The Bonfire of the Vanities (87 page)

Former Wall Street financier Sherman McCoy was brought in handcuffs to the Bronx yesterday and arraigned on a charge of manslaughter in the death of Henry Lamb, a 19-year-old black honor student who had been the pride of a South Bronx housing project.

Mr. Lamb died Monday night at Lincoln Hospital as a result of cerebral injuries suffered when he was struck by Mr. McCoy’s Mercedes-Benz sports car on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx thirteen months ago. He had never regained consciousness.

Demonstrators from the All People’s Solidarity and other organizations chanted “Wall Street murderer,” “Capitalist killer,” and “Justice at last,” as detectives led Mr. McCoy toward the Bronx Criminal Courts Building on East 161st St. Mr. McCoy’s alleged role in Mr. Lamb’s injuries became the center of a political storm last year.

Asked by reporters to comment on the contrast between his Wall Street and Park Avenue background and his current situation, Mr. McCoy yelled out, “I have nothing to do with Wall Street and Park Avenue. I’m a professional defendant. I’ve undergone a year of legal harassment, and I’ll undergo another—or perhaps another 8&f13; to 25.”

This was an apparent reference to the prison sentence he will face if convicted of the new charge. Bronx District Attorney Richard A. Weiss is said to have prepared a 50-page indictment to present to a grand jury. Mr. Weiss’s tenacious prosecution of the case was widely regarded as the key to his successful bid for reelection in November.

A tall, patrician figure, son of the eminent Wall Street lawyer John Campbell McCoy and a product of St. Paul’s School and Yale, Mr. McCoy, 39, was dressed in an open-necked sport shirt, khaki pants, and hiking shoes. This was in sharp contrast to the $2,000 custom-tailored English suits he was famous for as the legendary $1,000,000-a-year “king of the bond market” for Pierce & Pierce.

As he was ushered through a basement door of the courthouse into the Bronx Central Booking facility, Mr. McCoy said in response to a reporter’s query, “I told you, I’m a career defendant. I now dress for jail, even though I haven’t been convicted of any crime.”

At his arraignment six hours later, Mr. McCoy appeared before Judge Samuel Auerbach with a slightly swollen left jaw and abrasions on the knuckles of both hands. Questioned about it by Judge Auerbach, he said, clenching his fists, “Don’t worry, Judge. It’s something I’ll take care of myself.”

Police officials said Mr. McCoy had become involved in a “dispute” with two other prisoners in a communal detention cell, resulting in a scuffle, but had declined offers of medical treatment.

When the judge asked him how he pleaded, Mr. McCoy said in a loud voice, “Absolutely innocent.” Against the judge’s advice, he insisted on representing himself at the arraignment and indicated he will do likewise during his forthcoming trial.

Sources close to Mr. McCoy, whose worth was once estimated as more than $8,000,000, said that a year of extraordinary legal expenses and entanglements has left him “barely able to pay the rent.” Formerly the owner of a $3,200,000 cooperative apartment at 816 Park Avenue, he now rents two modest rooms in a postwar high-rise building on East 34th Street near First Avenue.

The original charge against Mr. McCoy, reckless endangerment, was thrown out last June during a turbulent hearing in the courtroom of former Supreme Court Justice Myron Kovitsky. Amid the ensuing storm of protest in the black community, Mr. Weiss brought the charge before a second grand jury and obtained a new indictment.

The Bronx Democratic organization, responding to community demands, refused to renominate Judge Kovitsky, and he was soundly defeated in his November reelection attempt. He was replaced by veteran Justice Jerome Meldnick. Mr. McCoy’s trial, in February, ended in a hung jury, with all three white jurors and one Hispanic juror holding out for acquittal.

Two months ago a Bronx jury awarded Mr. Lamb $12,000,000 in a civil action against Mr. McCoy, who has appealed. Recently, Attorney Albert Vogel, acting for Mr. Lamb, charged that Mr. McCoy was hiding assets in order to evade the judgment. The assets in dispute are the proceeds of the sale of his Park Avenue apartment and his house in Southampton, L.I., which he attempted to give outright to his estranged wife, Judy, and their seven-year-old daughter, Campbell. The court has frozen these funds, along with the remainder of Mr. McCoy’s securities and salable personal belongings, pending the outcome of his appeal of his civil damages.

Mrs. McCoy and her daughter reportedly have moved to the Midwest, but Mrs. McCoy was in the spectator section of the courtroom yesterday, apparently unrecognized by the noisy group of demonstrators, black and white, who occupied most of the seats. At one point, Mr. McCoy looked toward his wife, smiled slightly, and raised his left hand in a clenched-fist salute. The meaning of this gesture was unclear. Mrs. McCoy refused to speak to reporters.

Mr. McCoy’s marriage was rocked by the revelation that Maria Ruskin Chirazzi, heiress of the Ruskin air-charter fortune, was in the automobile with Mr. McCoy at the time Mr. Lamb was struck. The couple, it developed, had been conducting an affair in a secret apartment later dubbed the “rent-controlled love nest.” Mrs. Chirazzi’s then-husband, Arthur Ruskin, died of a heart attack shortly before her involvement in the case was made known.

District Attorney Weiss had been prepared to begin a new trial on the reckless endangerment charge when Mr. Lamb died, exposing Mr. McCoy to the more serious charge of manslaughter. Mr. Weiss had already announced that Assistant District Attorney Raymond I. Andriutti would head the prosecution. In an unusual development, Mr. Weiss was forced to remove the prosecutor of the first trial, Lawrence N. Kramer, from the case when it was disclosed that Mr. Kramer had interceded with a landlord to secure the so-called rent-controlled love nest apartment for a friend, Shelly Thomas, an advertising copywriter. Mr. Kramer, who is married, met Ms. Thomas when she served as a juror in an unrelated case which he prosecuted. The defendant in that case, Herbert (Herbert 92X) Cantrell, has obtained a reversal of his first-degree manslaughter conviction on the grounds of “prosecutorial misconduct.”

Mr. Andriutti said yesterday that he would call Mrs. Chirazzi as a prosecution witness in Mr. McCoy’s new trial despite the fact that it was a controversy over her testimony before a grand jury that led to the dismissal of the first indictment by Judge Kovitsky. She did not testify at the first trial.

Mr. McCoy’s legal problems were multiplied yesterday when a real-estate-firm employee, Sally Rawthrote, filed suit against him in Manhattan Civil Court for $500,000. Ms. Rawthrote had received a $192,000 commission for the $3,200,000 sale of Mr. McCoy’s Park Avenue apartment. But Mr. Lamb, via Mr. Vogel, sued her for the $192,000 on the grounds that the money should go toward the payment of Mr. Lamb’s $12,000,000 judgment against Mr. McCoy. Mrs. Rawthrote’s suit yesterday accused Mr. McCoy of “deceptively proffering encumbered property for sale.” In a statement she said she was “merely hedging against the possible loss of my rightful commission” and in fact wishes Mr. McCoy well.

Just how Mr. McCoy might deal with this and other complex legal matters growing out of the case was uncertain. Reached at his home on Long Island, Mr. McCoy’s former attorney, Thomas Killian, said that he was no longer able to represent Mr. McCoy due to Mr. McCoy’s lack of sufficient funds to mount a defense.

Mr. Killian himself currently has his hands full with a barrage of lawsuits brought by his new neighbors in the fashionable North Shore community of Lattingtown. He recently purchased the 20-acre Phipps estate and commissioned the noted Neo-Shingle architect, Hudnall Stallworth, to design a large addition to the main house, which is listed by the National Historic Registry. Local preservationists object to any alteration of the stately Georgian structure.

Mr. Killian is heated in his support of Mr. McCoy, however. In a speech before a private luncheon group yesterday, he reportedly referred to the manslaughter indictment with a common tauro-scatological expletive and was quoted as saying, “If this case was being tried in foro conscientiae [in the court of the conscience], the defendants would be Abe Weiss, Reginald Bacon, and Peter Fallow of
The City Light
.”

Milton Lubell, spokesman for Mr. Weiss, said the District Attorney would not respond to “kibbitzing” by “someone no longer involved in the case.” He added: “Only preferential treatment by certain elements of the judicial system has kept Mr. McCoy aloof from the law so far. It is tragic that it has required the death of Henry Lamb, who represented the highest ideals of our city, to see to it that justice will at last be served in his case.”

Buck Jones, a spokesman for the Reverend Mr. Bacon’s All People’s Solidarity, dismissed Mr. Killian’s charge as “the usual racist double-talk by a racist mouthpiece for a well-known capitalist racist” who seeks to “avoid paying what he owes for the racist destruction of a fine young man.”

Mr. Fallow, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the McCoy case, could not be reached for comment. He was reportedly on a sailing vessel in the Aegean Sea with his bride of two weeks, Lady Evelyn, daughter of Sir Gerald Steiner, the publisher and financier.