In October 1959, a tormented 33-year-old named Charles Van Doren returned to his Greenwich Village apartment after driving around New England for days to escape the paparazzi camped on his doorstep. A letter from a complete stranger suggested a self-evident solution to his crisis of conscience: Just tell the truth.
“In the morning,” he recalled a few weeks later to a congressional subcommittee in Washington, “I telephoned my attorney and told him my decision. He had been very worried about my health and, perhaps, my sanity, and he was happy that I had found courage at last. He said, ‘God bless you.’ ”
His lawyer was Carl J. Rubino, who died on Jan. 8 at 100. Mr. Rubino accompanied Mr. Van Doren to Washington, where on Nov. 2, 1959, testifying before an overflow crowd in the caucus room of the Old House Office Building, Mr. Van Doren admitted that he had been fed answers on the prime-time NBC quiz show “Twenty-One.” The revelation scandalized the television industry and prompted federal broadcasting regulations.
Wearing the hat of a defense lawyer was relatively new for Mr. Rubino at the time. Until then he had largely made his mark as a prosecutor, serving as a bureau chief under Frank S. Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, and a recent appointee to the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, charged with helping to root out crime on the docks.
As a prosecutor, Mr. Rubino investigated charges of dereliction of duty against the city’s chief magistrate, underreporting of crime by the police, counterfeiting of subway tokens, black-market sales of cortisone, and wartime scalping of railroad tickets.
But none of those cases captured public attention so sensationally as the quiz-show scandal, the inspiration for the 1994 film “Quiz Show,” starring Ralph Fiennes as Mr. Van Doren.
A $5,500-a-year assistant professor of English at Columbia and the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Mark Van Doren (who also taught there), Mr. Van Doren won $129,000 on “Twenty-One” after being coached with questions and answers before his 14 weeks of appearances.
Oren Harris, an Arkansas Democrat and the subcommittee’s chairman, described Mr. Van Doren’s testimony as “very dramatic” and “very pathetic,” but nonetheless said Mr. Van Doren was still young and predicted a great future for him. Mr. Harris concluded amiably: “I think I could end this session with you by saying what your attorney did say to you the other day — that is, God bless you.”
Because he had denied the rigging allegations to a Manhattan grand jury — “in my folly,” he recalled, he also failed to tell Mr. Rubino the truth — Mr. Van Doren was charged with perjury and faced three years in prison. But, with Mr. Rubino representing him again, he was given a suspended sentence by Justice Edward F. Breslin, who said he had suffered enough.
“How deep and how acute your humiliation has been is quite evident,” the judge said.
Carl Joseph Rubino was born in East Harlem on May 24, 1914, the son of Sicilian immigrants. His father was a tailor. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and Fordham University and clerked for a Manhattan lawyer. He became an assistant district attorney in 1941, rising to chief of the indictment bureau.
He married Charlotte Grasso in 1943, and the couple lived in Westchester County, N.Y.
In 1952, a grand jury investigation led by Mr. Rubino cleared Chief Magistrate John M. Murtagh of charges that when he was commissioner of investigation he had failed to report evidence of graft among police officers to Mayor William O’Dwyer.
But the grand jury did not accept the judge’s defense that oral reports to the mayor were sufficient. “To the contrary,” its report found, “we are moved to speculate whether avoidance of the written word was not deliberately employed, under the mayor’s guidance, out of fear that recorded criticisms might prove embarrassing to O’Dwyer and his administration.”
Mr. Rubino left the district attorney’s office in 1954 to open a private practice and represented a number of public and political figures.
After developing an expertise in medical jurisprudence, he served on the defense team that, despite several delays, sought unsuccessfully to stay the execution in 1956 of John Francis Roche, who had refused to cooperate with his court-appointed lawyers and confessed to five killings. By trying to prove his client was insane, Mr. Rubino said he wanted to avert a verdict of “extermination.”
He continued to practice into the 1990s. His wife died in 2003.
Mr. Rubino had been living in Charlottesville, Va., and died at his home there, his son Carl Jr. said. The family did not announce his death until last week. Mr. Rubino is also survived by two other sons, Thomas and John; two granddaughters; and four great-grandchildren.
When Gov. W. Averell Harriman named Mr. Rubino to the Waterfront Commission as its New York State member in 1957, Mr. Rubino pledged “unrelenting warfare” on the loan sharks and pilferers who “prey on the port.” He told The New York Times at the time that he had learned about crime, firsthand, on the streets of East Harlem.
“Don’t kid yourself, it wasn’t ambition and hard work that enabled me to find a good life while others from that environment went wrong,” he recalled. “It was a good family, the church, the Boy Scouts — and a lot of luck.”
Living among the poor, he said, “gave me an understanding into life at that level and knowledge of the problems — economic and otherwise — that lead to crime.”
“It imbues you with a sense of charity and understanding that comes to you instinctively,” he added. “Nevertheless, I am grateful to the Lord in his wisdom for lifting me out of it.”
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