A former chief judge of the state’s highest court, who fell from power in 1992 after harassing his mistress and her daughter, regained his law license yesterday.
“I’m delighted,” said Sol Wachtler, who served seven years as the chief judge of the Court of Appeals. “It’s been 15 years. I’m delighted at the decision.”
Wachtler, 77, spent 13 months in prison for harassing Joy Silverman and her teenage daughter.
Authorities said he posed as a private detective in order to extort money from Silverman, and once mailed a condom to the daughter.
He resigned from the bar following a guilty plea.
It was Wachtler who once remarked that prosecutors have so much control over grand juries that they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.”
Since his fall from grace, Wachtler has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and wrote a prison memoir titled, “After the Madness.”
“I had so many blessings . . . everything,” he told Newsday in a 2003 interview. “And I lost it all. I lost it all . . . I lost it because I was weak, because I was narcissistic and because I was mentally ill.”