by Ken Gross
At John Adams High School, Tony Lombardino applied himself. He played football, but had no time for girls. His grades never rose much above a C average, but his determination did not go unnoticed. He studied the clarinet and the saxophone because his father believed that some musical training helped a man appreciate the finer things in life. His father had played the violin at a silent-movie theater, where he met his wife.
In school there was a monitor system, and Lombardino experienced his first taste of prosecution. The cases involved talking, or stepping out of line, or some other school infraction. The penalties weren’t harsh—an hour after class at the most—but Lombardino was proud of his high record of convictions.
When Lombardino was a senior, his grades began to improve. At the time, he planned to become a dentist. The title impressed him. He remembered the respect commanded by the men on Bushwick Avenue who were dentists.
Some time before Lombardino entered Hofstra College he changed his career plans—he was going to be a lawyer, a prosecuting attorney. It had something to do with pride and respect. When he was a kid, someone had stolen some fruit from a peddler. A cop had come along, twisted Tony’s ear, and told him to get home. When he complained to his father, the latter had whacked him. He had to have respect for the police, even if he thought that an officer was being unfair. Some time later, in Queens, he heard someone call across the backyard that he couldn’t go fishing—his son had been arrested and he had to go to court. Tony Lombardino was offended. Where was the shame?
“One of the reasons that I became a prosecutor was my belief that people were getting away with things,” he would say later. “This is what’s happening to society. ‘I can’t go fishing today—my damn kid got arrested!’”
When he was nineteen years old, Lombardino got in to see the trial of Willie Sutton. It was held in the 100-year-old courthouse in Long Island City, where the ventilation was poor and the wooden benches were hard. He was made to feel the sharp sting of the law in that old building. Here was weight and substance, and he would regret that he would have to practice the law in modem brick-and-glass buildings where there were concessions to comfort. The law, he believed, should be cold and stiff, as unbending as the time it had taken to draw up the code. But at the trial of bank robber Willie Sutton, Peter Farrell presided and Lombardino was impressed by the dignity and depth of this judge.
Farrell would preside at the most important trial of Lombardino’s life. It would be almost two decades later, when the struggle against people’s disrespect inside the courtroom had spread to the streets and homes. It alarmed both men. Lombardino and Farrell had become prisoners of hard memories of tightly run courtrooms and tightly checked passions.
There was a two-year interruption in his education when from 1953 until 1955 Lombardino served in the Army. He became a corporal and operated a landing barge, stationed at Fort Eustis, Virginia. “They told us that there was a WAC behind every tree at Eustis—only there were no trees.” The nearest big town was Newport News. But Tony Lombardino didn’t feel comfortable there and he would drive an 800-mile round trip for a weekend in New York City.
When he resumed college, it took time for him to regain momentum. He graduated from Hofstra with a C average, and when he took the test for Brooklyn College Law School, he was in the lowest percentage of those accepted. His father explained that the family had taken out loans, that they had mortgaged their home to put him through school. He was expected to do better. And he did. Lombardino began tape-recording his lessons and taking elaborate notes. He studied furiously on weekends and organized study groups. He took an accelerated course and never received a mark below B. He was graduated in the top ten percent of the 1957 class of 400.
In his senior year, as an indication of his newfound maturity, Anthony Lombardino also took a bride. The ceremony was held on a Sunday afternoon—a concession to the self-employed butchers and hairdressers who couldn’t afford to take off a Saturday—at Our Lady of the Cenacle Church just off the Long Island Expressway. Lombardino wore a tuxedo. In the carefully structured society of Long Island Italians, he was considered to have “married down.” His father-in-law was a maintenance man.
After the wedding Lombardino and his wife lived in his old room at his parents’ home. It was a sensible thing to do. When he graduated from law school, he was advised to enter an important firm in some junior capacity. But he was impatient Against the unanimous advice of his relatives, Lombardino and a classmate, George Faber, opened a general-practice office in Ridgewood. His father helped build bookshelves. His first case was a negligence claim, and with the two-hundred-dollar fee he and Faber and their wives went out to celebrate.
Alice Crimmins, right, waiting with spectators for a session of the second trial to begin (UPI)
Sophie Earomirski waving to spectators outside the courtroom (N. Y. Daily News)
The all-male jury of the first Crimmins trial, May 26, 1968 (N. Y. Daily News)
Judge Peter T. Farrell (N. Y. Daily News)
Alice Crimmins with attorney Herbert Lyon, June, 1970 (N. Y. Daily News)
Assistant District Attorney Anthony Lombardino, left, and Detective Gerard Piering, right (N. Y. Daily News)
Medical examiner Milton Helpern (N. Y. Daily News)
Assistant District Attorney James Mosley, left, prosecutor Lombardino, center, and Queens District Attorney Thomas Mackell, right (N. Y. Daily News)
Edmund Crimmins, Alice Crimmins, and lawyer Harold Harrison leaving the courthouse (N. Y. Daily News)
Joseph Rorech (N. Y. Daily News)
The Crimmins boy’s body was discovered not far from the Van Wyck Expressway. Part of the New York World’s Fair is in the background. (UPI)
Anthony Grace, center, talking to Detectives Jerry Byrnes, left, and John Kelly, right (N. Y. Daily News)
The funeral of Missy Crimmins (N. Y. Daily News)
The place where little Eddie Crimmins’s body was found, five days after his disappearance (AP)
Missy and Eddie Crimmins
Alice Crimmins escorted by detectives after viewing the body of her dead daughter (N. Y. Daily News)
Alice and her husband, Eddie Crimmins, later the same afternoon (N. Y. Daily News)
Air view of Kew Gardens Hills apartment development, foreground, where the Crimmins family lived (N. Y. Daily News)
Alice Crimmins and her two children, Christmas, 1964
Alice Crimmins, right, waiting with spectators for a session of the second trial to begin (UPI)
Sophie Earomirski waving to spectators outside the courtroom (N. Y. Daily News)
The all-male jury of the first Crimmins trial, May 26, 1968 (N. Y. Daily News)
Judge Peter T. Farrell (N. Y. Daily News)
Alice Crimmins with attorney Herbert Lyon, June, 1970 (N. Y. Daily News)
But after the brave beginning, business was bad. “I realized soon that other lawyers had political friends—connections—and status to recommend them,” Lombardino recalled. “They had a lot of connections. It was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated.”
In Queens the law worked within circles. Judges could assign cases to favored firms. Police could recommend defendants to grateful lawyers. Lawyers could pass along overloads to colleagues certain that the favor would eventually be returned. When a judge was to be appointed, political leaders were consulted. When an Assistant District Attorney was needed, the Democratic committeemen drew from a pool of talent that had demonstrated loyalty and could be counted upon in the future. Every job had a string, and every string was held by a county committeeman, a grand puppeteer who could make the borough dance with business. Companies that wanted to do business with the county were eager to employ ambitious young attorneys who could connect them to the puppet masters. It was an ancient system of sleight-of-hand.
Because the Democratic ranks were crowded, Lombardino joined the Douglas MacArthur Republican Club. It met on the first and third Thursday of
every month in a Protestant church at Liberty Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway. Tony had chosen carefully. The membership consisted mostly of old Con Edison workers, retired policemen, and middle-level bankers. Like Lombardino, they had sensed something stirring in the activities of Senators Robert A. Taft and Joseph R. McCarthy. Later the club would become affiliated with the Conservative Party, but in the early 1960s it seemed that the political movements could lead to a rupture of Democratic control of Queens. Lombardino wanted to run for an Assembly seat, but the old-guard members of the club told him he was too impatient, that he hadn’t earned the right. During this period Lombardino became friendly with a young city councilman, Nat Hentel.
When Hentel was appointed District Attorney, Lombardino went to his district leader and said he knew Hentel and should be recommended for a post as Assistant District Attorney. Reluctantly the district leader passed Lombardino’s name along to the county leader. In January, Tony Lombardino moved into an eight-by-ten-foot office on the second floor of the Queens Criminal Courts Building on Queens Boulevard. In his off-duty hours he volunteered to go on felony runs with detectives. He was just like a kid again—riding around in unmarked radio cars, carrying a 7.65-caliber Beretta on his hip.
Lombardino’s office was across the hall from Assistant District Attorney Edward Devlin, whose door seemed to be always closed. Lombardino knew that Devlin was working on the Crimmins case, but he wouldn’t be satisfied until he discovered what was going on behind the closed door.
29
Eddie and Alice Crimmins had been reunited in the fall of 1965. It was, for both, a marriage of convenience. They were being hounded by the police, and legal advisors had said that for the sake of appearances it should be evident that neither blamed the other. They moved into a three-room apartment in the Beechhurst section of Queens. The development known as Le Havre consisted of middle-income eight-story buildings with the pretensions that the name implied. They had been thrown up hastily in the 1960s, in time to cash in on the great white urban decampment. A gloss of paint and a foreign name, like the presumption of a royal title, were expected to lend distinction, but only made the development seem more rootless. There was even less sense of community than at the garden-apartment complexes of Kew Gardens Hills. Residents of the high-rises were perpetual strangers, nodding perhaps now and then at a familiar face, but seldom reaching under the smile. Social exchanges were rare and invariably accompanied by some sense of apology or shame. When the buildings had just gone up, a woman had flung herself to her death from one of the upper floors. The reaction to the suicide was strange. The management had some difficulty renting that particular apartment, as if the affliction were somehow communicable. But there was almost no curiosity about the reasons for the woman’s plunge. Suicide was not an unthinkable alternative.
The Crimmins apartment on the third floor at 9-20 166th Street was almost underneath the Throgs Neck Bridge. All day and night the thunder of traffic overhead could be heard. And from her apartment Alice was almost directly opposite the unmarked spot across the bay where her children were buried. She could also look directly down into the parking lot of Ripple’s, the restaurant where Tony Grace spent his free evenings. At any hour she could see whether his gaudy Cadillac was parked outside.
The apartment complex was also across the street from Whitestone General Hospital. The police moved into the hospital on the same day that Alice settled into her apartment. If the residents kept a respectful distance from one another’s lives, the police had no such intentions. Before the painters had finished with the Crimminses’ walls, ultrasensitive microphones had been planted behind each beam. Before the telephone company finished connecting the two telephones, they had been impregnated with multiple bugs. There were standard recording microphones that would operate when a telephone was in use. But there were also sophisticated voice-activated microphones that would record every sound in the apartment. Alice knew that her telephone was tapped, but she had no idea of the depth of the surveillance.
Less than 100 yards away, in a comer of the third-floor pharmacy of the hospital, detectives kept a twenty-four-hour watch on the machines. They would monitor the listening post for three years, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And they would not pick up one incriminating statement.
The installation, maintenance, and transcription of the tapes were in the hands of Detective First Grade Philip Brady, a big, florid man who had been a policeman since 1946. Before that, Brady had been a master sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S. Army. He was well over six feet and weighed more than 200 pounds, and the effect of Brady’s presence was softened by a creamy, tolerant, and well-educated voice. He was, everyone agreed, a supreme technician. He could bug or counterbug in almost any situation. But he was a faithful Catholic. As long as he was convinced that he was in pursuit of a good end, he would justify the means. There would come a time when all the recordings were silenced by the voice of his conscience. He would eventually quit the Police Department in disgust at his colleagues’ fascination with spying. But in the fall of 1965 Phil Brady was absorbed by the techniques of detection. Like the most precocious student in class, he plotted with geometric precision where the microphones and tapes should be employed. He tried to ignore the business of what was coming over the tapes. That was for the other detectives—Jerry Piering, John Kelly, Charlie Prestia, Harry Shields.
The assignment was to sit on Alice Crimmins. And soon after she took up residence in Beechhurst she resumed her extravagant sexual affairs. Eddie had gone back to work at Kennedy Airport. Alice became an executive secretary for an official at a company in Long Island City. A middle-aged man from Atlanta, transplanted by his company to New York, he had left his wife and children behind. At first he was unaware of the history of the redheaded woman assigned as his secretary. She was efficient and clever. He had only to tell her once how a thing ought to be done, and it was done to perfection.
“I was always quick to pick things up,” she would explain. “I never had any formal lessons, but I pick things up.”
She could type with speed and file with care. She had coffee ready when it was needed. And she possessed one of the rare gifts of an office assistant—the ability to anticipate needs. She reminded him to call home; to have his cleaning done; to cash a check. It was an endearing quality that went beyond the bounds of office loyalty. Alice Crimmins was unable to separate her life into inviolate compartments. Her feelings were open and often transparent, and she was very careful about other people’s feelings. Once when she was in a lesbian bar and one woman attached herself to Alice, she was as gentle and diplomatic as possible. She accepted a drink, but made it clear that her orientation was purely heterosexual. The woman persisted. In a burst of impetuosity, she declared her love for Alice. Quietly, Alice held the woman’s hand and told the lesbian that it was nothing personal, but that she simply couldn’t handle that kind of relationship.
Alice took the same care with men. She worried about their needs and their feelings. The man she worked for had taken an apartment in Long Island City. There were a thousand confounding details, made more bewildering for him by the strangeness of the environment. Alice helped him buy furnishings. One night the man took her out to dinner. They slept together. Given her soft shoulder, the next stage was inevitable. It wasn’t long before Alice had moved some of her clothing into his apartment For a brief period they were happy. Alice would recommend shows, restaurants. She fell in love with the turn of the seasons, and for her it was again the springtime of an affair when the police interceded.
Harry Shields, Jerry Piering, Charlie Prestia, and John Kelly were furious. What kind of grief was that! So the detectives began a new tactic—an extralegal device to make Alice crack. A telephone call was made to Atlanta. The executive’s wife was told the exact nature of her husband’s new relationship. The woman was on the next plane north. She went straight to the apartment, where she found Alice’s things. Methodic
ally, with the police in a nearby apartment, she destroyed all of Alice’s clothing.
Given the stagnation of the case, the detectives were ready to try almost anything. They were out to break Alice by harassment. They let her know that she was always followed, that her affairs would never be secret.
The executive was transferred home, his career blighted, his marriage wrecked. But Alice’s composure hadn’t cracked. She had never intended to damage the man’s career. To her, he was someone who could comfort her, fold her in the protective cup of his arms during her lonely ordeal. To the police, she was a slut Instead of grief, they read lust.
The field reports reinforced the theme. Piering would sit in his office long after dark reading the smudged detective reports. Alice had been out with this man; she had slept with a chimneysweep. To him, the picture was an impossible incongruity. Soon after the children’s burials Alice was seen again in her familiar night spots. She was no longer a cocktail waitress—she was a customer. The reports, in clipped police jargon, delineated her movements, pinpointed her whereabouts. Subject was seen entering Heritage House in the presence of five men and two other females. Subject consumed five whiskey Scotch mists, danced several times with different partners . . . appeared to laugh a lot. . . .
What was missing from the reports was a certain tone, a kind of subtle understanding. Alice Crimmins, in the fall of 1965, drank harder, danced faster, and laughed with more abandon than she had done a year ago. But it was a frantic diversion that was not so identified in any of the police reports.