(FORTUNE Magazine) – I started working as a court reporter in 1979. I was 23 years old. I wanted to go into medicine, but I got derailed. And this isn't so bad. Here we get notorious people. We've had [Mike] Tyson here several times. We also had the World Trade Center bombing trials and several Mafia cases.

I've worked on a few Mafia cases. It's very nerve-racking because it's very emotional. And that old cliche about mobsters talking so slow? Well, that's not how they usually talk. They're usually so fast you can hardly decipher what they are saying. Every answer has five or six nicknames in it. It's difficult.

You can sometimes tell when an attorney should be doing something that he's not. But we're not lawyers. We're just takers of the records. At one time we were considered very high in society. We were the scribes. Now, we're often taken for granted.

--Interview by Julie Schlosser