35 – Boston
“I understand that Mr. Anderson is not available and that he was working all night,” Ben Shapiro struggled to maintain his calm on the telephone. “I have a feeling that what kept him up all night is just what I want to speak with him about. Is there anybody else who can help me?”
Shapiro had not expected to have that much difficulty locating his new client, Aaron Hocksberg. He got nowhere with state authorities, calling the various district attorneys offices for counties around Boston. All he’d learned was that whatever happened the prior night in the suburbs north of Boston, it was entirely federal; no state prosecutors were involved.
At 9:30 in the morning, nobody who was anybody in the United States Attorneys office in Boston was in the office. They were, he was told, universally “unavailable,” probably meaning the entire crew was awake through the night and were all home sleeping.
“I don’t think any of the assistants are in yet,” Anderson’s secretary sounded a bit frazzled herself. It was setting up to be an unusual day for her, too. “Oh, wait just a second.”
The voice on the phone became muffled. Shapiro could barely make out what was said.
“... Ben Shapiro ... to anybody ... you talk ... him ... busy?”
The secretary came back on the line.
“Assistant United States Attorney Judith Katz just came in. She said she can speak with you. I’ll put her right on.”
Shapiro had never met Judy Katz, although he’d read about her in the newspapers. Shapiro intentionally avoided representing the kind of persons Katz was building a career prosecuting. Nonetheless, Shapiro expected Katz had heard about him, too.
“Mr. Shapiro, this is Judy Katz. How can I help you?”
“Ben, call me Ben, please, Judy,” Shapiro said, trying to balance between sounding firm, sounding friendly, and sounding like a “senior” member of the bar due some deference by a young AUSA, Assistant United States Attorney. “Judy, I have a client who it seems was taken into custody last night by a couple of federal agents for some totally unknown reason and I’m trying to locate him and return him to his moderately hysterical wife.
“Do you suppose you could punch his name into whatever computer system you folks have for locating missing arrestees? I’d greatly appreciate it.”
“You’ve reached the wrong person, Mr. Shap ... Ben, I mean. I’m just about the only one around the office right now, and I’m also probably just about the only one in the office who has absolutely no idea about what seems to have happened last night,” the exasperation in Katz’s voice was obvious to Shapiro. “Uhm, maybe you could tell me what you know about it. I went to bed early last night, worked at home for a few hours this morning and just walked in the door here myself and half the support staff and almost all the attorneys are not around. I’m sort of wandering around myself right now.”
Judy Katz had a strong suspicion that whatever was keeping people away from the office had something to do with the Queen’s visit the previous day. Katz overheard two paralegals in the elevator, two young women with bags under their eyes and their hair obviously unwashed, talking about never having worked so hard in their lives, but they’d hushed up quickly after noticing Judy listening to what they were saying.
“Judy, I’ll be blunt with you,” Shapiro said into the telephone. “I’ve been retained by Aaron Hocksberg, do you know him, from Rudnick, Fierstein? No? Well, actually by his wife. It seems he was arrested last night, or at least that he was taken into custody.”
“What makes you think my office has anything to do with it,” Katz asked. “Do you know what he was charged with?”
“Well Judy, I suspect that he was part of that thing last night, that roundup thing that is all over the news,” Shapiro said.
Katz was puzzled.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ben. I haven’t listened to the news today. I’m a lowly public servant, Ben. I drive the kind of car that when the radio stops working, it doesn’t pay to fix it.” Katz laughed, thinking about her dented Honda Civic. “And I don’t understand what you mean by roundup. Who is it that you believe was rounded up by the United States Attorney last night?”
Shapiro was silent on the telephone for nearly a minute, long enough for Katz to wonder whether the phone connection were broken. When Shapiro did speak, it was almost in a whisper.
“Judy, I never thought I’d be saying these words,” Shapiro hesitated again, wondering whether he was reading too much into what little information he’d learned from the news and from his new client’s wife.
“Judy, my understanding is that the Department of Justice took hundreds of people into custody last night from homes all around communities north of Boston. My further understanding, from what his wife told me, is that Attorney Aaron Hocksberg is among those taken into custody. I’ve been trying to locate him all morning. Obviously he’s being held somewhere but everybody who is around this morning knows nothing about it and the people who do know, people I expect work in your office, are, I’m told, universally unavailable.
“I have to tell you, Judy,” here Shapiro took on his lawyer voice, the tone of voice that would not tolerate being refused. “I have to tell you that I am having a great amount of difficulty believing that somebody who is the head of a criminal division in the U.S. Attorneys office is totally unaware of a major criminal operation conducted by that office.”
He waited for a reaction. Hearing none, he continued.
“Look, Ms. Katz, I realize we’ve never had a case against one another before, but as you know, Boston is an extremely small town and what goes round in the legal community comes round some day. I don’t take well to being fed a bowl of bullshit by another attorney. I have a client to represent and I want to know where he is, right now.”
Katz, bewildered as she was by having arrived at a nearly empty office on a working day, was stunned by Shapiro’s barrage. As far as she knew, she’d done nothing to offend this senior attorney. She suspected this was another example of a young female attorney being spoken to by an older male attorney more like his daughter than his peer, treatment all-too-regularly inflicted on her. Shapiro, who she knew was a leading civil rights lawyer in the city, did not seem the kind of chauvinist who would act that way. She decided to put on her own professional demeanor.
“Look yourself, Mister Shapiro,” she said in her most authoritative and slighter deeper-than-normal voice. “I am not feeding you bullshit, or feeding you anything at all. You seem to know a lot more than I do about what might or might not have gone on last night. I don’t know anything about any sort of round up of criminals by my office and I can assure you that as the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force in the office of the United States Attorney, I would have been told about any such major operation.”
She decided to try the silent treatment herself, but, after hardly more than a moment she relented, feeling guilty that her first conversation with a lawyer she respected, from a distance, had gone badly so quickly.
“Ben, really and truly, I don’t know anything about what you’re speaking about. Tell me what you know.”
“OK Judy, I’ll accept what you’re saying although I’ve gotta tell you, I’m surprised,” Shapiro’s tone, too, was conciliatory. He didn’t enjoy hearing himself speaking sternly to a young lawyer, especially a young woman lawyer.
“Judy, I didn’t say there was a roundup of criminals last night.”
“Well, if they weren’t criminals, Ben, who were they? Who else but criminals would be rounded up by the government?”
“I’m shocked that you, you of all people at that office, don’t know about this. And, come to think of it, the fact that you don’t know anything about this is damned frightening to me.”
“Enough, Ben,” Katz interrupted. “Tell me, if we didn’t arrest criminals, who did we arrest?
“Jews, Judy, Jews. Its all over the news. Hundreds, actually thousands of Jews were taken into custody last night and are being held. Not criminals. Jews were arrested.”
Shapiro’s words were beyond comprehension by Katz, as if he spoke in Swahili. Then she remembered her odd lunch the day before.
“Oh my God, Ben,” she said, looking around her nearly empty office. It suddenly dawned on her that the man she was speaking with was himself a Jew and was himself a civil rights lawyer.
“Ben Shapiro,” Katz said. “I think its time we met. Can I come by your office some time soon? No, come to think of it, I’d rather not meet at your office, just in case. Can we casually just happen to both have lunch around 12:30 tomorrow? I have something to talk about with you. OK?”
Shapiro was puzzled, but her voice sounded so serious, so concerned that he did not dare refuse.
“Sure, Judy. Meet me at 12:30 at, let me think, how would the Sultan’s be? Do you know that place?”
For a moment Katz considered answering that the best word to describe his restaurant choice was “ironic,” but she simply said, “Great. See you at the Sultans.”