BOOK MARK : Law: Legal systems seem to be more concerned with keeping the wheels turning than with dispensing justice. In “Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A.,” the author gives some examples.

Monday morning I arrived at 100 Centre St., the massive gray New York City Criminal JusticeBuilding, coffee and doughnut in one hand, the Penal Code under my arm. The south entrance hall lobby, with its plain granite walls and echoey green-gray floor, was still dark. Police barricades stood in a semicircle just inside the revolving doors at the entrance and behind the barricades as skinny man with thick glasses arranged newspapers at his concession stand. Near the center of the lobby a few prostitutes, looking the worse for wear after a night that began on the streets and ended in the pens, waited at a line of pay phones beside an abandoned information desk. At this hour, a quarter to eight, the denizens of 100 Centre St.--judges, court officers, clerks, stenographers, police officers, prison guards, defense lawyers, and prosecutors--all stretched and yawned at the simultaneous close of one day and beginning of another.

To the far right of the entrance, a flight of stairs with a tarnished brass railing curved up to a second-floor walkway. As I walked across the lobby toward the stairs, a court officer asked, “DA?” I nodded; he waved me by. I climbed the staircase and headed down a dimly lit corridor, past a sign warning, “DEFENSE LAWYERS NOT PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT.”

It was mid-September. The district attorney’s five-week training course had ended, my fingerprints and photographs were filed, security clearance had come through, and my law books stood lined up and unthumbed on the shelves of an office that I shared with three other assistant district attorneys. I would begin my career drafting misdemeanor complaints in a place we called “eekab.” It was the acronym for Early Case Assessment Bureau, the complaint room, the heart of the district attorney’s office.

Just outside ECAB I was brought up short by about a dozen police officers in full uniform sleeping on the floor. Scattered along the corridor they looked like blue whales washed up on shore, and they were snoring loudly. I climbed over their blue legs and heavily-booted feet and continued on into a vestibule lit by a couple of fluorescent bulbs and covered with plastic wood paneling. This was the officers’ waiting room. More cops--some uniformed, with hats pulled over their eyes, others in plain clothes--slouched in orange seats affixed to the floor around the periphery. There were no windows, the doorways had no doors, and mysteriously, a few footprints dusted the walls.

One officer mumbled, “Mornin,’ counselor,” as I walked through, still balancing my coffee and doughnut, on my way into the complaint room, a complex of rooms, or rather cubicles, arranged along an L-shaped hallway. Cubicles were occupied first come, first served, so I went looking for a vacant spot. To the right and left, assistant district attorneys with their neckties loosened, yawned as they finished writing up the last cases of the midnight-to-8 shift. Coffee cups lay crumbled on the floor. Someone announced happily that the relief troops had arrived.

At the end of the hallway I found a free cubicle outfitted with the usual spartan accommodations: a few chairs, a beige metal desk, and a telephone. Like the other cubicles, it also looked generally abused. A pile of form complaints had spilled off the desk, and in a corner a folding lamp that looked like a crippled ostrich lay in a heap gathering dust. The desk was bolted to the floor and the phone bolted to the desk. I later learned that there had been a rash of thefts in which bags, wallets, and even telephones had been taken, hence the security measures. Rumor had it that some of the officers themselves were responsible. After a few sips of coffee, I went to work.

I quickly discovered that ECAB operated like a legal assembly line. We moved cases in bulk, saving a close look at the facts for another prosecutor on another day. We copied complaints out of the manual, copied the names and telephone numbers of police officers and witnesses into grids on our write-ups, called D.A. Data Sheets, and compressed the facts of each crime into barely more than a sketch. In training we were told that, for the purpose of a write-up, no case requires more than three sentences to summarize. The Watergate scandal would be reduced to: Nixon campaign workers break into Watergate Hotel complex. Presidential aides involved. President attempts cover up upon learning of crime. The routine was simple: Interview the cops, get the gist of the case on paper, copy a complaint out of the manual, and hurry on to the next arrest. Keep cases moving.

During my first few days I wrote up the most basic offenses. A large number were farebeats--not paying the subway fare. One day I picked up an arrest report charging Criminal Tampering and Criminal Mischief. I called the officer into my cubicle. He was a tough young foot patrolman from Harlem.

“Well, counselor,” he began, “this is really a bizarre one. You know about stuff ‘n’ suck?” I told him I’d missed that lecture at law school and asked him to tell me about it.

“OK. Up in the three-four precinct we’ve got a lot of kids who are into token-sucking, and they’re always hitting up the same damn turnstiles. Every morning they’re in the subway 10, maybe 20 times and then they come back for more at night. And what they do is, they slip a folded piece of paper into the token slot so the token won’t go through into the token box. After a passenger loses a token and walks away, the kids come back, suck it out of the slot, and sell it for a buck on the street.”

“What do they use to suck the token out with?” I asked.

“What do you mean, Counselor? They put their mouth on the token slot and suck. That’s why it’s called stuff ‘n’ suck.”

“So, Officer, what did the defendant actually do?”

“OK, the way I got it was from the token booth clerk, a Mrs. Hillary Grimes,” the officer said, checking his memo book. “She said that our boy Junior Eames here was sucking two or three token at about 2,200 hours last night. So she calls the precinct and says, ‘Hey, somebody’s sucking tokens at 125th and Broadway, send an officer over.’ Anyway, no one shows up, and, ten minutes later, Junior’s screwing around with the turnstiles again and sucking a few more tokens. Again she calls the three-four and still nobody comes. Well, the kid does the same thing one more time and Mrs. Grimes has had it.

“You know about Krazy Glue, that it bonds skin instantly? OK? Well, Mrs. Grimes takes the stuff and smears it all over the token slot. So, the next time little Junior comes along to suck a token, he gets bonded to the turnstile by his lips and teeth.” The officer smirked,.

“So, Officer,” I asked, “how did you come on the scene?”

“OK. The three-four got a call about some guy glued to the turnstile, and I was in the area on foot patrol, so I went over to investigate, figuring it was a lot of nonsense. When I got downstairs, though, there was Junior with his face stuck to the slot. Anyway, I’ve had trouble with Krazy Glue before, you know, people getting their skin bonded to stuff, and I knew the only way to get the perpetrator free without ripping his mouth was to call Emergency Medical Services.

“They sent some people over within ten minutes who injected a saline solution between Junior’s lips and the metal. Saline dissolves the glue. Anyway, the minute he got free, I arrested him. OK, Counselor? So the first thing Junior says to me after I put the cuffs on him is, ‘Listen, man, I wasn’t sucking tokens.’ ”

Police say token-sucking was a common practice costing the city a small fortune each year. Still, Grimes’ “solution” seemed harsh. Maybe the officer should have arrested them both.

Copyright 1990 by David Heilbroner. Reprinted with permission of Pantheon Books.

REVIEW: A review of David Heilbroner’s book “Rough Justice” appears on Page 4 of today’s Book Review section.