The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (2 page)

– Mark Bowden

from New York magazine

The e-mail arrived unbidden four years ago, bearing the stamp of a sender whose name he didn't recognize. All the message said was, "Are you the Lawrence Lessig who went to the Boychoir School?"

It had been a long time since anyone had identified the Stanford Law School professor that way. But it was true: From 1972 to 1976, Lessig had spent his sixth-through-ninth-grade years at the American Boychoir School in Princeton.

So Lessig wrote back, "Yeah, I'm the guy who went to the Boychoir School. What's up?"And with that, he opened up a closed doorway to his past-and found himself swept right through it.

Now, on the last Monday of November 2004, Lessig has just arrived at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, New Jersey. He is here to make an argument before the Supreme Court of New Jersey. His client, the plaintiff, is his e-mail correspondent. The defendant is their alma mater.

Since its founding in 1937, the nonsectarian Boychoir School has gained worldwide renown for producing a choir rivaled only by the more famous one in Vienna; its kids have sung for presidents, popes, and behind Beyonce at this year's Academy Awards. But now Lessig's client, John Hardwicke, is claiming that in the seventies, the school was a ghoulish sanctuary for the sexual abuse of children. In his two years there, Hardwicke says he was repeatedly molested and raped-induced, as the brief on his behalf to the state supreme court puts it, to "perform virtually every sexual act that could conceivably have been accomplished between two males"-by the music director, the headmaster, the proctor, and the cook.

This is not the sort of case for which Larry Lessig is famous. At forty-three, Lessig has built a reputation as the king of Internet law and as the most important next-wave thinker on intellectual prop-erty.The author of three influential books on the intersection of law, politics, and digital technology, he's the founder of Creative Commons, an ambitious attempt to forge an alternative to the current copyright regime. According to his mentor, the federal appellate judge Richard Posner, Lessig is "the most distinguished law professor of his generation." He's also a celebrity. On a West Wing episode this winter, he was featured as a character. "The Elvis of cyberlaw" is how Wired has described him.

I have known Lessig well, professionally and socially, for nearly five years. I've never seen him look as nervous as he does this morning. Dressed in a dark suit, his hair slicked back, tiny wire-rims perched on his nose, he moves slowly, ponderously, as if the weight of the stakes in the case is resting literally on his shoulders. The school (known until 1980 as the Columbus Boychoir School) has argued that, under New Jersey's Charitable Immunity Act, a statute designed to shield nonprofits from negligence lawsuits, it can't be held financially liable no matter how heinous Hardwicke's abuse. If the supreme court agrees, Hardwicke's case will be dismissed before even being heard by a jury. And scores of sex-abuse suits against New Jersey Catholic churches and schools will be rendered void as well. The church, not surprisingly, has weighed in on the side of the school.

During his work on the case, Lessig has been asked more than once by the press if he had experiences at the school similar to Hardwicke's. And Lessig has replied, "My experiences aren't what's at issue here.What's at issue is what happened to John Hardwicke."

The answer is appropriate, politic-but it's not entirely true. For Lessig has told me that he too was abused at the Boychoir School, and by the same music director that Hardwicke claims was one of his abusers. Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the supreme-court justices.The fact of his abuse isn't even known to Larry Lessig's parents.

In taking this case, however, Lessig has cast aside his caution about a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client's cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn't the only plaintiff here. Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was.

The Boychoir School sits on seventeen acres not far from the Princeton campus, surrounded by stands of evergreens and a scattering of suburban houses.You approach the grounds up a narrow drive, past a private property sign, until you come to a big grass oval in front of a handsome brick Georgian mansion. Three stories high, with fifty-odd rooms, the mansion is known as Albemarle and was once the home of Gerard Lambert, the founder of the chemical company that morphed into Warner-Lambert.

In the late sixties, there were several dozen fifth-to-ninth-grade boys living in Albemarle. Every morning, a bell would ring to signal the start to their day, in which classes were interspersed with three one-hour rehearsals, along with private voice tutoring and piano lessons. "Music was in the walls of the school; it was everywhere," a former student recalls. Decked out in uniforms of navyblue pants and button-down shirts or turtlenecks, the boys sang Bach, Handel, Mahler, Copland, Bernstein, and American spirituals. All through the school year, they toured the United States, driving around in a big bus kitted out with desks and a lunch counter. In the summer, the best of the choristers were taken on tours of Europe; on one occasion, they performed for Pope Paul VI-who placed his hands on the head of a soloist, Bobby Byrens, and declared, "He has the voice of an angel."

In 1968 the choir director, Donald Bryant, was fired over "a love affair with a little boy," one of the school's former board members later told the New York Times. (A number of such accusations would ultimately be leveled against him.) But Bryant's departure failed to set things right. Instead, the Boychoir School hired his replacement, along with a new headmaster, on the recommendation of John Shallenberger, the wealthy scion of a Pennsylvania coalmining family and a patron of boys' choirs. Shallenberger also happened to be a chronic pedophile: Convicted over four decades on multiple charges related to child molestation, he eventually fled the country to avoid prosecution in his home state. (He died this February, at eighty-seven, in Mexico, where he was overseeing an orphanage.)

The following year, John Hardwicke arrived at the school as a twelve-year-old seventh-grader. The son of a prominent Maryland lawyer, Hardwicke had no special love for choral singing; he enrolled in the school because his father encouraged him to do so. "What turned my dad on was that beautiful mansion, the idea of me associating with good families and touring around the world," Hardwicke says. "A stupid decision, in retrospect, but he had my best interests at heart."

One night in his first year, Hardwicke was visited in his room by a man he recognizes from pictures today as having been John Shallenberger, who was following the Vienna Boys' Choir on a tour of America at the time. It was bedtime, Hardwicke recalls, and although Shallenberger did nothing untoward, he offered a piece of advice: "He told me that I really oughtta not sleep with underwear on."

In the fall of 1970, the music director Shallenberger recommended, a Canadian named Donald Hanson, took up residence at Albemarle. In his late twenties, terrific-looking, with a thick shock of dark hair, he was just about the coolest adult the boys had ever encountered. He was a brilliant pianist, he drove a Jaguar, and the women who worked at the school all seemed to have a crush on him. "He was very charismatic, like a teen idol, a rock star," says Hardwicke. "He was an incredibly charming master manipulator."

About a week after Hanson's arrival, the music director asked Hardwicke to lend him a hand washing his Jaguar. As Hardwicke remembers it, Hanson touched him suggestively on the shoulder- and from there the contact escalated into a horror show.

Over the next several months, Hardwicke says, he and Hanson had sex "two, three, maybe even four or five times a day." Sometimes Hanson would masturbate on Hardwicke's body. Sometimes he would urinate on the boy in the shower. Hardwicke says that Hanson read to him from pornographic books and showed him child pornography. Also that Hanson once had sex with him inside his parents' house.

Nor was Hanson the only perpetrator, Hardwicke says. He claims he was fondled once by the headmaster and twice by a proctor. He claims to have been masturbated on by one of Hanson's friends. And he claims that, during a spell the next summer when he was visiting Hanson at Albemarle, the school's cook came upstairs and raped him in his sleep.

The morning Hardwicke awoke with his underwear off and the cook still in his room, Hanson drove him back to his family's home in Maryland. Because Hardwicke's voice had started to change, he wouldn't be returning to the Boychoir School that fall. He said good-bye to Hanson, walked into the house, and thought, Nothing will ever be the same.

T hat same summer, Larry Lessig first came to Albemarle. He had just turned ten, a sweet-voiced kid who sung at his church at home in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He'd come to attend a summer camp that the school conducted for choirboys.And after auditioning, he was invited to stay and enroll as a fifth-grader.

Lessig's father, who ran a steel-fabricating firm, was adamantly opposed."There's no way I'm going to send you away to school!" he thundered on hearing the suggestion. But Lessig was seduced by what the school promised, and the next summer, he asked again. His father was torn, but finally relented for the sake of his son's future. "It was a kind of Billy Elliot moment," Lessig says. "You could see him making this sacrifice-just hating the idea of losing me."

Lessig's first hint of Hanson's proclivities came one day when another boy scaled a wall outside the mansion. Climbing down, the boy told Lessig he'd seen Hanson in bed with a student. Lessig's response was total disbelief. "I remember thinking I could no longer trust this kid," he says. "It was obviously so ridiculous."

In the fall of his eighth-grade year, Lessig learned otherwise. On a Friday night, after Hanson had taken the boys shopping at the mall in Princeton, they all came back, as they often did, and gathered in his quarters to watch TV. As Lessig sat beside Hanson on the couch, the music director covered their laps with a blanket and proceeded to fondle him. Forever after, Lessig would remember the movie that was playing on TV: Run Silent, Run Deep.

The following June, on Lessig's fourteenth birthday, after the choir had returned from touring in California, Lessig was preparing to head home for the summer when Hanson pulled him into his room-"to give me a 'birthday present,' " Lessig says. "I remember feeling totally overwhelmed by him. It wasn't forcing in the sense of violence… It's not like I was afraid. But there was this recognition of, wow, there's nothing I can do. Here I am. Bam. It's over."

And yet, of course, it wasn't.

Lessig had been a bright light at the school since his first year there.With a perfect-pitch soprano voice, he'd been a soloist next in line behind Bobby Byrens ("My idol," Lessig says). And with a sharp and probing mind already in evidence, he soon emerged as an academic star and student leader, a striver, intensely driven. Now, in his ninth-grade year, Lessig was named head boy, which made him "in charge of taking care of the kids," he says."There was no proctor when I was head boy; I was discipline. And there were kids who were real shits-it was a Lord of the Flies-like experience."

Being head boy also signified something else: He was Hanson's favorite. And accordingly he was assigned a room next door to the music director's, at the far end of a hallway on the third floor. By midway through the year, the two of them were essentially living together."We put up a door in front of our rooms, blocking off the hallway, blocking out the rest of the world.We created a suite. And there was a classroom right next to it. So every day the teacher comes up, watches me come out of that door-which is also Hanson's door-and walk into class. There's no way anybody doesn't know what the hell is going on. But nobody says anything."

Lessig may have been head boy, but he wasn't Hanson's only prey. All along, Lessig says, he knew that Hanson was sleeping with "at least ten" other boys. "The weird thing about the sexuality was that there was no jealousy attached to it at all," he explains. "It was totally recreational. It was just like playing squash. He's playing squash with me, he's playing squash with him. Who cares? What does it matter?"

Among the boys, Hanson's promiscuity was well known, Lessig says. He would call students out of class to satisfy his cravings.The private voice and piano lessons he administered were especially notorious:"It was five or ten minutes of music, then it would turn into other things," Hardwicke recalls. And while none of this was ever spoken of explicitly among the boys, there was ribbing, teasing, nodding, winking-constant signals of in-the-knowness.As for the teachers, Lessig says, "Hanson was the boss.What was going to be said?"

Sometimes on trips home, Lessig felt faint stirrings of unease. But it never occurred to him to tell his parents. His relationship to Hanson, unlike Hardwicke's, was tender, sustaining; his parents would never understand. "Like all pedophiles, Hanson was really good at connecting with kids," Lessig says. "You just felt you were together; there was no ambiguity about it. He was a friend. A deep, close friend.We talked about everything. He told me about music. He told me about the world…For a kid cut off from everyone else in this weird universe, to have the most important person in the world give you love and approval is the greatest thing you can imagine. What else is there?"

On some level, Lessig realized that the relationship was "fucked up and shouldn't happen," he says. But he also had a precocious fourteen-year-old's exaggerated sense of his own maturity. "I felt that I could handle it," he says. "That everything was under control."

There were moments, however, when reality came crashing through. In Lessig's final year, he found himself gripped by "an insane depression," he says, over "the insanity of what was happening." In his closet he'd found a hatch in the ceiling that led to a crawl space above. He climbed up there and crouched alone for hours in the dark.