Condemned (10 page)

“Yes, it is. When you want to know things about me, I tell you. I want to know this. How Sandro Luca starts to become a famous lawyer so he can buy Tatiana Marcovich a beautiful fox coat.”

“I told you that my father was killed in an accident unloading a ship when I was nine years old, right?”

“Yes, this was terrible,” Tatiana nodded, waiting.

“My mother's brother, Sal Angeletti, became the man of the family.” Sandro looked out across the valley ahead, studying the flat landscape as he spoke. When Sandro envisioned Uncle Sal Angeletti, whose name had been used to identify one of Organized Crime's major families in New York, he did not think of him as the Capo de Tutti Capi of Organized Crime, nor even the head of a single crime family, but at the head of the long table of twenty five or so people who would attend Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner at Uncle Sal's large, brick home with white columns in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Boss of All Bosses: Capo de Tutti Capi, thought Sandro, his eyes steady on the interstate ahead. He hadn't known what any of that meant, had never heard or seen any of it, until one Sunday, when he was about twelve years old, as he lay stomach down on the floor in Uncle Sal's living room, reading the comics from the Sunday Mirror. Annette, his cousin, Uncle Sal's only child, was on the floor next to him. Andrea Maria, Sandro's older sister, was lying on the floor on the other side of Annette.

“Look at this,” Sandro had exclaimed in surprise. Part of the front page of the Sunday Mirror was visible, and there was Uncle Sal's picture. It was not a flattering picture; he held out his hand in front of his face, and his eyes were half closed, but it was definitely Uncle Sal. Next to him was a sharp-featured man with a goatee and shaved head, and a double breasted suit with a flamboyant white handkerchief in his breast pocket.

“Yes, it's daddy's picture,” Annette said knowingly.

Sandro looked at Andrea Maria. She, too, looked at Sandro, without surprise.

“You two knew that Uncle Sal's picture was in the paper?”

“Mommy showed it to me before,” said Annette. “She said she wanted me to know it was there, so I could ask her any questions if I wanted.”

Sandro looked at the picture of Uncle Sal again. He read the headline. “What does it mean, ‘Reputed Big Boss takes Fifth'?” asked Sandro.

“I don't know,” said Annette.

“Did you ask Aunt Tess?”

“No, I didn't.” Annette didn't offer any explanation as to why she had not.

“Who is the other man?” asked Andrea Maria.

“It says that he's Joseph E. Brill, Sal Angeletti's lawyer,” read Sandro.

Sandro was quiet as he passed a tractor trailer on the interstate. The boom of air as they sped past the big rig shook the car. “He must be doing at least seventy five,” Sandro murmured.

“And you are doing more than one hundred and five. Are there no speed limits in Pennsylvania?”

“I can see pretty far ahead at this point. And radar detectors under the hood will sound an alert if the radar police are about to ambush us.”

“Your Uncle Sal was one of the terrible people?”

“No, Uncle Sal was the greatest—a little strange, perhaps. Definitely a character. He's the one who started me toward being a lawyer. After he took on the responsibility of my family, he made sure that I knew I was going to be a lawyer or some other kind of professional man. He made it very clear that I was never going to be like he was, or like his friends—street guys.”

So it was, Sandro explained to Tatiana, as a result of Uncle Sal, that he went to law school. After law school, rather than becoming an Assistant U.S. Attorney or District Attorney, or going into the brown shoe world of Wall Street—regardless of color or style of suit, brown shoes and rumpled hat were then
de rigueur
in Wall Street firms—Sandro moved directly into criminal defense work in the small, independent firm headed by his Uncle Sal's attorney, Joseph E. Brill.

Brill had been a unique, “lawyer's lawyer”, a trial man to whom all manner of cases would be directed, including most lawyers who found themselves in the sights of prosecutors. One of those lawyers was Roy Cohn, of Senator McCarthy fame. Brill had represented Uncle Sal for many years prior to Sandro's introduction to the august legal world in which Joe Brill strode. Sandro assisted Joe Brill at trials for two years, learning trial technique and style—although Joe Brill repeatedly said that Sandro knew enough to try any type of case from the get go. For this reason, after a few months, Brill recommended to a Supreme Court Judge that Sandro be assigned a homicide case. At that time, two attorneys were assigned to the case of every indigent defendant where there was death penalty potential. One of the lawyers would be the lead counsel, the other, the second-seater, was usually the nephew, brother-in-law, or friend of another of the Supreme Court judges. Each lawyer was paid $1,000.00 by the State. Sandro was appointed as second chair in a murder case. Before that trial progressed very far, Sandro was lead counsel, handling the investigation and trial of a very dark Puerto Rican man charged with shooting a cop in the back with his own revolver. Sandro fought the best of the D.A.'s homicide bureau to a hung jury in that case, despite two alleged confessions made to the police by his client. After that, everyone knew that a new and artful trial attorney had emerged.

Sandro slowed the Ferrari now as they made their way through the Delaware Water Gap. The scenery was spectacular, and his story was held in abeyance as Tatiana took pictures of the mountains and forests surrounding them. Once back on the monotonous interstate, again headed east on 1-80, Tatiana wanted to know more about Joe Brill and Sandro.

“There isn't much more to tell,” said Sandro as the Ferrari devoured miles of New Jersey macadam. “Since that first homicide case—I think, by now, I've handled more than a hundred of them for indigents.”

“What is indig—?”

“Indigent. Poor people who have no money to pay a lawyer. The state pays me a little something—practically nothing—to represent them.”

“Why do you handle cases for nothing, when there are so many people who want to pay you?” asked Tatiana.

“Because it's a good life,” said Sandro.

“That makes no sense—because it is a good life? What does that mean?”

“That means that practicing law has provided me with a very good life—and you with a very good fox coat—and this is my way of giving something back to the public, to society. Sometimes, you see poor defendants and they don't know what's going on. They're like deer, frozen in headlights on the road. That's the way many defendants are in the front of the justice system—they're in shock and they don't understand what's happening to them. A lot of the lawyers from Legal Aid who are assigned to them are young; they're there to get experience, and sometimes, they're as helpless as the defendants.”

“You help the deer a lot?”

“About ten cases a year, I take. You know, I'm starting to sound like you when I speak.” They both laughed. Then they were silent again as Sandro worked his way forward through a flock of traffic.

“The greatest day of my trial life was when Joe Brill told me I had won my spurs as a trial lawyer.”

“What does that mean?”

“In older days, to become a horse soldier, when you finally learned all there was to learn, you were presented with a pair of special spurs, the metal things that a rider wears on his boots when he rides a horse.” Tatiana nodded. “So, after that first homicide case, Joe Brill told me I had won my spurs. I was so delighted to hear something like that from a lawyer like Joe Brill.” Sandro smiled at the happy thought. Tatiana, too, smiled. She reached for and rubbed Sandro's hand.

“Sorry about the race weekend,” he said, watching the road ahead.

“
Nyet problem.
We still have a weekend. Different place, that's all. Besides, I'm not unhappy that you don't race. It's dangerous.”

“Fun, though,” said Sandro.

They drove silently for a while. Tatiana turned toward Sandro. “How many miles do you drive when you race?” she asked.

“You mean around the track, how many miles do we usually go?”

“Yes. In the whole weekend?”

“I don't know, two miles and a half around the track, ten laps in the race, is twenty five, and practice, a couple of sessions, that would make fifty more. I don't know exactly. Between fifty and a hundred.”

“How fast do you go there?”

“Around the track?

“Yes.”

“It varies. Back straight, about a hundred twenty-five, turns less than that, average, about ninety, ninety-five.”

“How many miles from that place to home?” she asked, pointing ahead toward New York.

“Two hundred twenty five.”

“You go more than a hundred miles an hour from there to here, so you have now more racing than all weekend. And tonight we have a wonderful meal, make love, and have a beautiful weekend in New York. Not bad.”

“Not bad at all, when you put it that way,” said Sandro.

The phone on the console rang. Sandro pressed a button, the radio automatically muted. “Hello?” he said.

“Sandro,” said the deep, resonant voice of Senator Joseph Galiber over the loudspeaker in the dashboard.

“Hey, Big Joe, how's it going?”

“You don't care,” said the Senator pleasantly. State Senator Galiber was a tall, handsome, light-skinned black man who had graduated law school with Sandro. Years back, the Senator, who now represented a large district that covered about a third of the Bronx, had been the captain of the legendary City College basketball team. From time to time, Sandro helped write legislative bills for the Senator to introduce before the Senate.

“Of course I care. And don't say anything dirty, there's a lovely young woman listening to all of this.”

“Anybody I know?” said the Senator.

“Tatiana.”

“Hi Tatiana,” the Senator said. Sandro and Tatiana had had dinner a couple of times with the Senator and his wife. “Still haven't found out the real truth about this guy?”

“Don't start an international incident,” said Sandro. “This beautiful woman is crazy about me.”

“How are you, Senator?” said Tatiana.

“Call me Joe, Tatiana. And if you really cared, Sandro, you wouldn't leave me here in the salt mines, wondering if you finished polishing that drug bill. I'm supposed to re-submit it Monday. I've already scheduled a press conference. A couple of the media people have asked my staff for an advance copy. Is it ready?”

“You still in Albany?” said Sandro.

“I'm coming down this afternoon. I had a finance committee meeting this morning. The bill still has to be printed. One of the guys said I could fax it up to him and he'd work over the weekend and get it ready—if you get it to me, that is.”

“I just have to finish the residency section, something to prevent an influx of people coming into New York State to obtain drugs once they're legalized.”

“That's the current big concern,” said the Senator. “When we introduced the first bill, what was it, four or five years back, the other Senators looked at me like I was crazy.
Joe! De-criminalizing drugs? You've got to be kidding?
They didn't take it seriously. Now they stop me, and the most asked question is, how are you going to stop junkies from East Cupcake, Montana, or wherever, from flooding into New York State to get drugs?”

“I'll get it to you by tomorrow morning. It's great that the other Senators are looking at it seriously.”

“I think the new approach we worked out makes all the difference in the world. The first thing I tell anyone who asks is, you have to understand—just today, one of the Governor's people asked me about the bill—I told him the same thing, you have to understand there are two separate and distinct drug problems. The first and worst is trafficking in drugs. The other is addiction. This legalization bill is
only
intended to eliminate trafficking. Afterward, we'll deal with addiction as a medical problem, like alcoholism. When you separate the problems, they see the light.”

“Great.”

“And then I tell them, if you have any questions about how legalization will work, you can answer them yourself. We'll control drugs in exactly the same way we control alcohol. Whatever way we control alcohol, that's how we'll control drugs.”

“That alcohol reference must put a big crimp in the conversation, especially if the guy is just going out for a couple of shooters,” said Sandro.

The Senator laughed. “I add in about the rehabilitation package included in the bill, so we can begin working on the addiction problem next. They immediately counter with, ‘where's all the money going to come from to pay for this'?”

“And you tell them?”

“From all the jails that we won't have to build, and from the reduction of the police forces, the reduction of court personnel; we won't need as many Corrections people, and the millions that we presently spend interdicting the traffickers, the undercover operations, that won't be necessary.”

“You ought to remind them how few people have been prosecuted for bootlegging in our courts after Prohibition was repealed,” said Sandro.

“They say, you make drugs available, we'll have more addicts. I tell them, first of all, we already have a big addiction problem—”

“With many people in the closet that we don't know about.”

“I tell them, that's a different problem. This bill is only intended to eliminate trafficking, which will give us the freedom to deal with addiction as a medical condition.”

“Anyone tell you there'll still be trafficking if drugs were legalized?” asked Sandro.

“Not a one. Once you separate drugs into two separate problems, they just look at me, because it's obvious that, without question, legalization will eliminate trafficking overnight.”