By Andrea Peyser
The New York Post
NEW YORK — YOU call this justice?
For years, Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach of Brooklyn was known as the “Con dom Judge” - a mop-topped former lefty lawyer with a wicked soft spot for violent types. Reichbach got his nickname by becoming the go-to judge for every crack whore and addict who wanted a rubber, which he dispensed promiscuously from the bench in the days he sat in Criminal Court.
Now, Mr. Condom has proven that he’s a lover, not a crime fighter.
Justice Reichbach, 64, infuriated Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, every cop on the beat, and me, by freeing on bail a remorseless miscreant accused of shooting an officer nearly to death.
Thanks to Reichbach, Elijah Foster-Bey, who allegedly unloaded his illegal .32-caliber revolver in an East New York stairwell in October, gets to enjoy Christmas with his family.
And Officer Richard Ramirez, 29, will likely spend the holiday in the hospital, fighting to save his leg from amputation.
And, get this - it’s the perp, not the cop, who’s got Reichbach’s deepest sympathy.
“He’s a 17-year-old kid who lives at home with his family. His mother is a civil servant,” the judge told me about the guy accused of pumping three bullets into Ramirez, one of which severed his femoral artery. Ramirez survived only because a fellow cop used his belt as a tourniquet in the middle of the gun battle.
“His roots in the community are well-established,” Reichbach said of Foster-Bey, as if describing an Eagle Scout.
“It was a grievous charge - but not a homicide.” Holy cow!
I asked Justice Reichbach if Foster-Bey, accused of attempted murder to avoid arrest - and who whined on Facebook that he’d lost 30 pounds from taking cops’ bullets, poor thing - just might be considered a flight risk.
“First of all, they’re allegations,” Reichbach scolded. He added, "$100,000 bail is not an insignificant amount of bail.” Actually, Foster-Bey’s family put up just $6,200 cash and a house in Georgia as collateral.
This has gone far enough.
“Bail should be revoked,” said Commissioner Kelly. “A suspect who fled from police before shooting and almost killing Officer Ramirez should not be free while the officer still struggles to recover.”
I’ve been covering Reichbach’s antics for nearly a decade. It’s time to take another look at a man who makes life-and-death decisions from the Brooklyn bench.
A Columbia University anti-Vietnam war radical, Reichbach achieved cult status by co-authoring a 1969 work, “The Bust Book: What to Do Till the Lawyer Comes.” The manual, still in print, advises truly scary people on ways to elude justice.
Reichbach is mighty proud of his radical past and dangerous present - in 2001, he freed an armed thug because, he wrote, the guy felt intimidated by “four powerful and self-assured” cops. An appeals court sensibly overruled him.
But an unexpected item on his résumé has nothing to do with sticking it to authority, and everything to do with being authority. For Reichbach has aligned himself with Brooklyn’s Democratic boss, the scandal-scarred Vito Lopez. Reichbach hired Lopez’s daughter, Gina Lopez-Summa, as his law secretary in the ‘90s, before he won the nomination to the Supreme Court. He dismissed the move as irrelevant, saying “She worked for me six months.”
But Margarita Lopez-Torres - who refused to hire Lopez’s spawn - believes she was unconstitutionally denied a spot on the judicial ballot. Her case against Brooklyn corruption went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where she lost.
Reichbach doesn’t want to discuss such things. He’d rather talk about his lifelong efforts to free bad guys, whom he takes pains not to “intimidate.” In his courtroom, he displays the scales of justice - in blue-and-red neon. He hates wearing his judicial robes, breaking them out only for sentencing.
Reichbach has outdone himself this time. Foster-Bey must be locked up.
And the perp-friendly judge should consider an overdue retirement.