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Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
admitted the report, affirmed the finding of Social Services, and gaveled the hearing to a close. Perhaps it was not a total win for me, but it might very well have been a win for the child.
My only other appearance was more successful. And it was in Crim- inal Court! It seems that the son of an important handwriting and typewriting expert, Pearl Tytell, whom Gerry Walpin had often used as an expert witness in trials, was a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (where my son Danny now runs the physics program—a fact that is totally irrelevant but proudly stated anyway) and desirous of fol- lowing in his parents’ footsteps. (His father was also an expert in the field; see, for example, the Alger Hiss–Whitaker Chambers case, which effectively launched the career of the then Congressman Richard M. Nixon.) Unfortunately, one night he (Tytell, not, in this case, Nixon) had solicited a prostitute in the Times Square area and, more unfortu- nately, the prostitute turned out to be a New York City police officer. Solicitation for prostitution by a “john” is a crime in New York, and a conviction could well ruin our student’s chances of serving as an expert witness in years to come.
Walpin would guide me, but my job was to interview our young cli- ent, get the facts, have the interview transcribed, make some preliminary judgments of law, and appear with the client at his arraignment. The client told me that he was caught while, as he said, he was doing research on prostitution for one of his classes, and he proceeded to describe in elaborate detail his conversation with the lady cop. This was all fine, but the hardest part of my job in the office was to explain to the extremely puritanical and unworldly partner, Walpin, the meaning of such phrases as “around-the-world” in the young man’s transcript, all the while keep- ing a straight face. That was accomplished (barely) and, now armed with some case law on entrapment, I was scheduled to appear with our unfortunate researcher at 100 Centre Street for his arraignment the next morning.
One hundred Centre Street, which houses, and therefore is the name that most practitioners give to, the Criminal Court in New York City, is famously a zoo. As criminals are plentiful and don’t adhere to a strict
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