Defining ‘Wasted’ Just Part of Stewart Trial’s First Week

NEW YORK —  It’s not all studied jurisprudence at the Martha Stewart trial.

Though most of the goings-on in court have centered on serious allegations of insider trading and obstruction of justice, there has been no shortage of side issues that have popped up, many of which have been enlightening, if not purely entertaining. Here is a sampling from the first week of testimony:

Is ‘ganja’ legal in Jamaica?

During the lunch break Tuesday, the defense team placed a call to the Jamaican Embassy to ask just that question.

For the record, no, it’s not legal. And the query prompted a sharp retort from embassy representatives on the other end of the line, who are sick and tired of so many Americans thinking their island nation’s most notorious agricultural product is somehow government sanctioned.

Why the call to begin with?

With the jury absent that morning, lawyers had sparred over how deeply the defense could delve into star witness Douglas Faneuil’s drug use. The 28-year-old former aide to stockbroker and Stewart co-defendant Peter E. Bacanovic had told the FBI that he had used marijuana and the drug Ecstasy during the year he worked at Merrill Lynch & Co. -- though not on company time -- and earlier had “experimented” with cocaine and the animal tranquilizer ketamine, also known as “Special K.”

It also emerged that Faneuil, after signing his cooperation agreement with the feds, had smoked marijuana while on vacation in Jamaica, something he’d confessed to authorities soon afterward. The defense seized on the admission as a potential violation of Faneuil’s cooperation-agreement pledge not to break the law.

For his part, Faneuil said he had been under the impression that it was perfectly legal to light up in Jamaica. Nobody on the defense side was certain he wasn’t right. Perplexed, they called the embassy.

During the courtroom discussion, Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum was charmingly clueless about drug terminology. She instructed the defense not to use the word “wasted” in cross-examination because, as far as she knew, the term applied only to alcohol use.

David Apfel, Bacanovic’s buttoned-up defense lawyer, got the day’s biggest laugh by beginning his objection: “Your Honor, just on the narrow issue of ‘wasted,’ I can tell you as a child of the ‘60s.... “ The debate deteriorated from there.

Martha Stewart, the icon, is about style. Much of the press corps, however, is not.

After the New York tabloids broke the news that Stewart was lugging a rare Hermes “Birkin” handbag worth thousands of dollars, hard-of-fashion reporters realized they’d better get up to speed.

As the trial participants filed into the courtroom each morning, a murmur began through the four or five benches where the media was hunkered down: What color is that suit? Would you call those heels chunky? Is that velour? The dodgy lighting in the vault-like courtroom doesn’t help matters.

On Thursday, lead prosecutor Karen Patton Seymour wore a devastating herringbone jacket in a shade somewhere between red and orange -- but where, exactly? “Salmon,” somebody ventured. “Coho?” “Lox.” “How about ‘off-rust’?” Best guess: Dark coral.

Sometimes, a lawyer’s questions point intriguingly to offstage events known only to the interrogator and, perhaps, to the witness. But often such threads are left dangling if the lawyer can’t elicit the desired answer and moves on to another topic.

One subject that remains tantalizingly out of focus, despite a long series of questions from Apfel, is the Silver Platter Conspiracy.

Does Apfel see it as the key to some dark, subterranean motive? Or does he think it’s a total crock?

These questions arose after Faneuil testified about a meeting he had with his former lawyer, Jeremiah Gutman. The session took place within a couple of weeks after Faneuil had handled Stewart’s sale of ImClone Systems Inc. stock -- a trade the government contends was based on an illegal tip that ImClone founder Samuel D. Waksal and his family were trying to dump their shares. Faneuil said he hired Gutman after misleading the Securities and Exchange Commission about the stock sale by not mentioning that he had told Stewart what the Waksals were up to.

Faneuil said Gutman recounted a conversation with Merrill Lynch in-house lawyer David Marcus in which Marcus assured Gutman that the brokerage house had “a deal with the government whereby Merrill Lynch would hand over the Waksals on a silver platter” in exchange for the government’s “looking the other way” regarding Stewart. Faneuil said Gutman told him his only role was to “lay low” and -- if asked -- stick to his story.

Gutman denies telling anybody to lie. He’s on the defense witness list and could be used to help paint Faneuil as a chronic dissembler.

Merrill, too, dismisses the story as fantasy, noting that it was the brokerage that first flagged the suspicious trades and reported them to the SEC. Spokesman Mark Herr called it “false and absurd” to think that the firm would first squeal and then cover up.

And yet ... Apfel, in his cross-examination, got Faneuil talking about how, in the days immediately following his less-than-truthful interview with the feds, the administrator of Merrill’s Rockefeller Center branch office began showering him with gifts.

Telling Faneuil he “looked stressed,” she gave him a $150 dinner for two at posh Gramercy Tavern on the company’s dime, then a week’s paid vacation, then a pair of New York Knicks tickets.

It’s unclear what the defense makes of all this and whether they think pursuing it more deeply would help or hurt their clients. But at a minimum, Apfel’s questioning produced one of the trial’s classic lines.

As Faneuil described it, Gutman passed along Marcus’ praise to the young assistant for doing “a great job” of snowing the SEC. Marcus also supposedly said he hoped Faneuil “didn’t do anything drastic” -- such as telling the truth, presumably.

Added Faneuil: “I said to Mr. Gutman, ‘Do lawyers actually talk that way?’ ”