My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  While Hollywood was moving to escape from us, we were moving, too. It had been four years of stagnating in my shrine to Nick, and I felt like I was incapable of starting a new life there. So Jeff and I decided we were going to just leave, which we did, very quickly. Before Christmas 2004, we were already in our new house.

  The new house didn’t mean we were leaving Nick behind; indeed, I set up a closet full of his clothes, just like the one in his old bedroom. Left his shirts and pants on hangers, and his shoes on a rack on the bottom. It would be another five years until I could begin boxing them up. In the meantime, they were all still there, for me to look through and smell and imagine him wearing as often as I wanted.

  His childhood toys were put out on display, along with many framed pictures and assorted artwork of his. The point in moving wasn’t to abandon him but to leave a place that felt like I had been drowning in for the past four years. Every corner of that house was filled with sadness. Maybe in this one we would find some corners of contentment.

  CHAPTER 16

  ALPHA DOG

  A filmmaker contacted Jeff and me in 2002 and said he wanted to make a movie about Nick’s murder for the USA television network. He asked if he could buy our story rights, and we agreed. Anything that would add to the publicity about this case was a good idea, in our minds—a TV movie would help us publicize the hunt for Jesse James Hollywood in a way that me handing out flyers never could.

  But his movie never made it off the ground. Meanwhile, another filmmaker named Nick Cassavetes had also been thinking about our story. His two daughters went to the same high school that Nick had, though they were younger and hadn’t known each other. Cassavetes already knew a lot about Nick’s story just because it happened so close to home for him, so when his friend Kevin Connolly asked him for a script he could direct, this was the idea they decided on.

  They called their script Alpha Dog, and it looked like the movie would actually be made. Cassavetes contacted us in early 2003, and I asked the original filmmaker what we should do—was it OK for us to talk to Cassavetes?

  He admitted that his movie probably wouldn’t get produced, especially now that this one was in the works, so he agreed that it was OK for us to talk to Cassavetes. We did; we opened up our home to him.

  I showed Cassavetes Nick’s room, his bar mitzvah video, some of his writing—I tried my best to give him a picture of who Nick was and what our family had been going through. I gave him personal details that he would never have been able to learn anywhere else. Later, I also went to the set to talk with Sharon Stone, who would be playing the part based on me and who wanted to meet me to understand what I went through.

  Both Jeff and I were apprehensive about the whole thing—we wouldn’t have any control over the movie, and who knew what they were going to fictionalize or what perspective they’d take? All we really hoped was that they’d portray Nick as he really was. But the thought of seeing our tragedy unfold on a big screen while people ate popcorn was difficult. Important, but difficult. We spoke with Cassavetes and his crew several times, and then sat back and hoped the film would carry the right tone and the right message.

  The only thing I asked in return for our participation was that if the film did well, they would help us pay the reward money we were still offering for Jesse James Hollywood’s capture. Cassavetes agreed.

  Jack Hollywood, on the other hand, was a paid consultant on the film who even went to some of their locations and gave the actors advice on how to play their roles. He wanted to remind the actor playing the Jesse James Hollywood role that he wasn’t playing a monster, but Jack’s son.

  Cassavetes and his story researcher also contacted each of the other defendants and their families, as well as prosecutor Ron Zonen’s office. Ron was the district attorney who handled the trials related to Nick’s murder. He, too, thought it might help to ferret out Jesse James Hollywood, so he worked closely with Cassavetes and his researcher, loaning them the entire library of case files pertaining to Hollywood and the five trials we had already gone through.

  Connolly, the original director, had to drop out because he got a recurring role on HBO’s Entourage, so Cassavetes ended up directing the film himself. He had previously offered Justin Timberlake a role on The Notebook, but Justin said he was hoping for a “grittier” character. So this time, Cassavetes cast him as Jesse Rugge, and he sent him to meet Rugge in prison.

  “It was surreal to see someone my age serving a life sentence,” Timberlake later told Entertainment Weekly. He said that they all felt they got their hands dirty working on the film, because there were no winners at the end.

  We pinned a lot of hope to the film’s ability to help us find Hollywood. Once all the trials ended, publicity had died down, and I worried that Hollywood was going to get comfortable somewhere, secure in the knowledge that his picture would show up less frequently in the media now.

  Sonny LeGault, the lead detective who had been investigating Hollywood, was promoted to personnel, so he would no longer be active on the case. But Sheriff Jim Anderson wasn’t about to let it drop. He gave one man, Mark Valencia, a full-time task: to find Jesse James Hollywood, starting around 2004. For more than a year, that was the man’s entire job, day in and day out. The Department of Justice called it “Operation Movie Star.” And he was given the power to take the hunt internationally—so, along with his co-case agent, probation officer Maria Bongiovanni, he followed leads first from state to state, then country to country. In several places, they just barely missed Hollywood.

  The original detectives on the case had been tracking Jack Hollywood’s phone calls, and they heard a lot of drug dealing. They surmised that he was a large-scale trafficker of marijuana and cocaine, but they didn’t want to bust him too early and lose the ability to use him to find his fugitive son. So instead, they just kept investigating Jack and trying to learn more about how his drug business worked. Many of his friends (or former friends) and associates came forward to talk, both in prison and out, so investigators had some idea of Jack’s methods. He was dealing all over the country and even in some areas outside of the country, constantly on various phones making connections.

  Early in the investigation, detectives got a phone call from a religious leader in Brazil. Apparently, Jack Hollywood had come to meet him and tried to pay him off to shelter Jesse. The man turned down his offer and reported it, but Brazil was just one of many places where Jack had possible connections. Jack had also taken a trip to Canada and asked people there to shelter his son. No one figured Hollywood was still in California, which is why the FBI was involved, but it was unknown if he was still in the United States or in one of the other likely spots: Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.

  Tips had come in from all over the place, from people who thought they had spotted Jesse James Hollywood at restaurants, or walking down the street, or—as in the case of one off-duty police officer—at a Chicago baseball game. Multiple people bearing Jesse’s description were arrested and questioned, but none of them had any relation to him.

  When Valencia took over the case, he started by typing Jack Hollywood’s name into a central database—and he got a hit. A precinct outside of Santa Barbara had typed Jack’s name into the database just recently, so Valencia and Maria Bongiovanni drove to the desert to find out what was going on.

  It was a connection they would never have predicted.

  A drug task force had done an operation where they attempted to make a huge bust—they negotiated with drug dealers to sell several kilos of cocaine. It was a “reverse” deal, which meant that the federal agents had the cocaine and they were trying to get the targets to buy it. All of the dealers spoke Spanish and were from Central or South America. What the dealers negotiated was that they would switch cars with the federal agents; then the agents would put the cocaine in the criminals’ car, and the criminals would leave the money in the agents’ car.

  For whatever reason, the deal fell through at the last minute, but the agents d
id have the dealers’ car in their possession. So they put a GPS tracker on the car to see where it would go; then they returned it to the dealers. The car was busy, driving all over the United States. A GPS installation warrant is valid for a limited time, however, and when the warrant’s expiration drew near, the car was in Phoenix, Arizona. They decided to just pull the car over on a traffic stop to take the tracker off.

  Jack Hollywood was driving the car.

  The officers who pulled Jack over didn’t know who he was, and they really didn’t have anything on him, so they let him go after they copied the items in his wallet—which included a UPS receipt that tracked to a storage facility in Phoenix (he had several storage units around the country) and credit cards. Running the credit cards produced a receipt for a package that was shipped to New York. Valencia ordered the package to be intercepted, and inside, he found fifty pounds of marijuana.

  That was all he needed; now he knew he could write a warrant anytime he wanted to. It was time to find Jesse James Hollywood.

  An informant told him that Jesse James Hollywood was flying from Vancouver to Chicago just a few days before Christmas. One of his friends had also tipped off detectives that he had been entering and exiting the Canadian border dressed as a woman . . . so my “Jesseca” poster wasn’t all that far-fetched after all.

  Valencia tracked Hollywood’s prepaid cell phone to a specific building, and then he asked local police in Chicago to check out the building and find out if Hollywood was in it. When they got there late that night, they spotted a pizza delivery man coming out of the building, and one of the officers showed the man a photo lineup.

  “Did you see any of these guys in the apartment you just came out of?”

  “Yes, that guy,” the delivery man said—and pointed to Hollywood.

  They asked to see the pizza delivery receipt. Although Hollywood paid in cash, his name was still printed on the receipt because he had called in the order. And unbelievably, the name he used when he called in the order was “Jesse Wood.”

  Valencia booked a flight to Chicago. Meanwhile, early the next morning, local police got a team together and secured the building, then they booted the door open and found an open window, curtains blowing in the breeze . . . and four hundred thousand dollars in cash and fifty pounds of marijuana left in the empty apartment. On the floor were giant maps of Mexico and Brazil. There was no furniture, nothing else there but the pizza box—it was a “stash house,” just a place to stop from point A to point B with drugs.

  Officers arrested the next two guys who came into the apartment on drug charges. The guys were two of the people investigators had previously looked at in Seattle; they were tied to the Hollywoods. But no matter how Valencia tried, he could not get them to talk. They were more scared of what would happen if they talked than they were of going to prison.

  Authorities were that close to catching him, more than once. Detectives would later find out that Hollywood had snuck out the back door of a home they had come to search, or had been on a boat just before them. Back in the beginning, he had just gone out for a bite to eat from his hotel in Las Vegas, but he saw cop cars outside when he returned, so he left.

  The investigation into the Hollywoods’ drug operation led to a number of spin-off investigations involving the Chinese Triad, Mexican cartels, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and an illegal arms distribution organization. Detectives also assisted and provided information that solved two separate homicide investigations in two states. But Jesse continued to elude them.

  I didn’t know that my friends and I were working at cross-purposes with Valencia sometimes. Once, when I was in Canada putting up posters, he was quietly cringing nearby. He worried that we were going to spook Hollywood by alerting him that we knew where he was. Sure enough, that’s what apparently happened. As soon as our posters went up, his leads went cold. So, eventually, Valencia came to our house with his supervisor and said something along the lines of, “Hi. I’m Mark. You don’t know me, but I’m the investigator assigned to find Jesse James Hollywood . . . and I’m going to do my very best to find him. I can’t tell you what I’m doing or where I’m looking, but you have to trust me.”

  Valencia was a big brute of a guy—“Gorilla” was his nickname—and he was a Native American former U.S. Marine. With his long ponytail and tattoos, he was not someone who fit in very well with the other investigators in the sheriff’s department. He was the kind of guy who was normally called upon when they needed to break down the door of a suspect’s house or scare out a criminal, not the guy who was typically in charge of investigating. We liked and trusted him immediately, though. You could tell that he cared about our case and took it seriously.

  Trusting him didn’t mean that I felt I could just sit back and wait, though. Aside from the times I was trying to kill myself, the rest of my days were filled with activities geared toward tracking down Hollywood.

  We had twice increased our portion of the reward money, so we were now up to a total reward of seventy thousand dollars: twenty thousand of that would come from the FBI and fifty thousand from Jeff and me. I was all over the Internet publicizing that and asking for leads.

  We even offered to put our portion of the money into a college fund for Jesse James Hollywood’s younger brother if he turned himself in.

  Once, at a Taco Bell drive-through, I refused to pull my car forward because I was sure that Hollywood was driving the car in back of me. I wanted to trap him there, at least while I wrote down his license plate number and called the police. It turned out that the man was six feet tall and just slouched down in the seat. He looked nothing like Hollywood. It was just my brain playing tricks on me.

  Sometime in early 2005, detectives told us that it was no longer a case of “if” we find him, but “when.” They couldn’t be more specific, but they wanted us to know that much, at least. It had been more than four years of a lot of dashed hopes, a lot of leads from all over the world that went nowhere. Hollywood kept moving, and we kept missing him. But many people in Santa Barbara were personally invested in finding him, including Sheriff Anderson, so we never felt that we were less of a priority once Nick’s murder was no longer “news.”

  A new phone number began regularly appearing on Jack Hollywood’s phone bills. The person he was calling had recently applied for a visa and was heading to Brazil. Informants tipped the police that this person was going to meet Jesse James Hollywood—so Valencia and his partner got on a plane, along with FBI agent Dave Cloney.

  For a week or so, they met with Brazilian Interpol officers and were assigned two more FBI agents, who were the FBI’s Brazilian Legal Attaché. Because Brazil’s policy was not to extradite criminals who are charged with capital crimes, this could not be handled as an extradition. It would simply be a deportation because Hollywood was in Brazil illegally, using a fake name on his passport.

  It turned out that Hollywood already had a criminal record under that fake name; he was stopped on cocaine charges, but police let him go because he happened to share one of his fake last names with a judge. He would later swear he didn’t pick the name because of that reason but simply chose names that he thought were cool or belonged to childhood acquaintances.

  Interpol officers would have to be the ones to arrest Hollywood and get him on a plane back to the United States. They would do it, but they wanted some rewards for doing so: twenty flashlights and Leatherman knives. Oh, and they also wanted to go to Boston to see a Celtics basketball game. They turned down the chance to see the Lakers instead because “They just traded Shaq.”

  When the basketball negotiations failed, they decided they’d be satisfied, instead, with a three-day trip to Sao Paolo, the richest city in Brazil. With that, the agreement was sealed with a smile. No one actually begrudged the officers those perks; they were very hardworking and dedicated cops who made do with so little that the American officers admired how they managed to conduct proper law enforcement investigations despite it all. On one day that wee
k, the Interpol officers showed up late and bloody because they had been carjacked and in a shooting. Then they apologized for being late.

  One day, a supervisor was ignoring Valencia, so he asked if something was wrong. Through an interpreter, the supervisor said, “You didn’t give me a pin.”

  It turned out that Valencia had given Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department star-shaped pins to the officers, but he had run out. He called his department and had them quickly mail a personalized pin for the supervisor—and then things were well again.

  Investigators had tracked Hollywood’s new phone, and when they “pinged” it to check his location, he answered the phone. They pretended to have the wrong number and hung up. But later that day, the investigator meant to call home, and hit “redial” by accident, calling Hollywood’s phone again.

  “Cuz?” he asked. “Is that you?”

  “Who’s this?” the investigator asked.

  “No, who’s this?”

  It went back and forth for a minute until the investigator realized what had happened and hung up. But another minute later, Valencia realized something bad.

  “You just spoke to him in English,” he said.

  Considering they were in Brazil, it would be highly unlikely for anyone to accidentally call a wrong number and speak perfect English—twice, over the course of a few hours. They worried it might tip Hollywood off that, once again, the authorities were near. But there was no time to waste worrying about it. The agents knew, based on tips, that an American cousin was going to meet Hollywood at a mall near the beach. They had to outrun the bus she was on, so they sped all the way, finding Hollywood smiling and waiting when they arrived.

  He had been suspicious about the phone calls, but not suspicious enough.

  After the violent scene of the standoff, with Hollywood’s girlfriend screaming “Kidnapping! Kidnapping!” and military police and Interpol agents almost shooting at each other, Hollywood was taken to the police station, where he spent a great deal of time cursing out the officers in Portuguese, insisting that his name was Michael Costa Giroux and that they had the wrong guy. He had all the right fake answers to their questions about who his parents were, where they were born, which schools he attended, and so on. After some time, it looked like the Interpol officers were a little unsure . . . did they have the wrong guy?