—Judge Carl Harper
All the evidence in the case was trundled around the courthouse in a grocery cart that some bailiff had apparently borrowed from a local supermarket. It contained everything from family tax returns to the tin trumpet Roxanne allegedly slept with while trying to communicate with the dead. The cart was parked next to a Xerox machine in the county clerk’s office on all days when the court was not in session, and under the curious provisions of Florida’s much-admired public-records statute, it was open to public inspection at all times. The contents of the cart were shuffled and reshuffled by so many people that not even the judge could have made any sense of it by the time the trial was over, but journalists found it a source of endless amusement. You could go in there with a satchel of cold beers on a rainy afternoon and whoop it up for hours by just treating the cart like a grab bag and copying anything you wanted for a dime a page. That was the press rate. The price to the general public was $1 a page, but nobody paid it, and the people in charge were more interested in collecting autographs than money. As long as we kept an honest page count, they left us alone.
I spent a lot of time poring over copies of the Pulitzers’ personal tax returns and financial ledgers submitted as evidence by the Pulitzer family accountants, and I have made a certain amount of wild sense of it all, but not enough.
I understood, for instance, that these people were seriously rich. Family expenditures for 1981 totaled $972,980 for a family of four: one man, one woman, two four-year-old children, and a nanny who was paid $150 a week.
That is a lot of money, but so what? We are not talking about poor people here, and $1 million a year for family expenditures is not out of line in Palm Beach. The rich have special problems. The Pulitzers spent $49,000 on basic “household expenditures” in 1981 and another $272,700 for “household improvements.” That is about $320,000 a year just to have a place to sleep and play house. There was another $79,600 listed for “personal expenses” and $79,000 for boat maintenance.
“Business” expenditures came in at $11,000, and there was no listing at all for taxes. As for “charity,” the Pulitzers apparently followed the example of Ronald Reagan that year and gave in private, so as not to embarrass the poor.
The 441 Club, or the Rich Are Different from Us
There was, however, one item that begged for attention. The figure was $441,000, and the column was “miscellaneous and unknown.”
Right. Miscellaneous and unknown: $441,000. And nobody in the courtroom even blinked. Here were two coke fiends who came into court because their marriage didn’t seem to be working and the children were getting nervous.
And the servants were turning weird and on some nights there were naked people running around on the lawn and throwing rocks at the upstairs bedroom windows and people with white foam in their mouths were jacking off like apes in the hallways . . . people screeching frantically on the telephone at four in the morning about volcanic eruptions in the Pacific that were changing the temperature of the ocean forever and causing the jet stream to move south, which would bring on a new ice age—and that’s why neither one of us could get any sleep for two years, your Honor, and the sky was full of vultures so we called a plastic surgeon because her tits were starting to sag and my eyes didn’t look right anymore and then we drove halfway to Miami at 100 miles an hour before we realized it was Sunday and the hospital wouldn’t be open so we checked into the Holiday Inn with Jim’s wife and ye gods, your Honor, this woman is a whore and I can’t really tell you what it means because the children are in danger and we’re afraid they might freeze in their sleep and I can’t trust you anyway but what else can I do, I’m desperate—and, by the way, we spent $441,000 last year on things I can’t remember.
Welcome to cocaine country. White Line Fever. Bad craziness. What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on “miscellaneous and unknown”? The figure for the previous year was only $99,000, at a time when the Pulitzers’ cocaine use was admittedly getting out of hand. They said they were holding it down to just a few grams a week, at that point, a relatively moderate figure among the Brotherhood of the Bindle, but the evidence suggests a genuinely awesome rate of consumption—something like thirteen grams a day—by the time they finally staggered into divorce court and went public with the whole wretched saga.
The numbers are staggering, even in the context of Palm Beach. Thirteen grams a day would kill a whole family of polar bears.
Mandatory Death Penalty for Drunk Drivers;