The Professor and the Prostitute (29 page)

Jolly listened to Macris's suspicions, then warned him that he was making a weighty charge. If what he was suggesting was true, Buettner-Janusch was breaking the law and could get into serious trouble. But if the boy reported his suspicions and there was no truth to the charge, he himself would be in serious trouble. Jolly advised him to keep his anxieties to himself but to start keeping a notebook of all experiments being conducted in the lab. And, said Jolly, he himself would see what he could find out.

Professor Jolly, an Englishman, had been an admirer of Buettner-Janusch and had even served on the search committee that had brought him to NYU. He respected the chairman, but he too had had misgivings about him for some time. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, except that there was about the chairman a breath of the outrageous, an air of
épater le bourgeoisie
. And once B-J had said something peculiar to him. It was back in the winter of 1978, when the National Science Foundation had unexpectedly turned down his grant request. B-J had said to Jolly that he wasn't worried about this rejection because there was a possibility of finding alternative funds for the lab. He might get money from private foundations—and other sources. When Jolly had thought about what these might be, unaccountably, he'd been scared. But he'd put the conversation out of his mind until the day Richard Macris came to him.

In the next few months, Jolly began acting like an amateur sleuth. At night, when the student assistants had all gone home, he snapped photographs of their equipment and sifted through notes in their wastebaskets. Every two weeks, he took samples from chemical flasks and vials in the lab and stored them in a bookcase in his home. One day he submitted these samples to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and soon afterward, the DEA, without knowing where or by whom the chemicals had been made, reported back that one sample was methaqualone—known as Quaalude—an illegal drug.

What was he to do? Professor Jolly got in touch with Richard Macris and the two went at once to John C. Sawhill, then NYU's president, and told him what they'd discovered. Sawhill informed the U.S. Attorney's office, and the following night, without a search warrant but with the authorization of NYU, DEA agents surreptitiously searched the anthropology lab, seizing various pieces of equipment and numerous chemicals.

The chemicals were analyzed and found to contain LSD, methaqualone, and synthetic cocaine, and almost immediately the government opened a full-scale but secret investigation of Buettner-Janusch. The detectives would be a handful of junior gumshoes—students who, like Macris, were working in the lab. Some were persuaded, and some volunteered, to monitor B-J's correspondence, to listen in on his conversations, and even to wear hidden tape recorders on their bodies when they spoke with him.

At first Buettner-Janusch didn't know he was being investigated. On the night of the search, Macris and Jolly had let the agents into the lab with a key, but the search party had, upon leaving, broken down the frame of the lab door in order to make their visit appear to be a burglary. The chairman had been merely irritated at the time. But quite quickly he began to suspect that the burglary hadn't been haphazard, for six days later he remarked to Macris, “I've been denounced by someone. But who? Who?” And he said to a student named Danny Cornyetz, the director of the lab, “The only thing that's missing is, who's the goddamn informant?”

It would have been intolerable to him to suspect that his student assistants, the very people he had rewarded with his favors and power, could be disloyal. He was a man who insisted on loyalty, running his department in so authoritarian, so dictatorial a way that he even expected students who sought advancement from him to make his enemies theirs. And for the most part his students complied. “We were discouraged from taking courses with any of the professors of whom B-J disapproved,” one student explained to me. “And we accepted this, believing that if we wanted to study the subject matter any of these professors taught, and went ahead and registered for their classes despite the warnings, we wouldn't get recommended for graduate school, or we might even get flunked out. Lots of us just went along with this. And it got so bad that one of the professors B-J didn't like, a man who had a specially endowed chair in the department and ten thousand dollars' worth of fellowship money to give away every year, couldn't even find any student takers for his money.”

It was hardly the ideal academic atmosphere. But then B-J was hardly the typical academic.

Showy and sartorially splendid, he dyed his graying hair blond and dressed in expensive suits and custom-tailored shirts. He enjoyed the opera and ballet and went frequently to the Met. His spacious apartment on Washington Square was decorated with exquisite Navajo rugs and the finest American Indian pottery. His wife of many years, Vina Mallowitz, a biochemist, had died in 1977, but he had a wide circle of friends—not just scholars but playwrights and novelists and painters—and took great pleasure in entertaining them lavishly. His large parties were gala affairs, catered and served by uniformed butlers and maids. His small ones featured costly wines and gourmet fare that he himself cooked.

But if living well was one of his favorite pursuits, shocking people was one of his favorite pastimes. He'd been in jail, he used to tell colleagues. Then, after evoking wide-eyed surprise, he'd explain that it had been because he had been a conscientious objector during World War II. But, inconsistently, he'd also claim on occasion that he'd been a Nazi hunter in his youth and explain—somewhat anticlimactically—that before the war, his father had sent him on a bicycle trip to Europe which was in fact a secret mission to kill Germans. Flamboyance was his stock in trade, self-dramatization his principal currency.

Part of his fondness for calling attention to himself took the form of mocking or painfully taunting others. When NYU, under pressure from the women's movement, printed departmental memo forms that called for the signature of a “chairperson” rather than a “chairman,” Buettner-Janusch bought a stamp and inked onto each of his memos: “Please change this form! Stop defiling the English language with the vulgar neologism which I have corrected above.” When he wanted to indicate to a particular professor that he had no respect for his work, he walked into the man's office and, insultingly, removed his typewriter. He was explosive with his staff during faculty meetings, and he frequently assailed his teachers' academic credentials, calling them into question, not just in front of other teachers, but even in front of students. “He actually
hounded
me from the department,” said one professor, who left NYU and went to the University of Maryland. “He not only humiliated me in the presence of students but excluded me from departmental meetings.” Two other professors at NYU said that after they had had certain policy differences with him, the chairman tried to curtail their responsibilities and to prevent them from having any voice in departmental decisions. He was, said a vice president of Duke University, “a fine scientist but an iconoclast of the first order, who made a lot of people mad by his statements and ultimata.”

Certainly, he did make a lot of people angry. Perhaps that was why rumors of scandal trailed him wherever he went. Some colleagues said he'd plagiarized a fellow student's work when he was at the University of Michigan. (The university refused to discuss the matter.) Others said he'd mishandled the food and shelter money of an anthropological expedition he'd led while at the University of Chicago. (The charge was never pursued.) Still others said he'd never really done serious research, that the studies for which he'd become famous at Duke had actually been performed by his wife, an accomplished scientist herself.

Yet despite the rumors and his own abrasiveness, Buettner-Janusch led a charmed life in academic circles, every year garnering more and more fame and more and more research grants. But in 1977 his luck changed. That year, the National Science Foundation ceased funding him. He claimed the rejection was personal, not intellectual. Someone at NSF had it in for him, he said. But Dr. Nancie Gonzalez, an NSF program director for anthropology at the time, said, “NSF turns people down for one reason and one reason only—their work lacks scientific merit. And before such a decision is made, their proposals and their lab work are always meticulously scrutinized.” Buettner-Janusch's laboratory had been visited by an NSF team; his proposals had been studied, and he had been abandoned.

It must have been a terrible shock and a serious blow to his ego, not to mention a serious incursion on his ability to do research. Without funding, he would not be able to purchase supplies, hire assistants. But that November he came up with a solution. He formed a corporation with the mocking name of Simian Expansions. Its purpose, he would eventually explain, was to raise private moneys for research on lemurs. From then on, despite his loss of federal funding, Buettner-Janusch's lab at NYU remained active, well equipped, and well populated by ambitious students.

Several graduate students signed Simian Expansions' incorporation papers, and it was they whom Richard Macris began seeing in the lab at odd hours.

By May 22, 1979, B-J knew for certain that he was under suspicion of having made illegal drugs and possibly of having planned to sell them, for he was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. But he seems to have believed that even if he were to be indicted, he would have no trouble clearing his name. “My lawyers have told me they can beat any charges on my reputation alone,” he assured Richard Macris. And to Danny Cornyetz he confided, “The former dean of NYU law school” would soon smooth everything out by talking “like a Dutch uncle to Sawhill.”

But what the chairman didn't know was that by then his students were taping him. Cooperating with the government agents—some because they feared that if they didn't, they themselves might risk the government's wrath, others because they felt morally indignant—they had agreed to spy on him, and between late May and early July they collected a number of highly incriminating statements, among them that they themselves should “deny, deny, deny” and “get busy forgetting.”

Then, in August, the Drug Enforcement Agency returned to NYU and this time entered and searched a basement storeroom of the professor's, where they located a large cache of illegal drugs. (This find, however, as a result of strict privacy laws then in effect, could not be used in court.) In October 1979, Buettner-Janusch was indicted and charged with manufacturing and distributing various controlled substances as well as of conspiring to obstruct the government's investigation into the making of drugs on NYU's campus.

In July 1980, I attended his trial in the Southern District Court of New York, a trial that drew scores of friends and enemies of the charismatic professor. They sat on opposite sides of the courtroom, trying to ignore one another. The enemies had come, as might be expected, in the hope of seeing Buettner-Janusch taken down a peg. The friends had come, however, not just to lend their support, but for another reason as well. Shortly before the trial, B-J had circulated two lengthy, photocopied letters in which he implied that he was the victim of a government assault on academic freedom. In the letters, he referred to his prosecutor, a woman, as a “Nazi whore” and to the search of his storeroom as an “atrocity” resembling
Kristallnacht
, the night on which Hitler's stormtroopers smashed the property of Germany's Jews. The letters had persuaded his friends that the drug charges were senseless and that the reason he was being hounded was that the government was on a witchhunt. The issue here, his friends felt, was a scholar's right to privacy.

During breaks in the proceedings, they buttonholed me, saying, “The whole thing's preposterous! A man like B-J making drugs! Why would he? He didn't need money. He's independently wealthy. And he'd have known that if he did the things the prosecution is accusing him of, he'd be risking one of the most distinguished careers in America.”

Those who disliked the man were equally assertive. B-J was a sociopath, they insisted, a man without a conscience.

The evidence against Buettner-Janusch was presented by frail, hundred-pound Roanne Mann, five years out of Stanford Law, her dresses frilly and her voice little more than a loud whisper. Buettner-Janusch, she contended in her opening remarks, “used and abused his position in the academic community and turned a college lab into a drug factory.” The defense counsel was Jules Rithholz, a fifty-five-year-old veteran criminal lawyer who dressed in pinstripes and delivered his questions and assertions in loud, dramatic style. “We don't deny he made drugs,” Rithholz said at the start. “Of course he made drugs. But there is nothing sinister about making drugs in a laboratory.” He then proceeded to explain that Buettner-Janusch's drugs had been made for legitimate research purposes. The professor had been planning to give the drugs to lemurs in order to ascertain whether neurochemicals could alter typical primate behavior. Such research was of great potential value to mankind, Rithholz argued. Why, if behavior is part chemistry and not merely a learned set of traits, “we could cure wrongdoing, we could take care of people who are recidivists, repeated criminals, and make them kindly. In one shot, we could wipe out crime.”

The jury listened with interest. A majority of them had been to college. Then the prosecutor brought on the student gumshoes.

They were, in their way, hilarious—an often inept, bumbling bunch. Macris, for example, had attempted to tape not just B-J, but lab director Cornyetz as well, to see what he knew of what was going on. But he'd asked Cornyetz his probing questions while the two of them were walking in Washington Square Park, and the lab director—who'd written an anthropological treatise on punk rockers—spotted, just as they started to talk, a punky princess with glorious two-toned hair, and from then on he couldn't keep his mind on the matter under discussion. The tape revealed nothing of significance. Another tape, made by a student named Lisa Foreman, bombed out entirely. She'd worked in the lab in 1978 and noticed some of her peers “making substances” and “B-J checking on the substances.” She too had decided, apparently on her own, to tape-record a conversation with Cornyetz. But she'd muffed her mission because she'd inserted not a new cassette but an old one on which she'd previously recorded herself trying to teach her parakeets to speak. “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello,” the tape had gone on endlessly in between the lab director's words. The resulting cacophany had embarrassed her, and she'd erased the recording.