Waddling with the weight of the baby she was carrying, she knew that once that metal gate closed behind her, she could be a goner.
“Even if they [the investigators] wanted to get to me, they couldn’t,” Hanimov said. “It’s [a] huge warehouse where they gotta find me.”
She made her way to Elmann’s office — with a $500 down payment.
Elmann told her that Siminovsky was in the warehouse. The lawyer’s Volvo was in open view outside. But the boorish barrister, who wouldn’t give her the time of day in court, was nowhere to be found.
“Why doesn’t he want to see me?” Hanimov asked Elmann.
“It’s dangerous, you know. It’s really dangerous,” he replied.
A week later, Hanimov arrived with more cash. And the electronics salesman gave her a lesson in law.
“What is ‘chamber’?” she asked.
“Chamber [is] where they talk, they arrange things before they come to court,” Elmann said. “And afterwards, they put on a show for you.”
Hanimov gave Elmann $3,000 in marked $100 bills, provided by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, to get Garson to perform for her.
Although pleased with her progress, Hanimov left the warehouse angry. As the metal gate lifted to let her out, she uttered a single word caught on her body wire: “Bastard!”
She gave Elmann $9,000 in total during the course of the five-month investigation, and noted that Garson and Siminovsky immediately began treating her with civility.
Throughout her visits with Elmann, Hanimov repeatedly insisted on listening in on a conversation between the businessman and the judge. “I am begging,” she said.
But the fast-talking fixer who boasted that he called the shots in Garson’s courtroom (although evidence shows the only one he had a direct link to was Siminovsky) wormed his way out of it.
“There is no reason for you to, I cannot let you hear such words,” he told Hanimov. “What do you want, that he [Garson] go to jail?”
By late November 2002, Hanimov had gathered enough evidence to give prosecutors probable cause to tap both Elmann and Siminovsky’s phone lines, and to plant a bug in the ceiling of Garson’s chambers.
Evidence tapes show that the two tangential targets were tight. They embraced when they bid each other goodbye one cold dark night outside the warehouse. Like close friends, they also reassured one another when things weren’t going well. When Elmann was uneasy about which way his client Levi’s case was going to go, Siminovsky, who was representing Levi, assured him of a win.
“I was getting Garson, I was getting Garson drunk for two hours. He’ll do what I want...” a cocky and confident Siminovsky said.
In January 2003, prosecutors decided to “tweak the wire” — to create an incident that would cause their suspects to engage in a flurry of phone calls. They sent their secret weapon, Hanimov, to bribe Siminovsky directly with $1,000.
“Siminovsky freaks out and goes crazy,” Assistant D.A. Noel Downey recalled.
Griping to Elmann the next day, Siminovsky said, “I thought she just flipped out and I thought she knew something...”
But Elmann reassured him, “No, she don’t know shit.”
Siminovsky, sounding a bit like his mentor Garson, boasted that he could have demanded sexual favors from Hanimov in exchange for helping her get her kids back. “You know what I could have told her?... I could have said to her, ‘You want your kids? Get on all fours and suck my dick,’” Siminovsky said. “You know what she would have done? She would have done it.”
Mother Nature was as cold as those words on the clear February morning when Siminovsky spied flashing lights in the rearview mirror of his Volvo — and pulled over not far from his house in Whitestone, Queens.
The probers worked quickly. They wanted to flip Siminovsky into cooperating with them against Garson before anyone noticed they had picked him up.
They took a scared Siminovsky to the austere Fort Hamilton army base in Bay Ridge for questioning. Once inside the prison-like complex, enclosed by barbed wire, they entered a cold room in a bare brick building and read Siminovsky his rights — but he didn’t want a lawyer. Confronted with the evidence against him, the father of two, wringing his hands and rubbing his head, asked to call his wife. Then, with the promise of a misdemeanor conviction and no time behind bars, the big-bellied barrister agreed to help investigators nail Garson.
“He flips in like fifteen or twenty minutes,” Downey said. “He folded like a house of cards.”
During the interrogation, Siminovsky’s cell phone kept ringing. It was none other than the judge himself.
“He wanted to go to lunch,” Assistant D.A. Michael Vecchione, head of the Brooklyn D.A.’s Rackets Division, said, laughing.
A week later, Siminovsky was in Garson’s chambers and gave the judge a box of cigars. “I feel like Groucho,” Garson said as he chomped on a stogie.
The turncoat lawyer put the carton in the top drawer of the judge’s desk. Siminovsky said he got the cigars from a client, but in actuality investigators bought the box, spending upwards of $200.
The action was captured in grainy black-and-white images by the eye of the camera above.
“Romeo y Julieta. Warning: Cigars are not a safe alternative to cigarettes...” the judge read from the carton, commenting, “They are not a safe alternative to sex neither... but what are we going to do about it?”
He then took the box from his top drawer and put it in the lower one as if to hide it in a safer place. Minutes later, the plotting protégé Siminovsky thanked Garson for all his help, and asked for more guidance regarding the Levi divorce.
“Because you have my head together. You know, you gave me little pointers. Now you just have to tell me what to write in the memo and then we’ll be okay,” Siminovsky said.
The judge helped Siminovsky draft the memo, seeming disinterested as he gave dictation.
“The only evidence in the case is... whatever the hell it was by stipulation or blah, blah...” he said. Then he gave a bit of unsolicited advice to Siminovsky. He wanted his boy to cash in on the extra work they were doing. “I am telling you, charge for it... This is extra... this was not contemplated... The judge made me do it... Fucking squeeze the guy...” Garson said.
Less than a week later, Siminovsky slipped an envelope containing ten marked $100 bills to the judge, as thanks for referring a client to him. The judge stuffed the envelope into his pants pocket, even though he was prohibited from taking referral fees. It was only after Siminovsky left that the judge, alone in chambers, opened the envelope and counted the cash. He panicked, and summoned Siminovsky back.
“Yeah, ah, Paul, this is, ah, Garson, do me a favor, ah, why don... ah, if you can get back here I’d appreciate it,” he told the lawyer by phone.
When Siminovsky returned, the judge said, “This is a lot of money for whatever you call it...”
He gave back the bills, but Siminovsky told him, “Don’t worry about it,” and threw the envelope on the judge’s desk.
Garson picked it up and half-heartedly tried to hand it to Siminovsky again — there was at least three feet between the far edge of the envelope and the tips of the lawyer’s fingers — and then put it in his desk drawer.
After a little more back and forth between the two, Garson finally said, “I appreciate it.”
Earlier that same day the judge had made a remark to Siminovsky about his work that would prove prophetic: “One of the greatest things about this job is I don’t know what the fuck I have tomorrow until I get here. I don’t give a shit either, you know.”
Two days later, the judge got the shock of his life, before he got to work. Investigators picked him up outside his Upper East Side apartment and took him to the same army barracks in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge where they’d brought Siminovsky.