Closing Argument Defending and Befriending John Gotti, and Other Legal Battles I Have Waged

1 His great hand engulfing mine, hoisting my little boy's body up above the waves: That's how I remember Murray, my father. He was a big man, six foot three inches, 215 pounds of heart and brawn. He was not only my father but also what many fathers are not--my father figure. Murray was also my friend, although it's hard to recall him as such when I was growing up, disciplinarian that he was. I remember him telling me that my only true friends in life would be my parents. He was right, wasn't he? I mean, there's no limit to the love and protection afforded by your parents--the love of any other must be limited by self-interest, no? Or is this only the ranting of one paranoid lawyer-cop to his paranoid lawyer son? A legacy of vigilance, passed from centuries of pogrom victims in Lithuania, Hungary, and Austria, to my grandparents Irving and Bertha, and Harry and Sadie in the new world, and from their generation to Murray and Selma, who offered it to me. A legacy of loneliness, a fitting foundation for the egocentricity, pervasive distrust, and maniacal single-mindedness required of a successful trial lawyer. I was born on April 29, 1948, in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the first son of the first son of the first son. Selma, my mother, was fond of recounting (amid the confirming nods and clucks of my grandmothers, Bertha and Sadie), as she'd bathe me or tuck me into bed, how she'd selected me herself from among all the other children at the hospital, how there'd been no more beautiful infant than I, no child so clearly special, "supernatural even." "I'll show you photos--you'll faint," the women in my family would aver with rolling eyes as I grew up. "You were special, number one double plus." So what can I say? I had a destiny to fulfill, and a kid can't safely turn his back on destiny. At the age of twelve, in the late nineteenth century, Murray's father, my grandpa Irving, arrived in this country from Vilna, Lithuania, with his own father, for whom I am named. Irving was big like his son Murray. He seemed even bigger to me, as I was growing up. He married Bertha, whose family arrived in New York from Hungary at about the same time as the Cutlers; no Tinkerbell herself, standing nearly six feet, she and Irving seemed perfectly matched to my child's eye--two Tolkien-like giants from a kingdom before the dawn of time, come to the new world to establish a new kingdom where I would reign. I recall Irving as a tough man, even tougher than my father, walking around Borough Park where he and Bertha resided (or West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, where he had a little shop manufacturing leather bands for hats and caps), smoking a big cigar in an orange cigar holder that he'd remove from time to time, with a massive bearlike paw, from where it protruded between huge upper and lower sets of teeth. He cared nothing for how he might appear to others--neither neat nor solicitous--and he was no doting grandfather but rather a gruff, protective presence whose brusque benevolence was mitigated by (as Murray and Selma would tell me) Bertha's warmth. In 1950, when I was only two, Bertha died of stomach cancer (which eventually claimed my father as well in 1994). I have sorely regretted not having had an opportunity to get to know her before she passed away. Years later, when I was a teenager, Irving remarried to Gertie, who was a kindly woman, but she was never my grandma. My mother's parents, Harry and Sadie, who emigrated from a small town in Austria at roughly the same time (and age, twelve years old), lived nearby in Borough Park. Their house became a second home to me, a place I truly loved, where I would often go after school, a place of candy, cookies, attention--and freedom from my father's discipline. It was a place of learning as well, where Sadie taught me to multiply and to tell time. She was by far the funniest, most pleasant woman I've met to this day, with a gCutler, Bruce is the author of 'Closing Argument Defending and Befriending John Gotti, and Other Legal Battles I Have Waged', published 2003 under ISBN 9780609608319 and ISBN 0609608312.