Judge Not

Fall from honor. How Sol Watchler went from esteemed Chief Judge of New York to shamed prison inmate.

By PT Staff, published on July 01, 1997 - last reviewed on February 08, 2007

In the flash of a single afternoon in November 1992, Sol Wachtler went from Chief Judge to Chief Disgrace. Elected to New York's highest court on the strength of a TV commercial showing a jail door clanging shut, he would later be arrested and imprisoned for 13 months in a federal penitentiary. In prison, the man once favored to succeed Mario Cuomo as governor of New York was shackled and chained, stabbed by another inmate, and locked in solitary confinement.

Wachtler's debacle began as an affair with prominent Republican fund-raiser Joy Silverman. After the relationship ended, he embarked on a series of threatening letters and phone calls to Silverman—including a sexually explicit note addressed to her 14-year-old daughter, complete with an enclosed condom—from various locales around the country. Later diagnosed with drug-induced bipolar disorder (manic depression), Wachtler says that his illness triggered these threats, which he signed with the pseudonym "David Purdy", as a ploy to send Silverman running back into his protective arms.

Instead, she ran to a friend, FBI director William Sessions. The Feds tailed Wachtler for seven weeks. Then, one Saturday afternoon after he dropped off one of his letters, a swarm of agents descended upon his car and arrested him. According to press reports, as many as 80 agents from the FBI's Newark and New York offices took part in nailing Wachtler—more than had been used to catch mobster John Gotti. The Newark office, incidentally, also had under surveillance in late 1992 several Islamic extremists—known terrorists—associated with a local mosque. Around the same time that the bureau was preparing to nab Wachtler, Ramzi Ahmed Yusef, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, slipped through customs on an Iraqi passport, planned the attack, and fled the country without being questioned by authorities. Only the FBI knows whether it might have been able to intercept Yusef—and perhaps prevent the bombing—had it not been so busy trailing Wachtler.

As a result of his conviction and imprisonment, Wachtler lost his seat on the court, his distinguished reputation, and his chance to be governor. But he also gained something. In his prison memoir, After the Madness (Random House), Wachtler writes that his experiences transformed and humanized him, and taught him the true meaning of compassion. And indeed, during our conversation at his Long Island home, Wachtler proved a mild-mannered, kind, and courteous host.

PT: When I think of your situation, Jesus' admonition "Judge not lest ye be judged" comes to mind. Is there something about being a judge that works against honest self-examination?

SW: We're taught that judges sit at the right hand of God. After a while, some judges start believing this. People call you "Your Honor," and when you sit down, they sit down. No one interrupts a judge, but a judge interrupts anyone. People think you're the font of all wisdom. You can't live like that without being affected.

And by the way, my vanity was one of the reasons I didn't seek help for my illness. Here I was, a manic depressive. I would check into a hotel room under an assumed name and stay there crying for two days without ever pulling the shade up. My wife, who is a clinical social worker, begged me to get help and told me I was destroying myself. But rather than see a psychiatrist, I got prescriptions for Tenuate [a diet pill], Halcion [a sleeping pill], and Pamelor [an anti-depressant]—all from different doctors. I took more than 1,400 Tenuate and 280 Halcion in a four-month period. After a while, my mood swung from profound depression into a manic state, and I started doing these bizarre things. Yet I never saw it happening.

If you were the judge who was sentencing you, what would you have done?

I would have probably said, "He's 63 years old, he's never committed a wrong act before, he's given up his judgeship, visited psychiatric clinics, he's stable on medication, so why imprison him?" I wrote terrible letters. I'm not minimizing my crime. But there are a lot of women who call me up on talk shows to say I should have been sent away for life.

In your book, you wonder why Joy didn't just call you and say, "Sol, you're crazy. Stop it," or "I'm really going to get you in trouble. I'm not going back with you?" If we asked her, what do you think she would say? [Silverman declined to talk to Psychology Today]

She'd say she was scared to death because I was the chief judge, and God knows what I could do, and she wanted to get me arrested as soon as possible. But I can't get into her psyche. For seven and a half years she didn't turn on the washing machine without calling me first, and she would call me seven times in a day. I thought she was very dependent on me. I didn't realize that I was just as dependent on her.

You go out of your way to be non-judgmental about her.

I think that's only right. She was a victim. But she was very, very angry at me—not for the harassment, but because she wanted me to leave my wife, and I couldn't. I really wanted to, but I didn't have the courage to do it. And then I eventually broke off the relationship.

What was the worst thing that happened to you in prison?