"We have a problem." It was late in the day, close to 4 p.m. on March 22, the Monday after Bobbie's law school encounter with Malatesta. On the phone, Sennett was in imperial mode. He did not say his name, but simply directed me to meet him at Jim's in ten minutes. Arriving, I found McManis and Aif Klecker with Sennett in the conference room, each of their faces slackened and grave. Stan was in his well-pressed blue suit and the grip of his public persona, jaw prominent, very much in command. He circled a finger and Alf opened more of the red oak cabinetry to reveal a large reel-to-reel tape recorder, a stainless steel Grundig that began turning at once.
The sounds took a moment to identify. There was paper crinkling with an odd distinctness, the chuffing of various items being pushed about close to the microphone. Something clunked down with an impact like a log.
I asked Klecker if this was an `overhear,' the feds' delicate term for a bug.
"The mike's in the desk phone. Sound comes right here over the existing lines." Alf smiled with innocent pride, until Sennett swiveled about and burned him with a look for violating the strictures of need-to-know.
There were now voices, both female. From a distance, someone was talking to the nearer woman about the interminable length of a cross-examination.
"Anyone you recognize?" Sennett asked.
I didn't.
"I'll give you a clue," he said. "Two years ahead of us in law school." Nothing struck me until the distant voice addressed the first woman as `Judge.'
Magda Medzyk! Magda had had a lengthy career in the Prosecuting Attorney's Office, supervising appeals, then had gone on the bench. She was a stolid, frizzy-haired spinster, one of those folks who seemed to have reached middle age even in her law school days. Her wardrobe had never changed, her suits always heavy enough to appear armor-plated, guarding a figure of matronly proportions. I asked Stan where she was sitting currently.
"She's been hearing Special Motions in the Common Law Claims Division. Stay tuned. We're getting to the good part." Stan permitted himself a lean smile. It sounded as if Magda had gone back to writing at her desk, when her secretary announced a visitor. Mr. Feaver.
"Robbie!" A happy full-throated greeting. He addressed her as `Judge' and made a joke with the secretary about the fact that he'd caught her eating a box of chocolates for lunch. When she departed, there was quiet padding, and a barely discernible click, which I instantly recognized as the door lock. I sickened as I realized what was happening: Robbie was about to fix a case with a judge we'd heard nothing about.
There was precious little small talk.
"Come 'ere, you," Robbie said. You could hear him shuffle nearer. The springs in her chair sang out, there was coarse rubbing of clothing, and, to my astonishment, Magda Medzyk emitted a rapturous little groan. I knew for re I'd guessed wrong when he told her she had the greatest tits in the world.
Things progressed rapidly, to the usual percussion accompanying the human animal in heat-zippers, shoes hitting the floor, exerted breathing. Robbie and the judge eventually moved away from the phone, to a sofa I imagined, but their sounds remained telling. Magda was a groaner. As it developed, she was also wildly amused when Robbie employed certain Anglo-Saxon words. He could not have made a more explicit recording if it were a travelogue. As he described his forthcoming activities, unbounded fighter spilled from her. Big pink cunt. Big hard cock. to running brook of Magda's happy sounds was the only element that kept this from feeling entirely like a peep show.
"Enough?" asked Stan.
Plenty, I said. Klecker had his fingers over his mouth, but he jiggled with laughter. McManis, on the other hand, had turned away from the speakers as soon as the tape led. He'd spent most of the time staring at his thumb.
"So?" asked Sennett.
Odometer on his zipper, I reminded Stan. I didn't see big deal.
"You know the definition of bribery, George? A benefit any kind intended to influence the action of a public official."
I actually laughed at him. Prosecutors! Robbie sounded e the beneficiary to me.
"The lady on that tape isn't going to launch a thousand ships, George."
And he's not picky. I reminded Stan.
"Look, George, you say what you like. Moira Winchell didn't have any problem signing the warrant."
Stan had been playing on home court. Chief Judge Winchell, frosty and officious, would have been scandalized by this, especially as a woman entrusted with similar power. But I couldn't believe Sennett would actually prosecute, and I told him so.
"I don't know what I'll do, George. But I do know this much"-with gunslinger eyes, Stan leaned over the Parsons-like conference table-"your guy's holding out on us. He's banging the lady judge and then appearing before her on motions. On which he has a stellar rate of success, I might add. I want to know what else he's holding back. I haven't gone to D.C. with this yet. And you know full well I don't want to have to roll the Project up. I'd like to present this as additional information developed in the course of the investigation. But I can only do that little dance step once. Next time, they'll shut us down and cart Robbie off to do forty to fifty-two months. So this is it, George. Amnesty day at the library. I want all the books open and on the table."
I sat in one of the leatherette swivel chairs, confounded. I was long hardened to the dumb things clients would do. I was unsettled, rather, by a legal conundrum. No matter how supportive Chief Judge Winchell was, the law required probable cause, reliable evidence portending this supposedly corrupt encounter, before a bug could be authorized. Where had that proof come from? I asked Stan, and regretted it promptly, as he simpered.
"You're supposed to be wondering that privately, George. The government's response to the question is none of your business. But I warned you. I told you we'd know."
I groaned when the answer struck me: They'd bugged Robbie, too. Sennett was utterly stoic when I ventured this thought. He strolled to the electronic equipment in the cabinets and looked it over astutely, like a buyer in a showroom.
I told Stan this was too low, to make a deal with a guy and then undermine him, whatever the madmen at UCORC were demanding. But it was a mistake being so direct with Stan, given our audience. The personal side of our relationship had not really been exhibited to the agents. Sennett felt required to defend himself, particularly because McManis's continuing silence telegraphed a deep uneasiness with present events.
"George," Sennett said, "you may like this guy. But to me he's a Trojan horse with a body recorder, that's all. He might as well be a robot. I need two things to win these cases: Dead-bang recordings. And proof that the government held him to his bargain and didn't let him just bag the judges he hates. If a jury thinks that happened, then they may well cut everybody loose rather than let a creep like Robbie play favorites. And frankly, from what I hear, that seems like it's happened."
But bugging him, I insisted. A deal to cooperate didn't authorize this kind of gross intrusion into his private life.
"We're legal," Stan shot back. Like every prosecutor, he resented the suggestion of abuse. "We're completely legal. That's all I'll say." He bulleted me with one more angry dark look and put on his coat, which had been slung over a chair.
"No, I'll say something else, George. Because I resent your sanctimony. Your beloved client is what people have in mind when they use the word `lawyer' as a pejorative. He treated a profession which you and I are both proud to be a part of as if it's tantamount to pimping. And he got rich doing it. And when we caught him, he made a deal to tell us the whole truth and nothing but, a deal which he doesn't seem to be living up to. And you and he both better understand that I'll do whatever I have to within the limit of the law to protect these prosecutions. Because I have to, George. Because the people on the other side, your client's buddies, the Brendans, the Kosics, they're a law unto themselves. For them, there are no limits. These are ruthless men, George." My friend Stan Sennett stared from the door, his eyes now hidden in the shadow of his snap brim hat. He was pointing at me, a gesture meant to indicate he had no present use for courtesy or any of my other pretenses.
"And if I'm not willing to be as tough as they are, to seize every advantage allowed-if I'm not willing to do that, something terrible will happen, George. They'll walk away. And they'll do all of this, again and again. They'll win, George. And we'll lose. You and me. And the profession we're proud of." He looked back from the threshold. "And I don't want to lose." FEAVER PACED in my office and raged.
"Is that corrupt?" he asked. "Letting a lonely woman have a little affection?"
According to the recording, I offered, it wasn't so little. The locker room humor, an effort to soothe him, drew a fleet smile, but he barely changed stride.
"So I'm her jocker. So what? This is a lady, a person for Chrissake, she's a great person. You think she was looking for this? I was whispering sweet nothings in her ear for years. Do you know who Magda is? She was a novice, she lived in a convent until she was nineteen. She's still in an apartment with her eighty-eight-year-old mother. And we fuck in her chambers because she'd rather die than be seen coming out of a hotel room with a man. This lady, George, didn't have sex with anybody until she was forty, and then just because she couldn't stand thinking of herself as a virgin. So she got keelhauled and let the super in her building have at her one day while Mom's visiting an aunt. Quite a story. This guy wooin her a mile a minute in Polish, not a word of which she happens to speak, and smellin, so she says, a little European. And then, of course, she was so embarrassed she moved out the next month. I mean, she's pretty goddamned funny about it. Did you know Magda was funny?"
I'd had a four-week trial in front of Judge Medzyk when she sat in the Felony Division, and I didn't remember a moment that warranted more than a momentary smile. She had good demeanor and better-than-average ability, but for Robbie's purposes and mine there was only one thing about her that mattered-she was a judge, before whom he had appeared often over the years.
"I like Magda, for Chrissake. I really like her. We have a great time together. I'd like her whether she ruled for me or not. And she doesn't rule for me all the time. I get this little tiny smile and a shrug when it goes the wrong way, like, What can I do, this is my job?"
She had no business ruling either way, not in these circumstances. It was shame, I could see, that had been her undoing. She hadn't recused herself from Feaver's cases because she would have expired if she were ever called upon to explain the reasons to the Presiding Judge.
"So they're gonna put her in the penitentiary for getting laid?"
Probably not. There was no mention of any case on the tape I'd heard, and Robbie insisted there never had been. But that didn't obscure Sennett's larger message that Bobbie was not entitled to pick and choose whom he'd talk about.
"Who would I be holding out on?" he asked. "Really?"
Mort was my first answer. Robbie jolted. I'd scared him or caught him, perhaps both. My continuing worry was that Sennett and I would someday be having a heart-to-heart much like today's, but one where it was Morty on the tape, up to his ears in all of this. I told Robbie that the train was leaving the station. Anything that should be said about Mort or anyone else had to be heard now. He insisted, as always, that Mort was clean.
"Don't you believe me?" His dark face was a beacon of baptismal innocence.
Conveniently, my phone rang. Even before summoning Robbie, I'd called a private investigator named Lorenzo Kotrar, whom I'd represented some years before when he was charged with violating the federal wiretapping statute. Poor Lorenzo had gotten the goods on his client's cheating husband, a police captain, but the captain took more than his pound of flesh when Lorenzo went off to the Federal Correctional Institution at Sandstone for sixteen months. When Lo was released, he found the notoriety of his case had led to significant demand for his technical expertise. He now worked the other side of the street, so to speak, sweeping and debugging, usually for major corporations, but also for persons wary of snooping by spouses and partners, not to mention the government. He was calling from Robbie's office, to which Feaver had admitted him before coming to see me.
"It's clean," Lo told me, but he could not say that Sennett hadn't shut down, anticipating the sweep. Klecker had had such free access to the line cabinet in the building that it might have been no more than a matter of throwing a switch. Lo offered to do Robbie's car and house next, but Feaver was certain his two calls to Magda had come from the office.
I looked out to the river below, where the city lights swam on the currents. It remained possible that Sennett had tapped Magda's chambers for other reasons. Perhaps Bobbie had wandered into a trap set for someone else. But he found that idea laughable.
"Magda's a quality person. She wouldn't even know how to be a crook." So where? I asked, Where did Stan get probable cause for the bug?
Feaver's black eyes were still, but if he knew, he wasn't telling me.