CHAPTER 4 MEANING
—HERMANN HESSE
I HAVE WORKED with great men over the years, but two of my most important teachers about life and leadership were women.
In 1993, after my work on the Gambino trial ended, I kept my promise to Patrice and we moved our family to Richmond, a place where we had few connections but where we could raise a family more cheaply and comfortably.
After working briefly at a law firm, I returned to work as an Assistant United States Attorney, this time in the Virginia state capital. The law firm was fine, the pay good, and the people smart, but I missed public service, even with its mismatched furniture and low pay. I couldn’t tell my law firm colleagues this, but I ached to be useful again, to do some good for my community and to represent the victims who really needed me.
My new boss was Helen Fahey. She was the United States Attorney, the supervisor of all federal prosecutors in the eastern half of the state. Fahey’s rise to the top was unusual and inspiring. She had stayed home with her young children as they grew, then worked in various roles for a Defense Department agency, starting as a typist. All the while, for seventeen years, she pursued her education, as she told a newspaper, “one job, one month, one class at a time.” She never actually completed a college degree, but was admitted to law school anyway given her high test scores and work history.
I was thirty-five years old when I started working for Helen in 1996. I was the supervisor in the Richmond office, one of four Fahey oversaw, and I had dreams of energizing it to make bigger contributions in all kinds of areas, especially against violent crime and public corruption. Having been an Assistant United States Attorney in Manhattan and a partner at a big Richmond law firm, I thought I was “hot stuff,” as my mother used to say—not meaning it as a compliment. Maybe unconsciously picking up on traits exhibited by Rudy Giuliani, I was everywhere in the city and became the face of federal law enforcement in Richmond, representing the office with local law enforcement, the community, and the media. A free weekly Richmond newspaper put a picture of me on its cover, calling me “One of the Good Guys” and identifying me incorrectly as the “U.S. Attorney,” instead of an assistant. I had posed for the picture in my office in Richmond. Worse, I hadn’t told my boss anything about it. A stunt like that back in Rudy Giuliani’s office would have ended very badly. My first reaction to seeing the newspaper with me splashed across the cover was that I would be a dead man unless I seized every copy in the city. Then I remembered who I worked for. Fahey was secure enough to want me to succeed. She laughed at me a bit, which was appropriate and deserved, but she laughed with me more often.
Helen Fahey was comfortable in her own skin in a way few leaders are. I think some derided her behind her back as weak—“she let Comey take over Richmond”—but she knew exactly what she was doing. She was letting me grow, gently smacking me behind the ears every so often to make sure I stayed on track, and getting good results in the process. And she also didn’t care much what misinformed people said about her, a lesson I would find very valuable as I grew older. She put the interests of the team and the important job we had to do higher than her own feelings or worries about reputation.
Our effort to prosecute gun crimes and reduce Richmond’s homicide rate was bitterly resisted by some of the federal judges in Richmond, who saw those kinds of cases as unbefitting a “federal” courtroom. I didn’t care and my team in Richmond didn’t care. We were trying to save lives, so we plowed ahead, infuriating one senior judge. He responded by issuing an order holding Helen Fahey, our U.S. Attorney, in contempt for some minor administrative error: failing to put in a request to have the U.S. Marshals bring a prisoner to a scheduled court date. Fahey had nothing to do with the little pieces of paper we filled out to schedule prisoner movements. She typically came to Richmond once a month, and there was no conceivable basis for involving her personally. But the judge did it to rattle us and her.
He didn’t know Helen Fahey.
The day of her contempt hearing, the courtroom, courthouse hallways, and street outside were packed with dozens of police officers and federal agents, including police horses and motorcycles on the street. Fahey walked calmly to the “defendant’s” table in the courtroom and waited. The judge came out and was so rattled himself by the show of law enforcement community support that he began ranting about what a problem I was, ignoring Fahey entirely and directing his venom to the audience, where I sat. He then dismissed the case against her. She thought it was hilarious, and told us we were doing the right thing and to press on.
I owe my entire career in leadership to Helen Fahey’s confidence, not just in me, but in herself. She glowed in the achievements of her people—who loved her back—and we blossomed in her glow. She had the confidence to be humble.
* * *
But the person who taught me the most about leadership is my wife, Patrice.
All of us have encounters with death in our lives. It’s inevitable. I’ve had my share, even after the Ramsey Rapist receded into my nightmares. There was, for example, the time I visited Patrice, who at this time was just my girlfriend, while she was in the Peace Corps in a remote village in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and I nearly died from contracting malaria. If she had not driven me in the middle of the night on the back of her motorcycle and literally dragged me into a remote hospital, I would not have made it. But sometimes it isn’t when we face death ourselves, but rather when death takes away those we love the most, that we really learn about just how short our time on earth is and why what we do with that time matters.
* * *
In the summer of 1995, Patrice and I lived in a five-bedroom colonial on a dead-end street in a planned neighborhood in Richmond. It was the kind of place where the local fire company would bring the truck to your house on a child’s birthday, where the neighbors all knew each other, where the kids spent endless hours out in the quiet street drawing chalk roads to play bike games. Our two little girls thrived in the new house, and were joined by a little brother in 1994. And then came Collin.
Collin Edward Comey was born on August 4, 1995. He was born healthy, seven pounds, six ounces, and like all Comey babies, he was long. Patrice nursed him at the hospital and our three kids visited and held him. It was a wonderful day, one experienced by many parents with a newborn. But as that day wore on, Patrice sensed a change in him. He became strikingly irritable, so she kept asking the hospital staff if something was wrong. They assured her he was fine and all was normal. One nurse patronized this mother of four, telling her, “You’ve just never had a colicky baby.”
He was not fine. We didn’t know it yet, but Collin’s little body was fighting a deadly infection. About one-quarter of all women carry bacteria called Group B streptococcus. The bacteria are harmless to the mothers, but can kill their babies. They can be reliably detected toward the end of pregnancy and easily treated with penicillin during delivery. But in 1995, that testing and treatment protocol was not yet a regular feature of American medical practice. Though some hospitals and some doctors tested for the bacteria, the medical association representing obstetricians had not yet endorsed the practice and state boards of medicine had not made it a standard of care.
By the next morning, Collin had a high fever and a raging infection in his blood, called sepsis. Under extraordinary care in a neonatal intensive care unit, he battled for nine days. He was soon on a ventilator, the machine inflating his little chest again and again. Patrice hardly slept, and often drifted off while sitting up in a chair by his side. She explained that he had heard her and touched her for nine months and he needed that voice and that touch more than ever. So she sat with him, hour after hour, day after day, holding his little fingers and singing nursery rhymes to him.
The doctors then showed us the devastating brain scans. The infection had destroyed huge sections of his brain. Only the ventilator is keeping him alive right now, they told us. Your son is gone. But they wouldn’t tell us what to do; they wanted us to tell them whether to remove Collin from the ventilator. How could we do that? He was there, alive, right in front of us, and we were being asked to give up and let him die.
I went home to check on the other kids. My parents were staying at our house. As I typically am when under stress, I was calm, even a little cold. But as I explained to my mom and dad what was happening and the decision we faced, I burst into tears. I don’t think either of them knew what to do.
Back at the hospital, Patrice and I made the decision. In the midst of indescribable grief, she somehow saw what else needed to be done. Our other son was not yet two and couldn’t understand what was happening, but our older girls could. For their sake, Patrice decided that they deserved, they needed, to face the truth. Once they knew the truth, and could accept it, they would have a chance to see Collin one last time. The girls had held our baby in his first minutes of life, Patrice reasoned. They should hold him at the end. His death shouldn’t be hidden from them or it would loom too large as they grow. I never would have had the wisdom to see this. Expose a five- and seven-year-old to their dying baby brother? Who would do that? A wise woman would, and she gave a gift to our daughters. They got a chance to say good-bye.
To prepare our daughters for this, we took them out for a picnic and, through many tears, explained what was happening and why. My mom then brought the girls into a private room shortly after the machines were turned off. Patrice was holding Collin, and handed him to each of his sisters. The girls took turns rocking him and speaking to him, saying good-bye, and then handed him back. After the girls left, I held the little guy for a while and then Patrice held him. His mother sang to him until he stopped breathing, and then long after. It is difficult for me even now to describe that scene, as a brokenhearted mother rocked her baby to the end of his short life.
We were very angry. Had Collin been born with another doctor or in another hospital that required testing, he would very likely be alive, because Patrice would have been tested late in pregnancy and treated as she delivered him. But because he was born with a doctor who didn’t support testing and in a hospital that didn’t require all doctors to order it, he was dead. That didn’t make any sense. Patrice dug into the science and developed a relationship with a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and good people at the Group B Strep Association, made up of others who had lost babies. Infants were dying needlessly all over the country as the medical profession slowly pivoted and changed its practices.
“I can’t bring our son back,” Patrice said, “but I can’t bear the thought of another mother feeling the pain I feel. I’ve got to do something.” She framed it in religious terms, based on one of her favorite lines from the New Testament. In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “We know that God causes all things to work together for good, for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.”
She couldn’t explain why a loving God would allow Collin to die, and she rejected glib explanations about “God’s will.” She would reply, often to me after the well-meaning person had moved out of earshot, “What kind of loving God wants to kill my baby? I don’t believe that.” But she did believe she had to make something good come from her loss. That good, she announced, would be saving other mothers’ babies by forcing all doctors to test. So she went to it, channeling her grief into a nationwide campaign.
Patrice wrote publicly about our son and traveled the country supporting efforts to change the standard of care. She poured effort into speaking to the Virginia legislature, and succeeded in getting statutory language passed embracing universal testing and treatment for Group B strep. She didn’t do anything alone, but her voice, along with the voices of many other good people, changed our country. All mothers are tested now, and their babies live. Something good followed unimaginable bad. Other mothers will never know what might have been, which is as it should be.
Patrice’s quest—to try to make things right for others—undoubtedly influenced my own views on the purpose of the law and the justice system to which I’ve devoted most of my adult life. In the years that followed Collin’s death, I have seen a lot of bad things happen to good people, and I have been asked to help explain it and give those losses some sense of meaning. In 2002, when I went back to serve as the United States Attorney in Manhattan, I stood in the freshly excavated pit at Ground Zero, a place where thousands died, including hundreds of whom no trace was found. I had invited the country’s ninety-two chief federal prosecutors to that spot. I explained that those lost innocents were all around us, even though we couldn’t see them. This was a place of suffocating loss. It was holy ground.
Channeling Patrice, I told them that I didn’t know why bad things happen to good people. I recalled that, for those of us from a Judeo-Christian tradition, the Book of Job rebukes us for even asking the question. The voice from the whirlwind replied, in essence, “How dare you?” The truth is, I can’t explain God’s role in human history. To do that would require an understanding far beyond the loss of my son, and sweep in the suffering and loss of countless innocent sons and daughters. I just don’t know, and I have little patience for those who claim to know. What I do know is what Patrice taught me: There is meaning and purpose in not surrendering in the face of loss, but instead working to bind up wounds, ease pain, and spare others what you have seen. Our obligation, our duty, is to ensure that something good comes from suffering, that we find some kind of gift in good-bye. Not to somehow, perversely, make the loss “worth it.” Nothing will ever justify some losses, but we can survive, even thrive, if we channel grief into purpose and never allow evil to hold the field. In that mission lie the beauty and genius of our justice system.
* * *
Patrice and I were planning to stay in Richmond forever. We had good public schools, and a nice and relatively inexpensive house in a safe neighborhood. After Collin’s death, we had a healthy baby girl in 1996 and added another in 2000. We would raise the five kids in Richmond. I would do work I loved. We were set. Then the country was attacked on 9/11, and my phone rang.
I was home from work one day in October 2001, watching the two youngest girls. Patrice was at church for the foundational meeting of a women’s group she was starting. She spoke inspiringly to the women about growing old together. But she couldn’t hear our phone ring from there. I heard it at home and answered. The man said he was calling from the White House because the president would like to know if I would be willing to return to Manhattan as the United States Attorney, the chief federal prosecutor. I assumed it was one of my hilarious friends, so I began to say, “Yeah, why don’t you kiss my a—” when the man cut me off, saying this was not a joke. President George W. Bush needed to appoint a new United States Attorney, there was something of a political logjam in New York over the pick, and they had decided I was the right person: I had worked in that office, I had done terrorism cases, and I would be acceptable to Democrats and Republicans. Would I do it?
It is difficult at this distance to capture the feeling of the fall of 2001, a time of unity and purpose and anxiety in the country. Of course I will do it, I replied, “but my wife’s not home right now. I will call you back if she has a problem.” I hung up the phone, abandoned my caregiving responsibilities, and went out to stand in the driveway to wait for Patrice, my heart pounding.
After what seemed like hours, she came driving up in our red Ford minivan. She got out, took one look at my face, and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I answered, standing in the driveway without my little girls. “A guy called from the White House and asked me to be the U.S. Attorney in New York.”
Her eyes started to well up. “You can’t say no.”
“I didn’t say no. But I told him I would call back if you had a problem.”
She began crying, her open hands covering her face. “I’m going back to New York. Oh my God, I’m going back to New York.”
We were going back to New York, where the World Trade Center site still smoked. I would lead 250 prosecutors with hundreds of cases, ranging from terrorism to violent crime to corporate fraud, including what would be one of the most high-profile cases of my career.
Patrice opened the minivan’s sliding door and the large ceramic plate that had held the bagels she took to church slid out. In a moment that was hard not to take as a prophetic metaphor, it shattered on the driveway.
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