by James Renner
Janis keeps the frantic mother on the phone a while after Arcuri finishes with the coroner. Like Arcuri, Janis figures it’s a long shot, but feels this woman deserves to be heard, if only because of the hopelessness she must have endured since her adult son went missing in 1997.
When Janis is done, Arcuri calls the Cleveland Police Department for a copy of the missing-person report on Daniel’s son, Phi Huu Mai, a.k.a. Tony Daniels. The report mentions that Tony was mugged a few months before his disappearance. He was pistol-whipped in the face by his attacker and ended up in the hospital. His mother keeps a copy of the x-rays at her residence.
Arcuri calls Daniels back. “Hey,” he says, “Do you still have those x-rays?”
A short time later, Arcuri sits in a cruiser, poring over the flimsy black x-rays, while Janis drives toward the crime scene on Clemens Road.
“Hey, Quincy, what do you have there?” asks Janis, sarcastically.
“You know what, Jim? I think it’s him,” says Arcuri. “I know it’s him.”
Dr. Lovejoy and forensic pathologist Stanley Seligman are already there when the detectives arrive at the Westlake Woods complex. Dr. Lovejoy tells Arcuri he thinks scavenging animals scattered the bones around the woods. The victim, he says, is likely a white male between 18 and 25 years old.
“When you say white male, could it possibly be a man of Asian descent?” asks Arcuri.
“Yes,” says the doctor. “Why?”
Arcuri leads Drs. Lovejoy and Seligman into the lobby of the closest office. He hands over the x-rays. Separately, so as to not influence the other’s findings, the doctors each look at photographs of Tony’s teeth, which were damaged during the mugging. One molar was chipped and capped. They compare it to the upper teeth of the skull. Both say it is a match.
Tony Daniels has been found. Now Arcuri must figure out how he ended up dead in his sleepy little town.
Mai Daniels’s apartment on the east side of Cleveland is littered with a hodgepodge of incongruous religious artifacts. A jade-colored sculpture of Buddha stands below an image of the Last Supper painted onto polished driftwood. The air is stale from lack of ventilation. Pictures of a lost son hang on an old refrigerator in the kitchen.
“I kept thinking he was kidnapped, maybe,” says Daniels. “That he was in some man’s basement, locked up or something.”
She had terrible nightmares while Tony was missing. Whenever she saw a news report about an unidentified body found in the Cleveland area, she called the coroner’s office and offered to show them Tony’s x-rays again. Each time she hoped it was her boy. She hoped she might be able to finally put him to rest. Instinct told her he must be dead.
Tony was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in December 1970. Daniels moved with her son to Saigon a short time later so she could take a job with the U.S. embassy. She was assigned to the payroll department and passed out checks to FBI and CIA agents. Tony’s biological father, a Philippine, was not involved in his life. The day before South Vietnam fell to the communist North, Daniels left for America with members of the State Department on planes bound for Honolulu. From there, she moved to South Carolina. In 1978, Daniels came to Lorain County with Tony. She met a man and had a daughter named Elise. She found a job with Luxair, manufacturing air conditioners. Both she and her son became American citizens.
By all accounts, Tony was a precocious boy. He picked up English quickly, learning to communicate with classmates in Catholic kindergarten. He excelled in studies and was asked to skip a grade. In his spare time, he tinkered with model airplanes. When he was still in grade school, he told his mother he wanted to become a doctor. Those dreams were shattered when he started attending public high school after the family moved to Cleveland.
Daniels says her son was pressured into bad behavior by neighborhood drug lords. He brought home the sort of women that carry around personal drama like some expensive handbag. When he was 17, Tony introduced his mother to a young lady and her baby. He told Daniels that this woman was his girlfriend and that the baby was his.
“I said, ‘Tony, that not your baby,’ ” says Daniels. “It had kinky hair like a black man’s and the mother was white.”
She figures her son knew the baby was not his but wanted to take care of it anyway. He liked doting on the child, buying clothes and food.
A few years later, Tony enrolled at Ohio State University, where he pursued a business degree. He returned to Cleveland in 1994, to work in the office of Interstate-McBee, where Daniels was employed as a machinist. It was the last legitimate job he had.
Tony found his business experience gave him an advantage over the petty crooks who ran the streets where he lived. His mother didn’t know it, but at the time of his death, Tony had his hands in a variety of nefarious operations. He had his mind set on one goal: to become the next king of Cleveland.
Propped up against a wall in the Westlake office is a large board with a picture of Tony in the center. Radiating out from his photo, like spokes on a wheel, are other pictures. Most of these are mug shots. They are connected to Tony’s photo by a maze of dark marker lines, showing their relationship to the departed. This piece of accidental art keeps the case organized in the minds of the detectives. Almost everyone on that board had motive to kill.
Arcuri points a finger at the picture closest to Tony, a mousy-haired woman with a thin face. She has dark patches under her eyes but is not unattractive.
“This is Tony’s girlfriend at the time of his murder, Tara Shores,” he explains. “He was living with her in an apartment. They ran an escort company called TNT, which stood for ‘Tony and Tara.’ Used to advertise in local papers.”
The detective points to another woman, this one a platinum blonde, her hair cut short. Her face is fresh, her eyes alluring. “This is Tina Mave. Tony was seeing her, too. She was a prostitute, same as Tara. But Tina was married at the time to this guy, Frank Mave.” Frank Mave is a hard-looking type with narrow eyes and a ruddy complexion.
“The night before he disappeared, Tony spent the night at the Lakewood Days Inn with Tina Mave. They checked out around noon on September 27, 1997. Then, Tony rented a U-Haul and spent that day moving equipment into his new business at 10228 Lorain Avenue.”
The shop was called T&O Music Express, for “Tony and Omar.” Omar was a good friend who lived on the East Side, but he had little to do with daily operations. On the surface, it was a used stereo and electronics company. In reality, Tony was using the store to move stolen goods. His stereos were hotter than the streets of Cleveland on a sultry summer afternoon.
“Tony’s sister, Elise,” Arcuri gestures to a woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, “called his cell phone that afternoon. She wanted to use Tony’s credit card to set up a security alarm for her apartment. Tony told her he was on his way to return the U-Haul. He said his friend Sherman was following him in Tony’s Bonneville to bring him back home.”
Sherman Kyle is a black man with well-trimmed hair and a plastic smile. “Sherman was close to Tara Shores,” says Arcuri. “Sherman says he last saw Tony at the shop, around 10 p.m.”
The Cleveland investigators who worked Tony’s case when he was still missing focused on Frank Mave. It seemed like every hooker and pimp arrested in Cleveland wanted to implicate Frank Mave in Tony’s murder, in exchange for a lighter sentence. Many claimed to have heard Frank Mave threaten Tony. Cleveland police suspected he murdered Tony in a fit of jealousy, after discovering that his wife had stayed the night with him in a hotel. But there was no evidence to support this theory, and Frank Mave would admit to nothing more than small-time drug offenses.
Tony’s Bonneville was found abandoned on Silvia Drive, around the corner from Sherman Kyle’s childhood home. A few viable sets of fingerprints were found on the passenger side of the car. These were fed into AFIS, the law enforcement Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but nothing matched in 1997. After Arcuri inherited the case in 2005, he ran the prints again. This time there wa
s a hit. The prints matched those of Ejike Thomas-Ogbuji, a self-described local hip-hop artist.
In 1997, Tony had aspirations of becoming a record producer and was working with Thomas-Ogbuji on a rap album. When Arcuri caught up with Thomas-Ogbuji, the man acknowledged being in the Bonneville but could not recall if it was before or after Tony’s disappearance. He does, however, clearly remember that it was Sherman Kyle driving. Kyle had wanted to show off a new set of speakers he’d installed.
There was one more piece of evidence Arcuri found interesting. After Tony had been missing for a couple of days, his mother convinced the landlord to let her into the stereo shop. There, she found boxes of pizza and wings and two cans of soda sitting on a table. Daniels also discovered a wadded-up paper towel in the trashcan. It was covered in blood.
Recently, that DNA was matched to a profile in CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, compiled from DNA samples taken from incarcerated felons. The blood was matched to a person already known to investigators, a man already featured on their board.
On January 20, Westlake detectives returned to Tony’s stereo shop, vacant for several years. They sprayed the floor with a chemical agent that causes blood to glow in the dark. The area around the back door lit up like a psychedelic poster. The blood on the floor was Tony’s.
* * *
“He wanted to be known as Chinese Tony,” says Arcuri, revisiting the site where the skull was found. “He wanted to get his hands into everything.”
Smarter than his peers, Tony brought a sense of organization to the petty crimes that ruled the West Side neighborhood where he grew up. He used his friends as lieutenants in separate operations to generate cash, theft, prostitution, drugs, and the record label.
“No matter what he did, Tony doesn’t deserve to have a bullet put in the back of his head,” the detective explains. “The innocent victim isn’t always so innocent. But what crime did he commit that would be equal to what happened to him? Somebody got away with murder.”
In 2006, Arcuri gave a summary report of the case to Cuyahoga County prosecutors for review. Though all the faces remain on the board, there is a lead suspect.
“There are pieces still missing, but the picture is getting clearer. There still could be someone out there who was a witness, a co-conspirator or someone who later learned about the crime.” Arcuri hopes for that phone call.
Before heading back to the station, the detective makes one last circle around the Westlake Woods office complex. The rest of Tony’s skeleton may lie under this parking lot, never to be reclaimed. Arcuri points to blue ribbons hanging from young saplings a few feet into the thicket, beside a pond. They mark the location of Tony’s femurs and tibias. They are reminders that until his killer is found, he rests uneasy here. It’s also a reminder to Arcuri that he is not so far removed from the darker crimes of city beats.
* * *
Anyone with information related to Tony Daniels’s case can reach the Westlake detectives at 440-871-3311.
Detective Lieutenant Ray Arcuri points to the location where a landscaper found a human skull.
Mae Daniels held the key to her son’s identity—an x-ray image of his twisted tooth
Phi Huu Mai was known as Tony Daniels after he moved with his mother from Vietnam to a rough part of Cleveland.
Daniels once aspired to become a doctor.
Chapter 6
The Ted Conrad Affair
Cleveland’s Strangest Unsolved Bank Heist
It seemed like such a simple story.
On Friday, July 11, 1969, 20-year-old vault teller Ted Conrad walked out of Society National Bank in downtown Cleveland with over $215,000 tucked into a brown paper bag and fled. The FBI and U.S. Marshals Service have been looking for him ever since.
It’s one of those unsolved mysteries that every city has in spades, something to be rehashed by local media near the anniversary of the crime, or during sweeps. But newspaper articles I dug up on the subject were mostly superficial retellings, offering little in the way of actual investigation.
When the Plain Dealer published a new article about the heist on January 13, I printed it out and set it aside. The article, written by Jim Nichols, was quite good. Nichols found that every time Conrad’s classmates from Lakewood High School gathered for a reunion, the FBI was there in case the fugitive stopped by. Nichols printed the name of Conrad’s ex-girlfriend—Kathleen Einhouse—but I noticed he hadn’t contacted her. I thought that might be a way at fresh information, if I ever got around to writing an article myself.
On Monday, March 24, while cleaning my desk, I found the article again. Underneath it was an e-mail my editor at the newspaper had sent me on January 3. The subject line was: “d.b. cooper.” The message was short and contained a link to a website. “This says the fbi has reopened the case,” it read.
D.B. Cooper is the name given to the man who hijacked a 727 in 1971 and demanded $200,000 in cash, as well as two parachutes, for the safe return of the passengers and crew. Cooper got what he wanted and somewhere over the state of Washington, he bailed out the back of the plane with the loot. The FBI has been searching for Cooper—whose real name was most certainly not Cooper—ever since.
So, the FBI reopened the D.B. Cooper case about 10 days before a new story on Conrad suddenly appeared in the local daily. I saw the Plain Dealer article contained quotes from Scott Wilson, the FBI’s Cleveland bureau spokesman. I wondered . . . did the FBI think Conrad was Cooper?
It was enough for a phone call, I figured.
Wilson was on vacation, so I spoke to Special Agent James Keesling, who was filling in. Keesling said he had recently transferred to Cleveland from the Washington office currently handling the Cooper investigation. It seemed like a weird coincidence. I asked him if the FBI thought the two crimes were connected. He said he’d get back to me.
My interest now thoroughly piqued, I searched Whitepages.com for Kathleen Einhouse’s phone number. Chances were she’d have married and changed her name since 1969. She probably didn’t even live in Lakewood any more. But I tried, anyway. I got lucky. A “K. Einhouse” was listed in Lakewood. The woman who answered the phone was Kathleen’s elderly mother.
“Ted sent letters to my daughter after he ran away,” she said. “But the FBI took them.”
She promised to pass along my cell phone number to her daughter the next time they talked.
While I waited for someone to call me back, I pored through old clippings about Conrad, trying to glean fresh clues. The first item on the crime appeared in the Cleveland Press on July 15, 1969. Conrad had played it smart—he stole the money on a Friday, at closing time, giving him a full weekend to escape before a bank manager would notice the shortage on Monday. The FBI weren’t alerted until Tuesday, the same day the newspaper printed his school picture. By then, Conrad was long gone.
His method was elegantly simple. July 10, the day before the heist, was Conrad’s birthday. On Friday, he made a point to show everyone the bottle of Canadian Club whiskey he’d bought from the store across the street to celebrate his twentieth. He carried it around in a brown paper bag all day. When he left the vault at the end of his shift, no one—not even the security guard—bothered to check his bag. They assumed they knew what was in it. But actually, the bag contained a 10- to 12-inch stack of $100 bills.
Bank managers were stunned to discover the ruse on Monday, after Conrad failed to show up for work. In eight months, Conrad had never missed a day. He had seemed like such a fine young man! “An excellent employee, with excellent credentials,” said co-workers. “A lovely boy, a gentleman in every way,” said his landlord, who claimed she saw Conrad get into a cab Friday night and wave to her as the car pulled away.
Also in Conrad’s favor was the launch of Apollo 11, on its way to the moon. An entire nation was looking at the sky and could not be distracted long enough to search for a bank robber with a Princeton haircut.
Technically, it couldn’t really be called a robbery. S
ince Conrad worked in the vault, it was considered embezzlement. Whatever you called it, the bank was missing a lot of money. In 1969, when $2,400 bought you a new Dodge, $215,000 was enough to retire on, if invested properly.
A follow-up story ran later that week, tucked in the Metro section, above a piece about Sam Sheppard’s new wife passing her citizenship exam. It provided new details about Conrad’s personal life. After graduating from Lakewood High School in 1967, with an IQ of 135, Conrad had attended New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. His father was a professor there. Conrad was voted freshman class president but dropped out and came back to Ohio to be near his mother. She had remarried and lived on Bonnieview Avenue in Lakewood, with his sister, two brothers, and stepfather, Raymond Marsh. Shortly after returning, Conrad got his own apartment on Clifton.
* * *
A little after 7 p.m., Kathleen, Conrad’s girlfriend at the time of the heist, called my cell phone. I was halfway through a large margarita at El Jalapeños on West 117th Street when she called. If you’ve never had a large margarita at El Jalapeños, you should know that they are as big as my head and I once won a “largest head” contest (no joke). Luckily, Kathleen ’fessed up to being on her second bottle of wine, so we agreed it was better that I call her back in the morning.
“I have a tape you should see,” I vaguely remember her saying.
* * *
Head still pounding—why have one large margarita when you can have two for twice the price—I called Kathleen around 11 a.m. She was sitting on a beach in Ocean City, enjoying a short vacation with her friend. Her voice was kind and, it seemed to me, a little mischievous, or playful.