Baldwin, the author of The Fire Next Time; the jazz legend Charlie Mingus; and William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was published the same year that Kroll was killed. An aloof man, Tony was held in high regard by the people he deemed worthwhile—mostly people in the arts—to whom he was a helpful presence. The hoi polloi didn’t exist for Tony. “He treated everyone not within his immediate entourage,” Baldwin wrote, “with a bored, patient contempt.” He was both street wise and worldly. He was well traveled and could get by in several different languages. He carried himself with the air of someone to the manner born. Tony had been in the army and done a short stint at the post office. He had also worked as “bodyguard and chauffeur and man Friday” for Baldwin, as the latter would write many years later in No Name in the Street. That’s how he met Styron. The idea that Tony would have talked to a drunken sailor, let alone cared that he had harassed another black man on the street, much less carried an “inelegant weapon” like a sawed-off shotgun, was completely ludicrous to anyone who knew him.
Maynard’s associations with jazz musicians and well-known authors, of course, had nothing to do with his becoming a suspect in the Kroll killing. And certainly he did not fit the description of a five-foot-eight-inch black man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, who looked like Martin Luther King, Jr.
Maybe being seen in the area with Michael Quinn, his white brother-in-law, as well as a beautiful white woman, had something to do with it. But Michael was never questioned or charged as an accomplice. And no one had even given the cops a description of the killer’s white companion. It was as if the police did not care. They had a black guy and a couple of creepy Village late-night characters willing to finger him, and that was enough to satisfy them as well as the mayor. Probably the most obvious reason the cops focused on Maynard was his beautiful white wife, Mary Quinn, a model, who also worked in Tony’s and her brother Michael’s clothing store. Although Mary was in the process of divorcing Tony, as she had grown tired of his wandering ways, she still modeled in the store, and he still visited the Quinns in their Woodside, Queens, home, to which Mary had returned.
While New York City and particularly the Village were far more permissive than the rest of the country, interracial couples still turned heads, especially if the woman was beautiful. As a result it is inconceivable that the local cops had not seen the couple together on the streets and in the cafés.
As Baldwin wrote, Tony’s “aggressively virile good looks” made him “particularly unattractive to the NYPD.” Worse, Mary was Irish, as were many of the cops.
Arrested at the end of October in Germany, where he had traveled with a group of jazz musicians, Tony was held at Hamburg’s Holstenglacis prison. There he wrote a letter to William Styron explaining his circumstances. Baldwin moved around a lot, and Tony knew it would be easier for Styron to get word to his former employer of the dire straits in which he found himself. Notified, Baldwin immediately traveled to Germany and pulled some strings through his publisher there to get in to see Tony.
The cops and district attorney’s office would accuse Tony of running off to Europe to avoid prosecution. But like the false “stranger” eyewitness identifications by two unsavory street people who had never seen the killer before, which the police procured from witnesses who were in need of their goodwill when it came to their own activities, the flight claim was equally absurd, as Tony had gone to the American consulate in Hamburg, using his own name, to obtain a new passport.
After he was extradited to New York to stand trial, Tony was incarcerated in the Tombs, the vermin-infested, windowless jail attached to Manhattan’s criminal courthouse. Assistant District Attorney Gino Gallina of the Manhattan DA’s office was assigned to the case. Baldwin hired two defense attorneys who were well-known habitués of the New York criminal courts, first S. J. Seigel and then Selig Lenefsky, to represent Tony. Seigel and Lenefsky were typical lawyers who made their livings in the city’s criminal courts—chummy with everyone and knowledgeable about how to game the system for the best possible plea bargain. Because the lawyers were looking