The Professor and the Prostitute (28 page)

So, too, was the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney John Lenoir. A lawyer for only five years, Lenoir had spent most of his professional life as an anthropologist, earning a Ph.D. and living for three years in a tribal village in Suriname. There he became interested in the law after watching how primitive cultures resolved disputes. In the hands of these two men, the case of the red Ferrari emerged as a sharp sociological drama. To Lefcourt, Magliato was Everyman, beset on all sides by crime and violence, persecuted if he tried to defend himself. To Lenoir, Magliato was the classic vigilante, the man who takes justice into his own hands and who, though a hero in modern movies, is as much a menace to society as are the evils he seeks to correct.

The prosecution relied chiefly on the eyewitnesses from SoHo and on Eddie Klaris, who had come down from his first year at Vassar for the trial. Klaris seemed to quiver on the stand, perhaps torn between some lingering loyalty to Magliato and the damning account he was giving. It was damning indeed, for the boy insisted that they had obtained the Chevy's license number and had seen where the car was parked well before Magliato got his gun—testimony that was ultimately critical for the jury.

The defense relied chiefly on Magliato's own testimony. In almost a full day on the witness stand, he told the story of his life before the confrontation with Giani. As for that fatal meeting, he insisted that the shooting was an accident. When he drew and cocked the weapon, it was only to keep Giani covered until the police arrived. But he grew so rattled that the gun went off on its own. “I didn't mean to pull the trigger,” he said.

The defense also produced character witnesses and a chilling triumvirate of gun experts, one of them a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. The experts contended that guns like Magliato's could fire accidentally, particularly if the shooter was under stress. The three bore a striking resemblance to one another. Each sported a bushy mustache, as if it were a trademark. Two had attended Soldier of Fortune conventions. Among them, they had written over a thousand articles, with such titles as “Buckshot Breakthrough,” “Shooting Through Coat Pockets,” and “Hit the White Part,” for magazines like
S.W.A.T., Gun World
, and
Gun Digest
. They thought the fact that Magliato had managed to hit Giani right above the eyes from a distance of about forty feet was just beginner's luck—or misfortune.

Throughout the trial, Magliato seemed certain of vindication. During breaks, he made small talk with his family and friends, asking about an aunt's sore foot, a friend's problem at work. He was free on a $1 million bond, and each evening he hurried off with his companions, loping along in his awkward, gangly manner.

Giani's mother was there every day, too. All day she clutched a crucifix, and she told me that whenever the talk turned to weapons, she looked down at the crucifix and thought to herself,
This
is
my
weapon. Once, she turned to her lawyer and said it aloud.

At last, after three weeks of testimony, the trial drew to a close and the lawyers gave their summations. First, the defense: Magliato had picked up his gun out of fear, and Giani had died as the result of a “tragic freak accident.” Then the prosecution: Magliato had shown a “depraved indifference to human life” by pulling the trigger on a crowded street, and he'd shot Giani not because he had “dented his car but because Giani had dented his pride.”

The judge's instructions were complicated. The jury could convict Magliato of any of five crimes—or none at all. There were two separate counts of murder in the second degree: intentional murder and so-called depraved murder, murder resulting from a reckless indifference to human life. There were two counts of manslaughter: manslaughter one, an intentional act, and manslaughter two, a reckless act. And there was one count not bearing a mandatory jail sentence: criminally negligent homicide.

The jurors deliberated for two days, repeatedly asking the judge to reread his instructions. They also asked at one point whether certain of the charges were more serious than others. The judge, telling them to decide which crime, if any, the evidence seemed to support, warned them that they were not supposed to think about punishment, for such is New York law. The defense objected to this warning, suspecting that the jury might be trying to convict Magliato of one of the less serious crimes.

In the middle of the second day of deliberations, after hearing the charges for a fourth time, the jury finally pronounced Magliato guilty of depraved murder. His girlfriend, the jewelry designer, wept copiously. Mrs. Giani's fingers caressed her crucifix. And Magliato shuddered. Then, SoHo and Southampton suddenly behind him, he was abruptly swept off to jail by a phalanx of guards.

I visited him at Riker's Island two weeks later. He was again cheerful and optimistic. His luck had turned, he told me. His lawyer had received from Judge Sullivan a copy of a remarkable letter. One of the jurors, a woman, had written to the judge, spelling out in great detail a conflict that had come up in the jury room. The conflict turned out to be precisely what Lefcourt had suspected. The jurors had been trying to compromise, to convict Magliato of one of the lesser crimes, but they hadn't understood how to go about it. According to the letter, they had screened out intentional murder and were deadlocked on intentional manslaughter. At this point, the woman wrote, she and several other jurors had concluded that depraved murder might be a less serious offense than intentional manslaughter because it appeared third on their verdict sheet, so they had voted for this crime.

There were other confusions, she said—about the meaning of “depraved” and about the difference between murder and manslaughter. “I admit to you your Honor that we do not appear to be very bright,” the juror wrote. But she begged Judge Sullivan to review what had happened because she thought that Magliato had been denied his right to a fair trial.

Another juror had sent Magliato a poem. And a third had telephoned Lefcourt and confirmed the account of confusion in the jury room. So Magliato was exuberant. And, surprisingly, he hadn't been having a bad time at Riker's, he told me. He'd been sleeping and eating well and had been reading
The Grapes of Wrath
and rereading
War and Peace
. He'd also been getting a kick out of observing his fellow inmates. “Would you believe,” he asked, “that none of the guys here were interested in watching the vice-presidential debate? There are two TV sets, and everyone votes about what to watch. There were only two votes for the debate, so everyone watched some murder movie instead.”

Then, obviously a sharp student of value structures, he began to describe the new world he had been forced to enter. “It's like a great big fraternity house,” he said. “Only what you have in common isn't sports or classes but criminal stuff, like whether you're here ‘on a body.' Some people have one body, some two, some none. I've got one, so that lends me a certain distinction.”

Did he miss anything?

“Friends,” he said. And he also told me that he thought the make of his car had a great deal to do with everything that had happened to him. He said that if he hadn't been driving a Ferrari, Giani and Schneider might never have hit him in the first place and that the police, the D.A.'s office, and even the judicial system might have been less harsh on him, perhaps letting him plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide. There is something symbolic about a Ferrari, he maintained, something that arouses prejudices in others. What bothered him most about this fact was, he said, that his “wasn't even one of those eighty-thousand-dollar Ferraris. It was a special European car, only a thirty-nine-thousand-dollar model.”

His friends were all in court on the day of his sentencing. Surprisingly, so were four jurors—three regulars, one alternate. The jurors had come to demonstrate their concern about the verdict. They sat together in a back row, exchanging reminiscences and copies of their protests and poetry.

The woman who had written to Judge Sullivan told me, “I've done what I did as a matter of conscience.” An administrative assistant at a law firm, she belonged to a theater group and owned a horse. “I blame myself for not speaking up in the jury room,” she said. “But I felt intimidated, because there were outbursts when some of us wanted to reopen deliberations. There were people in there who just wanted to go home.”

The jurors' afterthoughts had little effect on the day's proceedings. Judge Sullivan declared that he'd found this case particularly troublesome, largely because some of the blame for Giani's death rested on the community. “We require of policemen who get guns that they have at least ten hours of training in how to handle their weapons,” he said. “But we let any ordinary citizen who shows need of a gun get one, and then we don't demand that he learn safety and competency. By Magliato's own testimony, he had only fifteen minutes' training with the gun.” Then, taking Magliato's previously unsullied record into consideration, Sullivan sentenced him to the minimum for murder—fifteen years to life (the maximum would have been twenty-five to life).

A year later, while Magliato was serving time in an upstate New York jail, an appellate court reduced his crime from murder to manslaughter. He had been guilty, in the view of three judges on the five-person court, not of a “depraved indifference to human life,” but of having caused a death through recklessness. The businessman was joyous, according to his lawyer, Lefcourt, and was anticipating that he might be freed on probation. No doubt, in his inimitable, optimistic way, he may have even begun to make plans for a rosy future. But at a resentencing hearing, Judge Sullivan, saying, “Nothing new has been presented to me. A man was killed who did not deserve to die,” again confined him to jail, this time for a term of four to twelve years for manslaughter.

It was a crushing blow for Magliato, who seemed stunned and perplexed. But I thought of Nietzsche, who warned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” In the space of a few crucial moments on a late summer evening, Magliato had jeopardized all he had gained in his lifetime by becoming as reckless, as monstrous, if you will, as the man who was his victim.

DR. QUAALUDE

New York, New York

1979

I
N THE SPRING OF
1977, Richard Macris, a nineteen-year-old student at New York University, became an assistant in the laboratory of Dr. John Buettner-Janusch, chairman of the Anthropology Department. For the young undergraduate, the appointment was a coup. To be singled out to work in the anthropology chairman's lab meant that he had passed a tougher test than any written exam. Buettner-Janusch was famous for smiling on only the best and the brightest.

Macris began his work—centrifuging and analyzing blood samples—eagerly. Buettner-Janusch had made his name, some years earlier, by doing complex biological studies that had established relationships between the blood proteins of lemurs and those of the higher anthropoids, and Macris was under the impression that the experiments he was being asked to do were somehow related to the chairman's interest in monkey-to-man blood factors.

Buettner-Janusch had come to NYU in 1973. His academic credentials were impeccable. He'd received a B.A., B.S., and M.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He'd taught at Yale for seven years and in that time written a highly regarded anthropology textbook,
The Origins of Man
. Then he'd moved to Duke University in North Carolina, where he'd gone on to do elegant research into the blood relationships among lemurs, apes, and man, research that answered key questions about evolution. By 1973, the forty-nine-year-old Buettner-Janusch was one of the best-known physical anthropologists not just in the United States but in the world, and he regularly received large research grants from the National Science Foundation. Indeed, he was so respected a scholar that NYU had to lure him away from Duke by promising him a new and lavish research facility, which cost the university $200,000.

Macris, a middle-class youth from Queens whose Greek Orthodox family had had to make sacrifices to send him to college, felt fortunate indeed throughout his first days in the costly facility. With lab experience, he would surely be able to get into graduate school, perhaps even win a good fellowship. But shortly after he began his work, he heard disturbing rumors. Some of the other lab assistants, boastful about their old-timer status and close relationships with BuettnerJanusch, hinted that B-J, as they fondly called him, wasn't doing lemur research at all; he was making illegal drugs—methaqualone and LSD. One day, one of the old-timers told Macris to wash his hands carefully because the material he was handling “could cause you to go crazy.”

Macris didn't quite believe the rumors. Still, there
were
funny things about the lab. As time went on, he noticed that former students of the chairman's, fellows who had long since graduated, were turning up in the lab. They arrived at odd hours, often at night, and held whispered conversations with B-J. Then, one day B-J asked him to come in on a Saturday, and when he got there, the chairman closed all the doors to the customarily unguarded facility and indicated that today they would be making anacetyl anthranilic acid, a precursor of LSD.

From that time forward, Macris began to wonder if the stories he'd heard could be true, and in early February 1979 he confronted B-J with his suspicions.

The chairman shrugged them off. “We're making neurotoxins to be used with lemurs,” he said.

“Isn't it available commercially?” Macris asked.

“Yes,” the chairman answered, “but the commercial product isn't pure enough.”

Macris's conscience started to bother him. Suppose the chairman
was
making illegal drugs. Suppose they weren't for use with lab animals. Perhaps he ought to notify the school authorities. Troubled, he sought the counsel of another renowned NYU professor, Dr. Clifford Jolly, an anthropologist who worked in the lab next door.