The coffee immediately marked me as a neophyte.

A little after 9 a.m. on a frosty Connecticut morning, I walked into Bridgeport Superior Court with a cup of black Dunkin‘ in my hand. ‘You should finish that now,’ a guard suggested. ‘No food or drinks inside.’

After gunning half my coffee and passing through the metal detector, I emerged into a large room that had some of the sleepy conviviality of a middle school homeroom. It’s not like everyone was best friends, but there was a certain familiarity between and among all of the groups: the harried public defenders, calling out names of clients they found themselves representing that day; the well-dressed attorneys for the well-to-do; the uniformed court marshals, as kind and strict as nuns; the defendants.

It’s the casualness of this last group that struck me most. A woman in a shiny white tie paced while talking loudly on her phone. ‘No, I’m here in court,’ she said. After a pause: ‘A bunch of shit that I didn’t do, to be honest.’ Someone else boldly wore a humorous beanie reading ‘ALCATRAZ SWIM TEAM.’

In the courtroom itself, one person who did stand out was a tall man in a sumptuous suit and a long wool coat. Alongside two attorneys, he stepped up to center stage when Judge Ndidi Moses (badly muffled, I must say, behind her mask and plexiglass) called out ‘James Iannazzo.’

This was the man I was here to see. Two weeks ago, he had made international headlines for a prolonged and quite scary rant at a Fairfield smoothie shop called Robeks that apparently followed his son’s dangerous allergic reaction to peanut butter that may have been in a smoothie he ordered. An employee filmed the tirade, and the hard-to-watch episode racked up millions of views online.

As a result of the incident, he was fired as a Merrill Lynch broker and charged with two misdemeanors. The felony charge – intimidation based on bigotry or bias in the second degree – appears to pertain to his calling one smoothie shop employee a ‘f—cking immigrant loser’ on video. Now he was standing before Judge Moses.

As he stepped forward, a cameraman from News 12 hastily took a cover off his TV camera and panned over.

The arraignment was brief. The State’s attorney asked for certain conditions of release, which were granted. Judge Moses instructed Iannazzo to stay out of Robeks. He was also instructed not to have contact with the victims, some of whom were named and one of whom was referred to by her initials. Among the few things Iannazzo said was ‘yes,’ after Judge Moses asked whether he knew whom those particular initials referred to.

Then it was over. The camera was wrapped back up, and about 10 people jogged out of the courtroom. A stone-faced Iannazzo stood in the hallway awaiting his attorneys.

Outside, two more news cameras stood in the light rain (pictured).

One of those belonged to ‘Inside Edition,’ which also brought a blonde reporter who waited with a microphone for Iannazzo to emerge. The crews started trading information. Perhaps he had already left. No, someone replied, he’s upstairs in the courthouse. A short-haired woman wandered down the steps and over to the small press scrum. ‘I’m just a web reporter,’ she told no one in particular.

Suddenly there was a mad rush toward the courthouse’s side door. Iannazzo had apparently hatched a plan avoid to the press – no great surprise, after the Daily Mail saw fit to base a whole story around blurry pictures of him carrying ‘what appeared to be a bottle of detergent’ outside his own garage. ‘EXCLUSIVE: Disgraced Merrill Lynch financier, 48, who was fired for racist, smoothie-throwing tirade at Robeks is pictured at his $2.6 million Connecticut home for the first time since his arrest,’ ran the breathless headline.

As three cameras tried their best to get a shot from up the block, Iannazzo went by in the backseat of an SUV being driven by one of his lawyers. ‘There goes Jimmy!’ one of the cameraman called.

But before I went home to file the story, I decided to get a smoothie.

It was kind of weird walking into the Fairfield Robeks. I had much the same half-disoriented, half-starstruck feeling I got the first time I walked in Studio 8H, where ‘Saturday Night Live’ is shot. Still, I didn’t recognize any of the employees. In fact, half the staff seemed to be in the midst of their training.

Upon receiving my Nuts About Protein (I asked for something caffeinated, to make up for that unfinished morning coffee), I made an elliptical reference to Iannazzo’s day in court. I had hoped to drum up some conversation, but as I should have predicted, the response was chillier than the smoothie. I walked out embarrassed to have been the thousandth guy to bring up the last thing they want to talk about.

That night, ‘Inside Edition’ showed viewers around the country a brief clip of Iannazzo’s day in court. Beneath footage taken by the News 12 camera ran the words, ‘SMOOTHIE BAN.’