18
Both of Les Karcher’s wives had been named Mary, though the younger one had been affectionately known within the family as “Tits.” The cops and paramedics found Older Mary in front of the house, where Skinflick and I had left her. Her skull had been crushed in, presumably by the iron stove grate that was found near her body, with (according to the Feds) no recoverable prints but a fair amount of Older Mary’s brain tissue on it. Tits, like the three male Karchers, was simply gone.* Unlike them, she hadn’t left any blood.
That the Feds would charge me with the murders of the Marys and not those of the Karcher Boys, as the father and sons came to be called, made a certain amount of sense. The Marys were a hell of a lot more sympathetic, and the Feds had one of their corpses. And if the case didn’t fly, they could always charge me with the Boys’ murders later.*
On the other hand, trying me for the murders of the Marys was in other ways a bad move, because I hadn’t actually done them. Any evidence the prosecution presented would be either fabricated or misinterpreted, and it would be impossible for them to disprove the “alternative explanation”: that Tits, after God knows what mistreatment over the years, had brained Older Mary and run off with the 200,000 dollars that one of the Ukrainian girls had overheard was in the house.
Let me state for the record, by the way:
Tits, if this is in fact what happened, then I bear you no ill will. Even if you were off somewhere the whole time, reading about my trial in the New York Post every day and laughing about how you could step in to save me at any time but weren’t going to—which I doubt—your actions are completely understandable.
Though I can’t swear I’d feel this way if things had turned out differently.
My “defense team” was assembled by the firm of Moraday Childe. It included, notably, both Ed “The Tri-State Johnnie Cochran” Louvak and Donovan “The Only Member Of Your Legal Team Who Will Ever Return Your Calls, Even Though Everyone Else Will Bill You $450 An Hour, Rounded Up, To Listen To Your Messages” Robinson.
Donovan, who is now a Special Assistant in the Office of the Mayor of the City of San Francisco—Hi, Donovan!—is about five years older than I am, so at the time was around twenty-eight. He was sharp but looked stupid—Sorry, Donovan! I know what it’s like!—which is exactly what you want in a defense lawyer. He did his best to help me, I think because he believed I was innocent. At least of those specific charges.
For example, Donovan was the first to pick up on how weird it was that I was being charged with murder involving torture, given that there was no evidence supporting the charge, and there was direct witness testimony from several of the Ukrainian girls that Older Mary had, if not directly participated in, then at least provided ancillary services to a couple of pretty horrific sessions. So it wasn’t a topic you’d think the prosecution would want to raise.
Donovan came to see me one day in jail—funny, I don’t remember Ed Louvak ever doing that—and said, “They’ve got something on you. What is it?”
“What do you mean?” I said to him.
“They have some piece of evidence they haven’t told us about.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Technically, yes. The rule is they have to show us anything they’ve got ‘in a timely fashion.’ But if it’s something good, the judge will allow it anyway. We can try for a mistrial on that basis, but we probably won’t get it. So if you have any idea what they might have, you might want to think about telling me about it.”
“I have no idea,” I said. Which was the truth.
David Locano was paying for all this, by the way, though not directly. He didn’t want a formal link to me, and probably also wanted to be able to cut me off if he thought I was turning dangerous to him or Skinflick.
But at the moment there wasn’t any reason for that to happen. We all knew the Feds would hold off on prosecuting Locano for solicitation of murder until they had proven that I had, in fact, murdered someone. And Skinflick wasn’t even a suspect.
Locano had kept Skinflick scrupulously clean. He had forbidden him to take credit for the hits unless it became clear that there wasn’t any heat. And he himself had never once mentioned Skinflick in connection to the Karchers outside of the steam room of the Russian Baths on 10th Street.
Unfortunately, he had been a bit looser when it came to me. The Feds had about eight hours of recorded phone calls in which he referred to me as “The Polack.” As in “Don’t worry about the Brothers K. The Polack’s visiting them next week.” But at least that gave Locano a strong incentive to try to keep me from being convicted.
The Feds told us about the tapes early, to encourage me to turn on Locano. They also told us they had some already-incarcerated mob guy who was willing to testify that, in general, I was a hitter who was known to do work for Locano.
But the Feds were keeping the Mystery Evidence, if Donovan was right and they had some, a secret till the last moment.
And in the meantime I rotted in jail.
Wendy Kaminer, that genius, says that if a Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged, then a Democrat is a Republican who’s been arrested. You might think a mafia hitman is not exactly the guy to be representing that argument, and in fact f*ck me, but let me point a couple of things out.
One is that, if you are accused—accused, mind you—of a capital crime, you will not be offered bail. I was in the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center for the Northeast Region (FMCCNR), across from City Hall in downtown Manhattan, for eight months before my trial even started.
Another is that, unless you’re a scary-looking famous hitman like I was, what will happen to you in jail will be a f*ck of a lot worse than what happened to me. I was never forced to sleep next to the lidless aluminum toilet, for instance, which had a perfect surface-tension dome of urine, shit, and vomit at all times, just waiting to slop over any time anyone used it. I was never forced to do what they call “taking out the laundry,” or any of the other thousand fantastically imaginative degradations incarcerated people come up with to demonstrate their power over each other and to fight off boredom. Even the guards kissed my ass.
And remember: this wasn’t prison. It was jail. The place they send people who are presumed innocent. In New York City, getting sent to Rikers Island (where I would have gone if my charges hadn’t been Federal) just means you’ve got charges pending.
And you might think you’ll never end up there, because you’re white, so the justice system works for you, and you never smoke pot or cheat on your taxes or leave any other opening for anyone who wants to hurt you—but that doesn’t mean you won’t. Mistakes get made, at which point you will fall into the hands of what is essentially the DMV, but with much less stringent hiring requirements.
And—even in New York City, and no matter who you are— your odds of getting arrested are about 150 times your odds of getting mugged.
Plus, newsflash: jail sucks.
Like they promise, it’s loud. Dog kennels are supposedly loud because any noise over ninety-five decibels is painful to dogs, so once one dog starts barking from the pain, all the rest start too, and the decibel count just keeps rising. In jail it’s the same thing. There’s always someone too crazy to stop screaming, and there are always the f*cking radios, but those things are only part of it.
People in jail talk constantly. Sometimes they do it to hustle each other. In jail, even the people so stupid you’re surprised they know how to breathe are constantly on the make. Because odds are good they’ll find someone even stupider than they are: someone more stressed-out, or more f*cked-up on drugs, or whose mother drank more alcohol when she was pregnant with them or whatever.
But people in jail also talk just to talk. Information, in a place that chaotic, comes to seem vital no matter what the quality.
The real value of conversation in jail, though, seems to be that it keeps people from thinking. There’s no other way to explain it. People in jail will have a conversation with someone four cells away rather than shut their f*cking faces for two minutes. Like there’s not enough noise from the guy knifing and/or raping someone near you, or sharpening his homemade syringe on the wall. People you threaten with death will keep talking to you.
What they’re all hoping for is that in the mindlessness of the place you’ll tell them something you shouldn’t, which they can then go sell to the warden. People in jail talk all the time about how much they hate snitches, and how people shouldn’t snitch, and how you’ll have to excuse them for a minute while they go off to knife someone for snitching. “Snitch” is one of their favorite words.* But all those f*ckheads, no matter how many times they tell you they’d rather die than be a snitch, spend most of their day trying to dig up something to snitch about. To lessen their sentence, or kiss ass, or just to fight the boredom.
Another favorite topic in jail is where everyone is headed.
As a mob guy and a killer, it was clear I’d be sent to one of the two facilities that make up Level 5, the highest level of security in the Federal system. The question was which one—Leavenworth or Marion.
What’s interesting about Leavenworth and Marion is that although they’re the only two Level 5 prisons, and although they’re also the two worst prisons in the U.S., they’re complete opposites. At Leavenworth the cell doors are open for sixteen hours a day, during which the prisoners are free to “mingle.” Apparently the mingling gets particularly baroque from June through September, because that’s when the warden leaves the lights off in the upper tiers. He has to: it gets so hot in Leavenworth that if he turns the lights on, the prisoners will destroy them to cut down on the heat production.
At Marion, meanwhile, the esthetic is completely different. You’re in “Ad Seg,” or “Administrative Segregation,” which means a tiny white cell, alone, with a fluorescent diffusion light over you that never shuts off and is the only thing you have to look at. You spend twenty-three hours a day there, with the other hour spent showering, going out to a solitary twelve-foot pacing run, or putting on and taking off your leg irons, which you have to do any time you do anything. In your cell you start to feel like you’re floating in fluorescent white nothingness, and that nothing else really exists.
If Leavenworth is fire, Marion is ice. It’s the Hobbesian hell vs. the Benthamite one. The dipshits I was in jail with all said Leavenworth was preferable, because at Marion you inevitably go insane. They also said that in free-range Leavenworth I, particularly, would do well, since as a mob guy I would get respect. At least as long as I was young enough to defend myself.
“Respect,” by the way, is the third word people in jail say all the time. As in “You tryin to start a war, dog? It ain’t respect to call that punk bitch Carlos! You got to call her Rosalita, dog. No, I mean it ain’t respect to the violators who are men in the block!” Which a guard actually said to me once.
I figured all told I would prefer Marion. But I didn’t worry about it too much, because the choice of whether you spend the rest of your life at Marion or at Leavenworth is not one you get to make. Bizarrely, it’s not one anyone gets to make. It gets decided randomly, on the basis of available beds.*
And anyway, I was planning to avoid both places. By snitching or whatever else it took.
I was willing to tell the Feds everything I knew, about the mob in general and David Locano in particular. True, I had once loved Skinflick like a brother. His parents had been closer to me than my own parents. Also true, I loved Magdalena so badly that I would have sold the Locanos and anything else I had access to in an instant, for one hour alone with her, anywhere.
I just didn’t know how long to wait. If it turned out that I would somehow walk, it would be crazy to tangle with the mob unnecessarily. But if I waited too long, and got convicted, it would be a lot harder to plea-bargain.
Locano’s guys were smart enough not to threaten Magdalena—or me, for that matter—directly, because they knew that if they did I’d start thinking about how to hurt them, and never stop. But they didn’t have to say much. I was in a cage, and they were out there, where she was. The ones who came to visit mentioned her all the time: “The case is bullshi’. It’s shi’. You’ll be back out wit your girl again. Wha’s her name? Magdalena? Nice name. Gray girl. You’ll be wit her in no time. We’ll sen her somin.”
Magdalena herself came to visit me four times a week.
Visitation rights are looser in jail than they are in prison— because Hey, you’re innocent!—and apparently they’re looser in Fed than they are in State. You’re not allowed to touch, but you can sit at opposite ends of a long metal table that has no divider, as long as the prisoner keeps his hands in sight on the tabletop. The visitor can keep her hands wherever, and do things to herself with them while you talk, and after a few weeks you don’t even think about the guards being there when this happens. And if you and she are fast you can stand at the same time, and you can kiss her or she can get her fingers into your mouth before you’re pulled apart and she’s thrown out and you get searched by a dentist. Because the warning that she won’t be allowed back turns out to be bullshit. And the guards, those sorry derelicts, are all willing to lie for you.
I loved Magdalena more and more with each visit and with each of her strange, formal letters. “In the quartet they keep telling me I am playing out of time. I am, because I am thinking about you. But it makes me play better, not worse, as I am so much more alive then, so I do not feel I am letting them down. I play best when I play from my heart, and you are my heart, I love you.”
If that feels to you like one of those f*cked-up prison romances where the obese woman writes to the celebrity wife-murderer, I don’t care. It saved my life, and my sanity. Her visits blotted out the squalidness of that shithole for days after she left.
Magdalena talked to Donovan more than I did. After he suggested to both of us separately that we might want to get married in case she was subpoenaed,* Magdalena told me that of course she would. That she would do anything.
I told her I didn’t want to, because I wanted to marry her for real. She said, “Don’t be stupid. We’ve been married for real since October Third.”
I’ll leave that one for you to figure out. It would be like trying to describe what the surface of the sun looks like.
Not that anyone seriously thought Magdalena would be subpoenaed. She would break a jury’s heart like that.
She brought me books, which were hard to read because of the noise. Then she brought me earplugs.
And, without telling me, she began the process of applying to become a Federal prison guard, so she’d have a chance in hell of being near me if things went badly.
Early in the summer of 2000, I was taken out of my cell and brought to an office in the FMCCNR I’d never been to before. That itself was not unusual, since every couple of weeks or so there was an “initial appearance” or “pretrial hearing” or whatever, to verify things like that I was who I claimed to be or who the Feds claimed I was, and that a crime had been committed at all. But this time the guard left me in the office alone and went and stood outside. Which felt extremely strange, even though I had wrist-waist and ankle cuffs on.
I immediately searched for a phone to call Magdalena. There wasn’t one. The wooden desk, like the wooden bookshelves, was empty. The wooden chair was the old slat-back kind. Out the window there was a ledge, and if I’d wanted to escape that would have been a good time for it. For a minute or two I considered it, and I was still looking out the window when the door opened behind me and Sam Freed came in.
He was in his late sixties then, immediately likable in a wrinkled gray suit. When I started around the desk he held a hand up and said, “Sit.” So I took the desk chair and he pulled over one of the ones along the walls.
“I’m Sam Freed,” he said. I’d never heard of him.
“Pietro Brnwa.” There was something about him that made you feel, even in your orange jumpsuit and leg irons, like a human being.
“I’m with the Justice Department,” he said. “Though I’m mostly retired now.”
That’s what he said. He didn’t say, for instance, “I invented WITSEC,” though that would have been true. He didn’t say, “I broke the mob’s back, and the people I gave immunity to have the lowest recidivism rates ever seen.”
Of course, he also didn’t say that he was one of the most loathed people in law enforcement. Because sure, he’d struck the mafia a deathblow, but only at the cost of setting a bunch of scumbags up with new lives, which most cops and even Feds found unforgivable.
He was Jewish, of course. Who else would fight that hard for justice in a way guaranteed to make him a pariah? His father had worked the Fulton Street Fish Market, paying 40 percent off the top to Albert Anastasia.
Like I say, though, at the time I had never heard of him. “Huh,” I said.
He said, “I heard about you from Baboo Marmoset.”*
“I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“Indian kid. Doctor. Long hair. He did your physical a couple of months ago.”
“Oh, right.” I remembered him now, though only someone of Freed’s generation would say he had long hair. Marmoset had talked on the phone and done my paperwork at the same time he’d examined me. Then he’d said, “You’re fine.” I was pretty sure that was the extent of our interaction.
“I’m surprised he remembered me,” I told Freed. “He seemed a bit distracted.”
Freed laughed. “He always does. God knows what he’d be capable of if you could get his attention. I’ll tell you a story.”
Freed put his feet up on the desk. “My wife and I like to go out to dinner theater,” he said. “These things at a Chinese restaurant where some actors stage a crime and you have to solve it. It’s ridiculous, but it feeds us and it feeds the actors, so there you have it.
“Sometimes Baboo comes along. He never seems to pay attention at all. He’s usually got some date, in fact. Spends the whole night with his face in her boobs or else checking his voice mail. At the end of the evening, though, when it’s time to guess who committed the crime, he’s always right.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“None,” Freed said. “Anyway, he’s the best judge of character I know. And I’ve known a few.”
He didn’t say, “Like Jack and Bobby Kennedy,” though he could have.
He said, “Baboo called you ‘an interesting and possibly redeemable individual.’ By which I assume he meant not only that you deserved a second chance, but that you probably had enough information to trade to earn one.”
I shook my head. I already felt like Freed was someone I didn’t want to disappoint, and I didn’t want to lie to him, either. “I barely talked to that guy. And I’m not willing to testify,” I said.
“Okay. It can wait. But not for long. Speed the plow. The opportunity won’t keep forever.”
“I’m not interested in entering protection unless I have to. I’m not ready for it.”
“I don’t know about that,” Freed said. “Protection’s not what you think. It’s not about becoming someone else. It’s about becoming who you were meant to be in the first place.”
“That’s a little deep for me,” I said.
“I don’t believe that for a second,” he said. “Think about what your grandfather would have wanted.”
“My grandfather?”
“I’m sorry to get personal. But I think I know what he thought of you, and what he’d think about you being here, and I think you know too.”
“Do you do this to all potential witnesses?” I said.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “But Baboo Marmoset thinks you can take it.”
“He doesn’t even know me!”
Freed shrugged. “The man has a gift. He probably knows you better than you know yourself.”
“That wouldn’t take much,” I said.
“No it wouldn’t, toughguy,” Freed said. He swung his legs off the desk and stood up. “But I think you know what this mob stuff is worth. It gives you a couple of headwaiters kissing your ass because you pay them and they’re afraid of you, and it takes everything else away. Including that lovely young lady of yours.”
Somehow when he said it, it didn’t bother me. But intellectually I knew better.
“You’re conning me,” I said.
“Takes one to know one,” he said. He opened the door but turned around before he went out. “You know, if I was conning you, I’d say this: Why did the the mob want the Karchers dead?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said.
He ignored me. “You saw how isolated the Karchers were. Who could they identify? You think they knew people higher up in the chain?”
I just looked at him.
“They didn’t. They knew people below them. That’s why the mob wanted them gone. So the business itself could keep going, under a different subcontractor.
“I’ll be in touch later. But if I was conning you I’d ask you to think about that, and what your grandfather would have said about it.”
Freed was right about the Karchers, of course. It had occurred to me a million times before.
But that night I slept without my earplugs so I wouldn’t have to think about it.
The trial itself you already know about, you child of Fox News, you. But you have no idea how injuringly boring it was, even to me. The Feds had been running “Operation Russian Doll” for months before I stepped in and f*cked things up for them, so there were thousands of financial documents that anyone capable of getting a job in the private sector would have known better than to read to the jury. And which had almost nothing to do with the Italian mafia. Or, as the FBI calls it, “the LCN.”
“LCN” stands for la cosa nostra—“the our thing,” or “the thing of ours.” I have never once heard anyone in the mafia actually say “la cosa nostra,” let alone “LCN.” Let alone “the LCN.” Why would they? It’d be like a bunch of French criminals calling themselves the LJNSQ, for “the le je ne sais quoi.”*
Anyway, for a while the trial was just a slog. Then, about ten days into opening arguments—right after they played the recording of my 911 call from the gas station, which a speech expert said was my voice “to about eighty-five percent certainty”—the prosecution produced the Mystery Evidence, and the whole thing took off.
The Mystery Evidence, of course, was a skinned, severed hand, which the prosecution said they would prove had once belonged to Tits.
The Hand was disgusting. You had to admit that it looked too delicate to be anything other than female, but also just a little too large to be that of an adolescent Ukrainian girl. And it was easy enough to take the Feds’ word for it that the Hand had been found outside the compound, right near where the car had been parked that they said they were going to prove I had driven away. And that the knife marks all over the Hand made it clear that it had been skinned, and not, say, picked over by some weasels or whatever.* It was a thing of deep horror. Particularly when the Feds projected it, huge, onto a screen at the front of the courtroom.
Naturally, Ed Louvak objected, but Donovan had been right: although it ran contrary to Brady v. Maryland for the prosecution to have kept the Hand secret from the defense, the judge allowed it into evidence anyway, since it was so grotesque and so likely to generate press coverage. And also, I suppose, because it was the only thing likely to get a conviction.
You have to understand that, relatively speaking, July 2000 was a terrific time to be tried for murder. Five years earlier the O. J. Simpson trial had managed to slander the concept of circumstantial evidence, which up to that point had been the basis for almost every criminal conviction in history. Circumstantial evidence includes everything except physical evidence and direct eyewitness testimony. If you buy a speargun, tell everyone in the bar you’re about to go shoot someone with it, then come back in an hour with the gun but not the spear and say you did it, that’s all just circumstantial evidence. The O.J. trial managed to make even physical evidence look suspect, because any gap in the “chain of custody” made it conceivable the cops had f*cked with it.
And eyewitness testimony, by that time, had been under fire for years as being unreliable. Which it is. Though in my case there wasn’t going to be much anyway—just Mike the Grocery Boy, on what he might or might not have seen in his rearview mirror.
The Feds, meanwhile, had barely any physical evidence other than the Hand. There was mud all over the Farm, but none of the footprints in it were large enough to be mine.*
So the Hand had been scrupulously protected, and supposedly kept under direct observation at all times from the moment it was found. Which seems silly. I mean, whose job is that? Do you have to sit in a refrigerator to do it? But it got the point across.
The Feds didn’t even have to DNA-test it—which they couldn’t have, because they had no reliable sample from Tits to compare it to. The O.J. trial had made DNA testing seem like a conspiracy by a bunch of a*sholes with jobs to fool jurors they thought were stupid. The defense was welcome to DNA-test the Hand—and come across as smart-ass elitist dickheads, for a result the jury would just ignore anyway—but the prosecution wasn’t about to.
It all confused the shit out of me.
I mean, there it was. The Hand. I couldn’t remember whether Tits had had long nails or not. But it was somebody’s hand. If the Karcher Boys hadn’t cut it off, then somebody else had, which meant I had to think about whether someone was setting me up.
But who, and why?
The prosecution referred to the Hand constantly, no matter what boring shit they were shoveling in the foreground. Like the surveillance tapes, which had so much static that the prosecution had to project subtitles up at the front, causing half the courtroom—and two thirds of the jury—to fall asleep. Until the prosecution said “Bear in mind they’re talking about the kind of vicious criminal who would do this to a woman’s hand,” and put the image of the Hand back on the screen, and everybody woke back up.
Things got more interesting when the prosecution started showing photos of the Farm, including the storm cellar, and then again when they finally called Mike the Grocery Boy to the stand about driving us into the compound in his truck. Mike was impressively sullen, and he got a laugh by saying, “From what I saw, it could have been Bigfoot back there.” The prosecution also began to lead up to calling the imprisoned mob turncoat, which might have been interesting.
But, as you know, the trial ended before that was necessary.
One night Sam Freed came to my cell. At midnight. He wouldn’t talk to me until a guard had taken us to the office where Freed and I had first met, and left us alone there.
“Look, kid,” he said then. “Something’s about to happen. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because I want you to focus on what I’m saying. And when you find out, you’re not going to be able to focus on anything.”
“Oh, don’t give me that shit—” I said.
“I’m giving it and you’re taking it. So listen. I made you an offer that would have been the best thing that ever happened to you. You could have been a goddamned doctor, like your grandfather. You could have been anything or anyone you wanted to be. Want to join the country club? I could have made you a WASP. You hear me?”
“I never wanted to be a WASP.”
“You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I will do everything I can to get that offer back for you after everyone calms down,” he said. “But for a while things will be squirrelly, and out of control. Just remember people will come to their senses eventually. You testifying against David Locano will always be worth something to the DOJ. Are you hearing me?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You will tomorrow morning, believe me. So spend tonight thinking about what I’m telling you—about taking a deal if I can get you one. With your permission, I’ll call your girlfriend and give her my number. Can I do that?”
“Well...yes, but...”
“You’ll understand it all tomorrow morning,” he said. “And when that happens—for Christ’s sake, use your head.”
At eight the next morning, the judge dismissed all State and Federal charges against me on grounds that the Hand should have been discovered under Brady v. Maryland after all. Six hours later they let me out of a holding cell. Donovan came and got me and took me out to lunch and told me what the hell had happened.
My defense team had had the Hand DNA-tested. They figured the public wasn’t as stupid about that kind of thing as they had been during O.J., and what could it hurt. When the results had come back they’d had the Hand examined by a radiologist. Then a PhD in anatomy, and then a zoologist.
The Hand was not a hand. It was a paw. From a bear. A male bear. And just like that, it was over.
That afternoon, the prosecution tried to seal the record. There wasn’t any point. The headlines started immediately:
“ESCAPE CLAWS.” “BEARLY LEGAL.” “WITLESS FOR THE PAWSECUTION.”
Those f*ckers never had a chance.
Which wasn’t fair. Everyone went on and on about what a colossal f*ckup it was, and how stupid someone would have to be to mistake a bear paw for a human hand. But I was in that courtroom, and so were a lot of other people. And not one of us doubted it for a second. In photos, at least, it was impossible to tell.
Even after I got to med school I was amazed by the similarities—particularly if you take off the claws, which people do when they skin bears. Bears are the only nonprimates that can walk on their hind feet. They look so much like people when you skin them that the Inuit, Tlingit, and Ojibwa all thought bears could become people by taking their skins off. And the Inuit, Tlingit, and Ojibwa dissected a lot more bears than some drunk at the FBI ever did. Let alone the New York Post.
Anyway.
That, kids, is how the Bearclaw got his name.