Felony Murder Page 2

  Dean turned and saw a dozen or so people huddled in groups of three and four. They were unmistakably press: technicians with headsets and wires and rolls of duct tape; well-dressed men and women who fussed with their hair or neckties. Dean now recalled seeing an Eyewitness News van parked on the sidewalk outside, its antenna expanded to full height. This was the show today.

  “Who’s handling it for the DA’s Office?” he asked.

  “Walter Bingham. Good man,” Judge Mogel added. “Know him?”

  “Yeah, he’s okay.” Walter Bingham was one of the senior trial assistants in the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He was pleasant enough, easy to talk to, and a pretty fair seat-of-the-pants lawyer whose good looks and imposing height didn’t hurt him, and who had a nice way with a jury. If Dean had any reservations about Bingham, it concerned his somewhat narrow view of what information a prosecutor was required to share with the defense. More than once, Dean recalled, Bingham had been slow to turn over some document or reveal some small bit of evidence that contradicted his theory of proof.

  Dean stepped back from the bench, left the well area, and walked to the front row of seats reserved for lawyers and police officers. He folded his coat, put it on one of the empty seats. There was no such thing as a coatrack here. He placed his inexpensive briefcase on top of his coat, leaving it unlatched so that if someone reached over from the second row to try to steal his coat, the briefcase would fall to the floor, spilling its contents and serving as an alarm. This was Criminal Court, after all: there were criminals around.

  Dean took out his Department of Corrections pass and headed to the holding pen. He was stopped in his tracks by Mike Pearl, the veteran courthouse reporter from the Post.

  “I hear you’re representing Spadafino,” said Pearl.

  “I guess so,” Dean said.

  “Anything you can tell me about him? You know, criminal record, family, personal stuff. Anything.”

  “Mike, I haven’t even met the guy yet. You know as much as I do.”

  “I hear he’s got a prior robbery.”

  “You see,” Dean said, “you know more than I do.”

  Dean found Joseph Spadafino sitting alone in the farthest pen, the one usually reserved for prisoners the corrections officers kept segregated from the main bullpen of adult males. At various times of the day or night it was used for females, youths, homos (Corrections’ stubbornly archaic term for gays and transvestites), and “obsos” (mentally disturbed prisoners who needed special observation). And celebrities, high-profile prisoners whose notoriety required extra precautions. Joseph Spadafino was a celebrity.

  “Mr. Spadafino?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Dean Abernathy, and I’m the lawyer who’s going to be representing you. Hang on to this.” Dean handed him a business card. The prisoner studied it, then read from it.

  “Ab-er-ath-”

  “Abernathy. Call me Dean. That’s easier. What do they call you?”

  “Joey.”

  “Okay, Joey, nice to meet you.” Dean extended his hand, and the two men shook. Dean figured shaking hands with inmates cost him four colds a year. In the age of AIDS, hepatitis B, and drug-resistant strains of TB, it was a practice most of his colleagues had abandoned. But Dean would be damned if he was going to start off an interview by creating more distance between himself and his client. There was enough to begin with.

  He looked at Joey Spadafino. Small, several inches shorter than Dean’s own five-eleven. Skinny, no more than 135 pounds. Handsome once, probably, but it looked like his features had sort of given way somewhere along the line. A nose that had been broken more than once. Curly brown hair that looked dull and dirty. A fair share of scars, scabs, cuts, and bruises, some old, some fresh. Bloodshot eyes peering out from dark sockets, suggesting he had been awake for a good forty-eight hours. And a faint but decidedly putrid smell that seemed to come in alternating waves of unwashed body odor, stale cigarette smoke, and something else Dean could not quite identify.

  Nice overall impression.

  “Excuse me, Counselor,” came a voice from behind Dean, who turned to see a uniformed court officer at the door. “The papers have come up. This is your copy.” He handed Dean a folded set of papers. Dean thanked him, and he left.

  “Okay, this is good,” Dean said to Joey, “we can go over these and see what they’re saying.

  “This yellow cover means you’re being charged with a felony. You know what that is - a crime that you could get state time for, more than a year. This,” Dean said, turning to the first page of the stapled packet, “is the complaint. The important part of it says” - his eyes scanned over the legalese and focused on the charges and factual allegations - “that, according to Detective Zysmanski of the Manhattan South Homicide Division, this morning, at approximately 2:40 a.m.in front of Seventy-six Bleecker Street, you committed the crimes of murder in the second degree, robbery in the second degree, and robbery in the third degree, under the following circumstances: Zysmanski is informed by persons whose name and addresses are known to the District Attorney that, by means of physical force or threat, you removed personal property and United States currency from Edward Wilson, and that during the commission of the crime or the immediate flight therefrom, Edward Wilson, who was not a perpetrator, died. And it says,” Dean added, “that you made statements.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, Mr. Aba-”

  “Dean. And I know that. At least I know they’re not even saying that you did. What they’re saying is that you were robbing him, and he happened to die of a heart attack while you were robbing him.”

  “That’s different,” Joey said.

  “Well, it is and it isn’t,” Dean said, smiling in what he hoped was a kind way, even if the lesson was about to be a cruel one. “But first, this business about the statements. What did you tell them?”

  “I told them what happened, that I took his money, yeah, but I didn’t hurt him or nuthin’. I mean he was drunk, real drunk. He just kinda fell down. So I took his money. But I didn’ kill him, I didn’ murder him!”

  “Who’d you tell this to?”

  “Jesus, everybody who asked me. Lissen, I ain’t got nuthin’ to hide here. I took the fuckin’ money. But I didn’ kill nobody, they know that.” Joey held his hands out, palms upward.

  “Who’s everybody, Joey? Who did you tell? Uniform guys? Detectives?”

  “Detectives, yeah. Lots of ‘em.”

  “Did they give you your rights?”

  “No. Yeah. I dunno. Later, yeah.”

  Dean suppressed a smile at the multiple-choice answer, asked instead, “Later, did a tall guy from the DA’s Office show up?”

  “Yeah. Guy with a mustache.” That would be Bingham.

  “Did they videotape it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Dean took a deep breath. “You want the bad news or the bad news?”

  “All’s I got is bad news.” Joey looked down at his shoes. Dean’s eyes followed. The laces had been removed as a precaution.

  “I’m afraid so. First, of course, the guy was the Police Commissioner. Second is the felony murder rule. We’ll be talking about that a lot, but basically what it says is that if I’m committing a certain felony, and the victim dies during it for any reason - heart attack, accident, runs into a car, shoots himself trying to defend himself, gets shot by a cop, whatever - I’m guilty of murder.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Life isn’t always fair,” Dean said, without wondering if the rule was fair or not. “It’s the rule.” Then, “We’ll be in front of the judge in a few minutes. All that will happen is he’s going to remand you - there won’t be any bail set - and give us a date next week. They’ll be presenting the case to the grand jury, which is going to indict you. The next time we come to court it’ll be upstairs, in Supreme Court, where we’ll plead not guilty. In the meantime, I’ll be investigating the case, trying to find out as much as I can. If
you like, I can have you brought over before next week, so we can sit down together and talk more. Would you like that?”

  Joey nodded mechanically.

  “Okay. In the meantime, there’s a couple of things I want you to do. Number one, most important, keep your mouth shut. You’ve done enough talking already. This is a big case. There’s a lot of guys in here would like nothing better than to hear you say something about the case, then drop a dime on you to help themselves. So nothing. Understand?”

  Another nod.

  “Next, can you read and write?” It was a precaution Dean had adopted after an embarrassed defendant had reluctantly admitted to being illiterate only after Dean had pressed him repeatedly to write down his account of his arrest. The illiteracy had, in turn, undermined the credibility of the arresting officer, who had claimed that the defendant had read a confession written out by the officer before signing his name to it. But Dean had almost missed it.

  “Yeah,” said Joey.

  “Well, get hold of some paper and a pencil, and in the next day or two, write down everything that happened. That day before the incident, the incident itself, the arrest, everything that happened at the precinct, everything until you met me. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want as much detail as possible. It’s just for us, for the next time we meet, before you start forgetting things. Don’t lose it. Don’t show it to anybody but me. Okay?”

  “Yeah.” Joey probably had not been very good with homework assignments in school, Dean decided, so he would not hold his breath. But it was worth a try. Sometimes little details remembered shortly after an arrest became pivotal months later at trial.

  “Next thing,” Dean said, “the television people are out there. They’ve asked the judge for permission to have a camera in the courtroom. He has to let them. The best I can do is to strike a deal so that nothing prejudicial gets said in front of the cameras, like your record. Okay?”

  A nod.

  “Do you have any people?” Dean asked. “Anybody out there you want me to try to get in touch with for you?”

  “Yeah. No, not really.” Multiple choice again. “I got a mother and a sister somewhere. But I been on the street. I’ve sorta lost contact, you know what I mean.” It was not a question.

  “On the street, like homeless?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How bad is your sheet?” Dean turned in the packet of papers to the computer printout of the defendant’s criminal record. It was several pages long.

  “Not that bad,” said Joey. Dean had once asked a fortyish prostitute the same question and got the same answer. Her printout had showed 122 arrests in the past five years.

  “Been upstate?”

  “One time.” Joey nodded. “Two to four for a sale.”

  It was Dean’s turn to nod. A sale meant drugs. Two to four years was a sentence reserved for second felony offenders. So Joey Spadafino had at least two prior felony convictions behind him, no family to speak of, no home. He had admitted on videotape to robbing the victim and, thanks to the felony murder rule, had thereby admitted to murdering him. And the victim just happened to be the very popular Police Commissioner of the City of New York. Not bad for starters.

  Back in the courtroom, it had become standing room only. Police brass, beefed-up court security, more press, and the just plain curious had come to see who had mugged the Police Commissioner and caused his death. Dean spotted Walter Bingham, the Assistant District Attorney who had taken the videotaped statement from Joey and who would be prosecuting him. As Dean neared him, he saw Bingham had not shaved.

  “Hello, Walter,” Dean said. “Looks like you spent the night at the precinct.”

  “Yeah, thanks to your client. How’ve you been, Dean?”

  “Okay.”

  “Mr. Abernathy, Mr. Bingham, please step up,” Judge Mogel was calling from the bench. As they approached, the courtroom hushed as spectators strained to hear what would be said.

  “I’ve got this application from NBC, joined in by the other networks and a bunch of local stations,” said Judge Mogel, quietly enough to frustrate all but the lip-readers in the audience. “If it were up to me, I’d tell them to go to hell, but the Court of Appeals says that absent good cause they’re allowed to televise this. I don’t want a circus, so I’ve already told them they’ll be allowed one pool camera, and they’ll all have to work off that. Any objection, Dean?”

  “No objection, Judge, if we can have a couple of ground rules.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, number one, no mention of the defendant’s record. I’m not asking for bail.”

  “That’s fair. What else?”

  “No mention of any statements. I intend to oppose any coverage of a Huntley hearing, if we ever get that far.” A Huntley hearing was an inquiry into, among other things, whether the police had warned a suspect of his constitutional rights before questioning him.

  “Judge,” protested Bingham, “I’ve got to serve statement notice. I’m required to do it on the record.”

  “Fine, you’ll do it,” said Mogel. “You’ll say, ‘The People serve notice pursuant to CPL 170.10.’ Nothing else. As to what the statements were, you’ll provide them to Mr. Abernathy in writing, within the fifteen-day statutory period. Anything else?”

  “No,” Dean said.

  “No,” said Bingham.

  “All right, it’ll take them a while to set up the camera. Come back in twenty minutes.”

  Dean spent the twenty minutes prying information out of Walter Bingham and dodging reporters. He didn’t like trying his cases in the media, even on the rare occasion when he had a case in which the media was interested. Besides, today he really had nothing to say to them that could help his client.

  From Bingham he learned that Joey Spadafino had admitted the robbery to several detectives during the hours following his arrest, but had hedged by the time Bingham took the Q&A, the videotaped question-and-answer session. Dean asked Bingham when he could get a copy of the video.

  “Are you going to have him testify before the grand jury?” Bingham wanted to know first.

  “No,” said Dean, “I think he’s helped you enough already.”

  “Next week” was Bingham’s answer. What it meant was that he was playing it close to the vest. He was required to give the defense a copy of the video, but he would wait until the grand jury had heard the evidence and voted its indictment before turning it over. That way, in case the defendant chose the somewhat unusual step of testifying before the grand jury, he would have to do so without first seeing - or having his lawyer see - what he had said during the Q&A. Dean had mixed feelings about the rule. On the one hand, it did serve to prevent a defendant from tailoring his testimony to what he had said earlier. But it sure felt like walking through a minefield without it.

  The arraignment was a nonhappening insofar as it brought no drama, no surprises, and no substantive developments in the case whatsoever. None of that prevented the media from treating it like a major news event. Commissioner Wilson had been a popular figure, a black man who had come out of the squalor of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Born Deshawn African Wilson to a single mother, orphaned at six, raised by a nearly blind grandmother who had somehow managed to keep him and his three sisters fed, clothed, and in school, he had entered the Police Academy at eighteen with the borrowed birth certificate of an older cousin, Edward Lee Wilson. Though he had confessed the ruse after making sergeant at the age of twenty-eight, it had cost him his first and middle names, and he was stuck for life with the less mellifluous “Edward Lee.” Twice seriously wounded in the line of duty, Wilson had earned a string of decorations exceeded only by the legendary Mario Biaggi. Unlike Biaggi, however, he had simultaneously retained a reputation as a scrupulously honest cop and a commander of absolute moral integrity. As he rose through the ranks to captain, deputy inspector, and eventually Chief of Patrol, that reputation had brought him national recognition.
Three years ago, the Mayor had named him Commissioner, bypassing several whites and other blacks who outranked him in both title and years in the Department.

  As Commissioner, Edward Wilson had been innovative and popular. A champion of the uniformed force that had spawned him, he put more men back on the street, where he felt they belonged. He streamlined paperwork, brought the Department into the computer age, and hired civilian employees to perform many of the clerical tasks that police officers had traditionally spent so much time doing so poorly. He was a fierce advocate of minorities within the ranks, and he defined minorities as women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays, and any other group of one or more who chose to wear beards, mustaches, sideburns, ponytails, earrings, garlic cloves, or anything else that their hearts desired. But as tolerant as he was of what he termed these “superficial distinctions,” he gave no quarter in two areas: corruption and brutality. Under him, the New York Police Department had regained its stature as a worldwide model, and Edward Wilson had himself become a familiar face on national magazine covers and Sunday-morning panel discussions. There had even been talk of a run for the Governor’s mansion, should Mario Cuomo ever decide to hang up his spikes. That thought, if indeed Wilson entertained it, had apparently been put on hold a year ago, when a heart attack that sidelined him for six weeks raised concerns about his long-term health.

  Watching himself on the ten o’clock news that evening, Dean Abernathy was secretly pleased at his sudden fame. He had said virtually nothing at the arraignment itself. The camera had focused on Joey Spadafino being led in front of the bench, on Judge Mogel’s ordering him held without bail pending action by the grand jury, and on Walter Bingham’s announcement that the presentation would begin that very afternoon; back to Spadafino, looking small and lost as he stood bracketed between Dean and a large uniformed court officer. Then Dean on the courthouse steps, staring directly and sincerely into the camera and stating that, while he could not yet comment on the facts, the public could be sure that “there’s more than meets the eye here.” Whatever that meant, Dean laughed to himself, clicking the channel selector back to the Knicks-Pistons game in time to see Patrick Ewing miss a free throw. The score appeared, superimposed over Ewing’s face dripping sweat as he concentrated on his second free throw.