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them as to the impact of Mr.
    Perini’s death on them. What else?”
    Neil Steinman knew instinctively that Judge Feigley was leaning toward denying the motion for a mistrial. She had been impressed, he thought, by what he said about “less drastic alternatives” to mistrial and “prophylactic measures to alleviate the impact of Mr. Perini’s death.” Now, savoring the judge’s rebuke of Jennifer Kellman, he said, “The government would have no objection to Your Honor’s meeting with the jurors, if Your Honor decides that’s appropriate.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Steinman,” she said. Looking expansively around the room, she asked, “Now, have we missed anything? Is there anything else?”
    At that point, a slim, nervous lawyer who had barely spoken during the course of the trial said, “What about Mr. Klein?”
    “Does anybody here know,” Judge Feigley asked, an expression of surprise on her face, “whether any new lawyer has entered an appearance for Mr. Klein?”
    P A U L B A T I S T A
    The same lawyer said, “Mr. Klein came to court alone this morning. He was sitting alone at the defense table when you asked the lawyers to come up here.”
    Sternly, she said, “I wish somebody had raised this before. The man was entitled to be here.”
    “I would have objected to that,” Sorrentino said. “This whole conference has been more in the nature of a sidebar, Judge, for lawyers only.”
    “Mr. Sorrentino, you seem to forget that this is my court. Mr.
    Klein, in effect, is now pro se . Nobody represents him. So as far as 30
    I’m concerned he represents himself until he finds another lawyer, and he has the same standing as you do to be here. I want him up here.” She motioned to one of her law clerks, telling him to contact the courtroom deputy to find Mr. Klein and bring him to chambers.
    The intricate system of moving jurors, witnesses, and others around the courthouse operated smoothly during Judge Feigley’s trials. Because of her seniority, she had a large staff and had, during the course of her years in this same building, developed a range of techniques for moving people from place to place. The courthouse was like an old castle and she knew where all the pul-leys and airshafts were. Her system needed less than five minutes to produce Selig Klein.
    Klein, who had built a durable trucking empire on the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts, was unmistakably bewildered when he walked into Judge Feigley’s chambers. The least sophisticated and the least known of all the defendants, Klein had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and worked as a truck driver before he started his own company, with one used truck, when he was in his mid-twenties. He still boasted about being a union member and collecting a two-hundred-dollar-a-month pension from the teamsters.
    Despite his decades on the waterfront, he managed to stay out of serious trouble with the passing parade of prosecutors, reformers, and Waterfront Commission members who policed the piers D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
    where he had his multiple depots. This was the first time he had ever been indicted. Given his background, it seemed strange that his only face-to-face encounter with the legal system was in a case like this, involving bribery and political payoff schemes, instead of one involving the kind of physical violence everyone assumed Sy Klein had put in motion for years.
    “Sit down, Mr. Klein,” Judge Feigley said, almost deferentially.
    “Maybe these ladies and gentlemen will make room for you at the table,” she continued, gesturing.
    Klein’s face was an open book. No matter how tough he was 31
    (and everyone believed he was tough), this setting was beyond him. He looked hopelessly intimidated in this group of lawyers.
    He had no idea how to act. And he couldn’t conceal his continuing amazement that this judge was not only a woman but black and that she had a mystical control over him. He had never been this close to her, and he