Oct. 28. “If you f – up … I promise you it will cost you $200, 000 to get your daughter back. How does that suit you?” ..MR0-
For weeks, Joy Silverman, a wealthy Manhattan divorcee and Republican fat cat, once nominated to be George Bush’s ambassador to Barbados, had been listening to the menacing calls hoarsely demanding payment for some supposedly compromising photos and tapes. With the caller’s voice electronically disguised, Silverman didn’t have an inkling who he was at first-nor is it likely anyone else would have guessed. When FBI agents unmasked the caller last week, after tailing him for more than a month, there was a sense of stunned incredulity. For the accused blackmailer was no less a guardian and potentate of the law than Sol Wachtler, chief judge of New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest tribunal. On Nov. 7 the judge was arraigned on a conspiracy charge that he harassed and tried to extort money from Silverman and threatened her 14-year-old daughter. He was ignominiously shackled to a psychiatric-ward bed for nearly three days before being placed under house arrest, an electronic-monitoring bracelet around his ankle, at his Manhasset home on New York’s Long Island. Hours later Wachtler had resigned, with an apology to his colleagues, from the court he had served for two decades and captained since 1985.
For the state’s scandal-hardened newspaper readers, this was not just one more unseemly fall from grace; it was a plunge into almost inexplicably bizarre behavior by a man who had been a kind of prince of the court, handsome, gifted and widely respected for his stainless integrity. As it turned out, the judge had been having an affair with Silverman, a stepcousin to his wife of 41 years-and had allegedly begun harassing her soon after she dropped him about a year ago. The question being asked everywhere after his arrest was how someone so admirable in his public life could appear to blunder so appallingly in private, risking a lifetime of achievement.
While they declined to comment on the case directly, psychologists and psychiatrists interviewed by NEWSWEEK say they have counseled hundreds of successful professionals who crumbled at or near the pinnacle of their careers. Many believe the kind of behavior attributed to Wachtler, who has been under treatment for an unspecified medical problem, could indicate either an organic ailment or a “narcissistic wound,” inflicted by a romantic rebuff. Steven Berglas, a Harvard Medical School psychologist, says he often sees men whose stellar careers crumble after a business failure or a sexual setback. “When their sense of power is pierced, these individuals often try to recapture it through very inappropriate means,” Berglas says.
Meanwhile, the FBI investigation that brought Wachtler to book was raising other questions. Silverman had met personally with FBI Director William Sessions to ask for the bureau’s help. By some reports, a friendship with the director allowed her unusual access to the agency chief, although more likely it was her clout as a generous Republican donor. In fact she had met Sessions only once before. Whatever the reasons, the FBI assigned a battalion of agents to the case in an operation that resembled a massive drug bust, with stakeouts, phone taps and a highway pursuit that tailed Wachtler more than 200 miles, from Albany to Long Island, on the day of the arrest. Federal officials insist they handled the investigation appropriately, particularly in light of the recent kidnapping death of oil executive Sidney Reso in New Jersey. “That makes you acutely aware of the importance of taking a kidnapping threat seriously,” said Michael Chertoff, U.S. attorney for Newark, N.J. Even so, it was hard to avoid the impression of overkill.
The seeds of Wachtler’s judicial downfall were planted when he started a discreet affair with Silverman several years ago, sometime after becoming executor of her stepfather’s $24 million estate. Because she is related to Wachtler’s wife, their occasional appearances together raised few eyebrows. When the affair ended, the FBI says, Wachtler at first reacted normally enough, phoning her angrily several times to complain about her attentions to other men.
Then things took a sinister turn. Last April, Silverman began receiving anonymous greeting cards and notes, including some addressed to her daughter Jessica. One card to Jessica, postmarked May 11, enfolded a condom along with what the FBI described as “offensive sexual references.” Then followed a series of typed letters saying the writer had “for sale” some embarrassing pictures of Silverman with a man. All the letters, according to one agency official, were signed with a distinctive handwritten mark that looked “like a child’s scribble.” After one demanding that an ad be placed in The New York Times to arrange a blackmail payment of $20,000, Silverman contacted Sessions. The FBI chief assigned the case to the bureau’s New Jersey office, where at least five of the letters were postmarked.
Silverman placed an ad in the Times beginning Oct. 1, with an unlisted number that was set up and tightly monitored by the FBI. It didn’t take long after that. On Oct. 3 agents traced a threatening call to the mobile phone in Wachtler’s state-owned car, and they began to close the net. The blackmail payment was set for Nov. 7. According to the FBI complaint, Wachtler had made arrangements to pick up the $20,000 in a Manhattan alley, then drop off the embarrassing materials. Agents trailed him from Albany to Manhattan’s Upper East Side; along the way, they say, he stopped and phoned an employee of a hair salon near Silverman’s building. He allegedly offered the employee a “big tip” to pick up-at the entrance to the cellar stairway next door-the manila envelope supposedly containing the payment. But Wachtler himself never collected the envelope. Instead, the FBI says, he put on a cowboy hat as a disguise, stopped a cab and gave the driver $10 to deliver a package to Silverman that proved to contain only another threatening letter. Then he headed home on the Long Island Expressway, where agents finally got the word from Chertoff at a Manhattan command center: “Arrest him.”
Not the least puzzling aspect of the case was that from beginning to end, none of the people around Wachtler seemed to get a hint of anything wrong. Joseph Margiotta, a former Nassau County, N.Y., Republican leader and a close friend, said that when his daughter called him last Saturday night with the news of the judge’s arrest, “I told her, ‘You must be mistaken, it has to be some other judge’.” Psychiatrists were not surprised by such observations. People often “compartmentalize” different aspects of their feelings, says psychiatrist Gerald Kraines, who has treated many successful professionals for depression. “When a judge has his jurist’s robes on, that may compensate for the inadequacy in other parts of his life.” Manhattan psychoanalyst Theodore Rubin says that obsessive behavior can burst out like an “encapsulated insanity,” leaving a person otherwise rational.
In the case of Joy Silverman’s spurned lover, the irrational may have won out, at least long enough to overturn his life-though perhaps not permanently. Shortly after Wachtler’s bail hearing, he called Richard Simons, now acting chief judge of the appeals court, to say he was resigning. “He asked us to forgive him for what he had done to the court’s reputation,” says Simons. “I said of course I forgave him. I don’t think there is a man alive who could’ve listened to him and not forgiven him.” For the woman who for months was a blackmailer’s uneasy target, forgiveness may take longer.
