Tragic

To those blessings in my life:
Patti, Rachael, Roger, Billy, and my brother, Bill;
and
To the loving Memory of
Reina Tanenbaum
My sister, truly an angel

To my legendary mentors, District Attorney Frank S. Hogan and Henry Robbins, both of whom were larger in life than in their well-deserved and hard-earned legends, everlasting gratitude and respect; to my special friends and brilliant tutors at the Manhattan DAO, Bob Lehner, Mel Glass, and John Keenan, three of the best who ever served and whose passion for justice was unequaled and uncompromising, my heartfelt appreciation, respect, and gratitude; to Professor Robert Cole and Professor Jesse Choper, who at Boalt Hall challenged, stimulated, and focused the passions of my mind to problem-solve and to do justice; to Steve Jackson, an extraordinarily talented and gifted scrivener whose genius flows throughout the manuscript and whose contribution to it cannot be overstated, a dear friend for whom I have the utmost respect; to Louise Burke, my publisher, whose enthusiastic support, savvy, and encyclopedic smarts qualify her as my first pick in a game of three on three in the Avenue P park in Brooklyn; to Wendy Walker, my talented, highly skilled, and insightful editor, many thanks for all that you do; to Mitchell Ivers and Natasha Simons, the inimitable twosome whose adult supervision, oversight, and rapid responses are invaluable and profoundly appreciated; to my agents, Mike Hamilburg and Bob Diforio, who in exemplary
fashion have always represented my best interests; to Coach Paul Ryan, who personified “American Exceptionalism” and mentored me in its finest virtues; to my esteemed special friend and confidant Richard A. Sprague, who has always challenged, debated, and inspired me in the pursuit of fulfilling the reality of “American Exceptionalism,” and to Rene Herrerias, who believed in me early on and in so doing changed my life, truly a divine intervention.

R
OGER
K
ARP GRIMACED AS HE
stretched one of his long legs into the aisle next to his seat. He rubbed his knee until the ache—a frequent reminder of an injury sustained as a star college basketball player many years earlier—subsided and he could turn his attention back to the stage in front of him.

His wife, Marlene Ciampi, looked at his leg and then his face. She frowned as she whispered, “You okay, Butch?”

“Yeah, just a little stiff,” he replied quietly with a smile. “These seats seem to get harder every year.”

Marlene smiled back. “I was just thinking the same thing and hoping it had nothing to do with age.”

They were sitting six rows up from the stage, just off-center, at the Delacorte Theater, an open-air amphitheater in the middle of Central Park. Situated on the southwest corner of the Great Lawn, with Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle as a backdrop, the Delacorte could not have been a lovelier spot to watch a play on a warm late summer evening, even if the tiered rows of wooden seats were not designed for comfort. A sliver of a moon rose behind the castle and a slight breeze stirred the leaves of the trees that surrounded the amphitheater and the shadows beneath—a perfect setting for that season’s Shakespeare in the Park offering of
Macbeth.

Karp and Marlene were with their twin teenaged sons, Zak and Giancarlo, who’d been dispatched that morning to stand in line for the free tickets that were handed out starting at 1:00 p.m. for the evening performance. That had allowed Butch, as he was known to family and friends, and Marlene to arrive just before showtime by taking a yellow cab to the 79th Street entrance of the park and then follow the footpath to the theater. The boys would be rewarded for their efforts after the play with a stop at the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue and 55th Street, a dozen or so blocks north of Times Square, where they could do battle with legendary hot pastrami and corned beef sandwiches, chili cheese fries, and New York’s finest cherry cheesecake.

Attending each season’s Shakespeare production, including the post-play stop at the deli, had been a family tradition since the days when Marlene was pregnant with their first child, Lucy. She was absent that night, back home in New Mexico with her fiancé, Ned Blanchett. However, Karp was pleased that his sons were still willing to indulge their parents by “sitting through some old play where they don’t even speak real English,” as Zak, the more macho and impatient of the two, groused when reminded of the date. Fortunately,
Macbeth
had a fair amount of witchcraft, ghosts, murder, and intrigue to hold their attention.

Act 2, scene 1 was just winding to a close. The Scottish Lord Macbeth stood alone in the dark hallway of his castle trying to summon the courage, and cold-bloodedness, to murder King Duncan as he slept and seize the throne at the urging of his power-hungry wife, Lady Macbeth.

The Shakespeare in the Park productions were always first-rate, and Karp enjoyed the Bard’s frequent theme of man’s battle between his good and evil natures and, of course, how justice eventually prevailed. He’d come by his love of theater, as well as of movies, thanks to his mother, an English teacher, but had also learned to see evil as a real entity, not some theoretical sophistry
to be debated in church. When Karp’s mother died of cancer at an early age he learned to fight evil vigorously. In fact, the crusade against evil was the driving motivation behind his actions as the District Attorney of New York County.

Onstage, a hologram of a dagger floated—a bit of technical wizardry—above the actor playing Macbeth, who tried to grasp it while it remained just out of reach. Karp knew from discussions with his mother that the ghost knife eluding Macbeth was a metaphor for his troubled conscience as the deadly moment of truth approached.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

the handle toward my hand?

Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

a dagger of the mind, a false creation,

proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

In his seat, Karp repeated the words “heat-oppressed brain” to himself. He’d used that very description in his summation at a murder trial he’d just concluded to explain the motive behind the prosecution’s star witnesses’ testimony against the defendant. That and Macbeth’s lament in act 2, scene 2 that he’d “murdered sleep” when neither he nor his wife could find peace due to the guilt that weighed on them.

“So why did they take the stand and testify without any sort of deal being offered or attempting to lessen their own guilt?” Karp had asked the jury as he faced the defendant. “Because, ladies and gentlemen, what they did—the part they played in the conspiracy to commit murder—was evil, but for them it came at a high price to their consciences. To paraphrase William Shakespeare, they could not escape their ‘heat-oppressed brains.’ They couldn’t enjoy life,
or forget, or close their eyes at night and rest. As Mr. Shakespeare wrote, they had ‘murdered sleep’ as surely as they and the defendant murdered the victim. But evil comes in shades of gray.”

In some ways, Karp felt a certain degree of sympathy for Macbeth. The man wasn’t a murderer by nature; he’d been courageous and faithful defeating a traitor in defense of Duncan. But his ambition had driven him to commit a crime that initially accomplished his goal, and in the end spelled his doom.

Onstage, the actor grabbed again at the knife, but it danced just out of reach.
There’s still time to walk away,
Karp thought as he had when he was a boy and wished that Macbeth could make a different choice leading to a happier ending. But onstage, even as Macbeth worried about getting caught, he chastised himself for being a man of words and not actions.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. . . .

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts,

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives;

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

Karp reflected on how, in some ways, the themes inherent in
Macbeth
were mirrored in the trial. The corruptive influence of power. The shades of evil. The eroding power of conscience on guilty secrets. And the consequences of sin.

It even broke down into acts and scenes,
he thought. The conspiracy, the murder, the investigation, the swift-paced plotting of confrontations, violent reactions, and bouts of conscience that led inexorably to the dramatic climactic moment in a New York City courtroom, and its inevitable epilogue.

A bell rang offstage.
Lady Macbeth letting her hubby know that the chamberlains, who she’s set up to take the rap for Duncan’s murder, are asleep and it’s time to do the deed,
Karp thought as the actor suddenly straightened and resolved to go forward with the plan.

I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell

that summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

With that, the actor turned and stalked off the stage toward where the audience knew King Duncan slept.
Too late,
Karp thought.
It is too late for everyone involved.
The scene came to an end and the stage went dark so that the stagehands could change the set for the next scene.

All of the players acted out their roles on the courtroom stage, too,
he thought.
It all began with act 1, scene 1 . . . three young men sitting in a car on a cold winter’s night, nine months ago, contemplating a horrific deed.

“
PRA KLYAST,
”
THE YOUNG MAN
in the backseat of the Delta 88 Oldsmobile said in Russian. “Is fucking cold, man!” He leaned forward and tapped the driver, another young man, on the back of his head. “Turn the car on and get heat!”

“It’s a waste of gas and we’re already low, unless you want to throw in some money,” the driver, a freckle-faced redhead named Bill “Gnat” Miller, said. “And keep your frickin’ hands to yourself.”

“Relax,
sooka,
” Alexei Bebnev sneered from the backseat. Twenty-seven years old and slightly over six feet tall, he liked to think of himself as a ladies’ man. But his light blues eyes were set too far apart in his round-as-a-basketball face, an unfortunate feature accented by a wide flat nose above a scraggly mustache and crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. Bebnev looked at another young man sitting in the front passenger seat. “Hey, Frankie, I thought you say your friend was cool?”