ANNE KENNER

If You Like Rules

If you like rules, you’ll love being a prosecutor. Especially if it’s 1986, and you’re in Brooklyn working for the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. There are rules for everything in that office, and you are scrupulous about them.

Take your narcotics evidence, for example. You have lots of it because Reagan is president and he’s all about the war on drugs. You keep it in the US attorney’s office vault unless you need it, and the only reason you need it is to get it weighed or tested or to parade it in front of a jury. You’re never supposed to open it up, and you’re never supposed to leave drugs in your office overnight where someone can steal it. It’s ridic- ulously easy to get drug evidence from the office vault; the DEA agents working your cases just walk down the hall and take it out for you.

Until Chuck Hersch, another prosecutor in the office, breaks the rules and leaves a bag of heroin evidence locked in his file cabinet overnight. When Chuck comes into work the next morn- ing, his cabinet is open and the heroin is gone. The US marshals come march- ing in, sweeping the halls, tearing apart Chuck’s office, interviewing everyone in sight. Chuck, who is the cockiest guy you ever met, looks very pale about the face and he stops flashing his trade- mark smile in the halls. And in a matter of days, the US attorney’s office vault is shut down and the drugs are sent to bigger, safer vaults far away. This is a real pain in the ass, because now if you want to get drug evidence to weigh or test or parade in front of a jury, you have to file a formal request with the DEA and you’ve got to keep an official record of every stop the drugs make along their way to and from your office. It’s like the drugs are in kindergarten.

Months go by without any news of the missing heroin. Then another prosecutor leaves evidence locked in his office overnight: an envelope full of counterfeit Social Security checks. The next morning, the envelope is gone. Only this time the US marshals find the night janitor trying to cash one of the checks at the federal credit union in the basement. Two minutes into his interrogation, the janitor, who is not a sophisticated criminal, admits he got the checks from the US attorney’s office. Plus he volunteers that he stole the heroin from Chuck Hersch’s office, al- though he says he threw that stuff away.

Anyway, moving the drug evidence out of the US attorney’s office and into the agency vaults doesn’t solve the problem. There’s an agent you work with, Simon St. Aschilles from the DEA, but he’s not like other DEA agents. He’s all spit and polish, with a European cut to his suits and three kids at home on Long Island. He works JFK Airport and he calls you for help getting search and arrest warrants when he catches peo- ple smuggling drugs into the US. Even though you think everyone is guilty of everything, you don’t play around with the probable cause rule and you make that very clear to Simon St. Aschilles. If the facts don’t add up, he doesn’t get the warrants.

Then your parents fly into JFK from Istanbul with a very tight connection back to San Francisco. You know Simon is on duty, and you know he can make things easy for your par- ents, and you call him and ask him to help. Your parents land at JFK and before they can even get off the plane Simon is in the gangway, badge out, es- corting them onto a private shuttle to the connecting plane, which waits for Simon and your parents to arrive. It’s just like a Hollywood movie and your mother is swooning.

Simon calls you the next week. He needs a search warrant for a house where he thinks some drugs are hid- den. He knows the facts are thin, but he’s sure the drugs are there. And you’re squirming, because he just did this amazing turn by your parents but you have this thing about probable cause and Simon doesn’t have it for this house. “Simon,” you say, “I can’t get you that warrant. Find me some more facts, and I can get you that warrant.” You’re talking over the phone but you can see his face: you may be following your rules, but you’ve broken all of his. You don’t work with Simon again and whenever you see him around he looks the other way. Until the day he’s sup- posed to show up at the US attorney’s office for a meeting and he doesn’t be- cause he’s lying dead in the living room of his house on the Island with a needle sticking out of his arm and heroin he stole from the DEA vault still left in the syringe. Your mother can’t believe that Simon St. Aschilles is dead but you’re not that surprised. It doesn’t make you feel any better about dropping your end of the bargain, though.

*

You carry a credential, but not a badge or a gun. You know the rule about all three: never use them outside of your official capacity. And if you have a gun, keep the safety on at all times and never leave it lying around at home where a kid can find it. The chief of narcotics in the US attorney’s office wears a gun in an ankle holster because he thinks it’s gangster. You don’t think he’s ever used it. He uses his credential, though, to get attention and restaurant seating and upgrades on airplanes when he has to visit his mod- el girlfriend in Europe because she has the stomach flu or feels homesick. For some reason, this never catches up to the chief, although a brain tumor even- tually does. He packs a lot in before then, though, and all the agents love him.

*

It’s very important as a prosecutor not to bother your secretary because she can be very scary. Take Phaedra Leroy, who sits with Sandra and Kendra and all the other secretaries in the pool where they spend most of the day laughing and fighting. Phaedra Leroy’s husband is in jail and she is very unhappy about that and it’s important not to say any- thing or look at her some sort of way that reminds her that her husband isn’t around. You never know whether Phaedra will agree to type that subpoe- na for you or file that motion in the clerk’s office, but she is usually in a good mood after lunch or right before she goes home for the day at around 4:30, so that’s when you try to talk to her.

One afternoon you need to ask Phaedra to type up a very big search warrant for two DEA agents who are waiting in your office. You start down the hall toward the secretarial pool when you hear lots of screaming and crashing and another prosecutor says to you, “Don’t go in there.” You’re very torn because the agents will be upset if you don’t get the search warrant done, and this being the 1980s, you don’t have your own computer and you can’t type it up yourself. As you sit there debating stuff in your head, things quiet down a little, so you decide to take your chances and you go in the pool room only to find that Phaedra left early after stabbing another secretary with a fountain pen and no one else is in any kind of mood to type up your search warrant. So Phaedra Leroy gets fired and it takes weeks before another secretary is hired for the pool and by this time you have bought yourself a typewriter.

*

Watch out for criminal cooperators and informants. Don’t get too close, or they will bite you in the ass. They have charisma and they’re charming, and it’s very hard to charge and prove your big cases without using them. But they’re dirty, and it’s hard to know when they’re hustling you, and they know that you know that. The hardest thing is when you have to put them on the witness stand, because you never know what’s going to come out of their mouths.

Once, you call a cooperator to testify against Jamil Khalife, who is arrested coming into JFK from Damascus carrying false-sided suitcases filled with heroin. Actually, Jamil Khalife walks off the plane carrying a book and he makes his travel companion, Jacqueline Murr, carry the suitcases. Jacqueline Murr doesn’t appreciate this at all, and when the heroin is discovered in a routine US customs inspection, she dimes out Khalife before he even makes it to the men’s room in the arrival terminal.

You reach a deal with Jacqueline Murr: if she testifies at trial against Jamil Khalife, she’ll only serve five years in prison. The agents and you meet with Jacqueline Murr four or five times before trial to go over her testimony against Khalife: this is what happened, then that is what happened, then this is what happened. She’s a little crazy, but the story just isn’t that complicated.

Then comes Jamil Khalife’s day in court. You pick a jury, you give your opening statement, you call the cus- toms inspector to testify about finding the drugs in the suitcases, and then it’s Jacqueline Murr’s turn to testify. Khalife is sitting at a table with his defense attorney, not fifteen feet from Murr. You ask her, “Do you recognize in the courtroom the person who gave you suitcases stuffed with heroin?” Murr says, “Can you repeat the question?” You ask her again, “Do you recognize in the courtroom the person who gave you suitcases stuffed with heroin?” And Jacqueline Murr stands up in the wit- ness stand, turns full away from Khalife, points her open hand at the foreperson of your new jury, and yells, “That’s the son of a bitch.”

On the other hand, you can get a great cooperating witness. You can get the witness of your life.

Like Ashok Malik. He’s facing twenty years on a drug charge brought by the US attorney’s office across the river in Manhattan. The only way Malik can possibly do less time on that charge is by cooperating in a separate case you’ve filed in Brooklyn against one of his most reliable customers, Charles Fulton. Ashok Malik is the most sophis- ticated person in the room. He speaks public-school English, flashing his Cambridge credentials, talking about his parents in Calcutta and brothers in London and Los Angeles. His finger- nails are clipped, his teeth are shining. His jumpsuit is pressed and fresh.

You’re in your office with Ashok Malik and three DEA agents, trying to see what kind of witness he’ll make. You show Malik a photospread and ask him if he recognizes anyone in the six different arrest photos it contains. “I’m afraid I do,” he says, pointing at exactly the right mug shot. “I’m afraid that’s Charles.” Nobody talks that way in law enforcement. You ask Malik if he ever sold heroin to Fulton. Malik remembers the date and time of every transaction, he remembers the details of his conversations with Fulton, he remembers what Fulton wore to every meeting they had during the course of their five-year business relationship. He has the best memory of any witness that ever lived.

Like it’s A Thousand and One Nights, Malik tells you how his heroin flows from Afghanistan to Calcutta to New York and often, in New York, to Charles Fulton. Ashok Malik is charming. He is smart. He is the best witness you’ve ever had. You wish you could use him in all your cases.

Then he says, “My wife, Sherry, is in town. I wonder if she might visit while I’m here.” Like you’re friends, and he hasn’t traveled to your office by secured van from the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and he’s not wearing handcuffs and rubber slippers, and people can drop in and out of the US attorney’s office like it’s the Tavern on the Green. You look at the agents, and they look at you. And then you say to Ashok Malik, “Sure.”

*

When you’re on emergency duty, never turn off your pager. In a high-volume jurisdiction like the Eastern District of New York you’ve got three prosecutors on duty around the clock, seven days a week. Duty prosecutors must respond to any and all emergency calls from the DEA, the FBI, the Secret Service, the US Customs Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The most junior prosecutor carries the #1 pager, the second carries the #2 pager, the most senior the #3 pag- er. If you have the #1 pager, your life is over for the week. You get paged when you’re in the shower, you turn off the water and answer it. You get paged in the middle of the night, or during dinner, or when you have the flu, you answer it. The only time you don’t answer your pager is when you’re standing up in court on another case, and then only if you give the duty supervisor notice of your unavailability. The minute you sit down again, you turn your pager back on.

It’s hard to follow the #1 pager rule, especially when you’re at a good movie. Take Fatal Attraction, for example. Consider seeing it early in the evening, when the agents are having dinner with their families instead of out arrest- ing people, or during the day when the drug dealers are sleeping. If you have to go later at night, try to time it so that the movie ends just before the flights from Lagos and Bangkok arrive at JFK with the swallowers (1) and smugglers. Call the dispatchers at customs and the DEA to see if they know anything’s going down in the district. Then convince yourself that your pager won’t go off at the worst possible moment, right at the beginning of the bathtub scene when it will ruin the entire movie for you forever.

*

Wiretaps and bugs are great. You wouldn’t believe the things people say over their phones, or driving in their cars, or washing their dishes. Your agents have to install the wiretap on a phone line or plant the bug in a car or a building without tipping off the suspects. Then you listen for the stuff you’re not supposed to hear. A lot of times, people just complain about get- ting fat, or fight about money, or talk about their kids or sex or the Knicks. But you’re really listening in for that last piece of evidence you need to help you bring down the Mob or handcuff the CEO and parade him in front of the news cameras lined up in front of Cadman Plaza. You’re also listening for informa- tion about who’s getting whacked when, and how. When you hear that last kind of news, though, you have to let the in- tended victim know he is about to be whacked. Which is a problem. If you tip off the intended victim you risk ex- posing the wiretap. If you don’t tip off the intended victim then you save your wiretap but if anyone finds out you get fired. Sometimes, though, you get lucky.

Take “Frankie C.” It’s the 1980s and the Justice Department wants to dis- mantle the Mob once and for all. All the prosecutors and agents in New York and New Jersey are racing to take down

1 The mules who swallow dozens of condoms full of 98 percent pure heroin or cocaine, fly for eleven hours with it unhappily resting in their intestinal tract, then hope to make it through US customs before the condoms perforate or they lose control of their sphincter muscles and evacuate the drugs in passport control.

John Gotti, the head of the Gambino crime family. Like everybody else, you and your friend David Shapiro are work- ing an investigation with wiretaps and bugs on phones, under cars, in social clubs and bars. Your agents have an active bug in a car belonging to an idiot named Jerry. Or at least he’s supposed to be named Jerry. That’s his alias but he’s so stupid he keeps forgetting and referring to himself by his real name, Tommy, Tommy Carbone. Tommy’s a minor criminal who does favors for the Gambino family in exchange for protection. He’s wanted on a parole violation but he doesn’t feel like going back to prison so he spends the days trying to use a false name and driving around in his white Toyota bragging about all the people he knows and what great crimes they’re planning to commit. One day he’s in the car with his godson, Tony Flotte. Tony’s all upset because he sold a guy a Japanese scimitar at a knife expo in upstate New York but the guy is unhappy and wants his money back. Tony’s spent the money, and he wants Jerry/Tommy to get the scimitar guy off his back.

Tony and Jerry/Tommy have this conversation in Jerry/Tommy’s white Toyota and the agents are listening in when all of a sudden Jerry/Tommy changes the subject. “Frankie,” he says, has offended someone important and he’s going to get whacked. The agents happen to know exactly who “Frankie” is: Frankie C., a very bad guy with a very filthy mouth who works for the New York Telephone company. Frankie isn’t a mobster, but he helps mobsters by tipping them off when he finds out the agents are trying to wire- tap their phones.

Now your team goes into crisis mode. If you send someone to warn Frankie C. that he’s about to get whacked, word will get out that there’s a live bug out there somewhere and your Jerry/Tommy/ Tony interceptions might go cold. If you don’t send someone to warn Frankie C. that he’s about to get whacked, he’ll get whacked, someone will find out that you didn’t warn him, you’ll get fired, and some other prosecutor will get to nail John Gotti.

So you send an FBI agent out to Frankie C.’s house in Queens. The agent tells Frankie that he has information indicating Frankie is going to be whacked. Because he’s an asshole, Frankie tells the FBI agent to go fuck himself because he doesn’t cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI agent gives his business card to Frankie’s wife, who also tells him to go fuck himself. The FBI agent goes back to the office, and five days later a hit man for the Bonanno crime family lures Frankie C. into the Just Us Lounge in Bensonhurst and whacks him. (2) Within hours, Frankie’s wife is on the phone, screaming at the FBI agent for not protecting Frankie. By some miracle, Frankie’s wife doesn’t call Jerry/Tommy or Tony, though, and your car bug stays hot.

2 Just to make sure, he also cuts Frank- ie’s body into little pieces and buries them in a deserted Staten Island swamp.

*

Remember this rule: The judge is always right. In the federal system, judges are appointed for life and they forget that they’re human. If a judge doesn’t like you, that judge can make your life hell. Judges can deny your motions, throw out your evidence, call your case first if you’re not ready, call your case last if you’re in a hurry. Mainly, judges can yell at you all the time anytime and, worst of all, they can call Andrew J. Maloney— the big boss in the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York—to complain that you’re an idiot.

When you have a particularly old judge, and they get old when they’re ap- pointed for life, you run some additional risks. Old judges fall asleep on the bench after lunch, and they can’t hear your arguments or your objections. Once, David Shapiro asks you to cover a sentencing for him in front of an old judge. You don’t know anything about David’s case, but he tells you not to worry. “I promise,” he says. “The judge won’t ask you any questions.” The minute the case is called, the judge asks you a question. You can’t answer it because it’s not your case and the judge calls you a “wooden dummy” and a “waste of time.” Then the judge says to you, “I’m calling Mr. Maloney to complain about this, Ms. Azrack.” But here’s the thing: that’s not your name. Ms. Azrack is another prosecutor in the US attorney’s office; in fact, she’s your direct supervisor. You both have black hair, you’re about the same age, and you admire Ms. Azrack. But you are not her. So you say to the judge, “Do what you have to do, Judge.” And the next case is called.

Another time you’re in front of an old judge on a bail hearing in front of a packed courtroom. You know the judge is going to let your defendant out of jail, but you also know you can get the defendant back in custody if he uses drugs while he’s out. You ask the judge to require random drug testing as a condition of release, but the judge gives you the stink eye and says he can’t hear you. You ask the judge again, louder, for random drug testing, but he rocks back in his seat and says he still can’t hear you. You ask the judge again; you’re basically shouting by now that you want to test the guy’s urine on a random basis. You say it two, three times, the judge just giving you the hairy eyeball and shaking his head. When you finish, he leans over in disgust and says, “You don’t have to yell.” And then he says, “I’m calling Maloney, Ms. Azrack.”

*

Be very careful when you’re handling drug evidence in the courtroom. Make sure not to trust the seal on the few kilos of cocaine the DEA heat-seals and lets you keep for trial after destroying the other 1,200 kilos it seized from a Colombian lightplane that landed in a field on Long Island. The kilos of cocaine are 98 percent pure and each one is worth thousands of dollars. The jury isn’t allowed to handle the drug evidence, but you want to make sure they understand how solid it is, how pure and how powerful. So you lift one of the kilograms off the trial table during

your opening statement. You look at the jury and you tell them how pure and how powerful it is, and then you drop it back onto the table so that they can hear and imagine its heft. Only the heat seal fails and a plume of pure and powerful cocaine arcs from the brick into the air and then lands, lightly dusting your shoulders, your hair, your eyelashes, and the very tip of your red pen. The jury is riveted for all the wrong reasons, and you know for a fact that the judge will call Andrew J. Maloney to complain about this.

*

Because you’re a woman, some of the judges think you should have been a nurse instead of a prosecutor, and one of them takes a walk with you in the neighborhood to persuade you it’s not too late. You agree it’s a shame there aren’t enough nurses in the world. You tell the judge that you still really want to be a prosecutor. He laughs and shakes his head and looks off into the distance, across the East River toward the dependable tip of Manhattan.

The defense attorneys are some- thing else. They can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves and they like to pinch your cheek or squeeze your arm when you run into them in the hallway outside the courtroom. Mel Sachs pats your cheek in front of a group of them at a bail hearing for his client and you really want to smack him but you don’t because you know they’ll turn it into a thing. They’re always telling you when you look good or not so good, and they express opinions about the colors you wear. You tell yourself: don’t get mad, get what you want. You try to win every time on every point, and you notice that the more you win, the more they touch you. But you know it’s because you’re winning.

*

DEA agents in New York are usually men. They lift a lot of weights and go out every night. They work undercover and they like the look. The agents swagger into and out of your office and they get mad when you don’t agree that they have probable cause. DEA agents like leather jackets and shoulder holsters, and a lot of them wear cowboy boots, which look stupid in New York. They like to make big, splashy arrests that show up in the New York Times, but they don’t like to work the cases afterward; they don’t like to write up reports, and organize the evidence, and prepare for trial, and testify in court. All those things take time, which they would prefer to use out on the streets making bigger, badder drug busts.

Once, some DEA agents make a bust in Queens with eight defendants and hundreds of kilos of beautifully pure cocaine. The main bad guy is a Colombian named Carlos Avendano. It’s a large, messy case with boxes of evidence and small-denomination bills and half-written surveillance records and arrest reports. After you get assigned the case, the agents fill up your office with the boxes. “Don’t worry about all this stuff,” they say, eyeing the door and their imminent escape. “These mopes are all going to plead guilty.”

Only they don’t. Not one of the defendants wants to plead guilty. Instead, they all want to go to trial. When you call the DEA agents to remind them you can’t prove your case unless they testify, the agents tell you they’re too busy making other bigger, badder busts.

So a week before trial, you call a courtesy meeting with the eight defense attorneys to show them your evidence. Then you go upstairs to an old, vacant conference room lined with empty file cabinets. You type and attach labels for each empty cabinet drawer; “U.S. v. Avendano,” the labels say. You order two big, fancy display charts that look like the street corners in Queens where the agents busted your eight defendants. You set the charts up on easels in front of the empty file cabinets. Then you meet with the defense attorneys.

They troop into the conference room and look at the beautiful charts. They look at all the file drawers marked “U.S. v. Avendano.” They look at you and then they sit down around the conference table. They know and you know the defendants are guilty. They know and you know they have no interest in looking through drawers full of evi- dence. “Let’s talk about a plea deal,” says Avendano’s lawyer.

After the defendants plead guilty, you call the DEA agents. “See,” they say, “we told you the case would go away.”

*

If you make a reduced plea offer in a case and the defendant doesn’t accept it, you take the defendant to trial on more seri- ous charges. You have to be consistent and you have to be tough. Take Hermie Cordero. Hermie is a hotel housekeeper who uses a three-day weekend to visit relatives in Manila. When Hermie flies back to the United States, she’s carrying a plastic bag full of souvenir trinkets for her kids and two pounds of lumpy methamphetamine ice in her under- wear. Because of an anonymous tip, US customs agents are waiting to arrest her when she lands.

Methamphetamine ice is evil, and Hermie’s smuggled so much of it that you can charge her with a crime that carries a mandatory ten-year sentence. But you know she was just bringing the stuff in for her husband. All Hermie has to do is admit she knew what was in her underwear and you can plead her out to a reduced charge and a two-year sen- tence. But Hermie won’t do it.

So you go to trial against Hermie on the ten-year charge. Her very green defense attorney calls Hermie to the witness stand to explain how the drugs got in her underwear. Hermie looks at the jury and says that four or five or six large and angry men kidnapped her near the Manila airport and forced her to wear the lumpy underpants on the flight home. What did she think the lumps were? “Diamonds.” You think this is ridiculous, and you tell her as much when you cross-examine her. Question by question, you take apart her story. By the fifth question, Hermie is crying. She knows she is going down and she knows she should have taken the plea with a two-year sentence. By the time you sit back down the courtroom is very quiet; all you can hear are the buzzing fluorescent lights and Hermie Cordero crying. The customs agent who sits at the trial table with you doesn’t look at you and neither does the judge. After all the evidence is in, the jury comes back with a guilty verdict and Hermie goes away for ten years.

*

If it’s 1990 and you interview to transfer from the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York to the US attorney’s office in San Francisco, the supervisors there will ask you if you are planning to have children. Say something back to them like the only thing you’re planning is to keep being a prosecutor.

When you do transfer, the defense attorneys are still mostly men but they don’t pinch your cheek like they did in New York. Your supervisors in the US attorney’s office are another story. In San Francisco, they’re all men and they have attitudes about women. When they find out you’re coming to the office, they invite all the other prosecutors to take their “dog” cases—the ones with bad evidence or difficult defense attorneys or inconvenient trial dates—and transfer them to you. When you arrive for your first day at work, you find piles of re- assigned case files on top of your desk. This strikes you as not very sporting.

Floy Dawson from Oklahoma is your unit chief. He’s a lifer in the Justice Department, waiting it out for retirement. Occasionally you see him walk down the halls with a hitch in his step, but he mostly just sits in his office. Floy’s got to sign off on all your indict- ments and plea agreements, and when you walk into his office he leans back in his chair and puts his cowboy boots on the desk. They look stupid in San Francisco, too. When you ask for his signoff, he flashes a toothy smile and tells you it’s hard to say no to your big blue eyes. Only your eyes are brown.

Then the Justice Department in DC takes a closer look at Title VII and makes a new rule: every US attorney’s office in the country has to have a sex harassment coordinator. You’re told that you’re it for the San Francisco office. You get a big binder in the mail from the Justice Department that tells you what to do if anyone gets harassed. All the prosecutors in San Francisco watch a video telling them not to harass anyone. Then everyone goes back to work and it’s looking easy to be the sex harassment coordinator until a student intern tells you a prosecutor named Octavio Rex mauled her in a car on the way to a court hearing in Oakland.

The binder tells you to report harassment charges to the criminal division chief in your office, Bob Lee. Like all the other supervisors, Bob is a man, but he’s from Chicago instead of Oklahoma. Bob is younger than Floy, his wife has a job, and Bob is the one who cooks dinner every night at home. But when you tell him what Octavio did to the student, Bob says, “Well why does she wear those short skirts?”

*

Here’s the thing: Every woman in the US attorney’s office wears skirts. You aren’t allowed to wear pants because the judges won’t let you into their court- rooms with them on. When you ask the judges for permission to start wearing pants they tell you that you are unpro- fessional. This gives you pause, but you ask them again a year later and some of the younger judges start allowing you to wear pants to court hearings and jury trials, and then the older judges cave in, and then you bring every skirt and ev- ery dress in your closet to Goodwill.

*

Bob Lee, the criminal division chief, is clearly unimpressed when you tell him what happened to the student in- tern. You go back to the big binder you got from the Justice Department to see what else you should do. The binder says you’re not allowed to ask Octavio Rex why he decided to stick his tongue down the student’s throat and shove his hand up her skirt. It seems that you can, however, file a “report” with the biggest boss in the San Francisco office, the United States attorney himself. You make an appointment to go see him, and his first assistant sits in on the meeting. You tell the US attorney and the first assistant what happened to the student. They ask you if she is upset. “Absolutely,” you tell them. They ask you what you think should happen. You tell them they should fire Octavio. They tell you that is extreme. You make a counteroffer: suspend Octavio. They tell you that will be difficult. You tell the U.S. attorney and the first assistant to call the people in the Justice Department who assembled the big binder and ask their advice, then. They promise they will.

A month goes by, then two months go by. You cannot persuade the student intern to come back. She thinks you have let her down, and you are afraid she is right. You schedule another meet- ing with the US attorney and the first assistant to ask what the people at the Justice Department have told them to do about Octavio. The first assistant opens his hands wide to tell you that a confidential letter has been attached to Octavio’s personnel file. “What does the letter say?” you ask. “It’s confidential,” says the first assistant.

Octavio Rex struts around the US attorney’s office and attends court hearings in Oakland for the next year or so until he leaves to accept a lucrative partnership at the oldest law firm in San Francisco.

*

You begin to get confused about rules. You like that they tell you what to do and how to behave. You like that everyone has to follow them. Only they don’t. And the rules get harder and harder for you to follow, too. There is nuance, which you don’t anticipate. The good guys aren’t always the good guys and the bad guys aren’t always bad. You have a lot of power and you use it to search houses and persons and cars, to arrest people and seize their belongings and forfeit their savings, to haul defendants in front of juries and then send them to jail for longer terms than you’ve been alive. But no matter how much you exercise your power the crimes keep happening and this makes you irritable.

You have kids of your own. You start to realize that all the smugglers and swindlers and hit men and con men used to be children once too. You wonder where their parents are when they show up in court for trial or sentencing, and what their own children think as they watch from the audience. At first, you wonder how the people you prose- cute could do the stuff they do, and then you wonder how they couldn’t, given what they’ve been through in their lives.

Certain cases start to bother you, especially the ones where you arrest young people who go away for a very long time. You feel a softening somewhere in your core that you probably shouldn’t have if you’re going to be investigating and prosecuting federal crime. You start asking yourself whether that extra year in jail or that additional fine is going to balance the scales. You have one young guy who goes to jail because he sort of helped his uncle cover up a counterfeit money ring, and you fret for years that he’s lost the right to vote. You have an- other young guy who agrees to ride shot- gun for what he thought was a small cocaine deal but turns out to be a big cocaine deal and for the first time it seems arbitrary that he goes away for twenty years, mandatory, instead of five years concurrent to his state sentence.

After fourteen years you take a leave of absence to think about all this stuff and when it’s time to go back you don’t, even though a voice in your head is ask- ing how can you possibly give this all up but you do and you’re okay with that.

338 SOUTHWEST REVIEW

VOL. 104.4

ESSAY

SOUTHWEST REVIEW 339

Home

If You Like Rules