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ROUGH JUSTICE Days and Nights of a Young D.A. By David Heilbroner Pantheon, $19.95 Nonfiction
Monday morning I arrived at 100 Centre Street, the massive gray New York City Criminal Justice Building, coffee and doughnut in one hand, Penal Code and ECAB manual under my arm. The South Entrance Hall lobby, with its plain granite walls and echoey green-gray oor, was still dark. Police barricades stood in a semicircle just inside the revolving doors at the entrance and behind the barricades a 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. White-shirted court of cers hovered in the shadows; lawyers with their clients ambled out of night court. At this hour, a quarter to eight, the denizens of 100 Centre Street-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 the beginning of another
