J'ACCUSE - Part IV

It's now March 2002.  The Village Voice runs its first story on my expense account at HDC.  While the stories are written with the venomous quill of Tom Robbins the facts themselves are basically true.  He lists my expenses from records provided to him by Chuck Brass, President of HDC.  I hate that this is happening.  Hate to have to read about myself and hate that my friends and family have to as well.  In the story Robbins will make his only mention of my aptitude as HDC president.  He says that by all accounts I did an 'adequate job.'  You need to realize that 'adequate' in this context is like saying I was Lincoln, Reagan, FDR and Washington, and jack Welch all rolled into one.  For Robbins to have to admit that would prove what I would later claim; namely that I had done a pretty good job running the corporation.

During this period, my attorney, Irwin Rochman, attempts to convince me to see a forensic psychiatrist.  He says he knows a top guy and that my spending might have irrationality attached to it that should be looked at by a shrink.  Part of the reason he says this is that I had never made an attempt to cover anything up within HDC.  All of my records were there for the Board, the audit committee, the internal auditor and Ernst & Young to see.  E&Y came once a year with a team of accountants and stayed for two months.  I had never even hinted that anything should be hidden from them.  It had never for a second occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong, let alone illegal.

I resisted Irwin's suggestion strongly.  I told him that I was sick and tired of reading about people who got into legal trouble and immediately claimed some mental condition.  I suffered from depression but there was nothing seriously wrong with me and I had done nothing wrong.  I would not see his shrink.

Also around this time it became apparent to me that Robbins was going to write about the fact I was gay.  Either in a Fred context or merely to 'out me' out of vindictiveness.  It's weird to be 'outed' by the Village Voice, the great champion of gay rights.  Irwin suggested that I had to discuss this with Ray.  He knew that I had never told my father I was gay and lived in death fear of him finding out.  Why?  I cannot give you a sensible reason and looking back it all seems rather silly.  All I can say is I was totally terrified that he would ever find out.

Did he already know I was gay?  He had to, of course.  I hadn't had a girlfriend since I was 13 years old.  As I have written before, there was no question of him throwing me out of the house or disowning me.  As a teenager I can't say I knew that to be 100% true but certainly as an adult I did, especially when I had stopped living at home.  So where did this fear come from?  I just don't know.  All I know is that it was real.  And now I knew that I had to have the conversation before it was actually printed.  I had to act like a man and say the words out loud to him.  I owed him that.

So after leaving Irwin's office one day I took the bus up Third Avenue to my father's office.  I am sure in retrospect that Irwin had told him everything.  He was my lawyer in name only.  He kept none of my confidences as in a usual attorney-client relationship. I had told Ray I needed to talk to him about something important.  I sat at the far end of his office in a chair.  Far away from his desk and from him.  I beat around the bush but finally said the words.  The entire time I kept my head averted.

During the time I was in his office, from the moment I walked in till the moment I left, I did not look at him.  I turned my head away as I told him and then when it was over and he wanted to give me a hug I told him not to get up - still not looking in his direction.  I was slowly becoming an emotional basket case and that day wasn't much different.  I cried softly as I thanked him for being so decent about this.  The shame of that confession still haunts me and I can't understand anymore why I felt it so deeply, although at the time it was searing.  He told me in a jocular way that he still intended to use the word 'fag' which he had always done.  He never directed it at me and used it in a non-hostile way that people of a certain generation do.  I took no offense.  He wasn't a homophobe.  My brother, on the other hand, I knew very well was deeply homophobic and I was grateful that he and I had stopped speaking years before.  I will write another time regarding my realization of how scared my brother was of gay men.  It had to do with him disowning a friend, I believe, he discovered to be gay.

At some point after repeated requests I finally acquiesced to see Irwin's forensic psychiatrist.  The meeting was at Irwin's office.  His name was Mark Mills and he had a forensic practice in D.C.  We had a brief meeting alone in a conference room where he told me that we would meet in a few days for him to do some testing.  He used offices in NYC of a colleague.  During this brief introductory meeting he said at least 5 times that I had to FEDEX him a check for $11,000 that day.  He said it over and over.  It started to piss me off.  I would come to learn that this was Mills' M.O.  His assistant would call me out of the blue, frantically, that Mills needed me to FEDEX him $5,000 or $9,000.  I never once saw an accounting of hours spent on this matter. 

But a few days later I met Mills and he did hours and hours of testing.  He told me afterward that he was going back to Irwin's office and I should go too.  When we got there I waited for Irwin while he consulted privately with Mills.  When I went into Irwin's office his law partner was there and they both looked very somber.  Irwin came at me hard.  He explained that he had found out from Artz that Robbins was going to run Fred chats.  He claimed Fred had given him these chats and they included lurid discussions about kids and sex.  I was stunned.  Irwin was behaving like a total asshole to me at that point.  Very hostile and accusatory.  I said nothing.  He said finally, "So what do you want to do?"  I responded, "I want to talk to Mark Mills, alone."  Irwin and his partner looked surprised and told me he was in another office. 

I went in and asked Mills if he already knew about this.  He said he did.  Irwin had told him earlier in the day but he didn't tell me so as not to ruin the testing.  He asked me what I was thinking.  I told him I wanted to pose a hypothetical question.  "OK," he said.  "What would you do if a patient told you that....ummm..well lets put it this way, if a patient had made a calm decision that he had no alternatives and choose to do something about it...ummm...what would you feel compelled to do?  I mean, if he had no options and chose, lets call it Option 1.  Would you feel you had to do something.  Does choosing Option 1 by definition mean you're crazy?"  Mills answered back calmly,"choosing Option 1, as you call it, doesn't necessarily mean you're crazy.  There are a lot of situations where that would be a logical choice of last resort."  "So you wouldn't feel compelled to intervene in every case?" I asked.  "In most cases I would and have. But not in every, no."  "There going to print a story that I am basically a pedophile.  That can't happen, Mark.  I couldn't live with that," I told him.  I explained to him that to be 'outted' and labeled a pedophile, however untrue, on the same day was more than I could bear.

I was an intensely private person.  My friends know that, my parents knew that.  I still couldn't understand, even amidst all the anguish I was feeling, how Fred was going to release these chats.  He came off way worse than I did in them.  What would all this say about him?  It hadn't dawned on me, even then, even after finding out from Decision Strategies that they turned up no suicide attempts and no institutionalization, that Fred was going to fabricate these chats.  Even after discovering that most of what he had said to me on-line to keep me hooked to him was all a lie.  The thought simply didn't occur to me.  Newspapers, even a rag like the Voice, don't run fabricated AOL chats with no verification and checking.   

I told Mills that I had no choice and I needed to go home and make some preparations.  He asked one thing. That I wait until the morning to do anything and that I call him then.  I told him I couldn't promise that but I had things to do that wouldn't be finished by 10AM so I didn't see a problem.  I came out of the office and Irwin asked what I wanted to do?  "Nothing," I told him, "I'm going home."  He was dumbfounded.  I asked him if Ray then about this.  Yes, Artz had told Ray earlier in the day.  Great, I thought.  OK, I said, I have one request.  Tell Ray that he shouldn't try to contact me for 24 hrs.  I want to be left alone.  Irwin said he would tell him.

I walked home trying to come to grips with the reality that my life was over.  This was it.  I cried as I walked.  I just never saw my life ending this way. I just kept staring at all the people on the sidewalks going about their business and all with futures.  I had none.  I was extremely sad, but I realized there was no other choice and I had better get on with doing what I needed to do.  I made two phone calls.  First to a friend in South Carolina and asked him if he would take Seabright, my dog.  He said yes and I told him I would drive there on Sunday.  This was Friday evening.  I next called my dogwalker and asked that he help me clean out a storage space I had.  He agreed to do it the next morning. 

When I left HDC I had the Corporation rent me a space to store all of my possessions until I had decided what my next job would be.  It was mostly books and papers from 8 years in government.  Also a lot of framed news stories from HDC ribboncuttings and groundbreakings.  I had also brought my winter clothes there to store until next year.  I decided my mother would have to clean out my apartment but I should at least clean out this space.  Since I knew I was throwing out almost everything in it, it wouldn't take me and Ralph long.

So I met Ralph the next morning and we cleaned out the space. We threw away most everything and I took back the clothes and a few boxes of things back to my apartment.  I spoke to Mills and told him of my plans.  I would drive south, drop Seabe off and then leave on Tuesday for South Dakota.  I had always wanted to see Mount Rushmore before I died and I decided I would do that since it was doable and then take my life in a hotel in Keystone.  Mills asked that I stop by D.C. after I left South Carolina before I want to S.D.  I agreed to see him on Tuesday.  I spent the rest of the day cleaning my apartment and prepared for the 11 hour drive to South Carolina the next morning.  We left early Sunday, before dawn.  While In North Carolina a huge 18 wheeler tried to drive me off the road and I wound up in a ditch with a flat tire in 100 degree heat.  Because of the angle of the car we had to wait for a tow truck.  Back on the road I finally reached Charleston.  I spent the next day making sure Seabe was acclimated and set off early Tuesday for D.C.  The story was supposed to come out on the web that day and hit the newsstands the following day.

When I reached Mills' office there was no story yet.  We went out for lunch.  It was funny because at one time I had lived just a few blocks from his office when I first moved to D.C.  When we returned Robbins' latest story was up but it wasn't about me.  It was about Richard Roberts and his use of the HDC credit card for strip clubs.  I don't think I had ever been more relieved in my life.  Robbins couldn't pull the trigger.  They couldn't publish the chat because Fred would look as bad as me, or so I believed. After that I decided to head back to NYC.  I had a reprieve.  I didn't know for how long, but I knew it felt good to live again. { I left Seabe in S.C. and I will explain why next time. }

Irwin had been having conversations with the General Counsel for the Voice, Victor Kovner.  Kovner and his wife were old left-wing activists and he served for a time as Dinkins' Corporation Counsel.  For those not from NYC, he was the City's chief lawyer.  Irwin had been trying to convince and warn Kovner that Fred was unstable and he was not to be believed.  Kovner told Irwin that he would not run any chats involving Fred unless there was an HDC connection.  It was all a snooker.  I knew, as did Irwin, that I had purchased something for Fred, a VCR, with an HDC credit card.  This excuse of Kovner's was going to, in his view, give the Voice free reign to run anything Fred would say.

I've promised you to reveal how Fred and Tom Robbins manufactured those chats.  Let me do that now  (How and when I found about this is explained in the POSTSCRIPT at the end of this post).  Here's how it worked.  At first Fred had chats already created.  The idea for the fabrication of Internet chats was his.  But Fred is no genius, although he is clever and also deeply psychotic. The chats were somewhat ham-handed and didn't contain enough useful non-sexual information for Robbins.  So Robbins told him the topics that he needed chats on and what key words and phrases Fred was to have me say and questions Fred would need to ask in the chats in order to elicit the appropriately incriminating response from me.  These had to appear to be natural conversations. 

Robbins also provided Fred with Internet links and newspaper stories that had been written about me and Ray. The goal was to take real events and turn them into chats that had some criminal component to them.  Let me give you an example.  In one chat, that resulted in a major Village Voice story, I tell Fred about a bribe I supposedly took.  According to me, in the chat, at a ribboncutting ceremony for an HDC project I took a paper bag full of money from the developer.  I think it was $10,000 I don't remember the amount the story claimed.  Now the weird thing when I first read this was that there was a ribboncutting for that project around the time claimed.  The correct developer of the project was named.  How could Fred have known that?  He was in Indiana.  How did he know of my schedule and HDC projects.

As Fred would tell me, Robbins sent him a copy of a Daily News story that ran the day after the ribboncutting announcing the new project.  Sure enough that story had the date, the developer, the project.  But if I took this bribe, where was the money?  Fred told me Robbins identified that problem but Fred came up with the solution.  In the chat/story I tell Fred that same evening I drove to Atlantic City and lost all the money at a casino.  When I first read that story I thought, "doesn't any one else see how incredibly convenient this all is?"  Money leaves a trace, usually.  Had I taken this money there would be a deposit or a large purchase or something.  So Fred and Robbins disposed of the question by having me be an inveterate gambler.  In the series of fabricated chats I routinely tell Fred I am stealing HDC funds to support a gambling habit.  As anyone who has ever known me knows I spend most of my time in casinos sitting or standing behind Tony Carbonetti watching him play blackjack.  I lose my $200 and then watch him play.

In another major Voice story I tell Fred about a conversation Ray had with Rudy.  Ray is attempting to enlist Rudy's help for a client of Ray's law firm.  I remember the day vividly when my attorney, Gerald Shargel, called to tell me there was a new story and Ray was mentioned this time.  I was completely bewildered.  I had never known anything about the things I was supposedly telling Fred.  Not to mention the most obvious point that I had never, ever mentioned Rudy Giuliani or my association with him to Fred.  That part I got.  It was obvious to me that Fred had written these chats after reaching out to Robbins so he now knew all about my RWG connection.  But how could he know this stuff about Ray?  I had never heard of this client and knew nothing about any meeting Ray had ever had regarding his legal work and Rudy.  It turned out the client was real.  But how could Fred have know that?  It plagued me. 

Fred would later explain that Robbins had sent him an old Newsday story regarding questions about Ray's client and possible Rudy assistance.  The story alleged a conversation between Ray and Rudy on this matter.  Once you read the chat it's an almost verbatim transcript of the Newsday story.  It was so obvious that the thing had just been lifted.  But no newspaper or media outlet bothered to check, certainly not the Voice.  These allegations - more than allegations, because I am supposedly saying them - were reprinted over and over. 

Fred told me that Robbins, like a good editor,  would frequently mark-up his chats.  Telling him where to expand on something or delete something else.  Fred said that the majority of the ideas for the non-sex chats came from Robbins. Especially those chats that were used to support the expense documents that Robbins had gotten from HDC.  He, Robbins,  very much wanted to tie my expenses with an overt acknowledgment by me that I was committing criminal acts and knew it.  Fred said that most of the expense chats were written by Robbins since he didn't have the documents and we, Fred and I, had never in reality discussed  anything to do with HDC or my expenses.  Fred also said that the idea of claiming I was using HDC funds to procure prostitutes came from Robbins.  He said Robbins suspected that some of my charges were for that but he hadn't been able to secure any proof.  Having me actually tell Fred that I was, in his mind, was good enough.  Of course, I never hired hookers using HDC funds. But that didn't seem to matter.

Fred said, in fact, that the most famous chat - the one that would prove Fred and Robbins undoing - was Robbins idea.  Robbins apparently was determined to have a story showing me to be a racist.  Fred said he wasn't sure why but Robbins was obsessed with showing that I hated blacks.  And in fact there is a Voice story alleging that.  The chat - that would prove the lead-in and backbone of that story - revolved around me saying racist things about blacks in Harlem as prompted by the occasion of Bill Clinton's office being located there.  Fred and I in this chat are just shooting the breeze when this subject comes up topically.  According to the the story and the chat this conversation happened in November of 2000.  The chat is apparently time stamped with the date as all chats would be. 

Well the problem with that is we knew historically that Bill Clinton not only didn't mention his office being in Harlem until after he left office, it came after a fruitless attempt to locate to Carnegie Tower in Midtown.  There was no way I could have been talking about that since it wouldn't happen for months.  It would be like me discussing the aftereffects of 9/11 and what a great job Rudy did in June of 2001.  It simply couldn't have happened.  The first time I read the story I didn't catch it.  But readers of the Village Voice did and wrote letters to the Editor asking how this could be and stating that they didn't believe these chats.  The next week Robbins responded by giving Fred a platform to explain how this could have happened, at the very end of another story.  Fred came up with the nuttiest possible excuse.  He said that some chats had become intermingled in his computer while downloading.  This was akin to saying that two books fall off a bookshelf at the same time and not only do some pages neatly swap with the covers but that full coherent text manages to insert itself in the different pages.  Were these chats real what he was saying was patently ridiculous. 

Fred told me that Robbins was furious and very nervous when this was uncovered.  Fred believed too that this was going to expose the whole thing.  But the NY press corps, deciding that I was a sleaze and Robbins a hero for exposing me, ignored it.  I've even read that Robbins won awards for this coverage.  It boggles the mind to think in this day and age that someone could perpetrate a fraud this massive and for so long - these Voice stories ran for months - and never be called to account even after it was revealed the chats were phony.

That the press corps in NY is so lazy as to not raise the issue is deeply troubling.  It is not a matter of liking or defending Russell Harding.  It comes down to the fraternity of journalists and the rules about policing yourselves.  If people begin to routinely question everything they read in a newspaper - not that the Voice is a real newspaper - then the Fourth Estate would crumble.  Is the world materially affected because Jason Blair called in some stories he wasn't actually at?  No, not really.  But if the world believes that the NY Times doesn't care enough about the stories it prints to verify that they are in fact true, then the paper disappears.  That's why the Times took the matter so seriously as did its readers. And that's why a rag like the Voice undertook no internal inquiry after it was revealed that the chats were fabricated or that they had been warned by Rochman.  A rag like the Voice has no integrity or journalistic ethics.

These articles went on for months.  Almost every one predicated on a Fred chat of some kind.  It was of little consolation that I knew they were phony or that my close friends did.  Tony Carbonetti said he knew immediately that they were fake when in one chat Fred has me calling Ray, 'Dad' or 'Daddy'.  Anyone who has ever known me or Ray and especially those  who've known us both know I only call him Ray.  I have been calling him Ray since I was a young child.  And if I am referencing him for the first time to someone who doesn't know him, I always say, 'my father'.  But such is the age we live in - scandal now, facts later.  I will expose how that same ethos played out in my prosecution in J'ACCUSE - Part V.  Look for it in the days ahead.

POSTSCRIPT:

At some point in early 2005 I was at Federal Medical Center Butner in North Carolina.  I was still pre-trial.  I did most of my sentence pre-trial.  One day at mail call I received a card with a Virginia return address.  I got very little mail in prison so I was intrigued.  The card was from Fred.  He struck this nauseatingly sympathetic tone about how badly he felt for me and how sorry he was.  I ignored it.  A few weeks later comes another card.  I was now furious.  Here was this true, genuine sexual predator, roaming free thanks to Debbie Landis, my prosecutor, sending me mocking cards in prison.  I called my attorney, Henry Mazurek, and told him to tell Debbie to make this stop.  Fred was her creation and she had to put a stop to these cards.  A few weeks later Henry told me that he spoke to Debbie about this and she said she would do nothing.  Fred wasn't her witness anymore and she intended to do nothing. 

That's when I got the idea.  I wrote Fred back and said I accepted his apology but that I couldn't resume a friendship with him unless he came clean and told me everything that had happened.  His first letter didn't say much and I responded back that I needed everything in order to move on and forgive.  In his second and third letters that's when he laid out how this all worked in detail.  Some of it confirmed hunches and suspicions I had, but other things just blew me away.  Even knowing what a lowlife Robbins was I still didn't think him capable of all this.  But Fred didn't know most of the stuff he had me saying in the chats, he couldn't have.  It all fit together once he explained.  Naturally, I was using Fred.  He's a demented psycho and I would have rather had nothing to do with him.  If Debbie had leashed her creation then I would have been happy never to have written to him or heard from him again.  But after the third letter, I had gotten what I wanted and I never wrote back.