Morgan made reference to Ramos’s dramatic “90 percent confession” in GraBois’s office, which Morgan could not have known about except from his cellmate. “He claimed he gave a statement because he was pressured,” Morgan later passed on, “by three grown-ups who extorted him for more than eight hours and then let him go.” At another point, Morgan referred to a woman he could only know about from Ramos.
“He doesn’t know for sure where Harmon is, she’s probably in the same dump on 13th Street.” Morgan was struck by Ramos’s ill will toward his former girlfriend. “She is a bitch cunt. Every woman Ramos talks about is a bitch, a cunt, or some other derogatory name. He apparently does not like women.”
But Morgan told GraBois on several occasions that Ramos reserved his real venom for the prosecutor himself.
“He would blow up the whole U.S. Attorney’s Office with a suitcase of plastic explosives if he could,” Morgan once stated. Ramos’s escape plans grew more detailed. “Ramos thinks he’ll get out one way or another,” Morgan reported. “He knows he can escape from Rockview eventually. They’ll give him outside custody and then he could get to Ohio and then Texas and off to Mexico.” According to Morgan, Ramos had clearly thought his route through, concocting a whole scheme to live in the jungle near the Colombian-Brazilian border, traveling through Mexico with some Rainbow friends to get there.
One week sequestered in the close, confining cell turned into two, and Morgan’s amusement was dissolving with his frayed nerves. With no clocks, no calendars, and no control over his sleep schedule—Ramos often insisted on keeping the lights on all night to read, then sleeping in a darkened cell all day—Morgan began to feel that insanity was infectious. When he found out he would miss a court date for one of his many lawsuits because of the undercover operation, he took out his frustrations on GraBois himself.
“I’m livid,” he told the prosecutor halfway through his stint. “Without my knowledge you put off my depositions in Danbury.” Morgan wanted out. “I agreed to stay in seg one week, I have now been here more than that. Passover is coming next week and I do not intend to spend it in the hole.”
GraBois calmed him down while spurring him on. “You’re doing such good work, we need you,” he exhorted the inmate. There were no Passover seders for Jon Morgan in seg that year, just a box of matzoh and Morgan’s fervent, unspoken plea for “next year in Jerusalem,” the traditional Passover prayer.
The holiday fell toward the end of Morgan’s stint, fortunately, because what really crystallized Morgan’s rage was watching Ramos play the Jewish card at Passover. As a boy in the North Bronx, Morgan had often used his fists to defend his faith, so it was increasingly difficult to go along while Jose Ramos masqueraded his devotion. When the rabbi came to the SHU for a special pastoral visit, Ramos picked a fight with him about the matzoh he’d brought to pass out. Morgan couldn’t hear the details—maybe it wasn’t the right kind of matzoh, or the finest quality. Standing in the back of the cell where he’d retreated out of earshot to give them some privacy, he silently seethed as he watched Ramos berate the elderly rabbi. For all the talk of Ramos-the-child-molester—and possibly worse—on some level, to Morgan it was just that: talk. It had happened elsewhere, out of sight, out of his experience. He was a direct witness to this scene, however. In a strange yet explicable way, it hit him the hardest.
Morgan had spent time with this rabbi, and knew the man was traveling the thirty miles each way between his home and the prison from a genuine concern for his inmate congregation, not for some paltry stipend. How dare Ramos—who pretended at his convenient faith—lecture this Orthodox rabbi? How dare he make a mockery of Morgan’s religion? Worst of all, how dare Ramos affiliate his sleazy, depraved soul with Morgan’s people? Jose Antonio Ramos was, as they said, “not good for the Jews.” He was ready to get out of there. He was done.
“I don’t think I’m going to get any more out of him,” Morgan told GraBois in a brief phone conversation a few days later. “He won’t talk about Etan Patz, he won’t talk about anything.”
“It’s okay,” GraBois replied. “I’m really happy with everything you got. We’ll talk more when we bring you down to New York next week.”
GraBois was grateful for Morgan’s efforts, but he was ready to see him go. GraBois was already working the bullpen. Unbeknownst to Jon Morgan, his relief was warming up in a nearby cell. Sometime in the previous days, Jeremy Fischer had arrived in the SHU at Otisville. Fischer was the next phase of the plan.
CHAPTER 23
Take Two
Many sexual offenders lie about their crimes…. Hopefully as you read this workbook you will understand that you must accept responsibility for your crime, recognize that you have a problem and want help in order to change.
—section underlined in pencil in Who Am I and Why Am I in Treatment? sex offender workbook Fischer “helped” Jose Ramos complete while in his cell, April 1991
You have to get over here,” the disembodied voice echoed into Jeremy Fischer’s cell. “C’mon, we can live together. I need to be near another Jew.”
For what felt like the twentieth time that week, Fischer found himself crouched in front of the toilet, as though he were paying the consequences for an overindulgent night out. But here in segregation at Otisville, drunken binges that ended by praying to the porcelain god weren’t even an option. Instead, prison toilets were useful for other things. You could wash clothes, tie dental floss to a makeshift weapon and temporarily flush it for later retrieval, even drink from it in a desperate moment. And sometimes, as in this case, if the acoustics were right your voice would carry the length of the sewage pipes and end up in the cell of the inmate downstairs.
Like a ventriloquist with his grotesque dummy, Jose Ramos had been speaking to Fischer through the commode for the last several days, and now he was urging Fischer to move in with him. Jon Morgan had just been sprung from segregation, leaving Ramos alone and unwanted by any other inmate. A pedophile is never “A list,” and Ramos was especially unpopular. Just as it had in Morgan’s case, Ramos’s request neatly sidestepped the challenge of inserting Fischer into the cell without arousing suspicion.
Jeremy Fischer and Jon Morgan were two very different animals. Both were educated, white-collar criminals, both were Jewish; but while Morgan was brusquely artless, Fischer was a slick talker, a real craftsman. As an informant, this had both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand, it made Fischer inherently less believable to authorities, so both GraBois and Galligan had set the bar higher for him to prove his worth, carefully looking for corroboration of anything he said. On the other hand, he more naturally suited the task. Like the best three-card monte dealers, Fischer possessed an agile mind, a golden tongue, and a performer’s instincts, all of which served him well at Otisville in April 1991.
After he accepted Ramos’s invitation, the cell they shared was Fischer’s stage. Like Jon Morgan, Fischer kept copious notes while Ramos slept, grateful for the loud snores drifting up from the bottom bunk. What he found irritating in other cellmates worked here as an alarm system. After he finished each page, he would tuck it into the waistband of his pants. It grew increasingly uncomfortable to move around with as many as ten or fifteen pages pressed against his stomach, but the thought of Ramos discovering his true intent was infinitely more painful.
Unlike Morgan, Jeremy Fischer was not inured to the general discomfort of segregation. The cell was dank and dark, and he shrank at the sound of rats and bugs scurrying in the night. In such close quarters, the rank odor of two bodies, each limited to three showers a week, was not quite overpowering, but it was certainly unpleasant. Mondays were the worst, especially if either of them exercised in the yard; there were no shower privileges on the weekend. Fischer tried to keep sight of his goal, and the prize it would earn him—a federal prosecutor in his corner and the chance to beat a parole violation. GraBois had made no promises, but Fischer was optimistic.
From the beginning he approached th
e mission differently, more strategically than Jon Morgan. He went about his task systematically, following a predetermined plan. Part of the time he was Jeremy Fischer, Esquire, coaching Ramos on legal strategy. When they’d first met, Fischer had told Ramos that he was in fact a lawyer, thinking that Ramos would be more open if he viewed their conversations as free counsel.
“I’ll get my own lawyer involved too, and I have contacts with Kunstler and Kuby,” Fischer told him, invoking the name of famed New York radical and underdog defender William Kunstler and his partner Ron Kuby. “This is a case they’d definitely want. It’s a high-profile, overzealous prosecution. It reeks of misuse of power.
“We’ll start a defense fund for you. I’ll contribute, and I know others who would too. Don’t worry, I’m going to help you. We just have to figure it all out.”
This seemed to strike the right note with Ramos. He was eager both to appeal his Pennsylvania sentence and to elude the Feds on the Patz case. He’d already filed the next round of appeal papers himself for the Warren case, and as for the Patz case, Fischer listened to him muse aloud endlessly about how to recant his near confession to GraBois without incurring perjury charges. The thousand and one statute GraBois had read to Ramos repeatedly that day in his office must have made a lasting impression. Sometimes it seemed to Fischer that Ramos hadn’t forgotten anything GraBois had said or done to him. Clearly, the point of intersection between both of Ramos’s legal cases was the all-consuming animus he felt for his tormentor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois.
Fischer later told GraBois that Ramos’s desire to recant the 90 percent confession was as much about derailing GraBois’s case as it was for the inmate’s obvious legal benefit. “His obsession for you is total,” Fischer marveled.
Fischer’s legal conversations with Ramos would invariably disintegrate into revenge fantasies. “The next time GraBois hauls me down to his office, I’m gonna be ready for him,” Ramos would tell Fischer. Now he was actively looking forward to seeing the prosecutor. He would talk relentlessly, gruesomely—of hitting GraBois over the head with a hammer; of biting off his face; of ripping out his liver. Ramos would lie in the dark after lights-out, filling the space between his bottom bunk and Fischer’s mattress with invective. His favorite image was delivering the “Ramos Award,” conferred with a hard-driving baseball bat.
“Let’s give him the ‘Ramos Award,’ ” he’d say of GraBois, and anyone else on his lengthy shit list. With no actual bat in sight, his ravings would have been comical, except Fischer had good reason to think he was locked in with a serial child molester who had raped and murdered a helpless boy. He had no choice but to take Ramos’s threats seriously… and then had no choice but to ignore them.
When he wasn’t playing jailhouse lawyer, Fischer’s parallel role was as therapist/confessor. Back at the state facility in Rockview, Ramos had repeatedly failed his applications for parole. The commonwealth of Pennsylvania was not going to approve a known sex offender who refused treatment. Now facing a twenty-year maximum sentence, Ramos had finally relented, so when he’d arrived at Otisville he’d brought with him course material for the treatment program. Who Am I and Why Am I in Treatment? asked the title of his workbook. Fischer was hoping that by helping Ramos answer that question, he would ultimately answer another one: “Did you molest and kill Etan Patz?”
With each passing day, as Ramos gradually relaxed his guard, Fischer offered a sympathetic ear. He cajoled and flattered, he soothed and empathized. If it helped Ramos to think that Fischer too felt these same shameful feelings, then the good doctor obliged.
“You know, in ancient Greece,” Fischer counseled, “it was the most normal thing in the world. Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes—they all had boy lovers.” Ramos liked to hear that he was in good company. Fischer also offered to put him in touch with a NAMBLA chapter he pretended to know about. Anything to help lower Ramos’s guard.
During these informal counseling sessions, the two pored over the workbook. Disclosure, the book emphasized, was a critical first step.
“In your notebook,” read chapter 6’s assignment, “make a list of all of the different sexual offenses you have committed…. Write down how many times you did each type of offense and how old you were at that time…. Share this assignment with your friend, group, or therapist.”
“Okay, Jose, tell me what happened,” Fischer would say. “Tell me why you did this. Tell me what you were feeling when you were with this child.” The two inmates set aside a prescribed time period each day—a mock therapy session—to work on the notebook. Ramos didn’t speak about Etan Patz, but he quickly began to reveal other incidents, other horrors. Fischer tried to ferret out names, identifying details, but Ramos didn’t always know himself.
“Where did this happen? What did he look like?” Fischer would pump Ramos for whatever he could get, then scribble it down afterwards, until the pencil stub would lose its point and he’d have to petition a guard to sharpen it. He’d relay all this information to GraBois and Galligan later. There was Joey Taylor, whom Fischer knew as the “boy on the bus.” There were boys with Down syndrome Ramos had met while living two blocks from a New Orleans children’s hospital. And there was the camp for retarded children in Ohio. On the third day in, Fischer was able to steal away to the phone to call Stuart GraBois.
“I think I’m on first base.” Fischer had been given a code to use. For every hit he was getting closer to a full admission of guilt—the home run.
“He’s got plans to escape. He’s even drawn me a map and it leads straight to New York—and you.” Fischer didn’t know that the prosecutor had already heard this from Morgan, so he hastened to tell GraBois the details of Ramos’s plan.
“He knows where you used to live,” Fischer continued, naming the town. Fischer couldn’t himself know where the prosecutor lived—score one credibility point, thought GraBois. “All he talks about,” Fischer cautioned, “is that once he escapes, he’s coming to your office to get you, now that you’ve moved out of your neighborhood. And he takes no small pleasure out of knowing you moved because you were afraid he was coming after you.” That, in turn, pleased GraBois. It sounded as though Ramos had believed Jon Morgan’s story that GraBois was no longer his neighbor.
“I’m getting some results from the workbook,” Fischer went on. “It’s not what you’re looking for, I know, but it’s progress.” He reported the atrocities he’d heard, including a few names. GraBois recognized one, someone Fischer couldn’t have made up. Hearing Fischer pass on the name Bennett Harmon was significant. Fischer had to work hard to earn his trust, and Sandy’s son was authentic coin.
“He’s got a serious plan for blowing you up,” Fischer warned again. “It’s all he talks about. I’ll try to get more details. Just be careful.”
“You be careful. Let’s stay in touch.”
That wasn’t going to be easy. Soon after their call, the segregation phone broke, and Fischer could only track his progress in sporadic notes. His sense of isolation almost complete, the days took on a tense routine. Daily “therapy” sessions with Ramos became increasingly frenzied; Fischer suspected his “patient” was using their sessions partly to exorcise demons, and partly to reexperience the sex. He even wondered sometimes if Ramos did feel a spark of actual remorse, and every once in a while he would catch a glimpse of another lost child. After their first few sessions Ramos started lobbying Fischer first thing in the morning.
“When can we get to the book?” he’d say.
“Wait awhile,” Fischer would stall. “I’ve got my own things to do. We have to conduct our work on a schedule, just like the professionals.” Instinctively, he sensed that putting off Ramos would bring him to a faster boiling point, so when they did sit down, Ramos’s tightly held secrets would spill out uncontrollably. It was strangely satisfying for Fischer to use his con artist talents to good purpose. He was all too aware that they usually landed him in trouble.
During the sessions themselv
es, Fischer sought to tread a fine line between amateur shrink and amateur detective, knowing if he pushed too hard he would tip off Ramos. Mostly he just listened, sympathized, and tried to keep the conversation going. He’d come to realize that Ramos had no friends; that the only people his cellmate talked to regularly were in law enforcement, and Ramos knew they were only listening to build a case against him.
“This is good,” Fischer would prompt when Ramos slipped into confessional mode. “Tell me more. What about Ohio? What about Florida? Were there young girls involved too? What did it feel like? Who did you tell? Did you have anybody to talk to just to get it off your shoulders?”
These discussions lasted hours, ending only when Ramos, either out of genuine pain or wariness, would claim searing headaches and retreat to his bed. Fischer would wait to hear the snores, then he’d turn on his two-dollar commissary-issue Japanese lantern and start to transcribe.
“Ramos has taken me into his confidence,” he wrote in the notes he was saving for GraBois. Fischer explained how he’d told Ramos that he needed to fill him in if he wanted help on the legal case. “He’s starting to rely on me.”
Putting it on the page made it real, but most of the time Fischer refused to be moved by what he was hearing. Feelings were just too complicated, especially in this cell. He was playing a part, and like any good actor, he needed to just be the part and not overanalyze. Otherwise, he feared, Ramos wouldn’t respond, and he himself might falter. Any combination of fear, disgust, even self-loathing both for getting drawn into Ramos’s scheming and for the massive deception he was perpetrating—all those feelings would only jeopardize the work.
Fischer knew that his own moral compass often skewed wildly off course—he’d enjoyed a long career of bald deception and criminal acts. But now somewhere, in the hours either spent feigning his sympathy or in writing it all down, he could feel a shift. At some point during the feverish incantations of violence and the chilling admissions of child abuse, a line had been crossed, and Fischer’s motivations were now both self-serving and selfless.
After Etan Page 35