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Synopsis
Indicted by the state of New Jersey for the murder of retired Colonel William Farber. Dr Carl Coppolino had been having an affair with Farber's wife, Marjorie.
Did he kill Marjorie's husband and his own wife so he could marry Marjorie? If he did, he may have regretted it, for Marjorie Farber became the prosecution's star witness, claiming her former lover had hypnotized her into becoming an unwilling accomplice in the death of her husband.
Famed attorney F. Lee Bailey led the defense and concluded that Marjorie Farber was a classic case of a woman scorned. But did the jury agree?
Release date: June 14, 2014
Publisher: Orion
Print pages: 224
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No Deadly Drug
John D. MacDonald
Each notorious trial in America creates a ready audience for books and magazine articles about the trial. Avid followers of the annals of contemporary crime, their appetites
whetted by extensive newspaper, television and radio coverage, buy the books and the magazines in order to learn more about what happened, what the people were really like.
Yet, for the most part, such books are a disappointment as they contain very little more than did the newspapers, and they are limited in their scope and effect by the author’s special
pleading, as it is far easier to write about a trial from the presumption of guilt—or of innocence—than to write about it with the total objectivity which includes both
presumptions.
Only from such an objective point of view can the adversary system of justice in the notorious trials of our times be properly examined. Were there not two sides, each worth presentation, there
would be no trial, and no jury to sway with courtroom skills.
This book is intended to give the reader a seat in court during many many days of legal proceedings in the twin indictments for murder brought against Dr. Carl A. Coppolino by the State of New
Jersey and the State of Florida. In this sense it is more an investigation of the apparatus of criminal justice in our times than it is a study of a specific trial.
All evidence and testimony from official sources has been kept in balance, so edited as to favor neither the defense nor the State. In the tactics and the strategies of both the defense and the
State, where the jury is led into areas of plausibility and emotional logic, many devices are used to invert such argumentation and examine it from the point of view of both innocence and guilt, in
much the same manner one might expect the individual juror to weigh and test the structures of evidence and testimony.
To this degree the reader may play the part of a juror, but a juror with the freedom to roam the courthouse corridors, talk with the reporters and the attorneys, mingle with the spectators, and
visit the places where the incidents given in the trial testimony took place.
It is not the purpose of this book to solve mysteries, or provide clues. In the adversary procedure the question of actual guilt or innocence becomes, except to the lay observer, a purely
secondary consideration of mild and passing interest. The name of the game is combat, endlessly subtle and intriguing. The thrusts and parries during combat confuse rather than illuminate.
Does our system of criminal justice, particularly as it applies to cases given national publicity, need certain adjustments and changes? We hope that the reader will not so lose himself in the
compulsive game of weighing testimony and evidence that he will fail to see that this is our primary purpose.
On the first day of September 1966, Dr. Carl A. Coppolino stood beside his chief counsel, F. Lee Bailey, in one of the new courtrooms in the Sarasota County Court House, in
Florida, and, as a necessary part of the ceremony of arraignment, listened as State Attorney Frank Schaub read to him, in front of the bench where Circuit Judge Lynn Silvertooth presided, the
indictment as handed down by the grand jury.
Dr. Coppolino’s wife, Carmela, had been buried in the Musetto family plot in Boonton, New Jersey, in St. Mary’s Cemetery exactly one year ago to the day.
Frank Schaub read the strangely clumsy and archaic document with no expression in his voice. His was a harsh and gravelly voice, and the words fell heavily, like stones.
“In the name and by the authority of the State of Florida: the grand jurors of the County of Sarasota charge that Carl Coppolino on the 28th day of August, 1965, in the
County of Sarasota, State of Florida, did unlawfully and from a premeditated design to effect the death of Carmela Coppolino, make an assault on the said Carmela Coppolino, and in some way and
manner and by some means, instruments and weapons to the grand jurors unknown, he, the said Carl Coppolino did then and there, unlawfully and from a premeditated design to effect the death of the
said Carmela Coppolino, inflict on and create in the said Carmela Coppolino certain mortal injuries and a mortal sickness, a further description whereof is to the grand jurors unknown, of which
mortal injuries and sickness, to the grand jurors unknown, the said Carmela Coppolino then and there died and so the said Carl Coppolino did, in the manner and form aforesaid, unlawfully and from a
premeditated design to effect the death of the said Carmela Coppolino, kill and murder the said Carmela Coppolino, contrary to the form of the statute in such cases made and provided and against
the peace and dignity of the State of Florida.”
To those in the spectator section of the courtroom, looking at the backs of the defendant and his attorney, as this odd document—verbose, archaic, and clumsy of
grammar—was read as part of the routine of the official arraignment, the two men, both in dark suits and white shirts, both dark of hair, made a strange contrast.
Carl, several inches taller than Bailey, stood in his habitual slouch. He was leaned down by his time in jail. His glossy hair was freshly trimmed. His shirt collar was loose around the pale and
slender neck, and his suit jacket looked a half size too large for his dwindled frame. From the rear he looked like a youth of twenty.
F. Lee Bailey stood very erect. Even when motionless he exudes a flavor of beefy energy, of dramatic command. His skull is large under the dark and wavy hair. Head, shoulders, and upper torso
are oversized for a man his height. He has the bull neck of the physical man, florid and rough textured.
From the rear they could have been the fifty-year-old dad standing beside his twenty-year-old son in time of trouble.
But after State Attorney Frank Schaub finished reading the indictment and the two men turned, their faces brought them back into chronological focus, the thirty-four-year-old defendant, the
thirty-three-year-old attorney—Bailey with his theatrical face, heavy bones, blue eyes that slant downward at the outer corners as do the dark expressive brows, a small mouth, a general look
of a slightly gamey handsomeness, so that one might cast him as the hard-drinking, womanizing private eye in a low budget television serial—Coppolino with a swarthy and narrow face, a great
beak of Italianate nose, a quick, charming, and expressive smile for his wife sitting in the spectator section, lift of brows, shrug, elegant gesture of one arm, and grace in the way he takes his
seat again.
On the morning of July 9, 1966, the Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, Florida, had carried on page one a story headed 2-STATE PROBE LAUNCHED IN DEATH OF SARASOTA DOCTOR.
This was the first mention of the Coppolino cases in the public press.
On July 15 a follow-up story quoted Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer as saying that the investigation had begun in November of 1965. “I worked on the case by myself at first because it
was so weird as to be unbelievable.”
In the same story it was reported that William Strode, the Assistant State Attorney for Sarasota County, had called a grand jury to meet July 22 at 9 A.M. Mr. Strode said
the law prevented him from making any comment on two previous grand jury sessions which had considered an indictment in the Coppolino case. Seven persons had testified at the first session. That
grand jury’s term had expired June 20, and a new jury had been empaneled on July 8.
On July 21, in Freehold, New Jersey, a Monmouth County Grand Jury returned an indictment of murder in the first degree in the death of Lieutenant Colonel William E. Farber on July 30, 1963, in
Middletown, New Jersey. The grand jury returned this indictment after hearing the medical testimony regarding the eleven-hour autopsy performed the previous Saturday on the colonel’s body by
Dr. Milton Helpern, Medical Examiner for the City of New York. The New Jersey Prosecutor, Vincent P. Keuper, requested that the indictment be impounded by the Superior Court until the unnamed
person indicted was taken into custody.
On Friday, July 22, the Sarasota County Grand Jury was in session all day and heard eight witnesses, then recessed until 9 A.M. the following Thursday, August 2.
During the day, while the grand jury was in session, County Judge John Graham issued a fugitive warrant for the arrest of Dr. Carl A. Coppolino, at the request of the State of New Jersey.
Coppolino was arrested at his home at 3263 Pine Valley Drive that evening by sheriff’s deputies. He was brought in wearing bermuda shorts and a sports shirt, and complained of feeling unwell.
After he was booked and advised of his rights, he was examined by Dr. William Page and Dr. William Douglass who recommended hospitalization. He was taken to the Sarasota Memorial Hospital and
placed under guard in a private room.
State Attorney Frank Schaub was phoned at his home by a newspaper reporter who suspected that Mr. Schaub might not have been advised in advance of the arrest by the Sheriff’s Department.
Mr. Schaub would make no comment.
On Monday morning, July 25, Frank Schaub called the Sarasota County Grand Jury back into session, and at twenty minutes past noon the foreman of the grand jury, Dallas Dort, returned to Judge
Lynn N. Silvertooth an indictment accusing Coppolino of first degree murder in the death of his wife, Carmela, on August 28, 1965. On Monday afternoon Coppolino was served with the Florida warrant
in his hospital room. At 9:30 P.M., after examination once again by Doctors Page and Douglass, Coppolino was brought back to the county jail from the hospital less than two
miles away.
On that same Monday, in New Jersey, Vincent Keuper announced that Dr. Coppolino was the person indicted for the murder of Colonel Farber, said that the colonel had died of a double fracture of
the cricoid cartilage in the throat, and that the State of New Jersey wished to try Coppolino first.
Coppolino, in the fall and winter of 1966, had an unusually boyish manner for a man in his early thirties. In repose his face was moody and masklike. But there was a quick effervescence about
him, and an engaging social manner. His voice is pitched rather high and is light in texture. He speaks rapidly, and often wittily. In his fine-boned physical grace and his casual slouch, there was
a flavor of elegance about him, an elegance frequently in contrast with that attentive, patronizing and slightly skeptical manner which is so typical of young physicians that one might almost begin
to suspect it is taught as a required course in all medical schools.
When asked by the Court how he pled, the accused man stood mute at the advice of his attorney who contended that one could not enter a plea to such an indictment because of the improper wording
of it. Judge Silvertooth then instructed the clerk of the court to enter a plea of not guilty on behalf of the defendant.
F. Lee Bailey had entered the case through a coincidence of friendship. He knew Dr. William Joseph Bryan of Los Angeles through having attended a seminar on the legal aspects of hypnosis given
by Bryan, the president of the American Society of Hypnosis. Subsequently Bailey had brought Bryan to Boston to hypnotize his client, the Boston Strangler, in an attempt to find out the deep
motivations behind Albert DiSalvo’s acts. In November of 1965, accompanied by Mary, his bride of a month, Carl Coppolino had gone out to Las Vegas to sit in on a panel discussion of medical
hypnosis at Bryan’s invitation. In July of 1966, when Bryan read of Carl’s simultaneous indictment for two murders in two states, he had phoned Mary Coppolino and spoken with her, and
then had located F. Lee Bailey and asked him to consider taking over Coppolino’s defense. Bailey was on a case at the time and when he had finished he flew to Sarasota, talked to Mary and
Carl, and officially entered the case on August 8, Monday, after spending four hours with Dr. Coppolino on Sunday. At that time James “Red” McEwen of Tampa, then vacationing in Wyoming,
was Coppolino’s defense counsel. On the following Saturday, August 13, McEwen talked with Coppolino at the county jail, and then announced on Monday that Bailey would be the chief defense
counsel in the case, and he would assist Bailey.
At about that same time James Russ, a prominent young defense attorney in the Orlando, Florida, area, was engaged to represent Mary Coppolino in the matter of her refusal to answer any questions
put to her by the State Attorney, Frank Schaub, with the understanding that he too would assist F. Lee Bailey in the defense of Coppolino.
During the few weeks between Bailey’s appearance on the scene and the preliminary hearing, there occurred the expected snowstorm of writs and motions and petitions, made more complex by
the fact of two indictments, the New Jersey fugitive warrant, and the attempt to have Coppolino extradited to stand trial in New Jersey first. Usually these maneuverings are a sort of abstract
warfare which do not involve the emotions of the laywers on either side. But it soon became evident to those who were following the action closely, and had a chance to talk to the lawyers, that a
very genuine and very strong distaste for each other was shaping up between Frank Schaub and F. Lee Bailey, and could be expected to reach full flower during the preliminary hearing.
Frank Schaub, then forty-five, had been State Attorney for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit for six years. As a prosecutor, in addition to hundreds of lesser offenses each year, he had handled
eighty-two homicide cases. He had asked for a first degree murder conviction nineteen times. Coppolino was his twentieth. Eleven times the jury returned a verdict of murder in the first degree.
Five times, including Coppolino, they returned a verdict of second degree. Once the verdict was third degree, and once it was manslaughter. Appeals were pending at that time in the remaining two
cases.
Twenty-nine times he had sought a conviction of murder in the second degree, getting it eighteen times, getting a manslaughter verdict nine times, and getting one verdict of not guilty. The
remaining case resulted in the accused being adjudged incompetent to stand trial.
Thirty-four times he had sought manslaughter convictions and in thirty-two of those cases the jury returned a guilty verdict. The other two defendants were acquitted.
To handle this vast work load Schaub had six Assistant State Attorneys, one in each of the six major counties in the eight county circuit, and one investigator. His annual salary was fixed at
$14,500. It is an elective office. He was elected to it in 1960 by a narrow margin, and won by a substantial plurality in 1964. Though he is entitled to maintain a private law practice, his sixty
hour week on the job makes it impossible. He drives about 35,000 miles a year within the circuit.
Born in Mount Vernon, New York, he received his BS in Business Administration at the University of Idaho, after an interruption of four years in the Navy where he served as an instructor in
athletics in the U.S. and overseas. He moved to Florida because of a severe sinus condition, enrolled in Stetson College of Law in DeLand, Florida, and got his law degree in 1948. He spent one year
in a large Tampa law firm, moved down to Bradenton, Florida, in 1950, married a Tampa girl in 1951, ran for Justice of the Peace in 1952 on the Democratic ticket and held that elective post until
1960. One of his duties in that position was to act as judge of the small claims court.
This public prosecutor, this father of five young children, was as unlike F. Lee Bailey as a lawyer can be, in almost every respect but one. In his own way he was as forceful and determined and
dominant a personality as Bailey. In a small group, when he was silent, you could feel the force of his presence, just as one could with Bailey.
But, unlike Bailey, there seemed to be little lightness or wit or flexibility in Frank Schaub. At the time of the preliminary hearing he was a strong-looking man with a beetling shelf of brow,
dark brown hair, pale eyes, a solid jaw, and a rather narrow range of facial expression.
He could look gloweringly annoyed and impatient, or full of injured indignation, or warily suspicious, or full of bland satisfaction, and that was about the extent of it. His habitual expression
was one of an unreadable impassivity. There was about him, to many observers, that very faint but perceptible flavor of kinetic violence, often an attribute of a man who has outgrown or has learned
to control an explosive temper.
He favored dark brown suits, brown shoes, neckties which blended sedately with that basic color scheme. He had an air of restless impatience at times, which would not be unexpected in a man with
dozens of other cases pending throughout the circuit.
In contrast to Bailey’s elegant and articulate ability to select the exact word and the most telling phrase, Frank Schaub appeared to have a tendency to lose himself in the thickets of his
own sentence structure, and then club his way out by brute force, letting the dangling phrases fall where they might. In contrast to Bailey’s all-encompassing attention which seemingly could
absorb, sort and file wildly diverse and simultaneous happenings and conversations, Frank Schaub appeared to be unaware of everything except that which he was focused on at that particular time. As
a consequence it often appeared that he had failed to see or grasp an unexpected and momentary opening or advantage.
Whereas Bailey would alter strategy and tactics almost instantaneously to fit the changing pattern of the moment, Frank Schaub gave the impression many times of continuing to pound away at a
target no longer available until at last he had finished that portion of the plan he had previously prepared. Bailey, using an exceptional memory, used no notes during direct and cross-examination,
whereas Frank Schaub worked with yellow legal pad in hand, with most of his questions, particularly in direct examination appearing to have been carefully written out in advance.
Bailey would accept and immediately adjust to the unexpected revelation during examination which seemed to be at odds with his preconception of past events. Frank Schaub appeared to have a
strong tendency to ignore the sudden and contradictory bit of testimony as long as he possibly could, apparently considering such surprises to be obstacles rather than opportunities.
It would not be fair nor accurate to term Frank Schaub a plodder. The work load is too heavy to permit him to work up each case in that exhausting detail which a plodding perfectionism would
require. It would perhaps be a usefully descriptive analogy to compare his courtroom strategy and procedure to a bulldozer. He would appear to see and interpret the winding pattern of the trails
ahead, aim himself at what appeared to him to be the logical termination point of the court action, would then lock the machinery in gear and lock the steering, and go grinding and rumbling off
through the brush on a straight course toward his desired destination.
This was the man who opposed F. Lee Bailey in the adversary proceedings in Sarasota, and, the following April, in Naples, Florida, a stubborn and purposeful man, single-minded, giving the
impression of being wary and suspicious of almost all those around him. He was irascible, and often quite abrupt. He was a biggish man with a heavy, soft, leaden voice, a tendency sometimes to
mutter and mumble. He seemed to have a pressing desire, a compulsive urgency to get on with the job at hand and get to the next one with a minimum of flap and waste motion.
As the Coppolino case was in Sarasota County, Schaub was assisted by William C. Strode, who had been the Assistant State Attorney for three years. Unlike the post of State Attorney, the job of
assistant leaves ample time for the private practice of law. Strode is a tall, relaxed, amiable man in his thirties, with a brush-cut and horn-rimmed glasses. He attended the Sarasota public
schools, has an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, and also attended Stetson for his law training. Bill Strode appears younger than he is, has a gentle, engaging, self-deprecatory
humor, and, as the Coppolino affair progressed, he gradually adapted himself to a curiously effective courtroom manner, a kind of sophisticated, ironic, “aw shucks” approach. As one
reporter put it, “The thinking man’s Huck Finn.” Though he was to become totally and desperately involved in the prosecution of the case, he did not become emotionally involved in
the personality clash between Bailey and Schaub.
The arena where the grand jury had met and voted to indict, where Carl Coppolino had been arraigned, and where, on the morning of Monday, September 12, 1966, the preliminary hearing was to
begin, is the bastard offspring of the traditional dignity of courtrooms, and of contemporary motel and show biz architecture. There are no windows, and so the air is a constant fabricated chill,
with a slight odor of chemistry and compressors. In the suspended ceiling of acoustic tile, a low ceiling which contains the conduits and ducts and p.a. system, are countersunk, behind frosted
plastic, thirty-one large lighting fixtures, each filled with four yards of white harsh fluorescent tubing. In the spectator section, with its fifty-three gray, comfortable, upholstered, spring-up
theater seats, and pale vinyl tile floor, the lighting enchances every wrinkle, mole, fingernail and texture with the merciless cruelty of motel bathroom lighting. In the unusually large arena of
the court itself, beyond the dividing barrier of an ornamental rail of teak veneer and brushed aluminum, the lights glare down on wall-to-wall carpeting of a curiously unpleasant shade of red, a
raw hue neither cherry nor tomato, and bounce off that color and illuminate the undersides of chins, of hands, of papers held in the hand, in strange pale pink.
The judge’s bench is high, and sixty feet, perhaps, from the spectator section. To enter court, the judge climbs a small set of steps in his chambers, opens a door behind the high bench
and directly behind his big black chair. The lower witness stand and the large jury box beyond are at the judge’s left. The two very large tables for the prosecution and defense are aligned
across the floor of the court, well back from the bench, with the defense table on the jury side. The bench and the walls are paneled in a medium wood, neither light nor dark. The chairs for the
jury are in black nauga-hide, and so are the chairs for the attorneys. The attorney chairs swivel, and they roll on the red carpeting on brushed aluminum ball casters the size of tennis balls.
Though the architect certainly must have sought a look of permanence and dignity, somehow the courtroom has the flavor of a temporary theatrical solution, as though when the scene is done, the
director satisfied, a crew will convert it to a ship’s lounge or a hotel lobby. And because of the lack of windows, the constant temperature and illumination, when one leaves after the
proceedings and goes down in the tiny little blue and white automatic elevators, as glaringly lighted as the courtroom, and out into the out-of-doors, there is the same sense of
disorientation—and vague guilt—as in coming out of a motion picture to find that it is broad daylight.
This was Judge Silvertooth’s first capital case. Among the several judges of the circuit, he stood next to the bottom rung in seniority. Cases in the circuit are assigned by lot. There is
a small device into which balls of several colors are placed, each color representing a judge of the circuit. Lynn Silvertooth’s color is black. When the Coppolino matter came up, and the
lever on the machine was depressed, the black ball came rolling out.
This assignment system was devised to eliminate the traditional maneuvering of attorneys to have their cases assigned to specific judges, based upon how judges have dealt with similar cases in
the past.
Names like Silvertooth, Silverthorn, Silverstaff are old Florida names, appearing frequently on the dusty rosters of the combat troops Florida sent northward into the Civil War. At age
forty-three at the time fate assigned him the Coppolino matter, Lynn Silvertooth had been a practicing attorney in Sarasota. In March 1964 when population increases made an increase in the number
of judges in the circuit necessary, Governor Farris Bryant appointed Silvertooth to the bench. Silvertooth ran for the office in November 1964, was elected, and was unopposed in the November 1966
election.
Lynn Silvertooth, well over two hundred pounds, gives no impression of softness. He is tall, massive, big-boned, huge in chest and shoulders. As Lynn Silvertooth had played football before
attending the University of Florida, it is highly probable that had not marriage and the Marine Corps changed the timing, and perhaps the motivations, he would have been most useful in a conference
where durability is prized.
Lynn Silvertooth is a calm, amiable, ingratiating man. He has a long broad slope of bland forehead to a jutting ridge of bone over deep-set eyes. His cheekbones are high and solid, his dark hair
straight, skin tone slightly swarthy. One standard question asked by people of the press corps coming down to cover their first Florida trial, and relating the man’s name to his appearance,
was, “Hey, is maybe the judge some kind of Indian?”
Judge Silvertooth is a man oriented to family, good friends, good cigars, fishing, cut-throat poker for small stakes. In social situations he manages to conceal those two factors which made him
an ideal judge in the Coppolino matter in Florida. He has such a calm and absolute and total conviction of his competence to sit on the bench that he can relax while on the bench, allow some
informal latitude, yet interpose the unmistakable iron of natural authority should anyone attempt to misuse the leeway he grants. Secondly, his mind is unexpectedly quick and subtle and complex,
and there is very, very seldom any confusion or inattention on the bench, or any failure to relate the law to the events taking place.
A good example of his gentle and self-deprecatory wit took place in the judge’s chambers in Naples while the jury was deliberating. Several reporters were there, talking to the judge, when
his mother came in. He made introductions and explained that he had never let her come to court when he was presiding, but he had made an exception when she had asked if she could be present when
he read his charge to the jury. As she is a personable and attractive woman, one of the reporters from the north said, “Mrs. Silvertooth, you are much too young a woman to have a son as old
as the judge here.”
Lynn Silvertooth said, “You should have seen me before I was assigned to this case.”
In Sarasota, the preliminary hearing was conducted on the top floor of the new three-story addition to the original courthouse, which, prior to the exercise of tasteless
practicality by several sets of County Commissioners in pasting pale, functional additions onto it, had been a noble and elegant structure, a distinguished adaptation of the best of the
Spanish-Moorish flavor of the nineteen twenties.
It is a comment on contemporary architecture to note that one can walk from the second floor of the old courthouse directly onto the third-floor level of the addition.
The county jail is another appendage affixed to the original building. This hodgepodge occupies one city block on the southeast corner of Ringling Boulevard and Route 301. There, except for
brief periods of hospitalization, Carl Coppolino had been held since his arrest on July 23, fifty-one days earlier. He was in an eight-prisoner complex on the third floor, a space thirty feet by
twelve feet containing two small cells, each with two double bunks, a short hallway, and a day room. The day room contains a table with a bench on either side, a toilet, shower, and a washbasin.
Each morning the bunk cells are unlocked and the prisoners can leave them and go into the day room for a breakfast of cereal, grits, and sausage. The cells each contain a toilet and washbasin.
Once in the day room the prisoners are not allowed to go back to their bunk cells during the day, or to sleep. They are given sandwiches at noon, and a hot meal in the evening. They can read
magazines and books, play cards, talk, write letters during the day. Toiletry items must be in plastic rather than glass containers. They are allowed underwear, shoes and a razor, and provided with
twill coveralls. They may have a personal radio. The county jail is not air conditioned. In the August heat felony prisoners can stand at the open windows and look out through the bars, hear the
traffic sounds, hear the afternoon baseball and night baseball sounds from Payne Park, about two homeruns away, hear the clamor of the evening birds settling into the half-grown trees along that
side of Ringling Boulevard. Coppolino’s area had its windows on the south, and he could look across Ringling Boulevard at the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, at the stubby marquee over the side
entrance to the cocktail lounge, and the old-fashioned lettering on the marquee spelling out Mrs. O’LEARY’S and SALOON.
As he was in the maximum security section he was l
whetted by extensive newspaper, television and radio coverage, buy the books and the magazines in order to learn more about what happened, what the people were really like.
Yet, for the most part, such books are a disappointment as they contain very little more than did the newspapers, and they are limited in their scope and effect by the author’s special
pleading, as it is far easier to write about a trial from the presumption of guilt—or of innocence—than to write about it with the total objectivity which includes both
presumptions.
Only from such an objective point of view can the adversary system of justice in the notorious trials of our times be properly examined. Were there not two sides, each worth presentation, there
would be no trial, and no jury to sway with courtroom skills.
This book is intended to give the reader a seat in court during many many days of legal proceedings in the twin indictments for murder brought against Dr. Carl A. Coppolino by the State of New
Jersey and the State of Florida. In this sense it is more an investigation of the apparatus of criminal justice in our times than it is a study of a specific trial.
All evidence and testimony from official sources has been kept in balance, so edited as to favor neither the defense nor the State. In the tactics and the strategies of both the defense and the
State, where the jury is led into areas of plausibility and emotional logic, many devices are used to invert such argumentation and examine it from the point of view of both innocence and guilt, in
much the same manner one might expect the individual juror to weigh and test the structures of evidence and testimony.
To this degree the reader may play the part of a juror, but a juror with the freedom to roam the courthouse corridors, talk with the reporters and the attorneys, mingle with the spectators, and
visit the places where the incidents given in the trial testimony took place.
It is not the purpose of this book to solve mysteries, or provide clues. In the adversary procedure the question of actual guilt or innocence becomes, except to the lay observer, a purely
secondary consideration of mild and passing interest. The name of the game is combat, endlessly subtle and intriguing. The thrusts and parries during combat confuse rather than illuminate.
Does our system of criminal justice, particularly as it applies to cases given national publicity, need certain adjustments and changes? We hope that the reader will not so lose himself in the
compulsive game of weighing testimony and evidence that he will fail to see that this is our primary purpose.
On the first day of September 1966, Dr. Carl A. Coppolino stood beside his chief counsel, F. Lee Bailey, in one of the new courtrooms in the Sarasota County Court House, in
Florida, and, as a necessary part of the ceremony of arraignment, listened as State Attorney Frank Schaub read to him, in front of the bench where Circuit Judge Lynn Silvertooth presided, the
indictment as handed down by the grand jury.
Dr. Coppolino’s wife, Carmela, had been buried in the Musetto family plot in Boonton, New Jersey, in St. Mary’s Cemetery exactly one year ago to the day.
Frank Schaub read the strangely clumsy and archaic document with no expression in his voice. His was a harsh and gravelly voice, and the words fell heavily, like stones.
“In the name and by the authority of the State of Florida: the grand jurors of the County of Sarasota charge that Carl Coppolino on the 28th day of August, 1965, in the
County of Sarasota, State of Florida, did unlawfully and from a premeditated design to effect the death of Carmela Coppolino, make an assault on the said Carmela Coppolino, and in some way and
manner and by some means, instruments and weapons to the grand jurors unknown, he, the said Carl Coppolino did then and there, unlawfully and from a premeditated design to effect the death of the
said Carmela Coppolino, inflict on and create in the said Carmela Coppolino certain mortal injuries and a mortal sickness, a further description whereof is to the grand jurors unknown, of which
mortal injuries and sickness, to the grand jurors unknown, the said Carmela Coppolino then and there died and so the said Carl Coppolino did, in the manner and form aforesaid, unlawfully and from a
premeditated design to effect the death of the said Carmela Coppolino, kill and murder the said Carmela Coppolino, contrary to the form of the statute in such cases made and provided and against
the peace and dignity of the State of Florida.”
To those in the spectator section of the courtroom, looking at the backs of the defendant and his attorney, as this odd document—verbose, archaic, and clumsy of
grammar—was read as part of the routine of the official arraignment, the two men, both in dark suits and white shirts, both dark of hair, made a strange contrast.
Carl, several inches taller than Bailey, stood in his habitual slouch. He was leaned down by his time in jail. His glossy hair was freshly trimmed. His shirt collar was loose around the pale and
slender neck, and his suit jacket looked a half size too large for his dwindled frame. From the rear he looked like a youth of twenty.
F. Lee Bailey stood very erect. Even when motionless he exudes a flavor of beefy energy, of dramatic command. His skull is large under the dark and wavy hair. Head, shoulders, and upper torso
are oversized for a man his height. He has the bull neck of the physical man, florid and rough textured.
From the rear they could have been the fifty-year-old dad standing beside his twenty-year-old son in time of trouble.
But after State Attorney Frank Schaub finished reading the indictment and the two men turned, their faces brought them back into chronological focus, the thirty-four-year-old defendant, the
thirty-three-year-old attorney—Bailey with his theatrical face, heavy bones, blue eyes that slant downward at the outer corners as do the dark expressive brows, a small mouth, a general look
of a slightly gamey handsomeness, so that one might cast him as the hard-drinking, womanizing private eye in a low budget television serial—Coppolino with a swarthy and narrow face, a great
beak of Italianate nose, a quick, charming, and expressive smile for his wife sitting in the spectator section, lift of brows, shrug, elegant gesture of one arm, and grace in the way he takes his
seat again.
On the morning of July 9, 1966, the Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, Florida, had carried on page one a story headed 2-STATE PROBE LAUNCHED IN DEATH OF SARASOTA DOCTOR.
This was the first mention of the Coppolino cases in the public press.
On July 15 a follow-up story quoted Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer as saying that the investigation had begun in November of 1965. “I worked on the case by myself at first because it
was so weird as to be unbelievable.”
In the same story it was reported that William Strode, the Assistant State Attorney for Sarasota County, had called a grand jury to meet July 22 at 9 A.M. Mr. Strode said
the law prevented him from making any comment on two previous grand jury sessions which had considered an indictment in the Coppolino case. Seven persons had testified at the first session. That
grand jury’s term had expired June 20, and a new jury had been empaneled on July 8.
On July 21, in Freehold, New Jersey, a Monmouth County Grand Jury returned an indictment of murder in the first degree in the death of Lieutenant Colonel William E. Farber on July 30, 1963, in
Middletown, New Jersey. The grand jury returned this indictment after hearing the medical testimony regarding the eleven-hour autopsy performed the previous Saturday on the colonel’s body by
Dr. Milton Helpern, Medical Examiner for the City of New York. The New Jersey Prosecutor, Vincent P. Keuper, requested that the indictment be impounded by the Superior Court until the unnamed
person indicted was taken into custody.
On Friday, July 22, the Sarasota County Grand Jury was in session all day and heard eight witnesses, then recessed until 9 A.M. the following Thursday, August 2.
During the day, while the grand jury was in session, County Judge John Graham issued a fugitive warrant for the arrest of Dr. Carl A. Coppolino, at the request of the State of New Jersey.
Coppolino was arrested at his home at 3263 Pine Valley Drive that evening by sheriff’s deputies. He was brought in wearing bermuda shorts and a sports shirt, and complained of feeling unwell.
After he was booked and advised of his rights, he was examined by Dr. William Page and Dr. William Douglass who recommended hospitalization. He was taken to the Sarasota Memorial Hospital and
placed under guard in a private room.
State Attorney Frank Schaub was phoned at his home by a newspaper reporter who suspected that Mr. Schaub might not have been advised in advance of the arrest by the Sheriff’s Department.
Mr. Schaub would make no comment.
On Monday morning, July 25, Frank Schaub called the Sarasota County Grand Jury back into session, and at twenty minutes past noon the foreman of the grand jury, Dallas Dort, returned to Judge
Lynn N. Silvertooth an indictment accusing Coppolino of first degree murder in the death of his wife, Carmela, on August 28, 1965. On Monday afternoon Coppolino was served with the Florida warrant
in his hospital room. At 9:30 P.M., after examination once again by Doctors Page and Douglass, Coppolino was brought back to the county jail from the hospital less than two
miles away.
On that same Monday, in New Jersey, Vincent Keuper announced that Dr. Coppolino was the person indicted for the murder of Colonel Farber, said that the colonel had died of a double fracture of
the cricoid cartilage in the throat, and that the State of New Jersey wished to try Coppolino first.
Coppolino, in the fall and winter of 1966, had an unusually boyish manner for a man in his early thirties. In repose his face was moody and masklike. But there was a quick effervescence about
him, and an engaging social manner. His voice is pitched rather high and is light in texture. He speaks rapidly, and often wittily. In his fine-boned physical grace and his casual slouch, there was
a flavor of elegance about him, an elegance frequently in contrast with that attentive, patronizing and slightly skeptical manner which is so typical of young physicians that one might almost begin
to suspect it is taught as a required course in all medical schools.
When asked by the Court how he pled, the accused man stood mute at the advice of his attorney who contended that one could not enter a plea to such an indictment because of the improper wording
of it. Judge Silvertooth then instructed the clerk of the court to enter a plea of not guilty on behalf of the defendant.
F. Lee Bailey had entered the case through a coincidence of friendship. He knew Dr. William Joseph Bryan of Los Angeles through having attended a seminar on the legal aspects of hypnosis given
by Bryan, the president of the American Society of Hypnosis. Subsequently Bailey had brought Bryan to Boston to hypnotize his client, the Boston Strangler, in an attempt to find out the deep
motivations behind Albert DiSalvo’s acts. In November of 1965, accompanied by Mary, his bride of a month, Carl Coppolino had gone out to Las Vegas to sit in on a panel discussion of medical
hypnosis at Bryan’s invitation. In July of 1966, when Bryan read of Carl’s simultaneous indictment for two murders in two states, he had phoned Mary Coppolino and spoken with her, and
then had located F. Lee Bailey and asked him to consider taking over Coppolino’s defense. Bailey was on a case at the time and when he had finished he flew to Sarasota, talked to Mary and
Carl, and officially entered the case on August 8, Monday, after spending four hours with Dr. Coppolino on Sunday. At that time James “Red” McEwen of Tampa, then vacationing in Wyoming,
was Coppolino’s defense counsel. On the following Saturday, August 13, McEwen talked with Coppolino at the county jail, and then announced on Monday that Bailey would be the chief defense
counsel in the case, and he would assist Bailey.
At about that same time James Russ, a prominent young defense attorney in the Orlando, Florida, area, was engaged to represent Mary Coppolino in the matter of her refusal to answer any questions
put to her by the State Attorney, Frank Schaub, with the understanding that he too would assist F. Lee Bailey in the defense of Coppolino.
During the few weeks between Bailey’s appearance on the scene and the preliminary hearing, there occurred the expected snowstorm of writs and motions and petitions, made more complex by
the fact of two indictments, the New Jersey fugitive warrant, and the attempt to have Coppolino extradited to stand trial in New Jersey first. Usually these maneuverings are a sort of abstract
warfare which do not involve the emotions of the laywers on either side. But it soon became evident to those who were following the action closely, and had a chance to talk to the lawyers, that a
very genuine and very strong distaste for each other was shaping up between Frank Schaub and F. Lee Bailey, and could be expected to reach full flower during the preliminary hearing.
Frank Schaub, then forty-five, had been State Attorney for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit for six years. As a prosecutor, in addition to hundreds of lesser offenses each year, he had handled
eighty-two homicide cases. He had asked for a first degree murder conviction nineteen times. Coppolino was his twentieth. Eleven times the jury returned a verdict of murder in the first degree.
Five times, including Coppolino, they returned a verdict of second degree. Once the verdict was third degree, and once it was manslaughter. Appeals were pending at that time in the remaining two
cases.
Twenty-nine times he had sought a conviction of murder in the second degree, getting it eighteen times, getting a manslaughter verdict nine times, and getting one verdict of not guilty. The
remaining case resulted in the accused being adjudged incompetent to stand trial.
Thirty-four times he had sought manslaughter convictions and in thirty-two of those cases the jury returned a guilty verdict. The other two defendants were acquitted.
To handle this vast work load Schaub had six Assistant State Attorneys, one in each of the six major counties in the eight county circuit, and one investigator. His annual salary was fixed at
$14,500. It is an elective office. He was elected to it in 1960 by a narrow margin, and won by a substantial plurality in 1964. Though he is entitled to maintain a private law practice, his sixty
hour week on the job makes it impossible. He drives about 35,000 miles a year within the circuit.
Born in Mount Vernon, New York, he received his BS in Business Administration at the University of Idaho, after an interruption of four years in the Navy where he served as an instructor in
athletics in the U.S. and overseas. He moved to Florida because of a severe sinus condition, enrolled in Stetson College of Law in DeLand, Florida, and got his law degree in 1948. He spent one year
in a large Tampa law firm, moved down to Bradenton, Florida, in 1950, married a Tampa girl in 1951, ran for Justice of the Peace in 1952 on the Democratic ticket and held that elective post until
1960. One of his duties in that position was to act as judge of the small claims court.
This public prosecutor, this father of five young children, was as unlike F. Lee Bailey as a lawyer can be, in almost every respect but one. In his own way he was as forceful and determined and
dominant a personality as Bailey. In a small group, when he was silent, you could feel the force of his presence, just as one could with Bailey.
But, unlike Bailey, there seemed to be little lightness or wit or flexibility in Frank Schaub. At the time of the preliminary hearing he was a strong-looking man with a beetling shelf of brow,
dark brown hair, pale eyes, a solid jaw, and a rather narrow range of facial expression.
He could look gloweringly annoyed and impatient, or full of injured indignation, or warily suspicious, or full of bland satisfaction, and that was about the extent of it. His habitual expression
was one of an unreadable impassivity. There was about him, to many observers, that very faint but perceptible flavor of kinetic violence, often an attribute of a man who has outgrown or has learned
to control an explosive temper.
He favored dark brown suits, brown shoes, neckties which blended sedately with that basic color scheme. He had an air of restless impatience at times, which would not be unexpected in a man with
dozens of other cases pending throughout the circuit.
In contrast to Bailey’s elegant and articulate ability to select the exact word and the most telling phrase, Frank Schaub appeared to have a tendency to lose himself in the thickets of his
own sentence structure, and then club his way out by brute force, letting the dangling phrases fall where they might. In contrast to Bailey’s all-encompassing attention which seemingly could
absorb, sort and file wildly diverse and simultaneous happenings and conversations, Frank Schaub appeared to be unaware of everything except that which he was focused on at that particular time. As
a consequence it often appeared that he had failed to see or grasp an unexpected and momentary opening or advantage.
Whereas Bailey would alter strategy and tactics almost instantaneously to fit the changing pattern of the moment, Frank Schaub gave the impression many times of continuing to pound away at a
target no longer available until at last he had finished that portion of the plan he had previously prepared. Bailey, using an exceptional memory, used no notes during direct and cross-examination,
whereas Frank Schaub worked with yellow legal pad in hand, with most of his questions, particularly in direct examination appearing to have been carefully written out in advance.
Bailey would accept and immediately adjust to the unexpected revelation during examination which seemed to be at odds with his preconception of past events. Frank Schaub appeared to have a
strong tendency to ignore the sudden and contradictory bit of testimony as long as he possibly could, apparently considering such surprises to be obstacles rather than opportunities.
It would not be fair nor accurate to term Frank Schaub a plodder. The work load is too heavy to permit him to work up each case in that exhausting detail which a plodding perfectionism would
require. It would perhaps be a usefully descriptive analogy to compare his courtroom strategy and procedure to a bulldozer. He would appear to see and interpret the winding pattern of the trails
ahead, aim himself at what appeared to him to be the logical termination point of the court action, would then lock the machinery in gear and lock the steering, and go grinding and rumbling off
through the brush on a straight course toward his desired destination.
This was the man who opposed F. Lee Bailey in the adversary proceedings in Sarasota, and, the following April, in Naples, Florida, a stubborn and purposeful man, single-minded, giving the
impression of being wary and suspicious of almost all those around him. He was irascible, and often quite abrupt. He was a biggish man with a heavy, soft, leaden voice, a tendency sometimes to
mutter and mumble. He seemed to have a pressing desire, a compulsive urgency to get on with the job at hand and get to the next one with a minimum of flap and waste motion.
As the Coppolino case was in Sarasota County, Schaub was assisted by William C. Strode, who had been the Assistant State Attorney for three years. Unlike the post of State Attorney, the job of
assistant leaves ample time for the private practice of law. Strode is a tall, relaxed, amiable man in his thirties, with a brush-cut and horn-rimmed glasses. He attended the Sarasota public
schools, has an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, and also attended Stetson for his law training. Bill Strode appears younger than he is, has a gentle, engaging, self-deprecatory
humor, and, as the Coppolino affair progressed, he gradually adapted himself to a curiously effective courtroom manner, a kind of sophisticated, ironic, “aw shucks” approach. As one
reporter put it, “The thinking man’s Huck Finn.” Though he was to become totally and desperately involved in the prosecution of the case, he did not become emotionally involved in
the personality clash between Bailey and Schaub.
The arena where the grand jury had met and voted to indict, where Carl Coppolino had been arraigned, and where, on the morning of Monday, September 12, 1966, the preliminary hearing was to
begin, is the bastard offspring of the traditional dignity of courtrooms, and of contemporary motel and show biz architecture. There are no windows, and so the air is a constant fabricated chill,
with a slight odor of chemistry and compressors. In the suspended ceiling of acoustic tile, a low ceiling which contains the conduits and ducts and p.a. system, are countersunk, behind frosted
plastic, thirty-one large lighting fixtures, each filled with four yards of white harsh fluorescent tubing. In the spectator section, with its fifty-three gray, comfortable, upholstered, spring-up
theater seats, and pale vinyl tile floor, the lighting enchances every wrinkle, mole, fingernail and texture with the merciless cruelty of motel bathroom lighting. In the unusually large arena of
the court itself, beyond the dividing barrier of an ornamental rail of teak veneer and brushed aluminum, the lights glare down on wall-to-wall carpeting of a curiously unpleasant shade of red, a
raw hue neither cherry nor tomato, and bounce off that color and illuminate the undersides of chins, of hands, of papers held in the hand, in strange pale pink.
The judge’s bench is high, and sixty feet, perhaps, from the spectator section. To enter court, the judge climbs a small set of steps in his chambers, opens a door behind the high bench
and directly behind his big black chair. The lower witness stand and the large jury box beyond are at the judge’s left. The two very large tables for the prosecution and defense are aligned
across the floor of the court, well back from the bench, with the defense table on the jury side. The bench and the walls are paneled in a medium wood, neither light nor dark. The chairs for the
jury are in black nauga-hide, and so are the chairs for the attorneys. The attorney chairs swivel, and they roll on the red carpeting on brushed aluminum ball casters the size of tennis balls.
Though the architect certainly must have sought a look of permanence and dignity, somehow the courtroom has the flavor of a temporary theatrical solution, as though when the scene is done, the
director satisfied, a crew will convert it to a ship’s lounge or a hotel lobby. And because of the lack of windows, the constant temperature and illumination, when one leaves after the
proceedings and goes down in the tiny little blue and white automatic elevators, as glaringly lighted as the courtroom, and out into the out-of-doors, there is the same sense of
disorientation—and vague guilt—as in coming out of a motion picture to find that it is broad daylight.
This was Judge Silvertooth’s first capital case. Among the several judges of the circuit, he stood next to the bottom rung in seniority. Cases in the circuit are assigned by lot. There is
a small device into which balls of several colors are placed, each color representing a judge of the circuit. Lynn Silvertooth’s color is black. When the Coppolino matter came up, and the
lever on the machine was depressed, the black ball came rolling out.
This assignment system was devised to eliminate the traditional maneuvering of attorneys to have their cases assigned to specific judges, based upon how judges have dealt with similar cases in
the past.
Names like Silvertooth, Silverthorn, Silverstaff are old Florida names, appearing frequently on the dusty rosters of the combat troops Florida sent northward into the Civil War. At age
forty-three at the time fate assigned him the Coppolino matter, Lynn Silvertooth had been a practicing attorney in Sarasota. In March 1964 when population increases made an increase in the number
of judges in the circuit necessary, Governor Farris Bryant appointed Silvertooth to the bench. Silvertooth ran for the office in November 1964, was elected, and was unopposed in the November 1966
election.
Lynn Silvertooth, well over two hundred pounds, gives no impression of softness. He is tall, massive, big-boned, huge in chest and shoulders. As Lynn Silvertooth had played football before
attending the University of Florida, it is highly probable that had not marriage and the Marine Corps changed the timing, and perhaps the motivations, he would have been most useful in a conference
where durability is prized.
Lynn Silvertooth is a calm, amiable, ingratiating man. He has a long broad slope of bland forehead to a jutting ridge of bone over deep-set eyes. His cheekbones are high and solid, his dark hair
straight, skin tone slightly swarthy. One standard question asked by people of the press corps coming down to cover their first Florida trial, and relating the man’s name to his appearance,
was, “Hey, is maybe the judge some kind of Indian?”
Judge Silvertooth is a man oriented to family, good friends, good cigars, fishing, cut-throat poker for small stakes. In social situations he manages to conceal those two factors which made him
an ideal judge in the Coppolino matter in Florida. He has such a calm and absolute and total conviction of his competence to sit on the bench that he can relax while on the bench, allow some
informal latitude, yet interpose the unmistakable iron of natural authority should anyone attempt to misuse the leeway he grants. Secondly, his mind is unexpectedly quick and subtle and complex,
and there is very, very seldom any confusion or inattention on the bench, or any failure to relate the law to the events taking place.
A good example of his gentle and self-deprecatory wit took place in the judge’s chambers in Naples while the jury was deliberating. Several reporters were there, talking to the judge, when
his mother came in. He made introductions and explained that he had never let her come to court when he was presiding, but he had made an exception when she had asked if she could be present when
he read his charge to the jury. As she is a personable and attractive woman, one of the reporters from the north said, “Mrs. Silvertooth, you are much too young a woman to have a son as old
as the judge here.”
Lynn Silvertooth said, “You should have seen me before I was assigned to this case.”
In Sarasota, the preliminary hearing was conducted on the top floor of the new three-story addition to the original courthouse, which, prior to the exercise of tasteless
practicality by several sets of County Commissioners in pasting pale, functional additions onto it, had been a noble and elegant structure, a distinguished adaptation of the best of the
Spanish-Moorish flavor of the nineteen twenties.
It is a comment on contemporary architecture to note that one can walk from the second floor of the old courthouse directly onto the third-floor level of the addition.
The county jail is another appendage affixed to the original building. This hodgepodge occupies one city block on the southeast corner of Ringling Boulevard and Route 301. There, except for
brief periods of hospitalization, Carl Coppolino had been held since his arrest on July 23, fifty-one days earlier. He was in an eight-prisoner complex on the third floor, a space thirty feet by
twelve feet containing two small cells, each with two double bunks, a short hallway, and a day room. The day room contains a table with a bench on either side, a toilet, shower, and a washbasin.
Each morning the bunk cells are unlocked and the prisoners can leave them and go into the day room for a breakfast of cereal, grits, and sausage. The cells each contain a toilet and washbasin.
Once in the day room the prisoners are not allowed to go back to their bunk cells during the day, or to sleep. They are given sandwiches at noon, and a hot meal in the evening. They can read
magazines and books, play cards, talk, write letters during the day. Toiletry items must be in plastic rather than glass containers. They are allowed underwear, shoes and a razor, and provided with
twill coveralls. They may have a personal radio. The county jail is not air conditioned. In the August heat felony prisoners can stand at the open windows and look out through the bars, hear the
traffic sounds, hear the afternoon baseball and night baseball sounds from Payne Park, about two homeruns away, hear the clamor of the evening birds settling into the half-grown trees along that
side of Ringling Boulevard. Coppolino’s area had its windows on the south, and he could look across Ringling Boulevard at the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, at the stubby marquee over the side
entrance to the cocktail lounge, and the old-fashioned lettering on the marquee spelling out Mrs. O’LEARY’S and SALOON.
As he was in the maximum security section he was l
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