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Dumb as a bag of gavels
Little League baseball is nobody’s idea of a legal education, but wisdom can be delivered in strange shapes and places, including the bleecher seats at the Stuyvesant Town housing complex’s diamond on the East Side. It was there some 30-odd years ago, while watching my kid play at being Babe Ruth, that I made the acquaintance of a Wall Street lawyer and fellow parent. We stayed in touch off and on, and now that I’ve moved into a three-month sublet on the Upper West Side, he was one of the first people I called.
“How do you explain Judge Merchan?” I asked him. Like most lawyers everywhere, he is a fount of gossip, much of it caustic, and didn’t mind in the least speculating about the judge who shaped both trial and guilty verdict in Donald Trump’s so-called ‘hush money’ case. His appraisal of the judge was as simple as things get in New York City: “They needed someone to make the conviction happen, and he was willing to do it.”
“They needed someone to make the conviction happen, and…
The September 2024 issue of our magazine is now available via our website and in newsagents. You can click here to view the contents. Digital subscribers can enjoy the PDF and online articles now, and print subscribers will receive their hardcopies in the mail.
Sep 02 2024
0 mins
The Society of Jesus mourns the death of Father Gerald (“Gerry”) O’Collins SJ AC. Fr O’Collins died in Melbourne on Thursday 22 August at the age of 93. He had been a Jesuit for 74 years and a priest for 61 years.
Aug 31 2024
3 mins
How could it not be the Jews? That was the immediate surmise of, let us be frank, noxiously aggressive bigots and anti-Semites. Tayah’s restaurant was in Caulfield, the heart of Jewish Melbourne, there was a synagogue nearby.
Aug 30 2024
4 mins