The Alice Crimmins Case

by Ken Gross

  Brady’s notes indicated he should check with the telephone company to see if Rorech had used his credit card—692-5515 Code K 123—to phone Alice. He would also check American Express credit card number 001 033 171 8, issued to Joseph Rorech, Jr. In the interview Rorech said he never paid in cash. There was also a note to check with the singer, the bartender, and the drummer at the Bourbon Lounge.

  Brady’s notes: “He says that she has told him of several calls she received at night when no one was on the phone when she answered. She suspected her husband of making the calls. . . . She also said to Rorech that she left the house after midnight on many occasions to check the whereabouts of her husband, Edmund, visiting the bars and other places he used to frequent, checking for him personally and for his car. He [Rorech] has, on several occasions, ridden with Alice about the area where Edmund lived before his present address to determine the whereabouts of his car, and she was not satisfied until she saw the car in the vicinity of the house and to be assured that Edmund was not out and in a position to check on her. . . . Relates that on one occasion Alice told him that she was going to take the children to a farm upstate where she and her husband used to go for vacations. He says that she spoke to him of this on the telephone two or three weeks before the present incident. . . . Alice had told him that Edmund had tapped her telephone and he described the manner . . . Ed had drilled a small hole in the wall adjacent to the telephone, and had inserted wires in pinholes made in telephone wires, whereby he was able to listen by throwing a switch in the bedroom.

  This incident had upset Rorech. He was jealous of Alice’s dates with her own husband. And Tony Grace. And Carl Andrade. And all the others. His vanity had been punctured. He was described by one former associate as a “penny millionaire,” and this seemed to fit a man of such intense hopes. Brady noted that Rorech was easily wounded and found it almost intolerable to be brushed aside for someone as unpolished as Anthony Grace. It was as if he could barely understand the insult. Tony Grace left bigger tips than Rorech did; he even gave five dollars to Evelyn, the maid, when he came to call. Tony took Alice to the Capri, Ripple’s, Mancini’s—superior restaurants that were now slipping out of Rorech’s economic reach. And when Tony got tied up on business and was late for their regular Friday-night dates, he would send a taxi to pick up Alice.

  Brady’s notes on Rorech’s mood rose and fell like a temperature chart as Rorech rubbed open cuts and threw in some spite. “She didn’t care for the children that much,” Rorech told Brady. “Not until recently, that is. She’d work all night and sleep all day. She’d leave the maid with the kids. Of course, she’d always tell Evelyn where she was—she’d tell her what motel and under what name she was registered. But in the past few months her entire attitude had changed. Once we were at a motel and she was crying uncontrollably, berating herself for the type of mother she was. Normally, she was extremely unemotional.”

  Brady noted that Rorech’s business was becoming a shambles. Desks were empty. Bills were piling up. Alice was his obsession. She said she didn’t sleep with Grace. Rorech told Brady he believed her. Brady believed that, didn’t he? asked Rorech.

  Rorech dribbled out little hints that would scatter the attention of the detectives. Did they know she had worked as a hostess in a Manhattan restaurant in March? She had met a man at the restaurant who used her as a model afterward. At least, she said it was as a model. Rorech had always suspected that it was a job closer to being a hooker. Brady was emotionless as he recorded Rorech’s outbursts. Rorech softened. Alice had never showed any sign of active hostility toward the children. She and Eddie had shared a fantasy that they would one day own a farm where they would live peacefully with the children. The vacations on the farm had been a blissful interlude in her endless bickering with Eddie, and she had looked forward to a life upstate. If there was any danger of losing the children, she had told Rorech, she would run away. She would go to Canada, or Europe, or simply disappear. She didn’t want her children to grow up in the strangled world of Eddie’s and her mother’s church.

  Rorech paused. Look at Tony Grace, he told Brady. Grace was always introducing Alice to important politicians and gangsters.

  What to make of this bleating, jealous lover? “We always had the feeling,” Brady would recall, “that he had a lot more to tell, but we had to find the right questions to ask.” It was like trying to figure out a combination lock.

  “Let’s see if we can get him to take pentothal,” said Kelly. If Rorech had secrets to tell, truth serum might be a short cut. Besides, by December 1965 Rorech seemed ripe to fall apart. He was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. He had written worthless checks for thousands of dollars. He was drinking more and more. Nassau County authorities could have indicted him on dozens of counts of fraud. But the New York City detectives and the Nassau County police had an unwritten agreement that they would leave Joe Rorech free to assist in trapping Alice Crimmins. He was a man on a very thin string.

  When Rorech first started getting into financial trouble, he hired a young former Queens Assistant District Attorney, Donald Manes, to handle his affairs. At first it seemed a straightforward legal tangle. Rorech’s business failures were resulting in lawsuits. There was also a messy situation about a girlfriend who was suing him for sodomy. Eventually the charge was thrown out.

  When Rorech’s financial troubles became enmeshed with a double murder, Manes decided to turn this client over to one of his partners. Manes was, at the age of thirty-one, very ambitious. He sensed trouble in Rorech—even his checks to the law firm weren’t reliable. Later Manes would become Queens Borough President and a candidate for New York Governor. His real ambition was the Mayoralty of New York, and a client like Joseph Rorech could jeopardize such ambitions. Long after Manes left the law firm of Martin Baron, Donald Manes, and Harold Harrison, Harrison would still be mired in the swamp of the Crimmins case.

  35

  Throughout the case, Harold Harrison did not understand that the stakes had changed completely. He was afflicted with the misconceived overconfidence of a man who knows his rights. It was as if his client had been picked up for speeding and Harrison, the attorney, were indignant about rough treatment by the police. What Harrison failed to grasp was the difference between the routine tidiness of textbook law and the emotional turmoil produced by the murder of two children. There were procedures to chart behavior, but professional detectives were inclined to bypass fussy technicalities under what they regarded as extreme provocation. The truth was that the greater pressure was for a solution, and if they were rude in the process, it would be dismissed as well-intentioned zeal. Short of searing brutality, they could treat a client as they wished. Harold Harrison’s knowledge of the law was sound, but flawed by artless naïveté. He would have been better served by an instinct for survival.

  For Harrison, Joe Rorech represented an interruption in the endless list of divorce cases and petty crimes that made up his dreary practice. Harrison was a Queens lawyer—a prisoner of a stagnating backwater of the law. In his world there were no dazzling legal precedents. The courtroom victories were, in reality, little more than cajoling an indulgent Assistant District Attorney into downgrading a felony case into a misdemeanor.

  There were a hundred like Harold Harrison who anchored like fishermen around the Queens Criminal Courts Building. They practiced the law, but not in the sense of someone driven by the passions of Brandeis or Blackstone. Their law was a bitter compromise between loyalty to a client and the sensibilities of the District Attorney’s office. It was smart, if you intended to keep alive a private practice, to mitigate the courtroom antagonisms by buying lunch or drinks after work . . . by reiterating at convenient moments that it was all really a game, wasn’t it? The smug young assistants in the District Attorney’s office knew that they had the upper hand and could manipulate lawyers like puppets. In Manhattan young assistants would be scouting important firms for jobs, but in Queens they were career prosecutors. In Q
ueens, prosecutors could cut off court-assigned cases, shutting out fees for miscreant firms that depended on them to survive. It went without saying, but the lawyers knew they had to go along with the District Attorney’s office when it counted. When it was important for the public image of the District Attorney, for example.

  Harold Harrison usually knew how far he could go. At thirty-six, he was grateful for his profession and often said that if he hadn’t been a lawyer he would have been doing something menial. Harrison was a mutation of New York’s tenements. His father, Louis, had been a cab driver—one of a generation of self-executing men who willingly sacrificed themselves so that their sons could have that cloak of respectability, a profession. The idea of the law was implanted urgently and early, and if he dragged his feet, Harold went along. He came to the law at night, after working cabs and cargo during the day and sleeping on the subway to Brooklyn College.

  Harrison was a barrel of a man. He seemed more comfortable working up a sweat tossing cargo than in a strangling shirt and tie. An aptitude test once showed he had a proclivity for police work. He even took the test for the FBI, but his mother was horrified at the prospect of her son carrying a gun. There was always a tinge of regret about the lost opportunity, and as an attorney Harold Harrison would still carry a pistol. In his Bayside house he maintained a bed for special detectives who needed to sleep near the station house.

  If Harrison had an abiding sympathy with policemen, he knew he had been faithful to that elastic code of ethics of those who call themselves attorneys. He would protect his client past the point where others fell away. There was substance under the glib surface. Harrison might boast about extravagant gambling trips to Vegas or the islands, but he was sensible enough to hoard a valuable coin collection like a postponed annuity. (The police and the District Attorney’s office were not displeased when the principal characters in this case later retained Harold Harrison to protect them.)

  Harrison did not require an elaborate briefing. Jerry Piering and George Martin had breakfast and lunch with Harrison on a more or less regular basis when his connection to the case was only tangential. Harrison was a man who always spoke just below a shout. And in a place like the Pastrami King—a frantic delicatessen across the street from the courthouse were judges, court attendants, lawyers, police, and defendants shouted at one another with their mouths full of spicy food—it was not uncommon for his remarks to be picked up three tables away. The incestuous proximity produced an atmosphere thick with drifting pieces of information. Eavesdropping secretaries would go home and spread Piering’s hunches across Queens like a virus. At first the phenomenon was misunderstood. The District Attorney’s office came to believe that someone was passing along secrets to Alice Crimmins. The mundane explanation, that high police secrets swirled together with common table gossip, was too uncomplicated to accept. Instead, authorities searched for plots, intricate connections, compromised associates. There were transfers, interoffice bugging, and threats of reprisal. Security became tighter. Later, however, when the spawning route of the rumors became clear, the District Attorney’s office found that the trickle of information worked against Alice. Security was relaxed and some rumors were deliberately leaked into luncheon conversations.

  In December 1965, however, when Harrison became Joe Rorech’s lawyer, Piering and Martin began to avoid him. In hallways of the courthouse, spotting Harrison, Martin would whisper “Cancer” and walk right by him.

  Harrison was unruffled, even flattered. It was the first time he had considered himself dangerous. He was still Piering’s and Martin’s attorney; later the question of conflict of interest would become hopelessly tangled when Joe Rorech brought Alice Crimmins to Harrison as a client. Harrison would, at one point, be representing Joe Rorech when Rorech turned against Alice Crimmins. Harrison would also be handling legal affairs for the detectives prosecuting Alice.

  But at the time Rorech came to Harrison, he was only another of Alice’s long list of boyfriends. There was nothing complicated about it, except that Rorech’s alibi was flimsy.

  “Have you got anything to hide?” asked Harrison.

  “Nothing. But they want me to take truth serum.”

  “Are you certain that you have nothing to hide?”

  “Positive.”

  “OK,” said Harrison, “let’s take the tests.”

  Harrison’s tactic was to drive straight through a challenge, daring the police to prove anything against his client. He won a wide range of concessions from the District Attorney’s office, which would give up more and more to entrap Alice Crimmins; like an addiction, the habit was bound to grow more expensive. Harrison was happy with the agreement. The District Attorney’s men agreed that nothing said under the influence of the drug would be used against Rorech. Also, Harrison would get to see the test results first and delete whatever he felt could injure his client. It was clear to Harrison that the prosecutors were not interested in Joe Rorech. They merely wanted to pick his brain, not target him as a suspect. Harrison’s obligation was to Rorech, not Alice Crimmins, and so he felt safe agreeing to the deal.

  The authorities had no intention of being bound by the agreement. Harrison could select the doctor, but they would wire the room thoroughly to record anything Rorech said.

  On December 6,1965, at a laboratory on Main Street in Bay Shore, Long Island, Joe Rorech took the first of two sodium-pentothal tests. Dr. John Murphy administered eighteen cc’s of the drug. The results of the test filled two pages.

  She went out with Mayor Wagner, Paul Screvane and hoods through Tony Grace, who is a New York contractor.

  She lived in a small apartment in Flushing. I was giving her $10-$50 a week. Tony was giving her dollars too.

  She said she didn’t have any sex with Tony, but I felt she did.

  I was having sex with her two—three times a week for nine months. I stopped seeing her because her husband threatened a custody action. I went out with Alice’s roommate Anita before Alice.

  Through it all I kept up sex with my wife. I always look for an outside girl. It flatters my ego. I realize I have to buy love. I still want to go out and have been going out with others.

  I don’t necessarily go out with women for sex. I look for excitement and enjoyment.

  Alice—I felt sympathetic for her—no compassion for her—no love affair—but sex with her was fantastic. She would blow me—so would [my] wife . . . I love my wife . . . way too much drinking—half quart of scotch a day, half home and half outside.

  At this point his narrative, more like rambling, was interrupted with a question. He was brought back to the night of July 13/14:

  I saw her two times—once she delivered shirts to me—once for cocktails. I think she liked me. She said she couldn’t care less about her children. She didn’t show them any affection but towards the end. She told me I satisfied her like no other man ever did. I loved her kids. They loved me. Maybe I like Missy a little better . . .

  He had apparently confused the question and was still going on, and so the question was driven home again.

  I phoned her that night at 10:30 or 11 p.m. or 11:30. I missed seeing her. I thought she was calmer than in months because she knew she was going to lose the kids. Her husband had so much against her.

  He was interrupted with another question.

  Did the kids get in the way of seeing her? Definitely not. I didn’t want to lose Alice.

  Alice said she had a meeting and might meet me later. I called her back at 2 a.m. from the Bourbon House—no answer. I was still dying to see her. I wanted to have sex with her. She wasn’t home—there was no answer. I went next door to another bar—Club House West on Jericho Turnpike near the new Wantagh-Oyster Bay Parkway . . .

  I feel like crying—love my wife so much. She deserves more.

  There was a little scribble of his initials after this page of the transcript.

  Eddie’s body was fou
nd five days later—badly decomposed—probably intentional. Missie was strangled, probably accidentally with a scarf. She was found the next day in woods many miles apart. She was half a mile from home. The kids had to go with somebody they knew. Eddie was about a mile in the opposite direction. Both were in underbrush in woods—but not buried in the ground.

  Papers said Alice was hysterical when the children were found. The husband works as a mechanic for TWA—good job. He was great in bed. Nobody knows why she left him and I know her better than anybody. She was very shy about undressing. She always wore her diaphragm.

  Her meeting that night had something to do with the custody. She told me but I can’t remember who.

  That ended the first session, but the police were unsatisfied. Joe Rorech, they were convinced, was holding back. They dropped vague hints about exposing his triple life. Often Rorech would attend private parties at Club 82 in the East Village of Manhattan, known for its female impersonators. One of his friends, a man who called himself Hans Crystal, dressed like a woman.

  “I don’t think you should take any more tests,” Rorech was told by Harrison, who felt his client had cooperated enough. He didn’t know of the pressure that Kelly and others were bringing to bear about Joe’s New York City life. They wanted to “turn” Rorech, make him an informer on either Alice or Eddie. In either case, they wanted Rorech as an agent. At a conference at the 107th detective squad room, without the advice of his attorney, Rorech agreed to take another sodium-pentothal test.

  “There are a couple of very puzzling aspects to your answers,” said Kelly. First, there was this business about Alice saying she was to meet another person. She might have been attempting to deflect Rorech’s advances or he could be lying. Truth serum is not infallible, so he could even be lying about the second call. Neither his cousin, Bob Rorech, nor his business partner, Dick Nevins, had been present at that attempted second call at 2:00 a.m. when he got no answer. In addition, it had seemed that Joe was showing self-pity during the first session. He claimed he didn’t care for Alice, and yet he boasted that only he satisfied her. He threw in important names. All in all, the test was inconclusive. Eleven days later Dr. Murphy injected twenty cc’s of sodium pentothal into Rorech’s left arm.