Thomas Adcock - Brooklyn Noir 3 - Nothing but the Truth

“When we finish this project — remember, we got something more for you, Larry”

“What? A game show?”

“No. It’s a movie script we picked up. White Heat meets Diff’rent Strokes. A gritty urban story, only there’s no grit yet. We need you to — you know — Brooklyn it up.”

“Brooklyn it up?”

“Yeah. Think you can handle it?”

“Piece of cake.”

“Money’s good too.”

“I’m all over it.”

Editors’ note [2] The author of this report, Jess Korman, is a shy person. He is of the same quirky generation of television writers as Neil “Doc” Simon, with whom he shares two impulses: recounting life experience comedically, as a means of relieving pain through laughter; and hiding behind alter egos. In writing his memoir, Jess Korman employs assorted aliases. In the case of “The Creamflake Kid,” a true tale (though some names have been changed), the character Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, a.k.a. Loo-Loo, is indeed the alter ego of a shy person .

Borough Park

Judge Gerald Garson, a cigar-smoking, suntanning Brooklyn jurist, was known to hold court in chambers. After sliding off his heavy overcoat, he would strut around in his crisp, dark suit and talk nonstop at whoever would listen. Those who needed favors from the foul-mouthed seventy-year-old would give him their full attention. They’d laugh on cue.

Attorney Paul Siminovsky — young enough to be Garson’s son — was a sorry excuse for a lawyer, but a professional ass-kisser. When he wasn’t wining and dining Garson at the Brooklyn Marriott hotel’s bar/restaurant — feeding an estimated $10,000 worth of food and drink to the judge’s belly over the years — Siminovsky was hanging out with the jurist in chambers, right off the courtroom Garson controlled at 210 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. The two men — Garson, the product of a well-connected Democratic family, and Siminovsky, who hoped to be adopted — shared the same sense of humor. For a while, they acted like a couple of frat boys.

The senior Garson sat behind his big desk one day in March 2003, making lewd and demeaning remarks about women, some of whom he was railroading in his courtroom. The sophomoric Siminovsky, then forty-six, popped candy into his mouth, indulging himself from the bowl on the judge’s desk.

“Rose Ann C. Branda. What’s the C . for?” Garson mused.

“I don’t want to say what comes to mind,” Siminovsky retorted.

“Cuchita,” the judge said.

“Cuchita?” Siminovsky asked.

“ Cuchita banana ...” the judge sang, as he waved his hands in the air from his chair.

Siminovsky laughed on cue.

Siminovsky was at home inside the judge’s private parlor, plopping himself into a black leather chair, crossing his legs, throwing back his big curly head, and laughing all the way to the bank.

Siminovsky garnered more jobs from Garson than any other lawyer. When kids needed to be represented in contentious custody battles, which paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, he was Garson’s first pick.

The powerful matrimonial judge — who decided the financial and familial fates of desperate men and women in highly disputed divorce cases — had a reputation of favoring those with brawn over those with breasts.

Anyone familiar with Garson’s courtroom knew Siminovsky was on a winning streak there. No wonder. Judge and jester hammered out cases behind closed doors — without opposing counsel, blatantly violating rules of fairness.

Siminovsky once told Garson to give a house to his client, Avraham Levi, who was getting divorced. And the judge guaranteed him a win.

“The house. Oh, you gotta order custody. His father owns half of it and he owns a quarter of it,” Siminovsky urged the judge at one point.

“Oh, you mean your guy,” Garson said.

“Yeah,” Siminovsky said.

“I’ll order, I’ll award, I’ll award him exclusive use on [the house],” Garson assured Siminovsky. “She’s fucked...”

Frieda Hanimov, a mother of three, feared she too would get screwed by Garson. Hanimov, a nurse who had reared three well-mannered children with her diamonddealer husband, noted that Garson was so abrasive to her in the courtroom one might think she was a crack-addled streetwalker.

“I’m a mother, three kids, married to a multimillionaire, and I lose everything. How could a mother lose?” she said. “I’m not a drug addict. I’m not a prostitute. How could you not be suspicious? I knew this judge was not normal.”

The feisty Israeli émigré was convinced her ex-husband had fixed the outcome of their custody case. And she was determined to keep her kids at any cost.

Hanimov, a sociable woman who made friends easily, had already been warned by Levi’s wife, Sigal Levi — who was fighting for her own children before Garson — that rumor had it wealthy men were able to fix their cases before the judgmental jurist. All they had to do was pay off the judge through a middleman, Nissim Elmann — a close associate of Siminovsky, who not so coincidentally had been appointed guardian for at least one of Hanimov’s children.

Elmann, a disheveled businessman who wore a yarmulke and an unbuttoned shirt under his tie, sold wholesale electronics just a few short miles from the courthouse. He worked out of a graffiti-emblazoned warehouse, which served as a front for a second lucrative business: brokering divorces and custody battles in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish communities.

A desperate but daring Hanimov — with more verve than the Energizer bunny — walked into the warehouse to see Elmann. At risk were her three priceless jewels: fourteen-yearold Yaniv, ten-year-old Sharon, and five-year-old Natti. She had given up everything in her divorce for them.

“They are my soul,” said Hanimov, who feared she would lose all three to her husband. He had already accused her of beating their eldest son with a belt — an accusation she tearfully denied, and of which she was ultimately cleared.

Elmann was a smooth-talking salesman, and used his shtick to convince men and women that they needed his services to get the upper hand on their soon-to-be exes in Garson’s courtroom.

“He said, ‘This guy is in my pocket,’ and I was like... I was in shock,” Hanimov said.

When Hanimov left Elmann’s electronics business, DVD Trading on Brooklyn Avenue, the not-so-dumb blonde — who had spoken to the shady businessman in Hebrew — knew that the rumors were true: Elmann was selling far more than DVDs and electronic equipment from his warehouse; he was peddling justice in Garson’s courtroom.

After that first visit, a frantic Hanimov called the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Within days, intrigued investigators had the nurse — very pregnant with her fourth child, the first by her second husband — going undercover, wired for sound.

“I was putting one [electronic bug] in my bag, the other one in my pocket, and the other one in my breast, in my bra,” she said.

This amateur sleuth — whom one movie studio has dubbed the Erin Brockovich of Brooklyn — has now been credited with cracking the biggest corruption case to ever rock the Brooklyn courts. The pregnant mother of three wore wires and captured conversations behind closed doors that would shock the public conscience.

Her heart raced as she made her way back into the salesman’s office, the metal gate of the desolate warehouse closing her off to the outside world, including the investigators sitting outside in an unmarked car.

“If he knew I had that device on me, he would shoot me on the spot. I was nine months pregnant,” Hanimov said.