Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (23 page)
The big hand seemed to come out from the sky.
It gripped his arm. It seized him powerfully and held fast, bringing the bawling Loo-Loo to a dead halt.
It was all over. The end of the line, and inspiration for the big block letters in tomorrow’s
Daily Mirror
:
BLOODY DEAD
KID SPLATTERED ALL OVER UTICA AVENUE
.
Not quite.
McEntee’s shiny badge was slowly becoming visible through the big puddle of Loo-Loo’s eyeballs.
“Now where’s the fire, boyo? You looking for trouble?”
“No.”
“You know you almost ran into that bus? You trying to wreck a bus or something?” McEntee laughed. “You want to be more careful. You could hurt people, feller.”
“Sorry.”
“Watcha got in the box? Looks like a cake.”
Loo-Loo now sized up McEntee, noting with disgust how the big cop was smacking his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s a cake.”
“How’s about donating a big piece to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association?”
“It’s for my father,” said Loo-Loo, prepared to run like hell again. “Gotta go!”
McEntee laughed.
They were waiting for him at the Creamflake. Al and Mr. Horn and the Russians and Manya in her sweater.
Wordlessly, Loo-Loo’s father took the Union box and had the boy follow him to the back, where he plunked the parcel down on the baking table.
Mr. Horn picked up a huge knife. He cut the string and opened the box and slid the chocolate layer cake onto the surface, positioning it under a glaring overhead light, and there it sat: pristine, a work of the baker’s art and toil, a prize.
Then—
whack!
—in a sudden motion, Mr. Horn brought down the knife, like it was a six-pound meat cleaver, slashing the chocolate cake in two. Everybody watched as Mr. Horn surgically slit the layers.
There were three layers of dark chocolate, with viscous spaces defining them: one space filled with raspberry jam, chocolate buttercream in the other. Again like the careful surgeon, Mr. Horn scraped at the fillings, determining their thickness, their richness. He handed a layer to Al, who tasted it.
Then the Russian bakers closed in for a taste. All the men made knowledgeable comments as they probed and dissected and sampled the enemy booty. Mr. Horn took notes, writing on a brown paper bag, which he would later hang over the worktable.
“You did a good job,” Al said to Loo-Loo. “Just don’t mention it to your friends.”
“Why not?”
“On account of it’s nobody’s business. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“How much change did you keep, Loo-Loo?”
“Three dollars.”
Al reached into the petty cash drawer.
“Here’s two dollars extra,” he said. “Go buy yourself a present at the Woolworth’s. Good job, kiddo.”
Loo-Loo heard the bleating siren of a cop car as it sped past the Creamflake, heading for Brownsville, no doubt, where somebody was holding up a liquor store or maybe a Plymouth exploded with somebody inside of it.
Loo-Loo studied the dollar bills, saying nothing. Five bucks in all. Pretty good. He stared at the engraving on the bills, particularly the triangle atop the pyramid with the one eye on it—staring back at Loo-Loo Scharfsky, as if it knew all about him.
“When we finish this project—remember, we got something more
for you, Larry”
“What? A game show?”
“No. It’s a movie script we picked up.
White Heat
meets
Diff’rent Strokes.
A gritty urban story, only there’s no grit yet.
We need you to—you know—Brooklyn it up.”
“Brooklyn it up?”
“Yeah. Think you can handle it?”
“Piece of cake.”
“Money’s good too.”
“I’m all over it.”
E
DITORS
’ N
OTE
:
The author of this report, Jess Korman, is a shy
person. He is of the same quirky generation of television writers as
Neil “Doc” Simon, with whom he shares two impulses: recounting
life experience comedically, as a means of relieving pain through
laughter; and hiding behind alter egos. In writing his memoir, Jess
Korman employs assorted aliases. In the case of “The Creamflake
Kid,” a true tale (though some names have been changed), the
character Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, a.k.a. Loo-Loo, is indeed the
alter ego of a shy person.
J
udge Gerald Garson, a cigar-smoking, suntanning Brooklyn jurist, was known to hold court in chambers. After sliding off his heavy overcoat, he would strut around in his crisp, dark suit and talk nonstop at whoever would listen. Those who needed favors from the foul-mouthed seventy-year-old would give him their full attention. They’d laugh on cue.
Attorney Paul Siminovsky—young enough to be Garson’s son—was a sorry excuse for a lawyer, but a professional ass-kisser. When he wasn’t wining and dining Garson at the Brooklyn Marriott hotel’s bar/restaurant—feeding an estimated $10,000 worth of food and drink to the judge’s belly over the years—Siminovsky was hanging out with the jurist in chambers, right off the courtroom Garson controlled at 210 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. The two men— Garson, the product of a well-connected Democratic family, and Siminovsky, who hoped to be adopted—shared the same sense of humor. For a while, they acted like a couple of frat boys.
The senior Garson sat behind his big desk one day in March 2003, making lewd and demeaning remarks about women, some of whom he was railroading in his courtroom. The sophomoric Siminovsky, then forty-six, popped candy into his mouth, indulging himself from the bowl on the judge’s desk.
“Rose Ann C. Branda. What’s the
C
. for?” Garson mused.
“I don’t want to say what comes to mind,” Siminovsky retorted.
“Cuchita,” the judge said.
“Cuchita?” Siminovsky asked.
“
Cuchita banana
…” the judge sang, as he waved his hands in the air from his chair.
Siminovsky laughed on cue.
Siminovsky was at home inside the judge’s private parlor, plopping himself into a black leather chair, crossing his legs, throwing back his big curly head, and laughing all the way to the bank.
Siminovsky garnered more jobs from Garson than any other lawyer. When kids needed to be represented in contentious custody battles, which paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, he was Garson’s first pick.
The powerful matrimonial judge—who decided the financial and familial fates of desperate men and women in highly disputed divorce cases—had a reputation of favoring those with brawn over those with breasts.
Anyone familiar with Garson’s courtroom knew Siminovsky was on a winning streak there. No wonder. Judge and jester hammered out cases behind closed doors—without opposing counsel, blatantly violating rules of fairness.
Siminovsky once told Garson to give a house to his client, Avraham Levi, who was getting divorced. And the judge guaranteed him a win.
“The house. Oh, you gotta order custody. His father owns half of it and he owns a quarter of it,” Siminovsky urged the judge at one point.
“Oh, you mean
your
guy,” Garson said.
“Yeah,” Siminovsky said.
“I’ll order, I’ll award, I’ll award him exclusive use on [the house],” Garson assured Siminovsky. “She’s fucked …”
Frieda Hanimov, a mother of three, feared she too would get screwed by Garson. Hanimov, a nurse who had reared three well-mannered children with her diamonddealer husband, noted that Garson was so abrasive to her in the courtroom one might think she was a crack-addled streetwalker.
“I’m a mother, three kids, married to a multimillionaire, and I lose everything. How could a mother lose?” she said. “I’m not a drug addict. I’m not a prostitute. How could you not be suspicious? I knew this judge was not normal.”
The feisty Israeli émigré was convinced her ex-husband had fixed the outcome of their custody case. And she was determined to keep her kids at any cost.
Hanimov, a sociable woman who made friends easily, had already been warned by Levi’s wife, Sigal Levi—who was fighting for her own children before Garson—that rumor had it wealthy men were able to fix their cases before the judgmental jurist. All they had to do was pay off the judge through a middleman, Nissim Elmann—a close associate of Siminovsky, who not so coincidentally had been appointed guardian for at least one of Hanimov’s children.
Elmann, a disheveled businessman who wore a yarmulke and an unbuttoned shirt under his tie, sold wholesale electronics just a few short miles from the courthouse. He worked out of a graffiti-emblazoned warehouse, which served as a front for a second lucrative business: brokering divorces and custody battles in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
A desperate but daring Hanimov—with more verve than the Energizer bunny—walked into the warehouse to see Elmann. At risk were her three priceless jewels: fourteen-yearold Yaniv, ten-year-old Sharon, and five-year-old Natti. She had given up everything in her divorce for them.
“They are my soul,” said Hanimov, who feared she would lose all three to her husband. He had already accused her of beating their eldest son with a belt—an accusation she tearfully denied, and of which she was ultimately cleared.
Elmann was a smooth-talking salesman, and used his shtick to convince men and women that they needed his services to get the upper hand on their soon-to-be exes in Garson’s courtroom.
“He said, ‘This guy is in my pocket,’ and I was like … I was in shock,” Hanimov said.
When Hanimov left Elmann’s electronics business, DVD Trading on Brooklyn Avenue, the not-so-dumb blonde—who had spoken to the shady businessman in Hebrew—knew that the rumors were true: Elmann was selling far more than DVDs and electronic equipment from his warehouse; he was peddling justice in Garson’s courtroom.
After that first visit, a frantic Hanimov called the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Within days, intrigued investigators had the nurse—very pregnant with her fourth child, the first by her second husband—going undercover, wired for sound.
“I was putting one [electronic bug] in my bag, the other one in my pocket, and the other one in my breast, in my bra,” she said.
This amateur sleuth—whom one movie studio has dubbed the Erin Brockovich of Brooklyn—has now been credited with cracking the biggest corruption case to ever rock the Brooklyn courts. The pregnant mother of three wore wires and captured conversations behind closed doors that would shock the public conscience.
Her heart raced as she made her way back into the salesman’s office, the metal gate of the desolate warehouse closing her off to the outside world, including the investigators sitting outside in an unmarked car.
“If he knew I had that device on me, he would shoot me on the spot. I was nine months pregnant,” Hanimov said.
She captured Elmann’s claims on audiotape in October 2002.
“Your husband paid money, a lot of money. And he has the upper hand,” Elmann told her.
“What is the upper hand?” Hanimov asked.
“Like whatever he says, he’ll get, okay? He also doesn’t care about wasting money because he knows that you don’t have money,” Elmann said.
Hanimov knew it was true. Cold hard cash—not motherly love—would win her three kids. She left Elmann’s warehouse crying.
About two weeks later, she met with Elmann and told him she would come up with her own money to win the bidding war for her children.
But, she asked, could he speak to those in control in the meantime?
“There’s no way. It doesn’t work like that,” Elmann told her in no uncertain terms. “Bring them something so that they will start to work. You’ll see something substantive, and you’ll bring the rest.” He added that otherwise, “Garson will destroy you … That’s business.”
They agreed on a $5,000 to $10,000 price tag.
Ever the salesman, Elmann then offered Hanimov a TV on the cheap. “A television like this, that I give you now for one hundred and fifty, costs three hundred in a store,” he said.
But Hanimov remained focused on the far greater commodity. Could Elmann really deliver?
He showed her Garson’s telephone number in his cell phone, and files of others he claimed to have helped. And the businessman reassured her in broken English, “He [Garson] will do everything for me. The problem is here, how much you can to sacrifice.”
Two weeks later, the investigation intensified, and a frightened Hanimov returned to the warehouse.
“If I scream, ‘Help,’ please help,” she told investigators who were listening to her over the wire from outside.
“Okay,” Detective Investigator George Terra reassured her.
Waddling with the weight of the baby she was carrying, she knew that once that metal gate closed behind her, she could be a goner.
“Even if they [the investigators] wanted to get to me, they couldn’t,” Hanimov said. “It’s [a] huge warehouse where they gotta find me.”
She made her way to Elmann’s office—with a $500 down payment.
Elmann told her that Siminovsky was in the warehouse. The lawyer’s Volvo was in open view outside. But the boorish barrister, who wouldn’t give her the time of day in court, was nowhere to be found.
“Why doesn’t he want to see me?” Hanimov asked Elmann.
“It’s dangerous, you know. It’s really dangerous,” he replied.
A week later, Hanimov arrived with more cash. And the electronics salesman gave her a lesson in law.
“What is ‘chamber’?” she asked.
“Chamber [is] where they talk, they arrange things before they come to court,” Elmann said. “And afterwards, they put on a show for you.”
Hanimov gave Elmann $3,000 in marked $100 bills, provided by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, to get Garson to perform for her.
Although pleased with her progress, Hanimov left the warehouse angry. As the metal gate lifted to let her out, she uttered a single word caught on her body wire: “Bastard!”
She gave Elmann $9,000 in total during the course of the five-month investigation, and noted that Garson and Siminovsky immediately began treating her with civility.