Linda Wolfe - Double Life. The Shattering Affair between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy...

Double Life

The Shattering Affair between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman

Linda Wolfe

E PILOGUE

A T THE TIME THIS BOOK WENT TO PRESS , J OY S ILVERMAN WAS, AS far as her acquaintances knew, still seeing David Samson, and Sol Wachtler was still in prisonbut not at the Butner Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, the prison to which he had been assigned. Something had happened at Butner, something startling and enigmatic. Sol had been stabbed. He had received two wounds in his back, just above the right shoulder blade, wounds that penetrated his flesh to the depth of an inch, and were so close together, they could have been made by a fork with its middle tine removed.

The incident occurred on a Sunday evening late in November. According to Sol, he had been lying in his rooman unlocked private chamber in Butners mental-health wingand listening through earphones to a radio, when someone crept into the area, put a pillow over his face, and attacked him.

According to the FBI, which quickly undertook an investigation of the incident, the injury appeared to be self-inflicted. They based this hypothesis on the location and shallowness of the wounds, and on the fact that at the time of the stabbing there had been only one other prisoner in the area, a delusional inmate whom they apparently judged incapable of the crime.

Sols family and his psychiatrist were enraged by the FBIs supposition. Why would he have wanted to hurt himself? said Dr. Solomon. Id been down to see him just before this happened, and he was doing great. Sure, in the beginning they had him cleaning the grounds, picking up papers with a spoke. But now he was helping some inmates prepare for their high-school equivalency exams, and he was doing aerobics and lifting weights. And hed gotten to know many of the prisoners, heard their stories, met their familieshe told me that unlike the press, which kept calling him the disgraced Sol Wachtler, the prisoners called him Judge and Your Honor. He felt comfortable. He had adjusted.

But some of Sols friends accepted the FBIs theory, seeing in it evidence that Sol was irrational, an idea that confirmed their loyal conviction that some form of madness had made him harass Joy Silverman in the first place. Maybe he was just crazier than any of us ever knew, one friend, a judge, said.

After the stabbing, Sol was kept for a month in what prison authorities call administrative detention, and prisoners call isolation or the hole, a locked cell where food is passed in through a slot in the door. Alone, he became noticeably depressed and seemed to lose track of time. Then, wearing leg irons and handcuffs, he was sent to a different prison, one with a full-service psychiatric wing. It was the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was given extensive psychiatric attention, treated with Prozac, and at last pronounced well enough to join the general prison population. He began living in an eight-by-fourteen-foot cell, sharing the limited space with three other inmates. And he began working, collecting a salary of twelve dollars a month. Ironically, the job he was given was to teach creative writing.

Occasionally, he would communicate with friends, writing letters in which he sometimes adopted a breezy, offhand style that seemed to make fun of all that had happened. There isnt a murderer, rapist, arsonist, or major drug dealer who doesnt think of you as a great man, he wrote to lawyer William Kunstler. That includes the harasser of Joy Silverman. Here I am with murderers, rapists, bank robbers, drug dealers, he wrote to columnist Cindy Adams. Despite the stabbing, I have no fear of them. Of course, theyre scared to death of me, the man who harassed Joy Silverman. He even told jokes in his letters. He was out of the psychiatric hospital, he wrote to Adams, and then, with an eerie allusion to the kidnap ad he had demanded Joy take, said, I guess Im just luckylike the newspaper ad: LOST. BEAGLE. Left ear missing. Blind and castrated. Answers to the name Lucky.

But sometimes his tone turned dark. In another letter to a friend, he described a visit paid to him by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, shortly before he resigned his august office. We had met on several occasions, Wachtler wrote, and the summer before last, we both were given doctoral degrees at Claremont College in California. Blackmun was now honoring me by visiting me at a federal prison. We embraced on his arrival, and on his departure I wept, remembering what wasand will never be again.

S OURCE N OTES

To create this narrative, the author interviewed over a hundred people who were either central figures in the story or whose lives intersected with those of the central figures. In addition, the author consulted various legal documents, books, and articles. She was unable to speak with Joy Silverman, who declined repeated requests for an interview.

A BBREVIATIONS

Unless otherwise noted, the interviews were conducted by the author. Frequently cited persons and court documents have been identified by the following abbreviations:

P ROLOGUE

pp. 12 SWs telephone call to JS: Appendix to Chertoff, Sent. Memo. of U.S.

pp. 23 Conversation between Chertoff and Ashrafi: Interview with Michael Chertoff, Apr. 12, 1993.

pp. 34 SWs call: Appendix to Chertoff, Sent. Memo. of U.S.

p. 4 Joy was shaking: Interview with William R. Fleming, Jr., Oct. 21, 1993.

pp. 56 SWs call: Appendix to Chertoff, Sent. Memo. of U.S.

p. 6 Theres been another call to arresting the chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York: Interview with Michael Chertoff, Apr. 12, 1993.

p. 6 When he landed in Denver: Interview with William R. Fleming, Jr., Oct. 19, 1993.

p. 6 SWs letter: Appendix to Chertoff, Sent. Memo. of U.S.

pp. 78 Joan Wachtlers experiences on Nov. 7, 1992: Interview with Joan Wachtler, July 16, 1993.

C HAPTER 1

pp. 1314 SWs boyhood: Interview with SW, July 16, 1993.