Breach of Trust

73

The next morning, I made it to the state office by seven. I had a packed day. In the morning, I was meeting with five of the six judges I was interviewing for the supreme court appointment. In the afternoon, I would finish with the guy who was going to win the beauty contest, George Ippolito. Then at two-thirty, the governor and I were going to sit down with a group of lawyers and clergymen seeking to spare Antwain Otis from execution a few days from now.

The judge interviews started at eight sharp, a half-hour each with fifteen minutes in between each one for some cushion. I’d be done by eleven-thirty.

I reviewed my list again. Four trial judges, two appellate. Had this been a real contest, I probably would have focused primarily on appellate court judges, as they are the closest in line to the supreme court, they have a set of published opinions to review, and they are accustomed to considering pure questions of law. Also, had this been a legitimate vetting process, I’d have talked to other lawyers-Paul Riley, for example-to get recommendations.

But this wasn’t a contest. This was a sham. And if the governor were going to choose a judge from the trial-court level to sit on the state’s highest court, which would come as a surprise to many people, I needed to lay the groundwork for it. Thus, the four trial judges on the short list. I wanted the word to get out that the governor was thinking outside the box, so to speak-he was looking beyond the ivory tower of the appellate court to judges who had gotten their hands dirty, who were on the front lines. So when Snow ultimately chose Ippolito, it wouldn’t look so odd that he’d picked a judge from the trial level.

It was with no shortage of dark humor that I observed my dual role here, the layers of deception I was mired in. I was assigned by the governor’s office to throw up a curtain of legitimacy around an illegal appointment-for-endorsement deal while, at the same time, I was assigned by the federal government to leave a little hole in said curtain so they could peek through. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.

I’d written up a list of ten mostly softball questions, covering judicial philosophy and ethics and attorney discipline, for the interviews this morning. If you were a fly on the wall, you would have found the morning’s interviews to be little different from the exchanges you see in the Senate Judiciary Committee when questioning nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Just for the fun of it, I wanted to ask them if they thought Roe v. Wade should be overruled.

But it wasn’t fun. It was, at best, a waste of time for the “candidates” and me. At worst, I was raising the hopes of people who had absolutely no chance of getting the appointment and who might be tarnished by association once the feds closed in.

I scheduled George Ippolito as the only afternoon interview, figuring I should save the worst for last. Plus it made the most sense from a practical standpoint. I needed to be wearing FeeBee for Ippolito, but I wouldn’t wear it for the other interviews. It had been one condition I had laid down that the feds had accepted. It was bad enough I was stringing along these other judges, bad enough that they might be tainted by this whole affair later. I wasn’t going to record their conversations with me when there was no reason to believe they were corrupt.

So I placed a little separation in time between Ippolito and the others and I went down to the food court in the basement of the state building after the other five interviews, ostensibly for a quick lunch. I dropped my tray of pasta on a table in the foyer just as another customer-one Lee Tucker-was vacating said table, leaving behind the F-Bird.

Back at my office, FeeBee in tow, I felt a knot form in my stomach as the receptionist informed me that Judge George Ippolito was here to see me.

George Ippolito was somewhere in his mid- to late fifties, I gathered, from his weathered features. His wispy hair was the color of sandpaper, which I assumed came from a bottle. He had liquid eyes, a tight mouth, and a thick nose that owed to a few too many nights at Rusty’s or Sidebar, one of the lawyer hangouts for the criminal bar. He was a reliable drinker, though no one was ever sure if that included daytime sauce. Judging from his temperament on the bench, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think he added a little flavor to his morning coffee, but I can’t say I ever heard him slur his words in the times I was before him. He was an asshole, but a sober one.

I could see from his expression when he walked in that he recognized my face, and he obviously knew my name, but he hadn’t previously put the two together. I’m sure he’d had hundreds of prosecutors pass before him in his day and they blurred together.

“Jason Ko-LAR-ich!” he said to me, breaking into a broad smile when he saw me. So, I guess he was going to play like he remembered me. It would have helped if he’d checked on the pronunciation of my name before embarking on that plan. Kola, like the drink. Rich, like you have money. How hard is that?

“Great to see you again, Counsel,” he said with a firm grip on my hand.

Somebody must have told him that I’d tried a case before him previously. I wondered if they also told him what I thought of him. Either way, no one bothered to give him the correct pronunciation of my name.

“Thanks for coming, Judge. This won’t take long.”

“Whatever you need, Jason. Whatever you need.”

Great. Terrific. I started with my boilerplate. The governor was considering a wide range of candidates from diverse backgrounds; you’ve impressed a lot of people, you made the first cut, we’re interested in speaking with you, blah blah blah.

“What kind of name is Ko-LAR-ich?” he asked, when I was finished.

“I’m three-quarters Irish,” I said. “But my father’s father was Hungarian.”

“It sounds Polish.”

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.

“You grew up on the south side?”

“Leland Park,” I said. This guy was interviewing me.

“What was your parish?”

Ah, south-side geography. Identification by the Catholic church you attended.

“St. Pete’s,” I said.

“St. Agnes.” He pointed at himself. “You went to, what, Bonaventure?”

“Right.”

“You spend time at Louie’s?”

“Best kraut dog in the city,” I said. It was just down the way from Bonaventure, my high school.

“Got that right. I went to a ball game last summer, they put ketchup on my hot dog. Ketchup.”

Sacrilege for a city dog. A lot of people don’t have a sense of humor about such things. Mustard is the only appropriate condiment for a sausage. Budweiser is the only beer at a ball game. On the other hand, I was supposed to be interviewing this guy for a seat on the supreme fucking court, so maybe we should talk about that for at least thirty seconds.

“How would you describe your judicial philosophy?” I asked him.

He watched me for a moment, then broke into a humorless smile. “My judicial philosophy? My judicial philosophy.” He sat back in his chair, chin up, eyeing me. “You’re interviewing me for this position?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re questioning whether I can handle this job?”

“I’m just questioning, period.”

“And you’re going to give a recommendation to the governor?”

“Correct.”

“Mmm-hmm.” He nodded at me. “How long have you been a lawyer?”

“Nine years.”

His expression said it all: What was a kid like me doing evaluating judges? This guy was actually insulted that he’d have to answer questions from me. “I’ve been a judge for seventeen years. I’ve got a record and it speaks for itself.”

Now we’d found common ground. His record definitely spoke for itself. And, if I was reading this idiot correctly, he wasn’t going to be doing any other speaking on the subject.

“Please pass on to the governor how honored I would be to serve on the court.”

“I’ll do that, Judge.”

“And when you write up that recommendation for me-that’s something that will be disclosed publicly?”

“Not sure,” I said.

“Well, if it’s going to be-I’d like to take a look at it first. Make sure it works.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good.” The judge clapped his hands together. “And now we can say we met?”

“Now we can say that.”

He got up and extended a hand. I took it and gave him my strongest grip, just a quick but hard squeeze. And then my vaunted interview with the honorable George Henry Ippolito was over.