause. What is the source? I know that my compet.i.tive spirit-my drive to win, my fear of failure, my desire constantly to outdo myself-bubbles up from very deep within my personality. It's rarely directed at others; I compete with myself. But if ambition only feeds the ego and self-regard, what does it avail? The urge to win might serve to acc.u.mulate life's material pleasures, but those pleasures can be no less ephemeral and addictive than Nelson's high and often just another way of becoming the biggest and baddest on the block.

What Nelson saw driving me arises from a different kind of aspiration: the desire to do for others, to help make things right for them. Strange ambition for a child? Some might say so, but I've been aware of it for as long as I can remember. Self-aggrandizing? I've never felt such release from the awkward hold of ego as when helping others. Reaction to early years in a house of pain? Perhaps, but at some point I let go of my compulsion to please: it's my own standard of character that I need to meet. In any case, I'm sure of having learned it from others, my examples. And very good ones.

IF I TRY to imagine my most immediate examples of selfless love, instinct leads me first to those who were closest: Abuelita, healer and protector, with her overflowing generosity of spirit; and my mother, visiting nurse and confidante to the whole neighborhood.

My understanding of my survival was bound up in every way with the fact of my grandmother's protection. It amounted to more than a refuge from the chaos at home: my sense of being under safekeeping, physically and metaphysically. It had given me the will to manage my illness, to overcome my insufficiencies at school, and ultimately to imagine the most improbable of possibilities for my life. And that feeling of Abuelita's protection would only grow after her death, made manifest in countless ways, from bizarrely fortuitous interventions that would save my life in diabetic crises to strange alignments of circ.u.mstances that have favored me unreasonably. Things that might easily have happened to me somehow did not; things that were not likely to happen for me somehow did. This seemed like luck with a purpose.

I was under no illusion of having been singled out, chosen for some particular destiny. But I did come to recognize in my good fortune the work of a blessing, a gift that made my life not entirely my own: I was not free to squander it if I chose. Gifts, Abuelita showed us, were for sharing with others. And though I was not given a mission, I had to find a worthy purpose, to earn this protection. The language of cause and effect would be misleading here, the implied exchange of one thing for another not relevant: suffice it to say, somehow a synergy of love and grat.i.tude, protection and purpose, was implanted in me at a very young age. And it flowered in the determination to serve.

MY CHILDHOOD AMBITION to become a lawyer had nothing to do with middle-cla.s.s respectability and comfort. I understood the lawyer's job as being to help people. I understood the law as a force for good, for protecting the community, for upholding order against the threat of chaos, and for resolving conflict. The law gives structure to most of our relationships, allowing us all to promote our interests at once, in the most harmonious way. And overseeing this n.o.ble purpose with dispa.s.sionate wisdom was the figure of the judge. All kids have action heroes: astronauts, firemen, commandos. My idea of heroism in action was a lawyer, the judge being a kind of superlawyer. The law for me was not a career but a vocation.

My earliest exposure to helping professions had been to those of medicine and teaching: Dr. Fisher, the staff at Prospect Hospital and the clinic at Jacobi, and the Sisters of Charity, who taught us at Blessed Sacrament. The law, I understood at a very young age, was different in scope. Doctors and nurses and teachers helped individuals, one by one. But through the law, you could change the very structure of society and the way communities functioned. In this way the law could help vast numbers of people at once. With so much hardship and suffering all around me, the need for change was glaring.

The spirit of the times inhabited this ideal of law as a n.o.ble purpose. The civil rights movement was the backdrop for my generation growing up. While Perry Mason's judge was an iconic glimpse of possibility to a child, the same small black-and-white screen framed the evening news stories about those courageous southern judges who unflinchingly defied mobs and the rule of the crowd. It was the same grandeur I perceived in Miss Katz's stories of nuns and priests working with the poor in Latin America, or in news reports about our own parish priest, Father Gigante, whose ministry took him into the blighted streets of the South Bronx. In those times, there seemed no higher purpose than to seek justice on behalf of those denied it.

Out of this tumultuous panorama came one heroic lawyer I would see in the flesh. Campaigning for the presidency, Robert F. Kennedy visited the Bronxdale projects in 1968. I remember pressing my face to the bars on our kitchen window, which overlooked the entrance to the community center, waiting to catch a peek of him as he pa.s.sed through the crowd. I was thirteen then. Soon I would be starting high school, getting involved in student government, swept up in our own elections, our poster parties and cafeteria stump speeches. Kennedy gave thrilling voice to the cause of justice for all and to a life lived in the service of that cause. And when, soon after my sighting, he was killed, the silencing of that voice, and the eloquence of those who mourned it, confirmed for me the n.o.bility of his purpose, which I would make my own.

THERE ARE no bystanders in this life. That had been my point about Kitty Genovese's neighbors during my best showing in forensics compet.i.tion. Our humanity makes us each a part of something greater than ourselves. And so my heroes were never solitaries. The figure of the lone visionary that enthralls so many young people in their own feelings of isolation never called to me. My heroes were all embedded in community. And the will to serve was first stirred by the wish to help my community.

When I got to Princeton, I saw right away that a sense of belonging would not come easily. The community was much bigger than any I had known, bound by its own traditions, some of them impenetrable to women and minorities. And so I found my place where I could, working with Accion Puertorriquena and the Third World Center. Through those a.s.sociations came my efforts at the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and my most formative experience of doing for others. Near as it was to Princeton, Trenton could not have been farther in human terms, a world apart from the certainties of privilege. But even by the standards of that afflicted city, the patients I served were vulnerable in the extreme: confused; distanced from whatever ties of family or friendship might have once sustained them; and, for want of a common language, cut off even from those looking after them. My outrage at their abandonment made palpable an emergent awareness that my community extended well beyond the place I came from, the people I knew.

While I was at Yale, the South Bronx was in the news again. President Carter paid a visit in 1977, the news cameras framing him against a moonscape of charred buildings, piled rubble, a neighborhood shattered by unemployment and other economic ills. The motorcade pulled up within sight of where Abuelita and my parents had lived when I was born, but until I had seen the place at the remove of the television cameras, I couldn't really see it. When you live in the midst of such decay, everyday life renders it almost invisible. Somehow communities continued to function amid their own ruins, and though this was perhaps America's worst urban catastrophe, it was hardly the only scene of desolation. Civil society, though carefully ordered by its laws, had nonetheless left a huge number of its members stranded. It was to the rescue of such communities that I first felt myself summoned, believing that the law must work for all or it works for none.

There were those at Princeton and Yale who, coming from such places as I had come from, resolved never to look back. I don't judge them. A degree from an Ivy League college or a top law school is a.s.sumed to guarantee entry to a world of plenty, and nothing obliges you to look back on what you've worked hard to escape. But I didn't see good fortune as a chance to write my own ticket; my sense of it remained as something entrusted to me, not given outright; and I would have enjoyed no peace of mind until I'd found some worthy use for it. My chance encounter with Bob Morgenthau over the cheese table would have led nowhere if I hadn't been deeply primed for what he offered. It was not what most of my cla.s.smates were looking for, but I could see that it fit into the scheme I imagined. Now, having completed that part of the journey, I was only more convinced that nothing had happened by chance.