Michael Vecchione

And I was in charge of the investigation begun by Frida Hanimov, who started this by walking into our office and telling us that she was about to lose her children because a judge had been fixed.

Semenovsky particularly became a lot less strident in terms of his feelings towards her.

This is the infamous Archives Bar. That's where- The bar. Bar restaurant where Semenovsky and the judge would meet often for drinks and dinner and where much of the money was spent on the judge.

This actually is the camera that was planted.

Yes.

Yes. We had a microwave dish that would read the signals being sent back to our office. This was our plant. And this is where we had the recording devices that recorded the judge's chambers, both video and audio.

Yes. We had people who were monitoring it all day long and into the evening.

I'm gonna get to work. Simonovsky kind of has the run of the room, and I mean, nobody else really has this kind of access.

Oh, absolutely. Without question. And he is not candid about reaching into the candy dish at any time.

a Supreme Court judge being paid off, being bribed. You can't get much more serious than that. So he decided to put a recording device on her.

The judge was admiring her lips.

Yes. And what she could do to him with those lips.

Yes.

We said, well, will he take a gift for the advice? And Semenovsky told us, absolutely. And we knew that he was a cigar smoker.

One afternoon after Szymanowski went to lunch with the judge and after he paid for the lunch again, he came back to the robing room and gave him the box of cigars and said, this is thanks for your help in the Levy case.

You'll see him reach into his pocket and he takes out $1,000 and he hands it to the judge. The judge takes it and he puts it into his pants pocket. Now Semenovsky leaves and the judge takes it out of his pocket and you see him counting it, takes a couple of bills and puts it into another pocket and puts some in an envelope.

What we had all suspected he would do, he actually did.

It's a stark military area here in Brooklyn Inn. There's barbed wire around the place.

I mean, not a place that we were very happy about sending her into, but it was necessary. She was not the type of individual who you would normally put a recording device on. She was pregnant, and to have a pregnant woman who had no experience doing this, it was harrowing on us as well.

He was not a low-level judge.

Well, no. None of us believe she did. She felt that the husband had been manipulating her child, which is what happened.

She could have been harmed. She could have been hurt. She could have been killed.

We explained to her that we needed to, in essence, test her to see if what she was telling us was the truth.

We couldn't cover her inside the warehouse. It's a rather stark and daunting place. It's kind of brick and closed up. So once Frida went into that location, she was on her own.

The very fabric of the legal system is at stake here. There is a question. If I walk into a courtroom, am I getting a fair shot? Am I getting a fair shake? I'm Michael Vecchione, and I am the Chief of the Rackets Division in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.

Her allegations were that a Supreme Court judge had been bribed. She was about to lose her children.

See, we didn't really know what Nisim Elman was about. We didn't know what he was capable of. How's her demeanor?