The Best American Crime Writing 2006

by Mark Bowden

  [When he gets to this part, you can sense the wheels in Matt’s head spinning a little too fast, creating airy spaces in his monologue, and all you can hear is him smoking. Matt smokes almost constantly—Marlboro Menthols—and this moment is permeated by smoking. You can hear it on the tape, the articulated exhale like an audible symptom of self-loathing.]

  When Lieutenant Colonel deCamp exits the building after checking out the scene, he says: “There’s three hundred thousand dollars missing.” What is he, fucking Rain Man? [DeCamp was wrong; there was way more than that missing. But still, the man knew all was not right.] Fucking Lieutenant Colonel deCamp; he was born with a silver spoon in his fucking ass. And he starts reading Matt Novak his rights as the rest of the guys load the truck with the $188 million, while the rest of the money is…everywhere. Because, let’s face it, enough people have had their hands on the $12 million, the process of dispersion is so far along, we’ll never really know where it all went. (By the next day, Jamal Mann had already sent an envelope of cash to his mother in New Jersey.) The $188 million goes into the bed of the truck, is driven to the airport, and is flown directly out of the country. Because that much money should simply not be around people. That much money has a mind of its own.

  IT TOOK FORTY-FIVE MINUTES for deCamp to find the $600,000 in the tree.

  In the next couple of days, Matt, Jamal, and Moyer were isolated, pressed by the Criminal Investigation Command. When Matt would see guys from his unit, they’d say, “What’s up, Clooney?” [See the movie Three Kings for reference.] Matt didn’t see the humor in it. In the interim, there was close to $12 million missing and the rest of Matt’s conspirators still moving about freely, unsurveilled. And maybe another person. I heard someone outside the door that night, and he’s never been identified. [The Novak tapes devolve often into wild conspiracy. There are men who took money home…. I saw pictures of one guy who lives a block away on a bed with thousands of dollars…. Captain Ahearn left the country with money. Most of the conspiracies have to do with what he sees as the wrongdoings of other people, as if there were a finite amount of guilt to go around and by giving some away it makes Matt less guilty. But he’s probably right that there’s a lot we don’t know. Major Rideout believes that another $220 million could still be out there somewhere.]

  Eventually, it was Matt who came forward and gave the fullest account of the events of April 18. Of the Eight, only Matt was kicked out of the army with a less-than-honorable discharge. Further evidence that the army exists on a parallel moral plane. Matt thinks it was because Captain Ahearn, his commander, didn’t like him. [The way I heard it was that very few people liked Captain Ahearn, but Matt didn’t keep his mouth shut about it.] Lieutenant Colonel deCamp says everyone got treated pretty equally, and if you look, several of the other Novak Eight are no longer in the army. [Still, only Matt was forced out.] Blanket immunity was granted, and no one got jail time. Major Rideout says, “My commanding general, General Blount, said, ‘This is going to be quieted; we’re not going to let this get out. We’re going to do a good investigation, but the last thing we need is a big black eye after what we just did, attacking into Baghdad and doing good stuff.’”

  Over the next six months, during the protracted process that ended with Matt’s removal from the military, he wasn’t allowed to work. He would show up at his unit in Georgia and sit out front in his car, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the rest of his life came unstitched. He discovered that his wife, Michell, had been seeing someone else. And now he’s separated, on his way to being divorced, without access to his children, living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with his parents, who believe that yoga is Satan worship.

  I had everything when I left for the desert. I did. I left a beautiful wife and two beautiful children, had a beautiful husky puppy and two cats. I had two vehicles, a Camaro and a Mercury Tracer, 1995 vehicles. Not like a couple of beaters. I had a 1997 brick home, corner lot, quarter of an acre. Privacy fence. Now what do I have? The money was the downfall of my entire life.

  [THE LAST OF OUR INTERVIEWS takes place late at night in a bar called the Thirsty Whale, located on Lake Minocqua, now abandoned for the season. Outside, the wind is howling through the bleachers, where summer people watch waterskiing shows. On one portion of the tapes, Matt is trying to enlist some help in destroying his ex-wife’s Durango. Come on! Let’s push it in the lake! Or set it on fire in the woods out by my folks’ house!

  He keeps talking about how he got more resolutely fucked than anyone else who was involved. He confesses that part of the reason he wants to talk about this episode in his life is that he hopes that a letter-writing campaign will ensue. He wants his day in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I asked Sergeant Kenneth Buff, Matt’s platoon sergeant and the first guy to find money that day, if victimhood was simply Matt’s default identity. Buff said that Matt Novak was the kind of guy you wanted to hang out with. He was universally liked. Funny. Clever. It was only after all this that Matt had changed. “Matt sunk into a real depression,” Buff said. “And I don’t think he ever recovered.”

  Matt doesn’t deny that he tried to steal money, but he is more interested in knowing: In the movie, is he the good guy or the bad guy? Maybe his guilt depends on the precise moment he made that crucial decision that his desires came before the greater good. As Rideout says: “A good supply sergeant, very few of them are probably legally correct. This guy was right on the edge of right and wrong.” Was it the hypnotic power of seeing $200 million in cash, the golden ring in front of you? Or before that, when he kicked down that first door to take a sweet Sony television so his unit could watch porno movies in more dramatic fashion? Or earlier, when he got to Kuwait and was told he had to steal shit to do right? Or even earlier, when he was an infant, a fetus, a zygote that mutated imperceptibly? Or was it pre-Matt, in the primordial ooze, and it just so happens that anyone in Matthew Novak’s position would take that money?

  At the Thirsty Whale, Matt picks out a girl from across the room and takes a seat next to her at the bar. Her name is M. She works in customer service, and she recently had a nervous breakdown. She’s medicated now. She and Matt hit it off almost immediately. She looks a little stiff, with her primly crossed legs and glossy new handbag. But Matt could smell the emotional injury on her, the fragility, the liability of having had a nervous breakdown.

  M says, “Don’t I recognize you? Are you from here?” What kind of line is that?

  Well, you know the war in Iraq, right? The flush of false modesty rises.

  “Yeah,” M says.

  Anything special you remember about it?

  Everyone’s silent, staring at him with vague smiles. They desperately want to go there with him, wherever it is he might be taking them, but they don’t know what he’s talking about. Earlier that night he said: Hopefully, this chapter in my life is almost over, or this novel in my life, because that’s what it is. But it’s not going to be over if it continues to be a more attractive identity for Matt than the one he’s currently living.

  You remember any stories?

  “Like?” says M. “Stories?”

  “Jennifer Lynch or whatever?” the bartender says.

  You remember anything about money? Something about GIs finding two hundred million dollars and trying to steal twelve million of it? They all smile now and nod, though whether or not they know the story is anyone’s guess. Yep, Matt says, that was me, no shit.]

  DEVIN FRIEDMAN is thirty-four years old, works as a senior writer for GQ magazine, where this story was published, and has never been in the army. He believes he would have been tempted by finding two hundred million dollars in American currency in the middle of a war zone, but believes even more strongly that no one really knows what he or she would do unless they’ve been in those circumstances. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award for essay writing, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Best American Travel Writing. He edited a bo
ok of photographs taken by soldiers who’ve served in Iraq called This is Our War, and believes that if he didn’t mention Fred Woodward, GQ’s very talented art director, and the photograph editor Greg Pond, he’d be screwing those two over for their work on the book.

  Coda

  If you’ve ever watched a trial you know the first rule of trying to re-create a crime: events start to break down upon scrutiny. Unless you have a videotape, and sometimes even when you do (Rodney King et al.), you’re never really going to know what happened. And in my limited experience reporting crime stories, the more interviews you do the more it starts to feel like reality is coming unstitched. Even in this case, the case of (as they’re referred to in this story) The Novak 8, when events were widely witnessed and the conspiracy lasted only a matter of hours, facts begin to lose their purchase. Did the lieutenant make off with a bunch of money as charged? Did the first sergeant? Was Matt Novak really the ring-leader, as the army contends, or the fall guy? In any case, pretty much everyone involved in this incident feels they were singularly screwed. Matt Novak especially so.

  The last time I saw Matt was via satellite when we were both being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo was being kind of a dick, insinuating that Matt was a quasi-criminal scumbag. It didn’t really help Matt’s worldview, which, as far as I could tell when I spent those wintry days up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin doing the reporting for this piece, wasn’t too rosy to begin with. After we went off the air on Geraldo, I tried to talk to Matt, but the connection was dead. My little flesh-colored earpiece was silent. Later, when 60 Minutes II called me to do a story about Matt (they barely credited my story in theirs, by the way; more on this later) I found out that Matt felt a little screwed over by me, too. And having tried to call him minutes before composing this coda, and being greeted with silence, I cannot report back about what exactly Matt objected to in this piece. Maybe it’s that the story didn’t completely alleviate his sense of being persecuted, which is what I think he’d hoped it would do.

  Finally, a mea culpa: I got the idea to do this piece from seeing an interview with Matt in a documentary called Soldiers Pay that the director David O. Russell was working on when I was doing a profile of him for GQ. I promised Tricia Regan, the co-director of the film, that I would mention it in the article, since they’d been generous enough to give me contact information for Matt. And, in the final version of the story that got printed, the name of that film did not appear. And for that crime: I am guilty. Add both the director of Soldiers Pay and me (hey, 60 Minutes II!) to the long list of people who believe the world kind of screws people over.

  Denise Grollmus

  SEX THIEF

  FROM Cleveland Scene

  RENEE CLUTCHES A CREASED black-and-white mug shot in the dim light of a suburban diner. The forty-three-year-old strokes her strawberry-blond ponytail as she surveys the scrawny Vietnamese man in the photo.

  She nods recognition at his deer-in-the-headlights eyes, flared nostrils, and pursed lips. “He looks just the same,” she says. “But I look pretty much the same too. I guess not much has changed in twenty-five years.”

  Now a wife and mother, Renee still remembers the smallest details of the night they first met, though she hasn’t spoken of it in two decades.

  It was August 29, 1980. Renee—who talked to Scene on the condition that her last name not be used—was a petite but tomboyish eighteen-year-old working at a McDonald’s in Akron. At 2:00 A.M., she was closing up the restaurant alone.

  As she turned off the parking-lot floodlights and walked toward her ’69 Pontiac, a man sneaked up behind her. He held a kitchen knife to her throat. “Get in and drive,” he said in a thick Asian accent.

  The man guided Renee into a sparsely furnished studio apartment in a house on a hidden alley. “I’m not going to hurt you; I just want to talk,” he said.

  Keeping the knife at her back, he politely introduced himself as Hy Doan. He told her he was from Vietnam and that he was a math student at the University of Akron. “He just kept talking off-the-wall, like we were friends or something,” Renee says.

  They spoke for several hours, before Doan asked Renee about her sexual history. She didn’t have one. “I’m a virgin,” she said.

  Doan didn’t believe her. His small talk became aggressive. At five foot five and 120 pounds, he was almost as tiny as his victim. Renee figured she could take him.

  Suddenly, she jumped on his back and wrestled him to the floor. She got her hands around his slender neck and choked him until he appeared to pass out.

  Renee jumped up and ran for the door. As she fiddled with the lock, Doan got up. Just before Renee could open the door, he grabbed her long ponytail and yanked her to his bedroom, ordering her to undress.

  Afraid for her life, she sacrificed her virginity.

  As Doan raped her, Renee stared through the doorway at the kitchen cupboards, which were filled with shiny packs of ramen noodles. “To this day, I can’t eat the stuff,” she says. “I can’t even look at it.”

  When he was finished, Doan made her lie in bed and cuddle. He asked if she enjoyed herself. “He was talking to me like I was his girlfriend,” she says. “I think he really believed it was consensual.”

  The sun was already peeking through the blinds when he allowed her to get dressed. He said he’d let her go home if she promised to keep seeing him. She gave him a fake phone number and left.

  Renee went to a friend’s house. The girl talked Renee into going to Akron City Hospital. Police were notified. Doan was charged with rape and kidnapping.

  Two months later, the case went before a grand jury. But Doan, who maintained the sex was consensual, wasn’t indicted. The jury didn’t buy Renee’s story. She knew too much about Doan’s home to have been there only once, jurors believed. They assumed the two were friends. “I was there for seven hours, memorizing everything in that house, to make sure I could prove to police that I was there and that this happened to me,” Renee says. “The legal system did nothing more for me, other than rub salt in my wound.”

  It wouldn’t be the last time Doan wriggled his way out of a rape case because of a discredited victim. In the past twenty-five years, he has beaten at least six.

  Detectives, prosecutors, and judges say Doan has developed the perfect M.O. for stealing sex. “It’s not rape,” says his lawyer, Jonathan Sinn. “It’s theft.”

  SINN DESCRIBES HIS CLIENT as a “walking stereotype.”

  “In court, he bows, talks about honor and family, and comes off as a naive immigrant,” Sinn says. “In reality, he’s very intelligent and understands everything.”

  Doan’s victims all describe him as a petite, polite man, with rotting teeth and foul breath. Though his accent is heavy, making him hard to understand, he has no problem with English.

  He was born in Saigon in 1959. It’s unclear when he immigrated to the United States. Doan did not respond to Scene’s numerous interview requests, though an anonymous man claiming to be a relative called on his behalf. “Hy does not want to talk to you, because he feels he paid for his mistake and has forgotten the past,” the man said.

  A 1998 incident report states that he has a sister, Nicole, living in Fairlawn, Ohio. But when Scene contacted Nicole, she had trouble deciding whether she knew Doan or not. She also denied being related to him.

  “Doan is like the last name Smith,” she says. “Just because we have the same last name don’t mean we are related. Maybe I helped him once. I help a lot of Vietnamese people. I’ve lived in Akron for a long time, and we are a small community.”

  Still, amid her denials, Nicole was able to confirm that Doan graduated from the University of Akron in the early 1980s. He then moved to DeKalb, Illinois, where he earned a Ph.D. in math at Northern Illinois University. “He’s not a stupid guy,” Nicole says. “He has tutored many Vietnamese in math. There’s just a lot of stupid people who say stupid things about him.”

  Despite his academic achievements, Doan returned to
Akron only to work a string of low-wage restaurant jobs while tutoring math on the side. Though he refers to himself as a full-time University of Akron tutor, the school has no record of his employment. But former employees of various Akron restaurants remember him.

  In the late nineties, Greg Madonia worked at Papa Joe’s, an Italian place popular with the elderly. Doan worked the salad-and-dessert line. He told Madonia he had a Ph.D. in math, but couldn’t find work in the United States, which was why he was dressing lettuce for six bucks an hour. His much younger coworkers referred to him as “Mr. Hy.” Madonia never noticed anything unusual about him.

  Tom Feltner, who washed dishes with Doan at the Mustard Seed, an upscale health-food market and restaurant in Montrose, recalls a slightly more offbeat Mr. Hy.

  “He was a weird guy,” Feltner says. “He didn’t say much, but he’d fly off the handle a lot.”

  Feltner, sixteen at the time, was under the impression that Doan didn’t speak much English. He also remembers Doan boasting of his math credentials and marveled at Doan’s dishwashing skills. “He could do the work of two people,” Feltner says.

  “He was like the kung fu master of dishwashing,” says the restaurant’s owner, Philip Neighbors.

  Coworkers pegged Doan for a harmless oddball. Little did they know they were in the presence of Akron’s best sex thief.

  AFTER THE JURY LET DOAN off the hook in 1980, Renee would see him around town.

  He’d show up at McDonald’s, stand in a corner, and watch her for hours. She told a security guard, who warned Doan to get lost.