$2 Chess Game Turns Into $1-Million Suit : Courts: A Soviet emigre was jailed for two days after being accused of gambling. He says he can’t believe it could happen in America.

NEW YORK —  The big, scowling man stared across the cell at the stooped, elderly man. Finally, overcome by curiosity, he spoke:

“What’re you in for?”

The old man had been in jail for 48 hours. He had had little to drink and almost nothing to eat. His bladder ached; his legs, after hours of standing, felt like stumps. He was dizzy and disoriented, and his chest still hurt from the heart seizure he had suffered on his first night in custody.

What was he in for? All he had left was the simple, absurd truth, which he told in a heavy Russian accent:

“I play chess on the street.”

Chess was one of the few constants in the life of Arkady Flom.

A native of Kiev, Flom had earned a degree in veterinary medicine in 1955. He enjoyed a comfortable life by Soviet standards, but as a Jew, he was increasingly dismayed over religious discrimination.

It was a relatively small thing--his son being kept off a fencing team--that finally convinced Flom to leave. In 1979, after he had suffered a heart attack, the Floms were allowed to emigrate so that Arkady could seek medical care.

In New York, chess was one language in which Flom was fluent. When his health failed to improve and his marriage broke up, he turned more and more to the game for diversion.

Several days a week, he would ride the subway an hour from his Brooklyn home to 42nd Street in Manhattan, where chess players gathered on the sidewalk near the New York Public Library. An entrepreneur there rented chess sets, tables and chairs, and the players often wagered a few bucks on their games.

Shortly before noon on Monday, Aug. 16, 1988, Flom was sitting at the last table on the left, waiting for a game. A young man sat down and asked if Flom wanted to play. Flom said yes, and told the man he usually bet $2 a game.

When the game began, it became apparent the stranger was a novice, and Flom quickly won. Somewhat embarrassed, he proposed a second game on these terms: Rather than play again for money, the man would pay him a dollar for a lesson. Flom would show him where he went wrong and teach him some moves.

The man handed over the money, stood up, and told Flom he was under arrest for gambling.

Flom was stunned: What game was less reliant on chance? What game was a greater test of skill?

Five other plainclothes officers appeared. As the chess players looked on in amazement, Flom was handcuffed, read his rights and taken off in a squad car. At the police station he was fingerprinted, photographed and charged with promoting gambling and possession of gambling equipment--chess men and a chessboard.

Flom, who had never been in trouble in the Soviet Union, had never seen the inside of a police station, felt as if he had fallen back into the dark world he left behind, the world of Stalin or Dostoevski.

“I’m a sick man. I’m not a criminal,” he pleaded.

Told he could make one telephone call, he dialed an elderly neighbor and asked her to contact his sons, who lived out of state.

“What you in for?” the woman asked in Russian. It sounded as if she didn’t understand him. At any rate, his sons never got the message.

After a few hours, Flom was driven to a jail downtown to await arraignment. He was told to empty his pockets, take off his shoelaces and belt and surrender the heart pills he was supposed to take three times a day.

Again, he pleaded: “I’m a sick man, I’m not a criminal.” Again, no one listened.

He was jammed into a dirty, hot cell with about 60 other men. There was no place to sit and the air was fetid. “What you in for?” he was asked. When he told them, they laughed.

Finally, he and about a dozen other men were chained together, led into a van and taken on a bouncing, lurching ride to another jail.

When they arrived shortly after midnight, Flom was badly shaken. He had been on his feet 12 hours and a terrible pain was rising in his chest. A medic inspected him, gave him back his pills and ordered him taken to Beekman Hospital. He was having a heart seizure.

At the emergency room Flom was given a painkiller and allowed to lie down for several hours. When he felt well enough to leave, he was taken back to the first jail, where he had to stand for hours. Then he had to endure a bruising van ride to the second jail.

There he was given a cheese sandwich and coffee. Too distraught to eat, he offered them to his cellmate. There was only one bed, so Flom spent Tuesday night sitting up.

The next morning he was taken to a holding cell for several hours, then ushered into a courtroom. Men in suits, men in uniforms and women in scanty dresses moved about, seemingly at random. Others slept on benches.

Flom did not realize he was represented by a public defender until the lawyer, Michael Butchen, began speaking.

“I don’t think this is gambling,” Butchen told Judge Herbert Adlerberg. “That is a chess game, not a three-card monte operation. It’s ridiculous. This gentleman has never been in trouble before. He offered the cop a chess lesson, so he busted him. . . . The cop must’ve been out of the academy two days.”

“How does (what Flom did) make out gambling?” the judge asked the prosecutor, Deborah Steiger. “I don’t see it.”

Neither, apparently, did Steiger. She quickly agreed to dismiss the charges.

Now he was free to leave, but Flom asked to speak.

“I am a sick man. I got two heart attacks. I told them and now I got. . . . They arrested me. I am not a gambler. I play chess 40 years. I never was a gambler. They put my case now, what does that mean?”

“I think you ought to talk to your lawyer,” the judge replied.

A month later he did just that. Now he is suing the city for $1 million for wrongful arrest.

But questions remain. Why, in a city that averages seven murders a day and leads the nation in armed robbery, did the police bother with a chess-playing grandfather? Why didn’t they merely issue him a summons or a citation? And why was he held more than 48 hours before he was arraigned?

Neither the police, the prosecutor nor the city lawyer will talk about Flom’s case because of his lawsuit. Police detective Diane Bolte, one of the arresting officers, recently was questioned under oath by Flom’s lawyer.

She testified that she and other members of the Morals Squad were sent to 42nd Street after police received an anonymous telephone call “stating there was illegal activity going on at that location.”

Who would object to such activity? Joan Ramer, director of the neighborhood planning board, says the chess players “weren’t a big problem. We got a few complaints, but some people thought they were picturesque.”

Flom was not gambling because chess is not a game of chance. New York courts settled that issue 87 years ago. When Bolte was asked how much she knew about the game, she testified: “I do not understand it and I have never played.” She admitted that she did not even know the meaning of the term “checkmate.”

False arrest is a costly problem for New York City, which pays out more than $10 million a year to settle suits alleging abuse of police power.

On a recent morning Flom, now 65, stood on 42nd Street near the spot where he was arrested on that hot summer day 2 1/2 years earlier. He was asked what he made of his ordeal.

Even in the worst days of the Iron Curtain era, he said, people could sit on any street corner and play chess for as much as they liked.

“I believe this can’t happen in a free country,” he said. “I left that kind of system in Russia.”