Four floors above the street, balanced on their midden of paperwork, sat the Criminal Court and the Supreme Court. In New York, Supreme Court was the name given to the top tier of courts in the judicial system, where felony trials were conducted. The Criminal Court was for arraignments, felony hearings, and motions and trials for misdemeanor crimes, such as shoplifting, indecent exposure, and possession of stolen property. The Criminal Court was also the place where young ADAs were initiated into the art of trying criminal cases, and was where Roger Karp worked. Above the courtrooms were the offices of the Manhattan District Attorney.
As Karp trotted up the broad steps, he passed by and under a set of legal homilies engraved in the building’s imperishable stone. One of them, “Justice is denied no one,” leaped out at him. At one time these had been engraved in Karp, too. And, though the atmosphere of the judicial system was far more corrosive than New York air, he could still read them on the tablets in his mind. Karp was an innocent and he believed in justice. That made him one of the most dangerous men in the building.
He got off the elevator at the fourth floor and entered the area known to everyone who worked at 10 °Centre as the Streets of Calcutta. The hallways outside the courtrooms were thronged with people of every caste, race, class, and moral dimension, with poor blacks and Puerto Ricans being somewhat overrepresented. Some were desperate, others sneering and cynical, or sleepy with drugs or exhaustion. They were waiting their turn in the Criminal Court system and were packed here in the murmuring corridors because all the seats, all the standing room, in the courtrooms proper were similarly packed.
These were the friends and families of criminals and victims. Many were witnesses for the prosecution or defense. There were a substantial number of people with swollen or bandaged faces, or with limbs in casts, the walking wounded of New York’s perpetual civil war. Defendants out on bail or their own recognizance lounged amid the victims and witnesses who would shortly testify against them. The defendants who were still jailed were kept in holding pens beside the courtrooms as they awaited their hearings or trials. An informal order was maintained by police officers, also waiting to testify, identifiable by their uniforms or-if off-duty-by the shields pinned to their clothing, but even more by the air of world-weariness and contemptuous humor they exuded as they stood chatting in little knots.
Four courtrooms sat along each corridor and each of these had between 10 and 150 cases on its calendar each day. The system commanded all those with business before it to appear either at 9:00 A.M. or 1:30 P.M., which meant hours upon hours of waiting for most of them. Some courtrooms had seating for about sixty people, but others were merely converted cloakrooms or judges’ robing rooms. In these, justice was done in what amounted to the anteroom to the latrines; the Men’s Room and Ladies’ Room signs were taped over, a desk was squeezed between the flags of state and nation, and the system was ready for business. There was barely room for the defendant.
In the standard courtrooms, furnished with heavy wood and dusty grandeur, people would rush in and scramble for seats like subway commuters. The overflow occupied the Streets of Calcutta. Here the experienced ones brought food and pillows, toys for the kiddies, playing cards, and plenty of smoking material. They sat on hard wooden benches and on the floor. The air soon became a dense fog of smoke, disinfectant, old paint, and too many people.
Through this dismal village strode Butch Karp, like a prince, toward the courtroom to which he had been assigned for the past eleven months. Supplicants surrounded him, plucking at his sleeves like true Calcutta beggars: “Ey Señor, my son’s case, Hector Sanchez, wha time it is?” “Hey man, what you done wit ma property?” “Mister, mister, can I tell you something…?”
Pushing through, Karp opened the oak doors to Part 2-A of the Criminal Courts. Within, a similar crowd was seated, but more quietly. There was a dull, coughing chatter here and the sounds of rustling newspapers and discarded paper vending machine cups.
The spectators from whom this noise arose sat on blond oak varnished benches arranged like church pews in the back of the room. A wide aisle dividing the rows of benches ran from the rear of the courtroom to a low barrier and a swinging, saloon-style gate. Beyond the gate sat the long oak tables for the prosecutor, on the left, and the defendant, on the right. Beyond these, the judge’s presidium rose like a squat wooden tower, with a table for the clerk at its base.
This was the courtroom of Judge Edward Yergin. Its business was misdemeanor trials and felony hearings. Each day’s schedule typically included a mix of petty larceny, burglary, possession of a weapon, possession of narcotics, rape, indecent exposure, resisting arrest, assault, picking pockets, and mugging. A little shoplifting. A little murder. The felony hearings were held to determine whether for each felony charge there was reasonable cause to believe that a crime had been committed and that the defendant had committed it.
Karp swung through the swinging door, Wyatt Earp entering the Last Chance Saloon, and dropped a six-inch-thick stack of papers bound with rubber bands onto the prosecutor’s table. Jim McFarley, the court clerk, looked up from his desk. “Hey Karp! Them Yankees, huh?” he said.
“Unbelievable,” Karp replied. “Definitely their year. All the way.” Karp gestured at the crowd. “What’s going on, Jim? You passing out tickets? What’re you giving away today?”McFarley grinned. “Was up to me I’d give ’em all three to five. Nah, nothing special, just the usual hunnert ’n fifty.”
The clerk was a cone-shaped man with a huge, gelatinous chin that seemed to flow into his shoulders with no need for a neck. He had ruddy cheeks and had played Santa at the annual Christmas parties for as long as anyone could remember. You rarely saw McFarley outside his wooden swivel chair; both of them were permanent fixtures of the court. McFarley dressed in polyester sport jackets and double-knit slacks of unlikely shade, and toted at his side a.38 caliber revolver he had never used. McFarley was strong against crime. The presumption of innocence did not carry a lot of weight with him. The people he saw accused in court every day must have done something wrong or the cops wouldn’t have arrested them, for cryin’ out loud. For that reason he liked ADAs (they put the dirt balls behind bars) and mistrusted the Legal Aid lawyers (they got the dirt balls off).
A simple philosophy, but one that had served McFarley well for nearly thirty years of providing the only continuity the New York criminal justice system would ever know. He and his colleague clerks ran the courtrooms; they were the traffic cops for a city without stoplights or signposts. They controlled the mountain of paperwork and determined what cases would be heard in what order on the daily calendar. Piss off McFarley and you sat in the Streets of Calcutta for days on end.
McFarley said, “Butch, the judge wants to see you before he takes the bench. He’s at an administrative meeting, should be here in about a half an hour.” He waved at the courtroom. “Better get this moving.”
“What does he want to see me for? Oh no! He finally found out I never passed the bar.”
“We all knew that when you tried your first case.”
“Thanks, Jim, I love you too.” Karp turned to the crowd and began the morning ritual of learning about the cases he would have to prosecute in just a few minutes. The first step was finding out which witnesses were present in the crowd. He had, of course, never met any of them before.