Tag: from the magazine

Read housed Yannetti, Jackson, Little, and herself in the same hotel throughout the trial so they could maximize preparation time. She paid $1.2 million leading up to and during the nine-week court proceedings between bails; accommodating, feeding, and transporting three lawyers; and hiring private investigators and experts. For that, she used her savings, about $500,000 from her since-depleted legal fund, and $400,000 donated by friends and family. She now has more than $5 million in deferred legal bills and a second trial looming.

The first one was “trial on a budget,” according to Read. Since she couldn’t afford to fly out support staff from Jackson and Little’s firm, Read became the support staff herself. She negotiated rates with two Uber drivers to shuttle the team to and from court. Read is aware her team has been photographed exiting (discounted) SUVs and surrounded by (volunteer) security, and dining out (the bill often picked up by friends or family members). As for criticism that her team occasionally enjoys upscale restaurants, she says, “You try feeding Alan Jackson McDonald’s.”

“We don’t typically work that closely with clients,” says Little, who became partner during trial due to her long hours. “But in this case, we needed every hand on deck.”

“LOCK THIS WHACK JOB UP”

About 10 months after O’Keefe’s death, the Office of the US Attorney for Massachusetts empaneled a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into an unspecified federal crime related to Norfolk County’s handling of Read’s case. The impetus is unknown; Levy will not comment on active investigations and, nearly two years into the probe, his team has not yet reached a conclusion. “When the FBI steps in, that usually is an indication that they are in possession of some information that is extremely damaging to the law enforcement agencies involved,” says Tom Nolan, a 27-year Boston police officer turned criminal justice professor at Emmanuel College who is not involved in Read’s case. Last year, the Alberts, McCabes, and other witnesses were subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury, according to state court proceedings.

It is incredibly logistically complicated to pursue a federal investigation into an active state murder investigation—in part because two agencies are interviewing the same witnesses simultaneously. Zach Hafer, a former federal prosecutor and Cooley LLP partner, tells me, “I can’t think of a time in my 14 years in the US Attorney’s Office where that happened. Presumably, it’s some type of federal obstruction or witness-tampering investigation—a cover-up of some sort.”

“In these types of cases, it is common for prosecutors to grant certain witnesses immunity to help them determine what happened and whether there is a provable federal crime. The US Attorney’s Office has always prioritized the prosecution of law enforcement misconduct,” says Hafer, pointing out that making false statements to a federal agent is a felony carrying a five-year sentence. “So even if an individual wasn’t guilty of the underlying offense—here, murder—lying about it after the fact to federal investigators is another potential charge.”

Shortly before the trial began, the feds provided more than 3,000 pages of findings to the defense and prosecution, including Proctor’s texts about Read.
A sampling:

she’s a babe, weird fall river accent though, no ass

She’s got a leaky balloon knot, leaks poo

Waiting to lock this whack job up

Hopefully she kills herself.

The federal investigation found that Brian Albert destroyed his cell phone the day before receiving a protection order to preserve it and its contents. (Albert said the timing was a coincidence, and he was due for an upgrade.) Also: that on January 30, Higgins, the ATF agent who’d been at the Alberts’, asked another federal agent for advice on extracting phone data. Months later, he drove to a military base to dispose of his destroyed phone and SIM card. (Higgins testified that the target of a different investigation had found his contact information.) The feds also determined that Higgins went to the Canton Police Station—where he worked from—after leaving the Albert home, though he was off duty and had been drinking. (He says he was reshuffling cars.) He spent much of the following day, a Saturday when he was still off duty, there—passing through the garage where Read’s car was eventually kept—until about 6 p.m. The federal investigation found a 22-second call between Albert and Higgins at 2:22 a.m.—five minutes before McCabe’s alleged “hos long to die in cold” search. The men said that both the dialing and pickup of those calls were “butt dials.”

Though the federal findings were disclosed, Morrissey appealed to Cannone days before the trial began to prohibit mention of the federal investigation in court, arguing that it would be prejudicial. Cannone approved the request, meaning Read’s lawyers could not so much as utter the letters “FBI” before the jury. When questioning forensic reconstructionists hired by the Department of Justice, for example, the most Jackson could say was that they were hired by an independent agency. Several jurors reportedly took that to mean they worked for an insurance company.

Then there was the Adams campaign. The future mayor hung out with James Harden and La La Anthony one night, Strauss and Tepperberg until 1:30 a.m. the next, and Charli and Dixie D’Amelio the next. And each time, he was brought to the club by member Ronn Torossian, the controversial PR maven who’s repped the Eric Trump Foundation and Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis.

Torossian’s close with Sartiano too.

“I’ve known him more than 20 years, and in many ways he’s one of these quiet geniuses you never see coming,” Torossian told me.

Zero Bond has quite the legit collection of art on the walls. Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were easy choices, given the NoHo connection: The Andy Warhol Foundation is a block away, and the Keith Haring Foundation is housed in his former studio on the fifth floor of 676 Broadway—the building directly next to Zero Bond. But Sartiano went a step further and asked Gagosian sales and artist liaison Sophia Cohen, daughter of Mets owner and hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, to curate a pretty serious contemporary art program.

Cohen said that Sartiano reminds her of giant titans of industry in terms of his skill for delegation.

“The reason why Zero Bond’s so successful is that Scott really wanted to mold a lot of worlds together,” she said.

The work with Cohen was one of the qualifications Sartiano cited when Adams’s staff asked for a CV in advance of naming him the mayor’s representative to the board of The Metropolitan Museum.

Sartiano was soon invited to swank dinners with his fellow trustees, including one for the mayor attended by Alejandro Santo Domingo, financier Blair Effron, collectors Catie Marron and Merryl Tisch, and billionaire Met donor Oscar Tang.

Sartiano is self-aware enough to know that he’s not like the other board members, and he doesn’t seem worried.

“My training was a little different,” he said. “I was more in the cultural institution of food and beverage. Which is part of culture in New York City.”

Sartiano has made it clear that he’ll back Adams for reelection next year. But what happens if a mayor with a 28 percent approval rating can’t win again? Challengers are lining up. Former comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer said he might face off against Adams. Ousted governor Andrew Cuomo has flirted with a run as well.

While finishing up the Dover sole at his Mercer Hotel restaurant, I thought back to one of Sartiano’s first press clippings in a career of getting ink, a story in Columbia College Today from January 2004 that has this as a lede: “Scott Sartiano, ’97, thought he’d end up as a politician.”

I asked him about his ambitions these days. He said he’d like to open Zero Bond in eight markets and open Sartiano’s in 25. (This spring, Zero Bond’s early efforts to eventually open a seasonal incarnation in East Hampton were met with fierce opposition from some locals.)

“That’s it. Just raise my kids, build New York City,” he said. “Maybe run for mayor.”

After our tour of the future Zero Bond space in Las Vegas, Sartiano changed into a suit for dinner at Delilah, a West Hollywood supper club where Drake hosted his 30th birthday that has been replicated at the Wynn. The Vegas edition is twice the size, sporting oodles of marble and four gigantic golden brass palm trees. The entire place had been bought out for Super Bowl weekend by DraftKings, the sports betting platform with a market cap of nearly $20 billion.

Sartiano introduced me to the restaurant’s owners, H.wood Group founders John Terzian and Brian Toll. Sartiano knew the general manager, and the bartenders, and the table of high rollers. Down in the cabaret lounge, a manager said that Justin Bieber, whom I’d last seen jumping around shirtless yelling about Ice Spice, would be performing later. When dinner was over, Sartiano retired to the bar, where the crowd included Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and Glen Powell. Dinner segued into a party, with a crew setting up the stage for guest performers. At one point I attempted to take a seat at what I was sure was the worst table in the restaurant but was told even that was reserved. Cory Gamble and Kris Jenner would arrive and sit there in short order.

At a certain point, Sartiano suggested that we check out another venue at the Wynn, XS, the ultra-opulent 40,000-square-foot venue that for years has been among the highest-grossing nightclubs on the planet. Despite the fact that XS was definitely the most peak Vegas place that a NoHo guy could possibly end up at the night before the Super Bowl, Sartiano really wanted to go. He had to chase the juice.

When he arrived, there was a scrum of people clearly uninvited trying to get in, and Sartiano told the people at the door who he was. Within seconds there was a handler taking us through various checkpoints around a crowd of thousands. He passed rows of tables, each secured for an average of $30,000 a pop, until arriving at the base of the DJ booth where a very friendly Alex Pall, of the Chainsmokers, was offering beer and multiple rounds of tequila shots.

Pall and the other Chainsmoker, Drew Taggert, were actually about to DJ themselves. He pulled Sartiano with him, and the booth was a strange consortium of the 1 percent and dance-music enthusiasts. In one corner was once again Josh Kushner, and not far from him was his friend Mikey Hess, who was now joined by his father, John Hess, who runs the namesake fossil fuel company. Not far off was Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who works his own DJ shtick on the weekends.

I looked at Sartiano. This had been his perch for decades. On a certain level, he loved it; this was the epitome of fun for the richest people in America. But he also missed his kids, missed his friends, missed the vibe that he had built in a big downtown loft in Manhattan. I asked him if this is what he wanted for Zero Bond at the Wynn.

“These people, yes,” he screamed, motioning to the VIPs in the booth.

“These people,” Sartiano said. “But not here.”

This story has been updated.

A 1911 PHOTOGRAPH shows Madam C.J. Walker in the driver’s seat of an automobile portering a carful of women—a veritable metaphor for collective success. At the time Walker had recently incorporated her haircare enterprise, which ultimately made her one of the nation’s first Black millionaires. As the Louisiana native later told Booker T. Washington, “I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing goods and preparations.… I have built my own factory on my own ground.” Walker trained “hair culturists” at the Lelia College of Beauty Culture (named after her daughter, A’Lelia) and brought the “talented tenth” of intelligentsia and wealth into her orbit. Renowned for their fantastic glamour, the two Walkers lived not far from the Rockefellers at their estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. After C.J.’s death in 1919, her two Harlem town houses continued to thrive under A’Lelia as places for conversation about art, culture, and politics.

Madam C.J. Walker’s beauty salon, photographed by James Van Der Zee in 1929.JAMES VAN DER ZEE ARCHIVE, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.

Based on the Baroque-era gatherings of Madame de Pompadour, of the famous steepled hair, the word salon carried a double meaning in Walker’s beauty parlors, as seen in a 1929 photograph by James Van Der Zee. The clientele, in kitten heels, bob cuts, and finger waves, coolly converse over tea.

This view of cosmopolitan life is one of many in “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” opening this month at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by Denise Murrell, the exhibition convenes the era’s thinkers and visionaries: Marian Anderson, resplendent in red, painted by Laura Wheeler Waring; Zora Neale Hurston in a pastel by Aaron Douglas; Paul Robeson immortalized in bronze; and Josephine Baker on film. Van Der Zee’s roving lens is particularly attuned to the magnificence of African diasporic communities—a transgender person in a fur-trimmed ensemble evokes avenues for acceptance in the era—and the subdued scene at Walker’s is just as central to the glitz.

Beauty shops are a mainstay of neighborhood garrulity, sites for transformation where the fresh coif brings its own twist of renaissance. Kerry James Marshall’s 2012 painting School of Beauty, School of Culture shows a salon at its most boisterous: where children play on the wood floor and posters of Lauryn Hill and Chris Ofili share space with advertisements for Dark & Lovely hair color. Hair is also a recurring topos in Jessica Spence’s graphic, vivid paintings. Six Hours (2017), shown here, alludes to a kind of durational performance that takes place in a braid shop in Westchester County, New York—just a short drive from Walker’s Renaissance Revival manse, where the likes of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois gathered. Spence, who notes Marshall as an influence, attended a 2019 salon, Encyclopédie, in Brooklyn, where a new generation discussed the overlapping worlds of media, art, and culture. In a sense, it was a milieu that Walker herself would soon rejoin, with the 2020 Netflix miniseries Self Made, starring Octavia Spencer. The entrepreneur finally got the gleaming Hollywood treatment, and the stylist in Spence’s painting, wearing her crystal-studded apron, does too.