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Ray Robinson: Murderer%u2019s Row Eileen Lottman on paperback publishing Charles Monaghan: A1 Murray%u2019s Train Whistle GuitarL i t e r a r y R e v i e wWho judges theCRUEL AND UNUSUAL JUSTICEby Jack Newfield, Holt, Rinehartand Winston. 205 pp. $7.95Reviewed by Mary Perot NicholsLet me state my bias at the outset. For any reader who does not know, Jack Newfield and I have enjoyed (endured?) a journalistic feud for some years. Sometimes our feuding has been carried on in the pages of The Village Voice and once it even broke into The New York Times. We feud because our definitions of the function of a journalist diverge sharply. I believe that the primary function of a journalist is to tell the truth. Jack Newfield, (I am only i stating my opinion and he may not agree) believes that the function of a journalist is to write and speak propaganda for the person or cause he happens to be enamored of at the moment.Newfield wrote a letter to The VillageVoice for the September 28, 1972 issue in which he confesses the following:I was there when Bella (Abzug) said at the VID in 1970 she was against the jets for Israel. And then I watched her deny she ever said it.And finally I lied, and denied she ever said it, so that she might defeat Barry Farber. I am now ashamed of all that.That letter is a classic in journalistic history. Newfield may claim that he only said this to people, that he didn't write it, but that is a cop-out. He is Jack Newfield, journalist, and people expect a journalist not to lie. Lying, and the contracts he performs for politicians in his writing are something I deplore. Since we work on the same newspaper, there are times when I feel I need to separate myself from him.FInough said about my bias. If the reader wants to turn off now, he can.In spite of what I have said about Newfield, I think he was performed an important public service in this collection of articles from the Village Voice and NewYork. A bomb needed to be dropped on the New York City judiciary and the New York Bar%u2014they are far more irresponsible than Jack Newfield at his most excessive. Newfield%u2019s muckraking of a number of corrupt, lazy, and incompetent judges%u2014 the inequities of the city marshall system; the sheer horror of our state and local prison systems; and, perhaps worst of all, the near total indifference of the presiding justices to the mess in the court system, was desperately needed.New York editor Clay Felker%u2019s idea of getting Newfield to take some of his Village Voice material and put it into popular reading form, \Judges,%u201d was brilliant. It was really %u201cThe Ten Worst\Association out and forced them to try to answer Newfield's charges. The BarState Supreme Court justices, as I write this, to make damn fools of themselves attacking the Bar Association as \Interestingly enough, one of theMary Perot Nichols is news editor of The Village Voice and a sometime contributorto Book World, Viva and the New York Times Book Review.seven Justices on the Committee who attacked the Bar Association Report was Arnold G. Fraiman, who comes in for very heavy criticism in Newfield%u2019s book. To wit: %u201cArnold Fraiman was then the city%u2019s Investigation Commissioner, the official directly responsible for looking into any allegation of misconduct. The Knapp Report on police corruption said of him, %u2018Fraiman failed to take the action that was clearly called for in a situation which seemed to involve the most serious kinds of corruption ever to come to the attention of his office, and which seemed to be precisely the sort of case his office was setup to handle.......Arnold Fraiman,%u201d wroteNewfield, %u201cis now a judge.%u201dNewfield was writing, of course, of the charges of police corruption brought to Fraiman by policemen David Durk and Frank Serpico, which later were exposed in The New York Times by David Burnham. The Times expose forced Mayor Lindsay to appoint the Knapp Commission to investigate.)Having said that Newfield has performed a service, I only wish he%u2019d done a better job of it. Reading this collection of articles in its entirety, I discover less of what Newfield calls his %u201cpassion for justice%u201d and more of his passion foe juvenile rhetoric and also a double standard, something he claims he deplores in the halls of justice.Newfield has no mercy for those he does not like, for example, Judge Fraiman. Fraiman was, after all, a creature of Mayor Lindsay as Investigations commissioner and there is no reason to think that he ignored charges of corruption all on his own. He may have sensed an at mosphere in the Lindsay Administration not conducive to his provoking a fight with the Police Department, or he may have just wanted to be a nice boy until he fulfilled an ambition to become a judge. Newfield gives no information that Fraiman is a bad judge.On the other hand, there is Supreme Court Justice Irwin %u201cBobby%u201d Brownstein, out of Meade Esposito's corrupt machine. (Esposito and his machine are held responsible by Newfield for the especially lousy Brooklyn court system.) Brownstein is a prince among men. (See the chapter called %u201cA Decent Judge in a Rotten System.\hardworking, a man who really goes out of his way to help a kid in trouble with the courts. He sounds terrific. Even Meade Esposito (one of the arch-villains of Newfield's book) describes him as %u201ca great fuckin' judge.%u201d However, Newfield never explains why Esposito ran Brownstein last year for Chief Judge. Was it because he was honest or because it would create a three-way race and effectively cut the throat of a judge Meade does not break fast with regularly, as he does with Brownstein: Federal Judge JackWeinstein, the reform Democratic choice?Newfield never explores whether Esposito has given %u201cBobby%u201d Brownstein a special dispensation not to be corrupt%u2014to be different from most other politicians in his stable. And after writing about how rotten the Brooklyn machine is, Newfield can still write about Brownstein: \(political) clubhouse background has provided Brownstein with valuable street%u2014smarts unavailable at Harvard Law School.\%u201cThe problem is that in Brooklyn, about 15,000 people are in the club. And about two million citizens are outside it.\fto wnere does orownsiein get ms \%u201cUncle\competition makes Harvard Law School look good.Worse than that, Brownstein took Newfield In the cleaners and Newfield wasn t even mad at him, even though Newfield declares in the book that politics is not a game.\conned Newfield into writing theIifollowing during the Chief Judge race: %u201cEither I%u2019m going to get elected chief justice, or else I%u2019ll just quit and go back to being a lawyer. I can%u2019t take this system any more unless I can change it.%u201d Newfield%u2019s postcript for the book, written long after election day, says %u201cAfter a period of depression, Brownstein has decided to remain on the bench%u2014a good thing for the citizens of Brooklyn.%u201d If politics is nota game, why didn't Newfield hold %u201cBobby%u201d to his promise to quit that rotten system? Why didn't he inspire him to try to change it by running against Meade Esposito for County Leader?Newfield%u2019s favorites are always having periods of depression, while his enemies, like Fraiman, seem to have no feelings at all. Mayoral Aide Barry Gottehrer, for example, \brutality (of the guards in the Long Island City Men%u2019s House of Detention after a riot) that he had to leave town on a vacation to get his emotions back in or der.\from the Daily News story of the sickening scene of prisoners being beaten with axe handles and Mayor Lindsay%u2019s cold response (asked about the beatings, he said, \injuries on both sides\you have to wonder why Gottehrer came back to spend several more years in such an administration.But to get back to Judge Brownstein, Newfield writes in glowing terms of reforms of the court system proposed by the Temporary Commission on the State Court System appointed by the 1970 State Legislature. In what Newfield calls %u201ca surprisingly tough section on disciplining judges%u201d the group defines the kinds of judicial misconduct judges should be removed for. Among these is %u201cassociations with persons (off the bench) that give rise to suspicions about partiality %u2014for example, litigants, politicians (italics mine), or reputed underworld figures.\Well, what is Brownstein doing hob nobbing with Meade Esposito?Former New York Post reporter Allan Wolper told me that one night during the Chief Judge race he was dining at the Tiro a Segno Rifle Club with Esposito, his female counterpart as district leader, Brownstein, and Edwin Weisl, Jr. During the dinner, according to Wolper, Esposito ordered %u201cBobby%u201d around. For example, Esposito ordered him to the phone to talk to Frank Rossetti, Esposito's counterpart as county leader in Manhattan. Then as Brownstein and Wolper were both going to the Upper West Side together, Wolper joined him in visiting a West Side reform leader. The meeting, according to what the West Side leader told Wolper, was set up by guess who? Jack Newfield! The purpose of the meeting was to help Brownstein get to know some of the West Side reform leaders. Clearly, someone Newfield has such a vested political inl e i e s l in is n u t kui1iK lu n a v e Ins puU -nLialjudicial misconduct (hanging out with Esposito) examined too carefully.Then there is the soft way Newfield treats Mayor Lindsay, though his prison system was in many respects as bad or worse than Rockefeller%u2019s, as compared to how he treats Rocky. Rocky plots his moves against the poor \other rich Republicans over wine andt ttiS i iNUf.ii uN i u%u00bbi i4THE LITERARY REVIEW IS SYNDICATED BY THE WEST SIDE LITERARY REVIEWy 16, 1974, PHOENIX, Page 11