Tell me about yourself: your background, your family, your work history. In smooth succession the prosecutor eased Ramos into familiar territory, into the same spiel Ramos had recited at any number of precincts and prisons. As he began to relax, Ramos grew expansive, like a patient reveling in his life story during a free, unlimited therapy session. He ran through the intricacies of the “salvage” business; GraBois and the detectives nodded sympathetically as he vented about his family—how he hadn’t seen them in years. He boasted of his legal prowess from behind bars, and his audience acted suitably impressed as he misused terms and talked about the legal filings he wrote for other inmates.
“You seem to really know your law,” GraBois told him, at the end of one convoluted story. He looked at Shaw and suppressed a wink. “You ought to be a lawyer.” Ramos responded with a big grin. After nearly ninety patient minutes, they were nearing the point in the interview GraBois had been watching for.
He picked up a piece of paper and pretended to be looking at a particularly incriminating spot on the page. It was a trick he’d used in the past.
“How many times did you try to have sex with Etan Patz?” GraBois’s tone had abruptly shifted, and now a different person was asking the questions, not the friend offering career advice.
There was an electric pause. Ramos went white, and his smile was gone.
“Don’t lie to me, Jose.” GraBois picked up the U.S. Code book threateningly. “And before you answer me, I’m going to read the thousand and one again.” When GraBois finished the part about the five-year jail term, he looked up at Ramos.
GraBois could see him weighing those extra years behind bars. “I guess you have a witness,” the inmate finally managed.
GraBois didn’t say a word, just examined the blank page in his hand.
“I guess you know everything,” Ramos said, his voice cracking.
Suddenly Ramos slouched back in the chair. He took a deep breath and began to cry, loud sobs that made his body heave.
“I’ll tell you everything,” Jose Ramos wailed. “I never told anyone this before.”
It was GraBois’s turn to be stunned. He and Shaw looked at each other from across the room. This was how you dreamed it would go, though it rarely did. Every once in a while you push the right button and your man falls apart, like a cornered animal. He thinks we have a witness, and now he can’t afford to lie his way out of it, GraBois thought, elated. He’d been doing this job for a long time and had seen his share of con artists. This was either the real deal or an Academy Award–winning performance. GraBois felt pretty sure it was the real deal.
“Start by telling us what happened the day Etan Patz disappeared,” GraBois said. “And Jose, you better not be lying to us.” He looked pointedly at the U.S. Code book again. Ramos followed his gaze and nodded.
“I remember that morning, I made my rounds, looking for garbage to sell.” Ramos’s sobs had subsided but his voice was still shaky. “Then I went over to Washington Square Park, and I saw a little boy bouncing an old tennis ball. And now I think it was the kid who went missing that day.”
“What did he look like?”
“Blond and blue-eyed, and he was around six years old.”
“Do you remember how he was dressed?”
“He was wearing a dark jacket, I remember, and he had on a belt with a western buckle. And those sneakers, the kind with bright stripes on them.”
Etan had been wearing blue sneakers with fluorescent stripes when he’d disappeared. But Ramos could have known that from the missing posters. GraBois reserved judgment on the significance of that detail.
“Did you know this boy?”
“No, no, never seen him before,” Ramos answered. “But I’m telling you it was the kid.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was over at Sandy Harmon’s apartment…”
“Who’s Sandy Harmon?”
“She was my friend, her and her son Bennett. We hung out a lot together back then.” Just like he’d told Frank Carroll back in 1982, Ramos explained how he’d met Sandy on the welfare line, that she was his lady friend, and that he was a “close” friend of her son Bennett as well. Ramos would visit them both two or three times a week back then, and on the night of May 25, 1979, or maybe it was the next night, he’d dropped by as usual. Sandy was watching the news, he said; about how authorities were scouring the city for Etan.
“She told me that she knew him; that she used to take care of him. They showed his picture on the TV, and I’m 90 percent sure that kid was the kid I talked to in Washington Square.”
“You talked to him?”
“We talked a little, and then I asked him if he wanted to go back to my apartment.”
“Um-hmm.” GraBois looked down at the fake notes he held, and made a check next to an imaginary witness statement. If Ramos could keep thinking someone had seen him that day, all the better. GraBois worked to keep a matter-of-fact tone in his voice.
“Why would you take him back to your apartment?”
Ramos hesitated, perhaps in recognition that he was about to step over a line. “For sex,” he said.
No one spoke for a brief moment. With no expectations or fanfare, the case looked to be breaking wide open right here in GraBois’s office. My God, he thought. He’s just admitted to soliciting a minor for sex. But the statute of limitations on a nine-year-old molestation crime had run out. GraBois needed to keep the momentum going and to ignore the goosebumps running up and down his flesh. We can’t give Ramos the breathing room to consider a lawyer, he thought.
“What happened in your apartment, Jose?”
“I gave him some apple juice, I remember that. Then I picked him up and started to feel around his legs.”
GraBois steeled himself against that mental image. “How high off the ground did you pick him up?” he asked. What if he’d picked him up above his head, then thrown him down hard enough to kill him?
“This high.” Ramos gestured indiscriminately in the air.
Bob Shaw moved to a filing cabinet along one wall of the office. He drew a line on it some three feet off the ground.
“That high?” GraBois asked.
“No, higher,” Ramos said. “His belt buckle was about here,” and he gestured at eye level, then nodded when Shaw moved the pencil farther up.
This meant something to GraBois. Ramos wasn’t just saying the first thing that came into his head. The prosecutor held up the thousand and one statute again.
“Then what happened, Jose? Remember, you don’t want to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying, I swear it. I tried to have sex with the boy. I admit it, I did some things back in ’79 that I’m ashamed of. There were kids I took to the movies in Times Square because I wanted to have sex with them, and I messed around with a boy once in the tunnel. But I never hurt nobody, and I never forced any of those kids. This boy said no. He wasn’t interested. So I put him down. And then he said he wanted to go to school.”
The tone in Ramos’s voice had suddenly changed. GraBois could sense he was getting his control back, could almost feel the instant that his panic-driven candor shut down, replaced by agenda-driven dissembling.
“So we left,” Ramos went on, “and we got in a taxi that took us back down to SoHo. But he changed his mind before we got there, and said now he wanted to go see his aunt in Washington Heights. I walked him to Sixth Avenue and put him on the uptown subway. I remember I waved goodbye to him from the other side of the turnstile as he got on the train. And that’s all I know.”
“That’s bullshit, Jose!” GraBois’s outrage burst from him. He couldn’t contain it as Ramos’s tale spun into absurdity. The idea that Ramos would politely acquiesce to a six-year-old’s resistance, let him go unharmed, and then cheerfully wave goodbye as Etan jumped on a city subway to visit an aunt GraBois knew didn’t exist was ludicrous. Ramos must believe we could prove he was seen taking the boy into his apartment, he thought, but it’s a lot harder to
prove Ramos never took him out.
“No, it’s true. Look, I want to tell you everything,” Ramos said and started to cry again, “I want to get it off my chest. But I guess I need a lawyer for this. I’ll answer all your questions then, even if he tells me not to.”
What GraBois wanted to do at that moment was to lock the door and go at Ramos even harder. This was not the time to stop, when his subject was still vulnerable, and the seasoned prosecutor knew he could squeeze out of him what really happened. He knew guys like this, and he could bet that by their next encounter, Ramos would have recovered, and he would shut down tighter than a cell door. Countless times, in the months and years to follow, GraBois would second-guess his next words, but really, there was no other option. He just didn’t do things that way.
“We’ll get you a lawyer, and we’ll take this up again tomorrow.”
The session was over. Shaw unlocked Ramos from the chair and the four men walked down the hall to return Ramos to the U.S. marshals. Only two elevators were working that day, so they stood in the hallway longer than usual. As they waited, Ramos turned to Bob Shaw and said with a baleful stare, “By the time I tell you everything, you’re going to be the police commissioner.”
He looked at Detective Cavallo and promised him a promotion. Then to GraBois he said, “And you, you’ll be famous. You’ll have Giuliani’s job.” Less than a minute later the elevator doors opened to find the U.S. attorney himself standing inside. The four men crowded on and rode next to Rudy Giuliani, who must have been on his way out to lunch.
GraBois was astounded to hear his prisoner pipe up.
“Mr. Giuliani,” Jose Ramos said. “I seen you on TV. The camera makes you look heavier.” GraBois’s boss cast him a glance as if to say, Who’s this bozo? GraBois was dying to tell him, but knew he’d have to wait. This news was bigger than a four-floor elevator ride.
What do you think?” GraBois asked Shaw, sitting with him and Cavallo back in his office.
“What do you think?” All three men were thunderstruck, trying to make sense out of what had just happened.
“He’s our guy,” GraBois said. “There’s really no doubt in my mind. Did you see his body language? The look on his face when he said he let him go. That was such bullshit.”
Shaw was still shaking his head. He and GraBois didn’t always agree on everything. The veteran detective had been on the case well before GraBois, and sometimes they butted heads on tactics and theories, but on this one there was no dissent.
“I think he’s our guy,” he agreed.
The men speculated about what Ramos had really done with the boy he’d taken to his apartment, the boy he’d all but admitted was Etan Patz. There was little doubt they were now looking at a homicide case. Yes, there was always the chance he’d sold him to some pedophile ring, but to GraBois’s mind it was unlikely. Ramos came off as a lone operator. The men kicked around the more feasible scenarios. Maybe Ramos had killed his victim because he’d put up a fight, or maybe he’d panicked when he saw the extent of the search. He’d told Sandy Harmon he was running out to look for Etan after seeing the TV news. Maybe that’s when he’d gone back to dispose of the body, or that’s when he’d realized he couldn’t afford to keep the boy alive.
GraBois called a defense attorney he knew and arranged for him to come in the next day. Despite Ramos’s promise to tell him everything, GraBois knew the man’s moment of vulnerability had passed. A door had opened, but had it now closed?
CHAPTER 15
“Just Watch Me”
Dear Rainbow Family Members:
It has come to our attention that an individual known as “Michael” whose true name is Jose Antonio Ramos has preyed upon the young sons of Rainbow Family Members. We ask your help in identifying incidents where your children have been sexually abused.
—November 6, 1988, letter from Stuart GraBois requesting a notice be placed in the Rainbow Newspaper Always Free
Jose Ramos arrived at the U.S. Attorney’s Office the next day sporting a Jewish yarmulke and a serious attitude. As predicted, gone was the acquiescent demeanor. In its place was an invocation of his right to remain silent. Twenty-four hours across the street in the MCC had given Ramos time to regroup. At Giuliani’s suggestion, GraBois had set up a camera to record the next session, but Ramos refused to be taped.
He was still performing, though; his fake New York Yiddish accent grew more pronounced from that day forward. Leonard Joy, then a public defender with the Legal Aid Society, was assigned to represent Ramos, who was brought back to GraBois’s office several times over the next months with Joy present. GraBois and his team played the requisite good cop/bad cop; tough-guy talk mixed with trips to the street vendor to bring Ramos back New York’s signature Sabrett’s. Ramos ate the hot dogs with gusto, then continued to play coy.
“Listen, Jose,” GraBois would say, “you own up to everything, let the Patz family finally get some peace, and I’ll work with you. I understand you haven’t seen your family in a long time. I’ll try to locate them and arrange for you to see them. You’ll do federal time for everything, always a nicer way to go. And that outstanding felony case in Pennsylvania won’t be prosecuted again, I’ll speak to the authorities there. But if you won’t give me what I want, I’ll push them hard to bring the case back.”
Ramos didn’t seem to think much of those terms. He showed no signs of concern whenever GraBois mentioned the felony charges against him in Pennsylvania. As far as he was concerned, the Taylor case could not be resurrected. Although Ramos never recanted his “90 percent confession,” as GraBois and his team took to calling it, he would never again let down his guard.
Frustrated by Ramos’s stonewalling, GraBois was nonetheless reenergized by the near confession. All that summer and into the fall the prosecutor conducted a systematic review of the case, plugging in Ramos as the prime suspect. Letters went overseas to Interpol, trying to track Ramos’s travel in Europe. GraBois talked to the Pennsylvania prison authorities and had them comb through Ramos’s personal property and his visitation lists for clues.
GraBois brought in Sandy Harmon. Sandy was stick thin and sallow-faced. To GraBois, who’d spent years either defending or prosecuting narcotics cases, she wore the familiar look of a junkie losing her health. She was lucid but tight-lipped, bitterly condemning her past treatment at the hands of authorities. Sandy did cooperate by confirming one part of Ramos’s story. He had been in her apartment one of those first days after Etan disappeared, and he’d left once she’d told him the boy was missing, saying he was going out to help look for him. But as far as she knew, she said, Ramos had never actually met Etan, although he’d seen Etan in Washington Square Park.
Yes, she admitted, her son Bennett had slept at Ramos’s apartment several times, and Ramos had stayed at her place sometimes too, but she again claimed no knowledge that her then boyfriend was molesting her young son. She did recall one occasion when she was walking with Bennett and realized Ramos was following them, hiding behind parked cars and in phone booths to avoid detection. She was afraid, she said, and had ducked into a store with Bennett.
Bennett came in the following week. He was a pleasant-looking young teen, clean-cut and well behaved. At thirteen, his small talk was peppered with references to the many girls he dated. GraBois couldn’t help but think that was a response to the fear of Ramos’s taint, and he felt badly for the boy.
Bennett claimed little knowledge of events from 1979. He acknowledged spending time with Ramos; they’d watched a Muppets TV show together once, but he couldn’t say if he’d ever been in the man’s apartment. GraBois knew that the boy wouldn’t be expected to remember much from the age of four, and even if he did, if there were any sordid revelations, it would take time and considerable patience on the prosecutor’s part for them to surface.
By the summer of 1988, GraBois had kept his interactions with Stan and Julie Patz to a minimum. The tension of previous encounters notwithstanding, the detectives and F
BI agents were the Patzes’ usual point of contact anyway. But now GraBois felt that he himself should let them know of this new development. Ramos’s partial confession was not only the first real break in the case, but it also presented a highly disturbing scenario to any parent. GraBois waited out the summer while he pushed Ramos for more information, but finally he called Stan Patz one day in September and asked him to come in.
“I wanted to tell you in person that there’s been a significant development.” Stan took a seat and sat quietly as GraBois recounted his meeting with Jose Ramos, how Ramos had walked into the U.S. Attorney’s Office prepared to confess to tax fraud, and had walked out leaving the investigators speechless. For GraBois, Ramos’s admissions had erased any lingering doubts about Stan’s culpability, so the prosecutor didn’t hold anything back. When Stan asked him for the worst of it, GraBois told him Ramos had admitted taking the boy he thought was Etan to his apartment for the purpose of molesting him.
“I really think we got the guy who did this,” GraBois finished.
Stan Patz felt more than heard the weight of this news, a heavy, sickening thud. His vigil in 1982, while the press had trumpeted the “drainpipe man,” had been the second worst weekend in his life. He’d never quite been able to banish the tabloid sketch of Jose Ramos, and what that represented, from the dark pit of uncertainty in which he’d blindly groped for almost ten years. Now he struggled to digest the idea that what he’d most feared was proving most likely. It just made sense.
After Etan Page 24