The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read online

  The Best American CRIME WRITING 2006

  Edited by

  MARK BOWDEN

  Series Editors

  OTTO PENZLER AND

  THOMAS H. COOK

  Contents

  Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook | Preface

  Mark Bowden | Introduction

  John Heilemann | THE CHOIRBOY

  Jimmy Breslin | THE END OF THE MOB

  Mark Jacobson | THE $2,000-AN-HOUR WOMAN

  Skip Hollandsworth | THE LAST RIDE OF COWBOY BOB

  Jeffrey Toobin | KILLER INSTINCTS

  Robert Nelson | ALTAR EGO

  S.C. Gwynne | DR. EVIL

  Paige Williams | HOW TO LOSE $100,000,000

  Mary Battiata | BLOOD FEUD

  Howard Blum and John Connolly | HIT MEN IN BLUE?

  Richard Rubin | THE GHOSTS OF EMMETT TILL

  Chuck Hustmyre | BLUE ON BLUE

  Devin Friedman | OPERATION STEALING SADDAM’S MONEY

  Denise Grollmus | SEX THIEF

  Deanne Stillman | THE GREAT MOJAVE MANHUNT

  Permissions

  About the Editors

  The Best American Crime Writing Series

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  IN THE LATE DARCY O’BRIEN’S brilliant study of the Hillside Stranglers, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi revel in the grim fantasy of a girl reared from birth exclusively for their pleasure. They watch and wait until the moment of flowering is reached, then rape and murder her. She is not a human being, but a plant grown for one dark harvest, then cut down.

  Nothing in the history of crime writing more deeply illustrated the banal and commonplace source of criminal acts, that they are rooted in simple selfishness.

  This year’s edition of The Best American Crime Writing amply demonstrates the irreducible and uncomplicated truth so powerfully rendered by Darcy O’Brien. From the comic to the macabre, bumbling criminals to cunning ones, it is selfishness that rules the day. The continuum runs from narcissism to solipsism, the antisocial to the sociopathic, the Me who must go first to the Me besides whom there is no other.

  This is not to say that things never get complicated, for as with Medusa’s head, odd and coiling things may spring from a single source.

  ONE OF THEM IS MONEY. It is Saddam Hussein’s money that provides the irresistible temptation in Devin Friedman’s story of G.I. Joe corruption, while in Skip Hollandsworth’s tale, it is the mere proximity of banks, along with an unlikely disguise, that beckons Cowboy Bob to “her” last ride. Howard Blum and John Connolly’s “Hit Men in Blue?” suggests how wickedly money can be gained. Paige Williams’s “How to Lose $100,000,000” demonstrates just how quickly it can be lost. Money is also the issue in Mary Battiata’s riveting study of how little of it, when in dispute, can generate a murder.

  Sex is predictably the issue at hand in other tales. How much it sometimes costs is the cautionary lesson learned in Mark Jacobson’s “$2,000-an-Hour Woman.” But, again, it is selfishness that provides the dark core of sexual crime. Escaping the consequences of that selfishness is the central focus of Denise Grollmus’s “Sex Thief,” and Robert Nelson’s “Altar Ego.” The failure to escape it forms the narrative thrust of John Heilemann’s “The Choirboy,” a heartrending tale of justice delayed…but not forever.

  Escape also provides the thematic center of Richard Rubin’s “Ghosts of Emmett Till,” an escape that is offered, in this case, by society itself, time and conscience the only arbiters of how effective it will be. In S.C. Gwynne’s “Dr. Evil,” it is an honored profession’s ineffective self-regulation that opens the escape hatch to a criminally incompetent doctor, horrendously botched surgery evidently still no reason to snatch the scalpel from his hand. In Chuck Hustmyre’s “Blue on Blue,” it is, at least briefly, the blind flash of a badge that provides a hiding place for a murderous cop, while in Deanne Stillman’s riveting “The Great Mojave Manhunt,” it is the desert waste that offers up concealment—nature, as always, indifferent to the kind of man it hides.

  AND, OF COURSE, there are always those who don’t escape at all, as Jimmy Breslin illustrates to such comic effect in “The End of the Mob.”

  These then are the stories in this year’s edition of The Best American Crime Writing, tales by turns harrowing and hilarious, a feast of human malfeasance chosen to satisfy the connoisseur’s taste for what Browning called the “fine Felicity…of wickedness” that is the just reward of reading fine true crime.

  In terms of the nature and scope of this collection, we defined the subject matter as any factual story involving crime or the threat of a crime written by an American or Canadian that was first published in the calendar year 2005. Although we examined a huge array of publications, inevitably the preeminent ones attracted many of the best pieces. All national and large regional magazines were searched for appropriate material, as well as nearly two hundred so-called little magazines, reviews, and journals.

  WE WELCOME SUBMISSIONS by any writer, editor, publisher, agent, or other interested party for The Best American Crime Writing 2007. Please send the publication or a tear sheet with the name of the publication, the date on which the article appeared, and, if possible, the name and contact information for the author or representative. If the first publication was in electronic format, a hard copy must be submitted. Only material with a 2006 publication date is eligible. All submissions must be received no later than December 31, 2006; anything received after that date will not be read. This is neither arrogant nor capricious. The timely nature of the book forces very tight deadlines that cannot be met if we receive material later than that. The sooner we receive articles, the more favorable will be the light in which they are perused.

  Please send submissions to Otto Penzler, The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Regretfully, no submissions can be returned. If you wish verification that material was received, please enclose a self-addressed stamped postcard.

  Thank you,

  Otto Penzler and

  Thomas H. Cook

  New York, March 2006

  Introduction

  THE MOST TYPICAL WAY for a crime story to begin is with a date. S.C. Gwynne starts, “On June 8, 2003….” Paige Williams’s begins, “On Christmas Day 2002….” Sometimes the date comes with an hour and a minute: “Saturday, March 4, 1995. 1:55 A.M.,” opens Chuck Hustmyre’s.

  Precision, because when you are describing someone committing a crime, you want to make sure you’ve got your facts straight; because most crime stories are based at least in part on trials and police files, and reflect the preoccupation of the criminal justice system with proof: This specific transgression of the law was committed in exactly this way at precisely this time against the herein named victim, and warrants precisely this verdict and punishment; but ultimately because the crime story is about something more than assigning blame and retribution. What fascinates us is the moment when things slipped…off…the…rails. It’s the same thing that prompts filmmakers to slow down the camera at the moment of impact, or breakdown. It’s the point where there was a tear in the social fabric, a clear crossing of the line that defines ordinary life, decency, civil discourse, honest commerce, or acceptable behavior. When exactly—“Now, on the last Monday of November 2004,” writes John Heilemann—grounds the transgression in reality, which is itself thrilling, because what scares us about crime is not its strangeness, but its familiarity. The consequences, the things that concern the judges, juries, and police, are about putting things right, restoring the fractured social order or contract, but we know that in a deeper sense things can rarely be put right, and that
the real world, as opposed to the imaginary order of laws and contracts, is much much messier and more interesting. So we settle in to read on. Because the story isn’t about blame and punishment, it’s about who, what, when, where, how, and, most importantly, why.

  In that greatest of true crime stories, In Cold Blood, enjoying a revival this year, Truman Capote built suspense toward the terrible murder of the Clutter family by walking us through the final day of each doomed family member, interrupting the ambling narrative with the steady drumbeat of their murderers’ approach. When Perry Smith and Dick Hickock pull into the driveway of the Clutter home in darkness, Capote abruptly skips over the critical hours of the crime to the following morning, when neighbors discover the Clutters’ bloody remains. He does this to maintain suspense—we all want to know exactly what happened inside that house—and keep us reading but also because he doesn’t want to describe the crime until he has laid the groundwork for us to understand why it was committed. In Cold Blood isn’t a whodunit, it’s a why-dunit.

  Most crime stories are ultimately about the doer. Donald Kueck, John Shallenberger, Matt Novak, Antoinette Frank and Rogers LaCaze, John Ames, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, Eric Scheffey, Mohammed Bouyeri, Jason Itzler, Peggy Jo Tallas…these are the characters who animate these stories and make us want to keep reading. We are fascinated by the exact details of their crimes, but what we hope those details finally add up to is an understanding of why they did what they did.

  In that sense, the crime story has long been at odds with the tendency to explain all criminal and antisocial behavior as mental illness. How boring would the world be if evil were just a malfunction? If all we needed to live law-abiding, respectable lives was a level head? For all but a few genuinely afflicted souls, crime is a deliberate choice. Crime writers have always known that their best subjects were completely sane. Their stories show how and why perfectly sane people do supposedly insane things.

  There is a bit of larceny and murder in all of our souls, although most of us choose to restrain it, out of virtue but also out of timidity. I once wrote a story about a criminal who believed he was, in fact, the most honest man in the world. He admitted that he enthusiastically cheated on his wife and took breathtakingly ambitious leaps into illegality, not because he was mentally ill or evil, but because he recognized the truth about all men. “All men cheat on their wives when they can get away with it”—he told me—“and they all break the law when it’s to their benefit.” He believed he was more honest than other men because he admitted these things about himself, and embraced them. The fact that he was telling me these things from a federal prison cell was just conclusive proof of the hypocrisy of man.

  So maybe that’s the heart of it. Maybe the criminal chooses his or her path because it is, for them, the truest one, or the more courageous one. Trapped in an unhappy relationship, why not kill our spouse? Can’t make ends meet and need a little excitement in your life? Why not cross-dress and knock off a few banks? Crave sex with small boys? Why not manage a boys’ choir or an orphanage?

  The precision in these stories fixes crime to real people, real places, real dates and times, and in doing so shows how frightfully ordinary it is. The perpetrators are not mentally ill, they are greedy, covetous, selfish, and amoral. Thankfully, few of us make these choices, but crime stories remind us that we are, nevertheless, constantly faced with them. Virtue and lawfulness are choices we make every day—when we are lucky, in the absence of severe temptation. These stories coldly examine the alternatives, and by illustrating the painful and usually self-destructive consequences, comfort us on our way.

  —Mark Bowden

  The Best American CRIME WRITING 2006

  John Heilemann

  THE CHOIRBOY

  FROM New York MAGAZINE

  THE E-MAIL ARRIVED UNBIDDEN four years ago, bearing the stamp of a sender whose name he didn’t recognize. All the message said was, “Are you the Lawrence Lessig who went to the Boychoir School?”

  It had been a long time since anyone had identified the Stanford Law School professor that way. But it was true: From 1972 to 1976, Lessig had spent his sixth-through-ninth-grade years at the American Boychoir School in Princeton.

  So Lessig wrote back, “Yeah, I’m the guy who went to the Boychoir School. What’s up?” And with that, he opened up a closed doorway to his past—and found himself swept right through it.

  Now, on the last Monday of November 2004, Lessig has just arrived at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, New Jersey. He is here to make an argument before the Supreme Court of New Jersey. His client, the plaintiff, is his e-mail correspondent. The defendant is their alma mater.

  Since its founding in 1937, the nonsectarian Boychoir School has gained worldwide renown for producing a choir rivaled only by the more famous one in Vienna; its kids have sung for presidents, popes, and behind Beyoncé at this year’s Academy Awards. But now Lessig’s client, John Hardwicke, is claiming that in the seventies, the school was a ghoulish sanctuary for the sexual abuse of children. In his two years there, Hardwicke says he was repeatedly molested and raped—induced, as the brief on his behalf to the state supreme court puts it, to “perform virtually every sexual act that could conceivably have been accomplished between two males”—by the music director, the headmaster, the proctor, and the cook.

  This is not the sort of case for which Larry Lessig is famous. At forty-three, Lessig has built a reputation as the king of Internet law and as the most important next-wave thinker on intellectual property. The author of three influential books on the intersection of law, politics, and digital technology, he’s the founder of Creative Commons, an ambitious attempt to forge an alternative to the current copyright regime. According to his mentor, the federal appellate judge Richard Posner, Lessig is “the most distinguished law professor of his generation.” He’s also a celebrity. On a West Wing episode this winter, he was featured as a character. “The Elvis of cyberlaw” is how Wired has described him.

  I have known Lessig well, professionally and socially, for nearly five years. I’ve never seen him look as nervous as he does this morning. Dressed in a dark suit, his hair slicked back, tiny wire-rims perched on his nose, he moves slowly, ponderously, as if the weight of the stakes in the case is resting literally on his shoulders. The school (known until 1980 as the Columbus Boychoir School) has argued that, under New Jersey’s Charitable Immunity Act, a statute designed to shield nonprofits from negligence lawsuits, it can’t be held financially liable no matter how heinous Hardwicke’s abuse. If the supreme court agrees, Hardwicke’s case will be dismissed before even being heard by a jury. And scores of sex-abuse suits against New Jersey Catholic churches and schools will be rendered void as well. The church, not surprisingly, has weighed in on the side of the school.

  During his work on the case, Lessig has been asked more than once by the press if he had experiences at the school similar to Hardwicke’s. And Lessig has replied, “My experiences aren’t what’s at issue here. What’s at issue is what happened to John Hardwicke.”

  The answer is appropriate, politic—but it’s not entirely true. For Lessig has told me that he too was abused at the Boychoir School, and by the same music director that Hardwicke claims was one of his abusers. Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the supreme-court justices. The fact of his abuse isn’t even known to Larry Lessig’s parents.

  In taking this case, however, Lessig has cast aside his caution about a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client’s cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn’t the only plaintiff here. Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was.

  THE BOYCHOIR SCHOOL sits on seventeen acres not far from the Princeton campus, surrounded by stands of evergreens and a scattering of suburban houses. You approach the grounds up a narrow drive, past a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign, until you come to a big gra
ss oval in front of a handsome brick Georgian mansion. Three stories high, with fifty-odd rooms, the mansion is known as Albemarle and was once the home of Gerard Lambert, the founder of the chemical company that morphed into Warner-Lambert.

  In the late sixties, there were several dozen fifth-to-ninth-grade boys living in Albemarle. Every morning, a bell would ring to signal the start to their day, in which classes were interspersed with three one-hour rehearsals, along with private voice tutoring and piano lessons. “Music was in the walls of the school; it was everywhere,” a former student recalls. Decked out in uniforms of navy-blue pants and button-down shirts or turtlenecks, the boys sang Bach, Handel, Mahler, Copland, Bernstein, and American spirituals. All through the school year, they toured the United States, driving around in a big bus kitted out with desks and a lunch counter. In the summer, the best of the choristers were taken on tours of Europe; on one occasion, they performed for Pope Paul VI—who placed his hands on the head of a soloist, Bobby Byrens, and declared, “He has the voice of an angel.”

  In 1968 the choir director, Donald Bryant, was fired over “a love affair with a little boy,” one of the school’s former board members later told the New York Times. (A number of such accusations would ultimately be leveled against him.) But Bryant’s departure failed to set things right. Instead, the Boychoir School hired his replacement, along with a new headmaster, on the recommendation of John Shallenberger, the wealthy scion of a Pennsylvania coal-mining family and a patron of boys’ choirs. Shallenberger also happened to be a chronic pedophile: Convicted over four decades on multiple charges related to child molestation, he eventually fled the country to avoid prosecution in his home state. (He died this February, at eighty-seven, in Mexico, where he was overseeing an orphanage.)