After the Madness: A Judge's Own Prison Memoir.

• Date: 01 May 1998
• Author: Lyon, Andrea D.
• Published date: 01 May 1998
• Author: Lyon, Andrea D.

After the Madness: A Judge's Own Prison Memoir. By Sol Wachtler. New York: Random House. 1997. Pp. 369. $24.

This book is both better and worse than one would expect. It is the story of Sol Wachtler, former Chief Judge of New York State Court of Appeals.(1) Wachtler had an extramarital affair with a woman for whom he had been appointed executor, and after the breakup he stalked her with letters, phone calls, and threats. Eventually he was convicted of extortion and sent to prison. His fall from power is what fascinates us, of course, but that is not what is valuable about this book. It answers an outsider's questions about the prison experience, seems to reflect accurately the dehumanizing aspects of prison, and cautions us regarding our wholesale warehousing of so much of our population. Its insights into these problems are tremendous, and many of Wachtler's suggestions for change are brilliant. In many ways, however, the book is disappointing.

The book begins with an enticing description of some of Wachtler's childhood experiences and his rise to preeminence in the New York judicial system. But it feels like a tease; the book really fails to answer many questions about Sol Wachtler the man, about the true nature of his illness -- if he indeed had an illness as we understand the term -- about his rise to prominence, or even about the real consequences of his fall. This book should have been either a complete autobiography or one with only introductory remarks about Wachtler's adulterous affair and crime. The book would have been better had it stuck to what is wonderful about it -- its insights into prison life.

1. WACHTLER'S RISE AND FALL

   In order to understand this book, to measure its accuracy and to assess its perspective, I read numerous Court of Appeals decisions authored by the former Judge Wachtler both before and after he became the chief judge,(2) the federal indictment against Wachtler, many New York Times articles about the case and its aftermath,(3) and Linda Wolfe's Double Life,(4) which luridly tells the story of the crime and the gossip about the central figures involved. I also spoke with Wachtler's chief federal prosecutor Michael Chertoff.(5) I did so because I did not feel that Wachtler was telling the whole truth about his life; his sense of entitlement fairly leaps from the pages of his book despite his protestations of guilt and remorse whenever he describes his affair, his extortion scheme, or the prosecution of his case. For instance, he views the prosecution in his case as unduly harsh and politically motivated. He is right, and he is wrong.

   Sol Wachtler came from comparatively humble beginnings -- his father was a traveling salesman "who made his living auctioning off the estates of the dead or the failed"; his mother was a Russian immigrant.(6) I learned most of this from Wolfe's book, though Wachtler's does contain a touching (if small in scope) description of an attack on him by childhood bullies in North Carolina for the apparent crime of owning shoes and being from a city (pp. 42-51). Like many of the recollections in Wachtler's book, the story has the feeling of disembodiment, as if Wachtler observed rather than experienced the things that happened to him. Indeed, Wachtler's description of his crime suffers from the same malady. Perhaps this is a function of Wachtler's having served so many years as an appellate justice, of having to remove himself from his decisions in order to be objective.

   In any event, Wachtler was selected by his father as the one in his family. He was the one accorded special treatment and marked to get the education. He wasn't allowed to work in the family business like his brother Morty. He got into Milford, a prestigious prep school that had a good reputation for getting kids into Yale.(7) He didn't get into Yale, but he did get into Washington and Lee University in Virginia. He was a good-looking, energetic kid, and he met Joan Wolosoff right after he graduated from Milford. He ultimately married her and the money that came with her. In part that money, and the connections that it brought him, helped him get elected to local office, to run for state, de office, and ultimately to win his position on the Court of Appeals.(8) Wachtler was considered one of the finest jurists of his time, his writing dear and concise, his insight masterful.(9)

   Until the affair with his ward, the fascinating Joy Silverman, Wachtler was a faithful husband, albeit not a passionate one. When Wachtler came into closer contact with Joy Silverman, an affair between them began -- and eventually ended. Essentially, Wachtler was upset that Silverman broke off their affair and found another man. He invented a character, "Dasd Purdy," who wrote a series of increasingly frightening letters to Silverman threatening her with exposure, threatening her teenage daughter with kidnapping, and ultimately demanding money not to kidnap her.(10) Wachtler was charged with extortion.(11) His letters were marled interstate, however, and thus what might have been a set of misdemeanor New York state charges(12) became a much more serious federal felony.(13)

   Wachtler complains about this choice of prosecution and credits then-Assistant United States Attorney Michael Chertoff's ambition, as well as his own status, as the true reasons why his transgressions were treated as a serious federal offense (pp. 195-97). He also accuses Chertoff of "nurturing" his criminal conduct by waiting to take him down until he had built a stronger case for the prosecution (pp. 19, 20, 196). It is this kind of accusation, coupled with blaming his crime on self-medication for his bipolar disorder, that makes Wachtler's protestations of sincere remorse ring hollow (p. 20). Chertoff told me that Wachtler was like many defendants -- trying to blame someone else for his misdeeds. Chertoff said that Wachtler seemed to think that the FBI should have just come to see him in his chambers, and that as "one of the boys" they should have told him to cut it out, rather than surrounding his car on the road and arresting him so publicly, a scene Wachtler describes vividly. The reason for the road arrest, Chertoff said, was to avoid a location like the home where it was more likely someone would get hurt.(14) Given the violent nature of the letters, this seems a legitimate concern. However, to say that politics or fame had nothing to do with the prosecutorial decisions in this case would be inaccurate.(15) Wachtler correctly points to arguably similar circumstance when an Assistant United States Attorney wrote herself threatening notes that authorities originally thought to have come from terrorists...