Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, and his daughter Lauren, an attorney and member of the state Bar Foundation, have established the Wachtler Veterans Memorial Fund, which will be administered through the Bar Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Albany-based New York State Bar Association.
The Wachtler Fund will address the legal needs of veterans, including issues related to housing, healthcare, employment, and benefits, alleviating the burdens faced by veterans and their families, allowing them to lead more stable and fulfilling lives, according to State Bar Foundation officials.
“The only reason to attach the Wachtler name to it was in order to attract some funds from certain other sources. The Veterans Fund has sufficient funding now, in excess of $100,000 in the fund now. It’s just starting. The Bar Foundation has always provided funds for legal services for veterans but not on this level,” Wachtler told The Jewish Press. “This is to navigate everything from [landlord-tenant court cases] to civil actions to navigating their way through the VA [Veterans Administration] and the entitlement programs to give these guys a hand, because G-d knows they need it. They don’t fit into some other categories. They’re homeless but they don’t get any special care for being veterans.”
The main impetus that led to this fund being created was Judge Wachtler’s service in the Korean War.
“My father talks about the Korean War all the time which is what, in a lot of ways, piqued my interest in this,” Lauren Wachtler, 70, an attorney with the white-shoe law firm of Barclay Damon and a Bar Foundation board member told The Jewish Press. “He was a sergeant when he left the military…He was stationed in Georgia, which is where I was born. He went to Korea and served in the military there but he was not in combat.
“My father played a pivotal role many years ago in establishing the first Veterans Court to support veterans transitioning back to civilian life who found themselves facing unique personal challenges, including mental health and legal problems,” she continued. “Our fund is one way that we continue my father’s unwavering commitment to assisting veterans and their families who deserve to be heard and helped. We provide legal services to veterans and their families who are in need of legal services and other assistance which are unmet through our legal process and justice system.
“This will provide veterans with access to benefits, legal assistance, and mental health issues which arise as a result of serving our country and our families who are impacted by all of those things as well,” she explained.
Now, at age 94, Wachtler – who once famously quipped, “District attorneys could get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich” – has a rich history to regale his friends with, but he keeps coming back to revealing his health issues.
“I’m sorry I talk so much. I really can’t control this. It’s called logorrhea [excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness]. It’s a mental illness that afflicts old people where they can’t control their flow of words and they often become repetitious,” he said.
Wachtler was living a storied life when his world came tumbling down on November 7, 1992. He freely speaks about the fateful day when he was arrested, which ended a 25-year political career. He was a political powerhouse in the 1980s who was touted as a Republican opponent against Governor Mario Cuomo, the man who appointed Wachtler as chief judge. His arrest came 32 years ago but Wachtler remembers it as though it was yesterday.
“When I was arrested, it was one o’clock in the afternoon, I was five minutes from my home [in Manhasset, Nassau County, where he still resides]. I was on the Long Island Expressway. I was arrested by three carloads of FBI agents and thrown into handcuffs. I didn’t know what the hell I had done. I was driving back from Albany and a meeting at the state Bar [Association],” Wachtler recounted for The Jewish Press. “The first thing I thought of was I must have hit someone when I was driving on the New York State Thruway and didn’t know it so they arrested me for a hit and run. They dragged me in chains, literally, to the FBI headquarters which was supposed to be on a skeleton crew but was jammed with people and reporters.
“I hadn’t been indicted for anything. The court, G-d bless them, refused to suspend [my law license] or ask for my resignation. I wasn’t granted bail, but I was put in the custody of two armed marshals, taken to the psychiatric ward and chained to a bed. All I wanted to do was get hold of a telephone to resign my judgeship. This is not part of a plea bargain.
“As soon as I got to a phone, I called up Dick Simons, who was the senior associate judge [on the Court of Appeals] and we both started crying on the phone. Dick said, ‘Well, why don’t you wait to see what this is all about. I said, ‘No, no, no … I know what I did.’ I said what I did was terribly wrong. I didn’t think it was terribly wrong at the time but it was terribly wrong. I can’t bring this kind of disgrace on my family and the court by having a trial. Not only that, I resigned from the bar…You can’t defend yourself without hurting the institutions you’re a part of,” Wachtler concluded.
What had he done? In 1988, the 58-year-old Wachtler began an affair with Joy Silverman. At the time, Wachtler was a co-executor of the estate of Alvin Wolosoff, Silverman’s stepfather and the uncle of Wachtler’s wife. He was also the trustee of four trusts stemming from Wolosoff’s estate for the benefit of Silverman and her family. The trusts (in aggregate) were reported to be worth $24 million at the time. According to then-United States Attorney Michael Chertoff, over time, Wachtler received fees of more than $800,000 for his work as executor and trustee of the entire estate. After Silverman ended the affair in September 1991, Wachtler began to harass her.
The arrest resulted in charges that included extortion, racketeering, and blackmail. Wachtler eventually pleaded guilty to harassing Silverman and threatening to kidnap her daughter. He resigned as a judge and from the bar. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but received time off for good behavior and was released after serving just 13 months. He served his sentence first at the medium-security Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, North Carolina, where he was stabbed in the shoulder while dozing in his cell. He was then transferred to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. “I was stabbed in Butner and then in Rochester because I was mentally ill,” Wachtler said.
After his release from prison, Wachtler had his New York law license restored by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division in October 2007. He also wrote a prison memoir entitled After the Madness.
Shortly after his release from prison, he became an adjunct professor at Touro Law Center and Chair of the Law and Psychiatry Institute of North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital. He became an advocate for the mentally ill and has received awards from the Mental Health Association of the State of New York and New York City.
“I’ve always been interested in the afflictions of mental illness. My grandmother committed suicide. We’ve had a streak of mental illness in my family tragically. I myself am mentally ill. My career was destroyed by my bizarre criminal acts,” Wachtler said. “When I was in prison, I was part of a group. You know, they have clubs in prison. One of the clubs was the veterans club where the veterans became one group. There were only a few Jews where I was. In upstate Otisville, Orange County, is where the Jewish prisoners are sent. There were a few Jewish inmates in Butner and in Rochester. In Rochester there were enough Jewish inmates to make a minyan,” he recalled.
Wachtler was frustrated with the treatment the Veterans Administration and the federal prison system gave to the mentally ill, many of whom would eventually become homeless post-prison. His daughter agreed.
“I think in many ways they are an ignored part of the population. These people are so deserving of assistance. I am hopeful that this fund will help address some of those problems where there are gaps in that assistance,” Lauren Wachtler said.
Her father saw how many veterans didn’t receive legal services. “They were evicted from their homes so they became homeless. They could not work the VA system; they were too busy sleeping on the street. Their kids were robbing them from their property. They would be in the VA hospital and the kids were coming in with a lawyer to draw up a will giving their kids everything,” he recalled.
“I started a clinic at Touro Law School, where I was teaching, which was a clinic to give legal advice, working with the Office of Court Administration with respect to the veterans’ court but also going into the Veterans Home [in Hauppauge] in Suffolk County, which is one of the largest in the country,” he said. Suffolk County has the largest population of veterans in New York State.
“I went in there with Fred Wilpon [former owner of the New York Mets], who is my in-law, and who was very generous in helping me set up the veterans’ clinic at Touro. Then we went to the Veterans Home. After the meeting with all their staff to assess what legal advice has been available to the veterans, we found there was no free legal advice,” Wachtler said, leading him to set up the clinic.
“He did work with students who were veterans. He was very involved with helping us to keep our veterans’ law clinic going,” Patricia Salkin told The Jewish Press. Salkin was the dean of Touro Law Center while Wachtler was a professor there. Now she’s the senior vice president for academic affairs and the provost for the graduate and professional division. “It was helping to make legal education accessible for the students and then providing opportunities for the students to use the knowledge that they were gaining in law school through our clinics and externship experiences that we were able to provide so that the students were then giving back and providing services to the community. He was very much community-focused and very much into serving people who needed help.”
Salkin and Wachtler first crossed paths when Salkin was the dean of Albany Law School and he was the chief judge on the Court of Appeals.
“He is a gentleman. He is a scholar. He’s a brilliant individual,” Salkin said of Wachtler. “He is someone who cares deeply about not just the law and the legal system, but using the law to do good and to help people.”
The former judge recalled many aspects of the court system and politics during our wide-ranging 75-minute interview.
“When you become really involved in the court system, it becomes as much of a part of your life as anything. More so then being in a business because you have enormous public responsibilities. You’re able to discharge an obligation, which is a great honor, not because of the power but because of the influence that you can have in bringing about good things,” Wachtler said.
His daughter Lauren spoke lovingly of her father. “He’s such a treasure. I treasure my father as much as I treasure this fund that he’s created. He’s an icon. He’s our families’ idol and so far beyond. It’s a gift. I don’t even know what I would do without him,” she said. “Our family is so proud of our father and his commitment to all charitable causes and in particular this one.”
Wachtler and his wife, Joan, had four children: attorney Lauren Wachtler, who married attorney Paul Douglas Montclare in 1983; Marjorie Wachtler Eagan, a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; actress and model Alison Wachtler Braunstein; and real estate developer Philip Wachtler. Philip Wachtler is married to Robin Wilpon, daughter of New York Mets former owner Fred Wilpon. Joan Wachtler died in 2022.
