The Professor and the Prostitute (30 page)

But several people had made successful tapes, particularly of conversations with B-J, conversations that strongly suggested that whatever else he had been doing, he had certainly been trying to cover up a conspiracy. Macris had one on which Buettner-Janusch's voice could clearly be heard saying, “Danny has been willing to state that he was, um, the one who was messing around” and “You know what we are doing. You know what the story is, and so on. I speak in metaphors. I hope you understand what the metaphor is. And you simply stick to it.” And Danny Cornyetz himself had one in which, after he reminded B-J of a discussion they had once had about making drugs, the professor responded sternly, “Danny, we're going to deny that conversation! We're going to say we were talking about something else.”

On one tape, Cornyetz could be heard asking B-J, “Why did we get involved in this in the first place?… Is it Brace's fault?” Bruce Greenfield was one of the students named in the incorporation papers for Simian Expansions. B-J answered, “Yes, yes it is.” Cornyetz went on, “Why the ——did he ever talk you into doing this?” B-J said, “Why the ——am I so stupid?” And then he answered his own question: “The problem is, the point is, there is a legitimate research project buried in all of this, too.”

On another Cornyetz tape, B-J could be heard declaring, “The only way they can indict one against the other is to have the others testify, and none of us have agreed to. We're too far committed.”

And Professor Jolly had a tape in which B-J remarked that he wasn't worried about the charges because of his powerful friends. “I've even got the dean of the medical school at Harvard,” he boasted.

When the tapes were played in the courtroom, even the chairman's friends grew suddenly silent and subdued.

I felt a fleeting flash of sympathy for the professor, particularly when listening to him ask Richard Macris, who was at the time taping him from his home in Flushing, to meet him at the lab as soon as possible. Macris said he couldn't possibly get there before one o'clock. “I have to get dressed,” he announced. And then he laughed. “Dressed. And everything.” From his uneasy giggle, I thought that Macris was remembering just then that in order to get ready, he had to don the body tape recorder with which the DEA agents had fitted him out. But B-J seems to have thought he meant that he had to take a shower, for he replied, “Well, then, go take a shower and get dressed and come.” Macris then admitted he'd already showered, and B-J, with a sigh of perplexity, said, “Well, ah, do whatever it is you have to do to get dressed.”

It is difficult not to feel sympathy toward someone who doesn't realize he is being taped. But whatever sympathy I felt vanished when I heard B-J say, on another tape, “My law firm has got to the head U.S. Attorney and pointed out the enormous eminence I hold in the field.” It is difficult to feel sympathy for someone who believes himself to be above the law.

Subsequently, B-J's predicament worsened. Danny Cornyetz testified that the chairman had said to him, “You are as amoral as the rest of us, and therefore I can tell you that we are going to make Quaaludes in the laboratory.” And the Anthropology Department's administrative assistant, a graduate student named Richard Dorfman, testified that not only had B-J told him, too, that drugs would be made in the lab but that eventually he gave him some lab-produced synthetic cocaine and asked him to sell it.

He did so, Dorfman said. It was just a tiny bit of cocaine, a mere $100 worth. He kept $20 for himself and handed over the remaining $80 to B-J.

The defense attorney's cast of characters was, of course, different. To prove the point that the anthropologist had made drugs in his lab only because he had intended to use them on lemurs, Rithholz produced a Chicago fund-raiser named Pat Pronger, who had been employed to raise money for Simian Expansions. Among the specific budgetary requests that Buettner-Janusch had made of her was money with which to purchase lemurs, for, as he'd explained to her, he intended to do a behavior-modification study on these animals. But Pronger's testimony misfired, for it became clear as she was cross-examined that the professor had requested only enough funds for two or three lemurs, or two or three females and their “husbands,” as she put it. These few animals would not have been sufficient to justify the large amounts of drugs that had been found.

Rithholz also put on the stand a group of character witnesses who testified that they considered Buettner-Janusch honest and trustworthy. But their testimony, too, seemed inadequate since, as the prosecutor pointed out, they'd known B-J in past, not recent, days. Finally, Rithholz suggested—confusingly—that perhaps Buettner-Janusch hadn't, after all, been making drugs. Perhaps Christopher Jolly, jealous of B-J and covetous of his position, had planted them in the lab.

The suggestion went nowhere. Jolly, with his longish hair and wry smile, looked disarmingly like an engaging, early Beatle, and no matter how hard Rithholz pressed him, he refused to admit to harboring any ill feelings toward the chairman. He did admit he'd been a scavenger, searching through garbage pails, and that he'd been sneaky, never confronting B-J with his suspicions. But he said that B-J's imperiousness required that he act surreptitiously. And he convincingly conveyed the impression that he'd been motivated solely by honor, by an old-fashioned view of the responsibilities of his profession, and by outrage over what he suspected was happening in the lab.

Buettner-Janusch didn't take the stand, and at last, after ten days of testimony, the prosecution and the defense summed up.

The jury deliberated for less than five hours and found Buettner-Janusch guilty on two counts involving the manufacture with intent to sell of LSD, methaqualone, and synthetic cocaine and two counts of lying to federal investigators. The one count on which he was found not guilty concerned the distribution of the drug cylert pemoline, a stimulant. No, he hadn't done
that
, the jury said.

That afternoon, as I left the courthouse, I felt I understood B-J's motivation for becoming involved in making drugs. It hadn't been just to make money. There exist in society certain individuals who believe themselves to be endowed with such extravagant, even imperial, intelligence that they feel it their destiny to conquer worlds, command obeisance, cancel the rules by which ordinary mortals live. To such people, safety seems boring, banal. And outwitting society becomes, in a way, a hobby. Buettner-Janusch, who detested banality and prided himself on his wits, had wanted to pit his brains against the system.

But why had his students gone along with him? I found that quite puzzling, and, in search of an answer, I went that afternoon to the NYU campus. Summer session was in progress, and the park that borders the school was filled with students energetically taking notes on the grass, the corridors bustling with bright and eager young faces.

I took an elevator to the office of the Anthropology Department, hoping I might find some of the students who'd worked in B-J's lab. During the trial, they had been enjoined from talking to reporters, but perhaps now they would open up.

I was fortunate, indeed. There was Richard Dorfman, the administrative assistant who'd sold the synthetic cocaine for B-J. He'd said at the trial that he'd done it in order to keep his job. But I wanted to know why he'd participated in the first stages of the scheme, the creation of the drugs. Hadn't he felt any concern about that, any sense that it was wrong or at least that he might, if he participated, be putting his career at risk?

Dorfman listened to my questions and began to speak. “You come to a lab where drugs are being made, and you feel imprisoned, but after a while, your sense of reality becomes distorted and you accept what's going on. You go along with what's happening. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the easiest path.”

Later, I mentioned Dorfman's comments to a professor in the Anthropology Department and she nodded thoughtfully. “You get the feeling, when you talk with the kids who were involved, that they felt the kind of sneaky, pervasive fear that people always develop in the face of true psychosis,” she said. “It's not the shaking-in-the-boots kind of terror. But it's terror just the same. And it makes people want to just look the other way, to want not to ask themselves too many questions. You know, B-J was always talking about Hitler, and how the government was using Hitlerian tactics on him. But, in fact, the way the students feared his power, and went along with him, makes you understand the rise of Hitler.”

Buettner-Janusch was sentenced to jail for five years. Clifford Jolly continued to teach at NYU. Richard Dorfman got fired. Richard Macris gave up anthropology for business administration. And Danny Cornyetz gave up anthropology to make tapes for a company that supplied museums with recorded art lectures.

About the Author

Linda Wolfe is the author of five true-crime books:
The Professor and the Prostitute and Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, Love Me to Death, Double Life, The Murder of Dr. Chapman,
and
Wasted: Inside the Robert Chambers–Jennifer Levin Murder,
an Edgar Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of
My Daughter, Myself,
a memoir;
The Literary Gourmet
, a classic cookbook; and
Private Practices
, a novel. Wolfe's articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, among them
Vanity Fair
, the
New York Times Magazine
, and
New York
magazine, of which she was a contributing editor. She currently writes a column about books for the website
www.FabOverFifty.com.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Some of the pieces of this book first appeared in abbreviated form in
New York
magazine.

Copyright © 1986 by Linda Wolfe

Cover design by Michel Vrana

ISBN: 978-1-4976-3704-7

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EBOOKS BY LINDA WOLFE

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA