My Beloved World (35 page)

For three months I scoured the streets of Harlem daily for witnesses. I knocked on every door within blocks of where the encounter had taken place, plastering the neighborhood with my card, begging anyone
who would listen to talk to me if they had seen what happened. I parked myself on a stool at Sylvia’s famous soul food counter and chatted with anyone coming or going. But no one ever came forward. If anyone had seen something, no one was saying.

One thing was accomplished, however: a genuine effort was observed. Ultimately, there would be no indictment, but there would be no explosive headlines either. Tensions had been defused, at least this time. But the larger story would not end any day soon. The DA’s Office would continue to make outreach a priority. It had to: activists like Mason would continue to light a fire whenever abuse was alleged. The only long-term answer was to cultivate better relations with the community, but that would take time and effort. The cops would need special training. The community would need to learn the value of helping the force recruit, instead of branding anyone of their own who joined a traitor. Looking back over decades since, you can see that those efforts have borne some fruit. Even New York’s high-crime areas are nothing like they were, although suspicion still remains even when the community cooperates.

The second big assignment that Bob Morgenthau sent my way would be my first murder trial. It was a huge case, very complex, and real tabloid fodder. As a homicide novice, I couldn’t have led the prosecution, but Hugh Mo, the senior assistant DA in charge, ensured that my second-seat role was far from pro forma. Hugh was a slightly built figure with a booming voice and a big personality to match; a hard-driving prosecutor, he was also a gentle family man—an all-around confounder of stereotypes. Our offices were side by side, and we developed an easy, seamless teamwork and camaraderie. He generously allowed my visible participation in the prosecution of Richard Maddicks, who was charged with being the Tarzan Murderer.

The press had so dubbed the perpetrator because his modus operandi included swinging through a victim’s apartment window from a rope secured to the roof. In a marathon of armed burglaries over a few months, he had terrorized one small area of Harlem, shooting three people to death and seriously wounding seven others. He would shoot anyone he found at home, whether or not the person resisted or posed any threat. He even shot one victim’s small dog. If anything prevented
him from finishing a job, he might return to the same building on another day or just lurk on a nearby rooftop or in an air shaft for a few minutes until he could resume.

Maddicks’s rap sheet told the tale: a twenty-five-year career in assault and robbery. He was on parole when he was arrested and supporting a two-hundred-dollar-a-day drug habit. His hauls as a thief suggested what sorts of people he preyed on: a pocketful of subway tokens, a wad of bills that had been stuffed in a shoe or a bra, the food in the kitchen. One of his big jackpots was a few thousand dollars one couple had kept at home, their life savings. His victims were barely hanging on to begin with, and their lives were usually destroyed by his visit, if they survived it.

Maddicks’s signature was not perfectly consistent, but there was enough overlap in the incidents to suggest a single perpetrator. The gun was one common denominator and the acrobatics another, whether he swung from a rope, scaled an air shaft, or crawled over a ladder stretched between two buildings. There was the flowerpot, the paint can, or the bucket weighted with a rock that came crashing through a window before he did. There was the chilling absence of fear.

Hugh and I had discovered twenty-three separate incidents, eleven of which had strong enough evidence to bring to trial and which we consolidated into one indictment. We figured the only way a jury could see the big picture of Maddicks’s villainy was to try all eleven together. Easier said than done: the law does not allow you to try unrelated crimes together, and it was no surprise that the defense filed a motion to sever the various counts.

When the law permits this or prohibits that, the first question to ask is why. The “why” is the essence of the principle, and once you understand it, you can structure an argument for not applying it in a particular case. Why is evidence from unrelated crimes inadmissible? Because suggesting that someone is prone to criminal activity would prejudice a jury trying to decide whether he has committed the one for which he is being tried. There are, of course, exceptions where a common element links the crimes and makes a joint trial both sensible and legally permissible, but they are carefully circumscribed and complicated by differences between state and federal law.

“It’s not a conspiracy,” said Hugh. “There’s only one of him.” I dug into the library looking for an appropriate way to frame the common elements that linked the crimes, and we requested a
Molineux
hearing, a New York State proceeding in which a judge decides whether the facts of the case justify allowing evidence that is normally inadmissible. We argued that our purpose was to show not criminal propensity but rather proof of identity: given the rare level of physical strength and agility required for the acrobatics common to all the incidents, we could reasonably claim that this element, not unlike a signature modus operandi, identified Maddicks as the perpetrator.

Judge Rothwax handled the pretrial motions. As usual, I made sure to be prepared, and he was perfectly reasonable. We would prosecute all eleven incidents in one trial. I felt the very real satisfaction of having devised an argument persuasive enough to show the facts of our case fell within the boundaries of this corner of the law. The critical faculty that had remained an abstraction to me at Yale, and eluded me at Paul, Weiss, and wasn’t even necessary to prosecuting most cases was now in my sure possession: I was undeniably thinking like a lawyer.

WE LOCATED
forty witnesses who were willing to testify, Hugh and I each taking twenty to interview and prepare for trial. This being my first murder, much of the legwork was new to me. So was the huge volume of records—autopsy, fingerprint, and ballistic reports, multiple witness statements given to different officers—to be assimilated. But with Hugh’s guidance I learned how to sift them for the crucial details to fashion our case. He instructed me too in the preparation of charts and maps and diagrams by which the evidence could be visually represented to prevent the jury from being overwhelmed by the dizzying minutiae, always a danger in complex prosecutions.

The effort also required Hugh and me to become intimately familiar with those few blocks in Harlem where Maddicks had conducted his spree. It’s essential for a prosecutor to visit the scene of the crime. You have to root yourself in the space, internalize it, and absorb details that you would invariably miss in a secondhand description. You have to
make the scene come to life in the minds of the jurors, and so it has to live in your mind first.

One squalid apartment I visited had been used by addicts as a shooting gallery. There were used needles and spoons all over the floor. The power had been cut, and you could barely see anything in the light coming through the windows dark with grime. A mattress already reeking of ancient urine had soaked up blood like a blotter. What could a man lying here possess that would cost him his life?

Another household reminded me sadly of Abuelita’s. An extended family—a mother, three grown children and their spouses, several grandchildren—all sharing two apartments in the same building. The kids were in school; the parents had jobs—restaurant work or maintenance. Their father, long deceased, had been a security guard, and it was his old nightstick that the brothers had grabbed when Maddicks appeared at the window. They chased him to the roof, from which he spidered down the gap between two buildings as they rained blows on him from above. He seemed to disappear. Back in the apartment, the family gathered in the commotion to phone the police. His sister, brother, mother, and young niece were standing beside Steve Robinson when a bullet came through the window from the opposite building and entered his forehead.

Was Maddicks a skilled sniper too, or was it just a lucky shot? Either way, Steve Robinson’s death would devastate that family, scattering them to the winds. Only one brother, broken and with few words, remained to show me what had been their home, the bloodstain still visible on the floor.

Azilee Solomon had come home from work to find her door unlocked, her home ransacked, her longtime companion—her husband, really, by common law—dead in the blood-soaked chair where he had been napping. They had both worked at the Hilton hotel for twenty years, she as a chambermaid, he as a janitor. Every last penny that they had saved for retirement was stolen. The meat and coffee from their refrigerator were gone, along with the shopping cart that Mrs. Solomon used to wheel her groceries home.

At Maddicks’s girlfriend’s apartment, detectives found the same
meat and coffee, but that proved nothing: anyone could have bought those brands. Outside the building, however, there were six shopping carts lined up by the trash, among which Mrs. Solomon instantly recognized her own. It was true that shopping carts were also mass-produced. But only one could have had the piece of yellow tape that Mrs. Solomon had used to mend a broken rung. “Take out those old clothes,” she told the detectives. “And you’ll find that yellow tape underneath.” At trial we staged a dramatic shopping cart lineup in Judge James Leff’s court to re-create the moment of discovery.

I spent a lot of time with Mrs. Solomon in the process of preparing for her testimony. I got to know her well. She was a deeply religious woman who radiated kindness. My gift of faith was not as great as hers, but I was deeply touched to see the solace it brought her. Though the murder of her partner was senseless and had turned her life upside down, she somehow accepted it as God’s will. She wanted Maddicks removed from the proximity of anyone else he might harm, but she expressed no desire for vengeance. Her tears flowed but without self-pity as she told her story in a matter-of-fact tone, first to me and then to the jury. I could tell that she had been loved.

The Tarzan Murderer himself was, by disturbing contrast, my first real-life encounter with a human being beyond salvage. Throughout the trial, I watched him obsessively, searching his face for the least trace of feeling. Something in me badly needed to see even a glimmer of empathy or regret, as witness after witness told one more horrifying story of loss. I would be disappointed. He sat there, utterly impassive, hour after hour, and I couldn’t help thinking: the devil is alive right here. I’ve always had a fundamental faith in rehabilitation, always believed that education and effort, if applied intelligently, could ultimately fix anything. Richard Maddicks taught me that there are exceptions, however few. What we do with them is a separate question, but after he was sentenced to sixty-seven and a half years in prison, I was glad to know that he was unlikely to be free in my lifetime.

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 pornography 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 anticipate 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 circumstantial 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.