Deranged Jewess Ruins Lives in Hate Letter Hoax

A wealthy New York City contractor. A Park Ave. businessman. A high-profile investment banker. A former talent scout from California. A prominent New Jersey doctor. A Putnam County architect.

They call themselves the Diamond Support Group and have one objective: to get Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marylin Diamond thrown off the bench.

The six men say Diamond ruined them financially during their divorce cases – and then fingered them as possible stalkers who had sent a slew of threatening letters over three years.

The NYPD closed a two-year investigation into the alleged threats after a criminal profiler told cops he believed Diamond wrote the letters herself.

Now the six men, who have been cleared as suspects, want the state Commission on Judicial Conduct to investigate her. They say they’re also considering filing a civil suit against Diamond – charging she slandered them.

“We want to band together and get her off the bench, so she doesn’t do it to someone else,” said Neil Eversole, a former talent scout who now lives in California. “It has been heartening to speak to these other men, because people just don’t believe a judge could do what Diamond did – accuse me of a crime, send detectives to my house and then bankrupt me. This judge has so much power to affect your life, she can destroy you – and she will.”

Diamond turned over a list of about 20 men to investigators shortly after the letters began arriving in 1999, saying the litigants were potential suspects with possible motives to write menacing phrases such as, “Die Bitch.”

Eversol said detectives came to his Sutton Place apartment numerous times during his divorce from a Manhattan bank executive.

Architect Ralph Brill said he was photographed by detectives in Diamond’s courtroom during his divorce case.

Park Ave. businessman Tom Snowdon was followed by NYPD detectives for weeks during his high-profile divorce from fashion designer Cathy Hardwick.

The others did not want their names used, fearing that going public could affect their appeals of Diamond’s rulings.

“Now that I have talked to a number of other people she accused, it’s mind-boggling how apparently crazy she has been on the bench, and how long she has gotten away with it,” Snowdon said.

“We’ve all been terribly beaten up and abused by her,” Brill said. “It’s been high drama all the way through with her.” They’ve written letters to Gerald Stern, the administrator of the commission, demanding an investigation into Diamond’s actions.

Stern refused to comment about a possible probe when contacted by the Daily News.

Seeking others

Brill also has filed a Freedom of Information request to get the names of other people on Diamond’s list – so he can reach out to them to join a possible civil suit.

Diamond was shadowed by security, primarily state court officers, for three years because of the series of threatening letters she reported receiving.

Detectives from the threat assessment unit, part of the NYPD’s elite Intelligence Division, tried to determine who was writing the hate mail.

The leads turned up nothing, so investigators turned to Ray Pierce, an FBI profiler and retired NYPD detective. Last month, The News reported that Pierce had concluded the 61-year-old jurist was behind the threats.

‘Pig in a poke’

Cops have no hard evidence linking Diamond to the letters, and she has denied writing the bizarre rants, said her lawyer, former federal Judge Harold Tyler.

Tyler also defended Diamond’s list of suspects, dismissing the group’s complaints and its threat of a civil suit as “a large pig in a poke.”

“The police said to Judge Diamond they wanted to get names of litigants so they could perhaps corroborate whether someone was guilty of sending the notes,” Tyler said. “It is still legal for citizens to cooperate with the police.”

Tyler, who was hired by Diamond after The News’ stories appeared, also scoffed at Pierce’s findings.

“The police have been investigating this for over three years, and there is nothing to this charge that she is writing notes to herself,” he said.

Tyler added that Diamond’s security detail has ended.

But that’s not enough for one Manhattan lawyer, who also was questioned by investigators and is considering joining the Diamond Support Group.

“She has destroyed lives,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be named because he is embroiled in a custody battle in front of another Manhattan matrimonial judge. “Some of these guys will never make a comeback.”

A criminal profiler who analyzed threatening letters sent to a Manhattan judge has concluded that the judge wrote them herself, the Daily News has learned.

Since Acting Supreme Court Justice Marylin Diamond reported the first of the bizarre threats three years ago, she has been guarded virtually around-the-clock by NYPD detectives or Supreme Court officers, according to law enforcement sources.

They escorted Diamond from her upper East Side home to the courthouse in lower Manhattan and from there to her weekend home in Westport, Conn., the sources said.

They guarded her at hairdressing appointments, lunch dates, and social functions – until last week, when her armed security detail was lifted the same day the Daily News contacted the NYPD and the state Office of Court Administration about the case.

“She needed to justify her security detail, so she was writing the letters to herself,” one law enforcement source told The News. “It’s a crazy case. Detectives were trying to determine who was sending her the letters, and everything was coming back to her.”

Reached Thursday at Manhattan Supreme Court, Diamond expressed shock when told of the profiler’s findings, then declined further comment.

Later that day, she told the NYPD that two additional letters were sent to her chambers with 9/11-related threats, sources said.

On Friday, Diamond denied she was the source of the letters.

“To allege that I was the one making these threats is totally incorrect and grossly irresponsible,” Diamond said in a statement released through David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration.

Husband a judge

The 61-year-old jurist, a graduate of New York University and St. John’s Law School, is one of the city’s few Republican judges. She was elected to New York City Civil Court in 1990 and appointed an acting state Supreme Court justice four years later.

There, she joined her husband, Franklin Weissberg, a longtime state judge who has since retired from the bench.

For years, Diamond handled divorces, many of them high-profile cases, including that of Jocelyne Wildenstein and her billionaire husband, art dealer Alec Wildenstein.

Last October, she was presiding over the bitter breakup of wealthy investment banker Theodore Ammon and his wife, Generosa, when Theodore Ammon was found beaten to death in his East Hampton, L.I., home.

According to law enforcement sources, when Diamond began receiving the letters in 1999, the case was assigned to the threat assessment unit, part of the NYPD’s elite Intelligence Division. Detectives began poring through the judge’s case files.

But when investigators became stumped about a possible motive for the letters, they called in Ray Pierce, a retired detective and founder of the NYPD’s criminal assessment and profiling unit, the sources said.

Pierce, who was trained as a psychological profiler by the FBI, reviewed 48 letters, typed as well as handwritten. Most were mailed to Diamond at her chambers, though some were sent to her Manhattan home.

Anti-Semitic

In some of the letters, the writer called her a “pig,” the sources said. Others were anti-Semitic. Some featured a roughly scrawled heart with a dagger drawn through it. All of them threatened her life.

One of the first letters to arrive in 1999 read: “You bitch. I see you every day on the train. I’m going to … crucify you. Maybe I’ll see you in hell.”

Pierce told investigators he has “no doubt” Diamond was writing the letters herself, the sources said.

They said he reached that conclusion by considering a combination of factors: A barrage of letters would come when there was talk of her security detail ending, or during times of terror alerts. After last Sept. 11, for example, Diamond received a letter containing baby powder during the anthrax scare. Pierce also found the letters were written by an “insecure woman,” according to sources.

“She has a serious problem. She thrives on attention. She had a security escort to her daughter’s wedding, she’s very impressed with that,” Pierce told investigators, according to one source familiar with his findings.

“There was a vicious theme in all of the letters, but an obvious failure on the part of the person sending them to act. It became obvious after a while it was just a farce,” Pierce concluded, according to the source.

Pierce himself declined to comment on the case.

Michael O’Looney, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information, also declined comment on the case.

‘Credible threats’

Bookstaver defended Diamond’s need for security, but would not discuss the cost to taxpayers for three years of 24-hour-a-day protection.

“We do not discuss judicial security. Discussing that may put someone’s life in danger,” Bookstaver said. “There were persistent, credible, serious threats made against her that were taken seriously, not only by the court system, but by the NYPD.”

Diamond is not the only judge who has needed armed guards. For years, the NYPD and court officers have protected Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Leslie Crocker Snyder, who has been threatened by murderous drug gangs. Another state Supreme Court justice, Ira Gammerman, got a security detail when his name turned up on what he was told was a “hit list” allegedly compiled by parking garage magnate Abe Hirschfeld.

Nor is this Diamond’s first brush with controversy. In the summer of 2000, the heirs of a wealthy Mexican art collector accused Diamond of using “undue influence” to gain control of the elderly woman’s $21 million trust fund. Diamond said she was wrongly accused and a suit filed by the heirs was later thrown out of court.

Her judicial record contains a number of notable decisions, including those in the Wildenstein case and rulings that backed the city’s efforts to close sex shops and keep the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association from taking contract disputes to arbitration.

No DNA evidence

For the moment, it seems unlikely Diamond, even if she is the author of the threatening letters, will face any criminal charges. Right now, law enforcement can’t prove it, though sources say investigators are hard at work trying to bolster Pierce’s theory.

There is no DNA evidence tying her to the missives, and a handwriting analysis also failed to link Diamond to the threats.

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