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…