Ever since Morgan had gone up to Otisville a few weeks earlier, Galligan kept reminding GraBois that the case could be jeopardized if the two men were in direct contact without her. “Stu, you know I love you,” she would say, “but if he tells you something and I don’t hear it, and it comes to a trial, you know damn well you’d have to testify, not me. And if you’re a witness, you can’t be the prosecutor. It would kill you if someone else took this case after everything you’ve gone through.”
Now Galligan glanced out the window ten flights down to the line of people waiting to get through the metal detector at the building’s entrance, then turned to face GraBois. She shook her head. “No, no, that’s not what I meant this time,” she said. “I meant, has he told you what he got from Ramos? I just got off the phone with him, and I figured he’d have called you in the time it took me to take two elevators and cross a lobby.”
“He called me for a minute earlier this morning, but he couldn’t really talk. What’s going on?”
“Ramos told Jon that he plans to blow you up.”
“Right.” GraBois liked to hear Ramos’s ravings.
“I know, I know, but this sounds like a legitimate threat.” She recounted Morgan’s story.
Within a few days of arriving at Otisville, it had become clear to Jon Morgan that Ramos was in protective segregation, and he wasn’t getting out. Too many people knew who Ramos was and what he was in for. Prison management didn’t want to risk any violence if another inmate went after him. Morgan could understand that. Technically Ramos was “on loan,” and if the state facility in Pennsylvania sent over a live inmate and got back a pine box, someone at Otisville would have to answer some awkward questions. If Ramos wasn’t coming out of seg, Morgan would have to go in after him.
I’ve gone this far, he told himself, I may as well finish it up. Besides, he’d already been warned by Galligan and GraBois what it might take. To avoid any suspicion that could arise if GraBois arranged it from the outside, Morgan simply wrote an anonymous letter to the warden saying another inmate in general population was after him. Guards picked him up coming out of breakfast the next day, and he was off to protective custody—the hole.
Morgan knew that most inmates hated the hole, but he personally didn’t mind it. It was quiet, and you were left alone. The word conjured up the dark, waterlogged hold of a galley ship filled with slaves, but the reality was starker and more sterile. You landed in segregation for two main reasons—in disciplinary seg as punishment, or in administrative seg to protect at-risk inmates by separating them from the rest of the population. Either way, you were moved out of the general “Compound” to the SHU, or Special Housing Unit. Physically, the SHU wasn’t that much different from the rest of the prison. It featured the same cinderblock cells, linked by antiseptic corridors where the sound seemed to carry for miles, so a whisper at one end of the tier mingled with every other noise to reach your ears at the other end in a cacophonous riot. There were small distinctions—the sink and toilet in the SHU were stainless steel, not ceramic, which made for a colder seat but one that couldn’t be broken into weapon-sized pieces. The bed and chair were bolted down. The biggest difference between seg and general population, though, was the amount of time you spent in your cell and the privileges you enjoyed when out of it.
In general population at Otisville, they cracked the cell doors first thing in the morning, and until the four o’clock count you were free to move around—to the library, to the track out in the yard, maybe to the gym. There you could lift weights, ride the stationary bikes, play some hoops or even tennis once your “workday” was over. After the count you were on your own again until an hour before lights-out at ten o’clock; then you were shut back in your cell for the night.
By contrast, seg meant total lockdown, trapped with one roommate in an eight-by-fifteen-foot space for basically twenty-four hours a day. You got tougher time in disciplinary seg, where you couldn’t open the windows, smoke, or turn on the lights at will, but even if, like Morgan, you were placed in the hole purely for your own protection, you ceded your movements to the guards. Cuffs were de rigueur outside the cell. Showers were rationed to three a week—if you were on the guards’ good side—and exercise to one hour daily—again, if you weren’t on anyone’s shit list. You could breathe fresh air during an outside workout, but you were still caged, in something like a giant dog run. But since Morgan passed most of his days prepping for his labyrinthine lawsuits, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d worked out, it was all truly academic to him. Besides, he thought, this was a short-term gig, just a week or so, no sweat. He counted on GraBois to spring him upon request. Ultimately, he didn’t really feel like he had a choice, so he’d just make the best of it. And buried down deep, so deep perhaps he didn’t even recognize it himself, Jon Morgan relished the idea he’d been singled out as the linchpin of a special team. Who wouldn’t enjoy being on a secret mission, even if it turned out to be impossible?
The hardest part of the assignment for Morgan was finding Ramos in seg. Trapped in your cell, you could go your whole stint without catching sight of a particular inmate if he wasn’t on your tier. Even if he were, he could be four cells away and you would never know it. Morgan’s task was complicated by the fact that only the warden and a couple of his key staff were in on the operation. In general you could never know if the guards would keep their mouths shut. There were just too many side deals in prison. Besides, guards were known to do things like grab your letters and read them out loud to the rest of the inmates, just for entertainment. A slip of their tongue could get you killed.
The problem was solved a few days after Morgan arrived. In a rare moment, he was out of his cell, sitting in the legal phone booth that fronted the law library. Even in seg, inmates could not be denied access to either legal calls or legal resources. Inmates were eligible for one legal call a day as needed, and up to one hour a day in the library. Of course, “law library” was a misnomer—no hushed stacks filled with tomes of jurisprudence, just a converted cell furnished with one regulation prison desk and chair, one typewriter, and the basics: Black’s Law Dictionary, a Corpus Juris Secundum law encyclopedia, and a set of the federal regulations.
As Morgan was finishing up his call, he nearly missed guards leading his quarry into the library a few yards away. But Ramos himself banged on the window to get his attention. Morgan’s escort wasn’t back yet, so the two could reunite through the glass. Morgan showed surprise that was only partly feigned, since he’d never dreamed it would be this easy. “I’m down in Otisville from upstate to be closer for one of my cases,” he explained to Ramos, who was just happy to see his old friend.
Ramos looked about the same as he had when Jon Morgan last saw him, a little better groomed, perhaps. His wiry gray hair hadn’t grown back completely to its straggly mane in the three months since he’d cleaned up to prepare for sentencing in Warren. As usual he carried a thick pile of paperwork: court transcripts, subpoenas, and his ubiquitous press clippings. There were more of these to come, Ramos said, showing Morgan his collection of media pitch letters. Vanity Fair wanted to talk to him about his link to the Patz case, as did Inside Edition and the local New York CBS News channel. The inmates at Otisville might hate him, but outside the prison he was in demand.
“What’s happening with that address you were going to get me?” Ramos asked Morgan. “I’m still interested.”
Morgan looked around; they were alone, but at first he wished Ramos wouldn’t speak so recklessly. Then he remembered—he was allowed, even supposed to be talking this way.
“Listen, if you get it, be careful; I know they’re watching my mail,” Ramos instructed Morgan, despite the irony of saying this loudly enough to penetrate a solid wall. Ramos appeared not to notice, nor to care. “Here’s what you need to do. First send me a letter with the stamp upside down, so I know that you got the address, and then send me another letter and write the address under the stamp.”
“Go
t it.” Morgan only half listened to this Rube Goldberg–esque plan, thankful he had no intention of complying. One thing is sure, Morgan realized: Ramos had really thought this through.
“Why do you want GraBois’s address?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know.” Then Ramos told him anyway.
“I know a guy on the outside. He’s a demolitions expert, and he owes me a big favor,” Ramos said. “I did a writ for the guy in here.” He went on to describe a suitcase of explosives and his plan “to blow up GraBois’s building, when the time is right.”
“I think it might be an apartment building,” said Morgan.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ramos told him. “I’ll take out the whole place.”
Of course, Morgan could never tell what was real and what were the ravings of a pathological liar. Ramos had spun a lot of tales in the past, each one more grandiose than the last. The bus he sorrowfully spoke of losing in Pennsylvania, the one Morgan later found out was a junk heap filled with garbage, had been described by Ramos as a moving Four Seasons. Still, explosives and an outside contact who knew how to use them? That was a viable threat. The fact that Ramos would talk about it openly out of the cell meant he’d lost all reason.
Mary Galligan had listened to Morgan tell her all this in his furtive call, then got off the phone and headed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Whether Ramos or Morgan was full of crap, she thought, GraBois needed to be protected.
“He’s asking Morgan whether you have any kids.” She had finished recounting the conversation, and now watched for GraBois’s reaction. She knew if anything was going to get to GraBois, it was this last bit.
“That son of a bitch.” GraBois felt the outrage any mention of his family in the same conversation with a perp could elicit. This was a hot-button topic for any prosecutor, and GraBois was no exception. Like most of his colleagues, he had a strong stomach for taking on the vilest of the human species. He’d met all kinds in charge of the prosecutions of the NYPD–FBI Joint Task Force for the Sexual Exploitation of Children. He’d screened the child porn; he’d heard the victim statements. Those were the days when GraBois didn’t flinch. But bring his own family into it? That just made him crazy.
“Look, Stu, this is not the kind of guy who can pull off killing an assistant U.S. attorney. He’s not connected; he’s one guy. I mean, he’s begging someone just to come up with your address.” For the most part, Galligan believed the soothing sounds she was making to calm him down. But she had also just been assigned the Cathy Palmer attempted assassination case. Palmer, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, had narrowly escaped a .22 caliber rifle with a sawed-off barrel that was spring-loaded in an attaché case and then sent to Palmer’s office, so Galligan knew these weren’t always idle threats. At this point, though, Ramos’s seemed rather vague and ill-conceived. “Look how many steps he’d have to take to pull this off. It’s all puffing, I’m sure of it.”
There was, of course, the small part of her that said: A guy can get lucky. That’s why she’d put the phone down from Morgan and raced over to see GraBois. The U.S. Marshal Service needed to be flagged along with the Bureau, and an order placed in the prison files that GraBois be notified upon Ramos’s release. Shortly after that, GraBois began to drive his car with a remote-control key chain that started the engine from yards away.
In the meantime, that day in GraBois’s office, he and Mary Galligan briefly imagined pursuing Ramos on charges of threatening a federal prosecutor, but in the end rejected the notion; they didn’t want to jeopardize Morgan’s tenuous position. So when Jon Morgan called GraBois the next day and repeated the same information he’d given Mary Galligan, the prosecutor listened, calmly making notes. GraBois kept his cool even as Morgan warned him that if Ramos were brought down to Manhattan for questioning, he planned to attack GraBois and choke him. Let him try, thought GraBois, it’ll give us grounds to bring new charges. It wasn’t personal risk that lit GraBois’s fuse, but the prospect of inadvertently bringing the danger of his work home. He told Morgan to keep going.
The plan progressed just days later, when Ramos’s cellmate was moved out and Ramos requested Jon Morgan replace him, although Morgan couldn’t figure out why. Maybe, he reasoned, Ramos considered him a known quantity since he’d already confided that his conviction was for sexual deviance. Or maybe Ramos figures that if Morgan knew GraBois, he was only one degree of separation from something he badly wanted. Over the next few weeks, Morgan got to hear just how badly, as he listened to Jose Ramos’s endless tirades against his “oppressor.” The prosecutor, Ramos would say, was clearly just using the Patz case as a career stepping-stone—how else to explain his perseverance?
Morgan had to admit this spying game was entertaining at first. “You know,” he’d say to Ramos, at GraBois’s instruction, “you were arrested in a National Forest. That’s federal land. The Feds can come after you now on separate charges, and they probably will.”
Ramos looked shocked. “They can’t do that. That’s double jeopardy.”
What a moron, thought Morgan. “No it’s not. Double jeopardy is when you beat a charge and the same people try to go at you again. This is different—there’s no double jeopardy between the state and the Feds.”
“He was so upset, he almost died,” Morgan told GraBois later, during a call from the legal phone.
During such calls GraBois and Galligan would play at being Morgan’s attorneys, even acting the part on their end of the phone. These conversations were all recorded, monitored intermittently, and there was always the risk that someone listening in would inadvertently—or deliberately—pass on the juicy tidbit that Jon Morgan was on the job. Morgan tried to call GraBois and Galligan regularly, reporting the latest details first to whomever he could get on the phone, often to both. The parallel calls were consistent with each other, and little by little, comparing notes, GraBois and Galligan were able to fit more pieces of information into the puzzle.
Despite the risk, Morgan occasionally called GraBois right from the cell, to speak cryptically as Jose Ramos sat on the bunk below him. A guard would dial the number—to what Morgan claimed was his lawyer’s office—and then pass the phone through the meal slot. Inmates in seg got a certain allotment of calls weekly. Morgan was working the phones prodigiously, so when he used up his time, Ramos would sometimes offer Morgan his own personal minutes for Morgan’s nightly call to his mother. Ramos himself had no one to call. He just had Jon Morgan.
When Ramos’s nonstop, mostly useless prattle did merit a trip to the legal phone, Morgan passed on whatever information he had deciphered. GraBois and Galligan found some of it useful for building the case against Ramos. Almost as important, these bits and pieces solidified Morgan’s own credibility. When Ramos talked about his days in the Navy, on board an aircraft carrier, GraBois subpoenaed his military records, and it all checked out. When Morgan reported that Ramos bought his bus in Florida for $2,500, that also checked out. Morgan heard stories of Bennett, Sandy Harmon’s son, and how much the boy loved his friend “Michael.” He also heard about the drainpipe where Ramos was hunted down and persecuted. Still, GraBois and Galligan needed to hear him talk about their case. For whatever inexplicable reasons, Ramos had felt comfortable discussing the Patz case with Morgan in the past, and now the Feds were counting on a reprise. There were random fragments, but they were elusive, almost lost among disjointed, irrelevant mutterings, like Ramos’s elaborate, fanciful plans to stage a prison break.
“He knows Etan’s school bus route,” Morgan finally called one day to tell GraBois. It was April 1, more than two weeks since he’d arrived in the hole. Morgan and Ramos had been talking about landmarks around New York, with Ramos boasting he knew the Village like he owned it. He’d started drawing maps of some of his favorite hangouts, which grew more and more detailed, including one of the Patz neighborhood. Somewhere in the midst of this, Morgan told GraBois, the school bus route came up. “He knows all the stops the bus
made back in 1979,” Morgan told GraBois, “and he says Etan’s was the third stop in SoHo.” Ramos knew the name of Etan’s school and told Morgan he was surprised they didn’t alert the parents when a child didn’t show up. As with all their communications, GraBois listened impassively to this first taste of progress and said little—he couldn’t afford to give his informant a reason to embellish. “See if you can get more details on how real this planned prison break is,” he told Morgan, “and get us the map Ramos drew.”
But Ramos was starting to wear Morgan out, jumping from one subject to the next, the traces of worthwhile information like slivers of gold embedded in a slag pile of useless stone and rubble. While it was true Morgan himself meandered in conversation, Ramos was just plain incoherent, and he would contradict himself from one moment to the next. The first time he told Morgan that they’d never be able to charge him for Etan Patz’s murder because there was no body, Morgan was both repulsed and elated at the revelation, until a minute later when Ramos then announced, “The kid will turn up alive.” It’s like a television with a remote gone haywire, Morgan reported back in exasperation.
He’d been warned it was dangerous to take notes, but at a certain point, Morgan felt he had no choice. It was getting tougher every day to make the calls, and he couldn’t keep the disparate fragments in his head. Yes, it was a risk—he’d seen the razor blades Ramos secreted in the binding of a book. But he was bigger than Ramos, Morgan reasoned, and a blade might cut, but chances were it wouldn’t kill. Perched on his top bunk while Ramos read a Stephen King novel below, Morgan began to keep written accounts on the sly. Some pages he stashed in the two worn paper bags that comprised his personal property. Some he’d smuggle out in letters to his mother, folded into an envelope thin enough to avoid suspicion. Mrs. Morgan in turn would forward them on to the Feds.
After Etan Page 34