Ex-Judge Takes Tribune for an April Fool’s Ride

The Tuesday edition of the Tribune was hot off the presses when Municipal Court Presiding Judge Fred Link’s phone began ringing off the hook. Link’s fellow judges were calling to express outrage and concern about the lead item in Neil Morgan’s gossip column that cast suspicion on their morality and judicial temperament.

But, mercifully for San Diego’s judiciary, former Municipal Court Judge Lewis Wenzell called Link to proudly announce that he had pulled the wool over Morgan’s eyes. Morgan, Tribune editor and gossip columnist, it seems, had fallen for an April Fool’s hoax perpetrated by his old adversary.

Headlined “The Trash Pile,” the item announced that Wenzell had “surfaced with a smear” and had written a book detailing the juicy but injudicious activities involving judges Wenzell knew during his four-year tenure on the bench. It was the kind of stuff that gossip columnists find irresistible.

Morgan, giving the impression that he had read Wenzell’s manuscript, wrote that Chapter 6 “details feuds between older judges and judges who, like Wenzell, were appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown.” Morgan said that Chapter 9 details the “alleged sexual relationship between a married judge and a clerk, and of alleged after-court pot parties in another judge’s chambers.”

But on Wednesday, a gleeful Wenzell told The Times that the book and the stories about sex and pot parties in judges’ chambers were a hoax.

Wenzell said that the information for Morgan’s column item came from an anonymous letter written by Wenzell himself and mailed to Morgan. The unsigned letter urged Morgan to call Wenzell and confront the former judge about the book. “ . . . I bet Wenzell would not deny what I have said,” read the letter. But Wenzell said that Morgan never called.

“You know Neil. He wouldn’t be able to pass up a good story. If there was any journalist in town who would publish a story without checking the facts, it would be Neil,” Wenzell said in a telephone interview.

Reached in New York Wednesday night, Morgan said he is not satisfied that the letter is a hoax. Morgan said that he tried several times unsuccessfully to call Wenzell about the alleged book but was never able to reach him.

“I had other reason to believe that he was writing a book,” said Morgan. “And to my reasonable journalistic satisfaction, I don’t know if he is or isn’t writing a book. I don’t know which Wenzell to believe. . . . If I’ve been had, I’m the victim of a non-literary hoax.”

Wenzell resigned from the bench in August, 1982, in the face of a recall election. He was convicted in 1981 of soliciting prostitution, but his conviction was later overturned by the state Supreme Court. Before his conviction was reversed, Wenzell faced the prospect of being the first California judge to face removal from the bench on constitutional grounds of moral turpitude.

After the reversal, the Tribune printed a postage-paid recall petition in its news pages, urging voters to sign it and mail it to the county registrar of voters so Wenzell could be removed from the bench.