Never Let Them See You Cry (28 page)

Some people
are
characters; others
have
character.

Lorri Kellogg has character. She is a nurturer, full of laughter, boundless energy and good common sense. A fearless woman, she does not take no for an answer, and would have been a great reporter. We met when militant feminists torched a stack of mattresses at the Playboy Plaza Hotel during a national political convention. We had nothing to do with the arson.

Lorri was divorced with no children. In fact, that is why she was divorced: Unable to bear a child, she was eager to adopt, but her husband wanted biological offspring and, therefore, a divorce.

Lorri moved to Miami and a job as a real estate executive. Hers was the good life: an apartment overlooking the bay, sailing, scuba diving, swimming with dolphins, playing tennis, and channeling her free time and vitality into the POW-MIA movement. A volunteer, Lorri founded a Florida organization to distribute petitions, leaflets and bracelets. Those who wore them pledged not to remove the wristbands until the man whose name was on it was free or accounted for. I wore my bracelet, with the name of Lieutenant Colonel Brendan Foley, for more than ten years.

Lorri's life seemed full, yet something was missing. We briefly lost touch after the convention, and the next time I saw her she had a new goal: to become a mother.

Like many other Americans, she had seen Art Linkletter on a TV show about Korean orphans in need of food and clothing, and like many other Americans, she agreed to sponsor a child with a monthly pledge. Weeks later a small snapshot arrived from the orphanage, a tiny face with sad eyes. Her name was Myung Sook.

Lorri devoured everything in the library on Korea and its children. Myung Sook, an infant abandoned in a cardboard box at a post office, faced bleakness at best. Lorri decided to adopt the child she sponsored. It seemed so simple. But nothing worthwhile ever is. The would-be mother was unmarried and the child was foreign; the bureaucracy was double-barreled and the international red tape an unintelligible maze that led to roadblock after roadblock.

Lorri never doubted she would succeed. She gave up her career to open a daycare center, so Myung, to be renamed Jaime, would have playmates when she arrived. She enlisted the aid of politicians, senators, representatives, reporters and the bureaucrats themselves.

Eventually she did the impossible: Jaime Myung was the first foreign child adopted by a single parent in this country under a new law passed at Lorri's behest. It took three years.

Jaime arrived in New York on an April night, rumpled and exhausted after a twenty-seven-hour flight and a twelve-hour time change. She spoke no English and wore shoes that did not fit and winter leggings. The long-awaited moment came when the Traveler's Aid guardian placed the child's small hand in Lorri's. The terrified four-year-old took one look at her new mother and exploded in a three-hour tantrum of sobs, kicks and hysterical screams.

For this, I thought, Lorri gave up the good life.

She rocked the child in her arms, repeating “uhm-ma, uhm-ma,” the Korean word for mother. After three hours, the child stopped crying, hugged Lorri and smiled.

Jaime flushed her first toilet in New York and saw her first TV. The movie was
Brigadoon
, and Jaime tried to feed Gene Kelly her banana. She and Lorri sat on the floor and ate bowls of rice.

Jaime finally dozed off at three
A.M
., but the new mother stared at her all night. “I wanted to be awake if she needed me.”

By the time they arrived in Miami, twelve hours later, they were getting along famously. Jaime wore a dress and a matching bonnet in red, white and blue, symbolic of her new home.

“How unfair that she couldn't be here when she was seventeen months old,” Lorri said.

Jaime was a playful and lovable girl. She still is.

That spring day in 1976, Lorri announced the order of business: “Disney World, sailing, lots of love and just a good happy, normal, busy home life.” The future, she said, might bring Jaime a sister.

The future arrived on Mother's Day, a year later: Hee Jin Jung, age twenty-two months, known forever more as Tarabeth JJ Kellogg. Her homecoming climaxed a roller-coaster week of visa snafus and missed airline flights. “Giving birth would be easier,” Lorri swore. “Emotional labor pains are much more difficult.”

Her new daughter arrived snuggled in the arms of an Eastern flight attendant who had volunteered to escort the baby. “No better way to spend Mother's Day,” the flight attendant said.

Everybody cried except Tarabeth. The pint-sized traveler clung dry-eyed to her new mom and curiously studied her new sister.

“I'm going to help take care of my sister,” Jaime, now five, announced in perfect English.

Tarabeth was petite and pretty. She still is.

A year later Tarabeth became the littlest American naturalized as citizenship was administered en masse to 927 people. For weeks she had announced, “I'm gonna be an American.” Her age exempted her from taking the oath, but she raised her right hand and took it anyway.

“I do,” she sang out loudly, flashing a victory sign to her mom.

The ceremony was unique for more than one reason: Jaime had not been eligible for citizenship until two years after her adoption. Lorri's reaction: “Ridiculous.” Tarabeth, patriotic in a navy-blue sailor frock with an American eagle on the sleeve, did not have to wait like her sister.

Lorri had done it again. This time, she had changed the law—with a little help from Senator Edward Kennedy and Florida Representative William Lehman.

The federal judge conducting the swearing-in ceremony solemnly explained that Tarabeth now enjoyed all but one of the rights and privileges of any native-born American: She could never be president.

Uh-oh, I thought, as Lorri bristled.

By then, Lorri realized that more children and other would-be parents needed help. She founded Universal Aid for Children, Inc., a private, nonprofit adoption agency specializing in placing foreign-born youngsters with American families and providing relief and medical assistance to needy children all over the world.

Daughter number three spoke her first English words only hours after she arrived. “Coca-Cola,” said Jillian Catharine Kellogg, the former Hee Jung Lee, age five.

“I feel like she's always been here,” Lorri said. Jillian and her sisters played, romped and giggled through their first day together. Like the others, Jillian had never seen a telephone or a television, a modem bathroom, an ice cube or ice cream.

She caught on fast.

Lorri happily described them as “very typical ‘give me, get me, buy me, take me' American kids.”

A
Herald
photographer shot Lorri's children at play for the Sunday magazine section. The assignment changed his life—forever.

Months later we were all waiting at the airport again, to meet his new daughter, Hae Jung Kang, age two.

Lorri has brought many children to this country for medical treatment. One little girl named Sara, age eight, from El Salvador, was horribly burned in a bombing that obliterated her village in 1983. Sara has undergone ten operations for reconstructive surgery since 1985. She faces twelve more. Since Sara has little family left and would live in a refugee camp, her grandmother's wish was that she stay in America. That is how Sara became Kellogg daughter number four.

Now thirteen, Sara has visited her grandmother several times. Lorri makes frequent trips to El Salvador, to deliver wheelchairs and crutches. For a decade, throughout the war, she has worked with the ravaged nation's first ladies and their volunteer committees. Lorri visits refugee camps and, through her agency, gathers urgent supplies for orphanages. One of her daughters usually accompanies her. Jaime and Tarabeth, at ages eight and five, worked with her in the mountains of Honduras. Even the littlest child can fold diapers.

I worry, but Lorri must have a guardian angel. She missed a devastating earthquake by a day and a half, a deadly raid on the capital of El Salvador by hours.

She recently returned home from Romania and is placing orphans from that country too.

Tarabeth, my goddaughter, seems to harbor no political aspirations—as yet. At sixteen, she is far more interested in the New Kids on the Block and riding her bike. She is a part-time bag girl at Publix Supermarket and as American as apple pie. So is Jaime, now eighteen, and sisters Julian, sixteen, and Sara.

When Jaime called recently with the news that Tarabeth had been hit by a truck while riding her bike, I thought I would have a heart attack. Her collarbone was broken, but she mended quickly. Kids are resilient, but it took me days to recover. This, I thought, must be Lorri's life, every day. How does she do it?

Asking her that question is like asking me how I can do my job year after year. The answer, I am sure, is the same.

How can you
not
do it?

There are 9,276 lawyers in Miami. It only seems like more.

They are all here: the best, the worst, the flamboyant and scheming, the treacherous, the conniving, the good, the bad and the ugly. All help to make Miami one of the most litigious cities in America, a place with more lawyers per man, woman and child than most cities in the world.

All are out to make a buck.

On my first newspaper job, I met a lawyer representing a notorious jewel thief. He agreed to discuss the case and suggested we meet in the bar at the club where he lived. I had skipped lunch, and it was eight
P.M
. I scarcely touched my drink and declined another, while he kept hailing the bartender. Soon five sweating drinks stood lined up like soldiers on the bar in front of me.

He downed his and invited me to dinner, in his apartment. When I declined and left, he tagged along, suggesting we sit in my car and talk about the case. He slid into the tiny Triumph I drove then. For a moment, we talked. Then suddenly he hurtled through the air toward me—and impaled himself on the gear shift. His screams were pitiful.

That was my first encounter with one of Miami's vast army of lawyers.

During my second year at the
Herald
I was assigned to the criminal-court beat. I worked long hours, hard-pressed to cover the cases before all five criminal-court judges (today there are twenty-four). Most striking to me was the joy young public defenders took in beating the prosecution and winning their cases and how their office seemed to attract the very best young lawyers.

Their charismatic boss, public defender Phillip Hubbart, thirty-four, recruited many of his underpaid and aggressively loyal staff from the criminal-court workshop he taught at the University of Miami.

Hubbart called them a new breed, and they were, back in the early 1970s. They wore their hair longer and their clothes more mod than most lawyers. They were under thirty, believed marijuana should be legal and spent a great deal of time in jail conferring with clients. The days of their lives revolved around violence, victory and disaster.

They were never boring. Impeccable Christian Dior suit hanging elegantly from his lean frame, Stephen Mechanic exuded the style of a matinee idol and the aroma of expensive aftershave. Soft leather boots gleaming, blond hair curling at his collar, he battled for his clients with the zeal of an alley fighter who did not hesitate to slug below the belt. He did not earn enough to support his wife, but luckily his father owned Miami Beach hotels and had set up a trust fund.

Roy Black, the son of a daredevil racecar driver, went to college on an athletic scholarship. Seven hundred took the bar exam with him; he ranked number one. Formerly of the University of Miami championship swim team, he now spent weekends in the smelly, sweltering Dade County Jail and pounding ghetto pavements in search of witnesses. When Dennis Holober was a senior law student, he so successfully impugned the victim's character in a rape case that he won freedom for the defendant and a tooth-rattling punch in the mouth from the victim's enraged father.

Arthur Rothenberg sported a neatly trimmed mustache, rimless glasses and the well-tailored demeanor of an English nobleman. A health-food aficionado who lunched on homemade yogurt, he talked his way through college on a debate scholarship.

“I found myself terribly involved with making money. It was depressing,” Rothenberg told me, explaining why he dropped out of private practice and took a major pay cut to work for Hubbart. “Money isn't worth getting out of bed for every morning. A man's life is his work. I wanted to make mine as meaningful as possible—I struck gold. This is worth my day. It's worth my time. It fulfills me. I have to draw on every ounce of energy and talent I have, every day. There's pressure from all sides: defendants, families, police, the prosecution. You've got somebody's life at stake.

“I realize the weakness and foibles of man—the ignorant and the uneducated. If you gave a man a choice, he wouldn't consciously choose to be a criminal. Individuals are trapped by their surroundings, their heritage of genes. That could be me in jail. I think it's pretty much out of a person's hands what they will be.”

Ray Windsor, boyish and curly-haired, agreed: “At some point in life money is not necessary. I don't need it right now. I can't think of anything more fascinating to do. You rap with some of these guys for fifteen minutes, and it's difficult to believe they committed the crimes you know they have. Once you've pierced their subculture a little, you realize why they are here. They're truly victims—they're as much a victim as the victim of the crime they committed. The state is supposed to be the plaintiff, but our repressive society can very often be the defendant and all those people in jail the victims of our crimes.”

They were serious—dead serious. Where did they learn this stuff?

No wonder State Attorney Richard Gerstein, a World War II hero who lost an eye in combat, usually looked grim.

At that time, his office was more than three times the size of the public defender's. Prosecutors had larger support staffs and were paid twice as much. Yet morale seemed higher in Hubbart's office. Defender Tom Morgan, twenty-five, explained. “Their office is far more bureaucratic than ours.” Married, with a child, he said that he joined Hubbart's staff because “there wasn't anybody smarter to work for.”

The daily pace was hectic, the responsibility harrowing. When Roy Black joined the staff, the backlog was so great that on one of his first days on the job he had thirty trials. He defended a steady stream of clients whom he had never seen before, until ten
P.M
. He went home and swore he would never come back, but he did go back. So did the others, every day—to the chilly, crowded fourth-floor criminal courtrooms where every minute counted. In a system awash in thousands of cases, constant frenzied plea-bargaining took place in corridors, judges' chambers and in whispers during trials in progress. They tried more than half their cases.

There was something more appealing and romantic about defending, rather than prosecuting. “It's the revolution in the criminal law field itself,” Black explained. “The Warren Supreme Court has revolutionized the field, making it a popular arm of the profession instead of the stepchild it used to be.”

Policemen freely offered less positive impressions of the Warren court

His first day on the job, Holober was tossed the defense of a man accused of second-degree murder. He pleaded his client not guilty and began cross-examining witnesses with deliberate lack of speed, awaiting the return of his investigator dispatched in a frenzy to view and photograph the murder scene.

The defendant and his wife had fought. He wrestled a knife away from her and stepped outside to cool off—the knife still in his hand. Her brother lunged at him with a shovel and was stabbed to death, in what Holober creatively described to the jury as a “combination of self-defense and accident”—though the victim was stabbed six times. Holober eloquently talked himself to tears in his emotional closing argument. The jury said not guilty. In one week, Holober took five indigents to jury trials—and won acquittals for all five.

The defenders seemed even more zestfully exuberant when winning cases for defendants who were obviously guilty. If only the prosecution could recruit lawyers with such passion and zeal.

I always knew when a case, somehow bumbled and about to embarrass the state attorney's office, was to be called—and lost. Some persuasive young prosecutor would seek me out, urgently suggesting that we go somewhere quiet to chat over coffee, a decoy sent in an attempt to divert me from the courtroom where the debacle was about to occur.

The ploy never worked. There were always too many people eager to spill the beans: court clerks, bailiffs, corrections officers, angry witnesses, opposing lawyers, irate cops and civilian-court watchers, usually senior citizens who enjoyed watching real-life drama more than TV soap opera.

There was never a dull moment on the beat. It was always chaos in the courts—frequent escape attempts, suicides and hysterics. Defendants collapsed, killed themselves or ran. One prisoner bolted out of a courtroom, pursued by a stampede of police, witnesses, jailers and his screaming family and friends, who had come to root for him at his trial. The escapee charged up a down escalator, then vaulted over the side. He knocked down several secretaries from the public defender's office, who were then trampled by pursuing police. Miami Police Officer Robert Weatherhoit finally dropped him with a flying tackle off the escalator. They landed in a heap at the feet of State Attorney Gerstein, who called the cop's tackle “worthy of the NFL.” The escape attempt was the third that week. A prosecutor had dropkicked another escaping defendant off the escalator, and a third had leaped out a third-floor window.

Crisis was the rule, not the exception. It was always something: the speedy-trial-rule crisis, the probation-department crisis, the jury-selection crisis, the ever-simmering jail crisis and the visiting-judge crisis. Backlogged calendars created a state of emergency and visiting and interim judges were appointed to help reduce the caseload. One of them was the courtly, Tennessee-born Judge George Holt, a controversial former state representative. Years earlier he had been the target of Florida's first impeachment proceedings against a judge and had barely weathered the storm. A senate vote necessary to remove him from office came up two ballots short. Now, age sixty-eight and frisky, he was summoned from his South Carolina retirement to help ease the crisis in Miami's courts—out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Holt was good-humored, plain-talking, and colorful to say the least. Assigned to speed things up in the court system, he did so, to the horror of the prosecution. He tossed out charges against an embezzlement suspect, saying, “I'm not going to hear any three-dollar case.” In a fit of pique, he dismissed a day's entire calendar of armed robbers and drug suspects, throwing out their cases, after clashing with a prosecutor.

A SWAT team could not have pried me from his courtroom.

The judge was about to conduct the jury trial of a notorious defendant facing two counts of robbery when a set of briefs caught his eye. They were not of the legal variety—they were suede and looked hot. An attractive woman wearing short pants and boots was among prospective jurors thronged in the corridor when he arrived to pursue justice and impanel a jury. Judge Holt did a double take.

“What's her number?”—her juror number, he asked the clerk, in front of the entire courtroom. The clerk had no idea.

“Find out,” His Honor ordered.

A dutiful deputy marched out and pretended to be checking subpoenas. He returned and reported in a stage whisper, “She's number nineteen.”

“Call number nineteen,” the judge ordered.

The dark-haired woman, in her fringed boots, stepped to the jury box, unaware of the conspiracy. Public defender Tom Morgan and prosecutor Sky Smith promptly accepted her. Both young lawyers were eager to keep the judge happy.

“I knew she was being called out of order,” Smith would say later, “but she was acceptable. Even if she hadn't been, I would have been hesitant to excuse her in view of the judge's preference.”

During routine questioning, the woman was asked if she would follow Holt's instructions during the trial. “I'll do anything the judge tells me,” she cooed.

The judge beamed. “Hear that?” He nudged a bailiff. “I think she likes me.”

The trial got under way as the victims, a Coconut Grove couple, testified to a night of terror, awakened in the dark by a figure at the foot of their bed. The intruder's face was grotesquely distorted by a stocking mask. He held a flickering candle high in one hand, a sawed-off shotgun in the other. He fired a blast into their mattress. The husband leaped up and grappled with the gunman, who battered them both with the weapon before he dropped it and fled. The intruder also left his jacket behind.

Police said the jacket belonged to the defendant. A shell matching those in the shotgun was found in his closet. Scratches on his leg were consistent with the struggle. The public defender was morose. The prosecution had an airtight case.

The judge enlivened the proceedings with country-boy jokes and wisecracks and ordered miniskirted women to sit where he could see their legs. Leaving the other jurors locked up, he summoned number nineteen from the jury room to request her telephone number. She flirted back as they discussed the bestselling book
The Sensuous Woman
.

“You won't need any book, honey, when you're out with me,” the judge told her from the bench.

The prosecutor finally protested, “Judge, I'm shocked.”

He seemed to be the only one. Peals of laughter rang out from the jury room, where members were playing
Concentration
.

On his way back from lunch. Judge Holt confided to me that he intended to hand the defendant two ninety-nine-year terms.

Sounded right to me.

The jury did not deliberate long at all.

Not guilty.

The stunned prosecutor and I pursued the jurors outside. “I'm sorry,” one apologized, “but we were just having too much fun to send anybody to jail.”

I wrote about the case, then had occasion to write about it again two months later, after the wife of an ice-cream vendor was shot to death, the latest victim in a series of Coconut Grove robbery-murders.

They arrested the killer, the same man acquitted in Judge George Holt's courtroom.

Some things are worse than a clogged calendar.

Take Judge Murray Goodman, insecure and fearful of criticism from the press, who would refuse to call any newsworthy or controversial case if a reporter was present. I took to lurking outside his courtroom, peeping in from time to time. When an interesting case was called, I would slip inside and take a seat. The judge would look up in horror, call a recess and flee the bench.