by Ken Gross
She wouldn’t exactly tell me who she was seeing when I first called her. She was hedging. I wanted to see her, but she was going to be busy . . . The whole thing has been a headache. It could have gone on better. I just have to do these things and she was really good. She went for me.
At 11:30, she was nice, friendly, chit-chatted. I was never in love with her. A tramp in her own way, but very lovely, just chit-chatted. She said it was very, very important.
I hope and pray to God that it’s not her. She didn’t want Eddie to go live with her husband . . . Why did she give me the brush off? I presume it was money. She never asked for it. She wouldn’t tell me why she was separated from her husband . . .
She told me to call back at 2 a.m. I expected to see her.
Another question.
What did she say at 2 a.m.? I wish I could remember—chit chat. She was at home. I don’t think she had anybody there. She does not make a habit of bringing women or men into her place . . .
No, no—she wasn’t home at 2 a.m.—was 11:30 call.
I’m sorry I got involved with her. She positively told me who she was going to meet that night. I think it’s Eddie, her ex-husband. I think she was going to meet Eddie. She told me to call about 2 a.m. but that it would be too late to go out . . .
I went home about 4:30 from Holiday Inn motel in Plainview.
I don’t know why she wanted to meet her husband. She hated him. He had been putting pressure on her recently. He constantly threatened to take the children away from her. She feared the children would become like her husband. . . . I never met him. No, I’m sorry, I did meet him when I was going out with Anita before Alice. It took eight months to switch from Anita to Alice. Anita was mad and wanted to kill us both.
Gloria [Rorech’s wife] is wonderful—has them all beat except Ginger [another girlfriend]. Why do I have to go out?
I tried to destroy myself financially a long time—it could have been self-punishment. I let my business go to pot because of women.
I became Catholic just before marriage in 1949 to make her happy. You should meet Gloria. They don’t come any better. You’d love her.
I called Anita a few days ago at her office. I’d have a drink with her. I get lonely. She chit-chatted with me. We’re going to meet next week. I have to call her again. She’s exceptionally good-looking. . . .
She’s a secretary. She was very friendly with Alice. Alice wanted to take off on her own. Alice didn’t hear from her for a year. Maybe I think Alice called her to cover me up because of the custody business. Alice didn’t want Tony Grace to know about me. She was going out with Tony. I didn’t want to think she was going to bed with Tony. She covered herself good.
He initialed the last page of the transcript. What were the police to make of this weepy, contradictory statement? The glimpses into his heart were carefully hedged and protected against exposure by self-serving rationale. She didn’t sleep with Grace, he would rather believe. And even if she did, it was only because he paid her more. Anyway, Rorech didn’t love her. He loved Gloria.
The police found it very difficult to accept anything he said. At one point he claimed she was there for the 2 a.m. phone call. Then he denied it. But he finally gave details.
If Rorech’s defenses had been lowered by the sodium pentothal, it was clear that some of them could not be reached by drugs. As a witness, Kelly and Brady decided, Rorech was unreliable. But that did not mean they couldn’t make use of him.
Was Rorech willing to turn double agent? He had very little choice. He needed to buy time. The bills were starting to come in—$357.25 from Lord & Taylor, unpaid; a $1431.89 judgment for Texaco, Inc.; a $15,001 judgment for Mutual Associates. There would be other judgments in Nassau and Suffolk courts for unpaid bills—$412.60 from the Long Island Pool Co., Inc.; a $13,147.59 judgment for the Franklin National Bank; $938.25 for American Express Co. The Huntington Savings and Loan Association would win a judgment against Rorech and his wife of $30,000, foreclosing the mortgage on his Dix Hills home. The judgments would total $56,748.51. The world of Joseph Rorech was crumbling like a stale cake.
36
Alice Crimmins was being isolated. One by one, the people close to her were being transformed into police agents. They would agree, under relentless pressure, to allow their homes, their telephones, and sometimes their persons to be wired for sound. It was all done on the premise that the detectives were only trying to solve the murders of two innocent children. The target of all of this attention was Alice Crimmins. No one had to be told—not even her mother, Mrs. Burke, who allowed Phil Brady to install a microphone in her telephone. (This device never worked satisfactorily. The only usable transcriptions the police were ever able to obtain were conversations between Alice’s mother and the dog Brandy inside the apartment.)
Joe Rorech had effectively been “turned” and would take Alice to motel rooms where recorders had been planted to trap her into some kind of admission. know was that even as he acted as a double agent, others were taping his conversations. The people he met socially and in business were often wired for sound and would lead him in strange verbal dances. While he checked on Alice, he was being covered. There was no way for those involved to know where the circle began or ended. Margie Fischer would check on Grace, who checked on Alice. Detective Phil Brady was wired when he spoke to Margie Fischer. Jerry Piering recorded the briefing sessions with Phil Brady. The only person in the case not actively engaged in police spying was Alice Crimmins. She was not ignorant of it. Early on, in the midst of a conversation with Joe Rorech, she found strange wires poking out of her mother’s telephone. And so her talk began to take on a kind of indirection. Gradually, she accepted a third presence whenever she spoke.
In such a world, it was not odd that nothing said could be absolutely trusted. Who could tell what was a coded reference to something else? Who could say for certain that something said to a second party was not in fact meant for a third party? Words were judged for prosecution purposes alone. Every sentence took on multiple layers of meaning. In the winter of 1966, during a telephone conversation with Rorech, Alice talked about her exhaustion, but said hopefully that the case appeared to be near solution:
RORECH: I don’t believe it.
CRIMMINS: If only they were. The only thing is they’re ready to solve it, but I’m afraid they are trying to solve it by me. I don’t like that.
RORECH: I don’t like that either.
The language is vague enough to convey several meanings, but the police singled out one meaning. Alice was eager to have the case solved, but she was afraid she was the target of the solution.
If there was one sorry hinge in this encirclement, it was the conscription of Anthony Grace. Alice trusted him more than any of the others. She trusted her brother, John Burke, but she knew that he was cooperating with the police. However, she didn’t think her brother would provide them with material of any value. But Tony Grace had become more than a lover—he was a substitute father. She had confided in the Bronx contractor as she had in no one else.
Detective Brady wanted to warn Alice that Tony Grace wasn’t the friend she thought he was. One cold night he sat alone at the listening post in Whitestone Hospital. He had just ended a telephone conversation with Grace. In a kind of man-to-man fashion, Grace had delivered heretofore unuttered confidences. Alice was merely a proficient tart, he told Brady, but nothing more. Her hopes of eventual marriage, he said, were idiotic. He had no intention of getting married again, especially not to someone like Alice Crimmins.
Brady brooded over the conversation. He thought of Alice, exposed on a battlefield surrounded by snipers. In Alice’s apartment the listening devices picked up noises, movement, but no conversation. Assuming that Eddie wasn’t home, he started across the street. In his pocket was the tape of Grace dismissing the relationship with Alice. When Brady knocked on the door, Eddie answered. Brady, who had expected Alice
, was shocked. He fumbled for a moment and made up an excuse for the visit. They had a drink together until Alice got home and then Brady left. He couldn’t very well play Tony’s tape with Eddie present. So the warning he had intended to deliver was filed somewhere in the back of his mind.
At the beginning of the investigation Anthony Grace had intended to keep as much distance between himself and Alice Crimmins as possible. His first real interrogation was held in the privacy of the detective command center at the 102nd Precinct on August 5, 1965. Harry Shields and Jerry Byrnes were present, but the questioning was handled with obsequious politeness by Deputy Inspector Thomas McGuire.
MCGUIRE: For the record, will you give me your pedigree?
GRACE: Yes, Anthony Grace . . . GRACE, Bronx, New York. KI 7-6321. Business telephone IN 1-3000.
MCGUIRE: I assume that’s the number you called from the boat at the time of the cruise?
GRACE: Yes. We called that a couple of times. Yes. Or that call is either one of the two.
MCGUIRE: Tony, I have already had a chance to speak with you briefly.
GRACE: Yes.
MCGUIRE: As I indicated in the talk with you and with Mike LaPenna, your attorney, we are not concerned with your activities or with the activities of anyone—we have spoken with a thousand people in connection with this investigation and I hope you understand that context. I think I explained to you before these are all police officers. . . . [At this point McGuire gently introduces the officers present and then brings Grace back to the night of the disappearance, when Alice called him at the Capri bar in the Bronx.] I want to go back over that, Tony, and make sure. I know I spoke to you before, but I would like to know how you fixed the time as 11 o’clock. Could you be wrong or is that an approximate . . . if it is . . . is that an approximation?
GRACE: No. I’d say not because we left there a little after 11:30 to go out and eat.
MCGUIRE: Where?
GRACE: We went to the Ripple’s.
Grace left, he said, with the owner, Tony Gordon, and three women known as “the bowling girls.” McGuire’s questioning proceeded with exceeding tenderness, considering that Grace had been caught lying—in his previous statements he had claimed he had never left the Capri. But he was a man of substance and standing. The names that McGuire dreaded mentioning were the names of people to whom he owed his job.
MCGUIRE: If somebody said you were in Ripple’s earlier that night who would be right? Who would be wrong? Would you be correct or would they be correct? Here is why I’m asking you and I will be very frank with you; you see our information is that you were in the area of 10:30 in the Ripple’s. Would that be wrong?
GRACE: That would be wrong. Yes. I will tell you why it would be wrong.
MCGUIRE: We have information to that effect. That’s what I’d like to hear.
GRACE: It’s got to be wrong. But here, I’ll work it backwards. I left the office around 8:30. Near 8:30.I picked up my wife. We went to dinner . . .
MCGUIRE: At the Capri?
GRACE: No. We went to the King Cole. We finished having dinner around 10 o’clock or so. I asked her if she wanted to stop off for a drink at the Capri. She said she had better not. I said OK. She said to drop her home. So I dropped her off. She asked for a paper and then I took her home. I must have got back to the Capri around quarter to eleven. I had two or three drinks there. Then they wanted to eat and we left there. So it had to be around 11:30.
There was no accusation in the questioning. It was all well-mannered—someone had made a mistake and they were only here as gentlemen to rectify time and circumstance. It was not the way they questioned Alice—at her they pointed fingers, her they called a liar. With Grace they continued talking about the trip to Ripple’s.
MCGUIRE: Well, Tony, you went there with three . . . as you indicated and as I have spoken to you, with three bowling girls. Who were they?
GRACE: I only know their first names.
MCGUIRE: You know only their first names?
GRACE: Yes.
MCGUIRE: What were their first names?
GRACE: One was . . . Let’s see now, there’s five of them in all.
MCGUIRE: This was a Tuesday night. Go ahead.
GRACE: I think one is Sylvia. One is Marie . . . that’s all I know them by.
MCGUIRE: Who drove your car?
GRACE: Sylvia drove over. She wanted to drive.
MCGUIRE: I understand you wouldn’t let her drive again, by the way.
GRACE: She’s a fast driver. As a matter of fact, going over Tony Gordon got a little bit upset and he took the wheel coming back.
MCGUIRE: Because of her driving?
GRACE: That’s right.
MCGUIRE: Are they all married?
GRACE: Yes. They’re all married.
McGuire struggled to frame his next question. He was faced with Tony Grace, sitting with his back braced, his defenses alert, his protective devices at his fingertips. McGuire moved with care.
MCGUIRE: Let me ask you something, Tony. I know you’ll be frank. I’m sure you will give us . . . You know in my first meeting with you I spoke with you and Mr. LaPenna. I have spoken with Charlie Fellini here and we are only concerned with what will furnish us the truth about the death of these two children. That’s the only thing we are concerned with, and I have explained it to you before and I am repeating myself, but I don’t mind repeating myself because it’s something I want to emphasize and I don’t mind repeating myself.
GRACE: Well, Lieutenant [here Grace reminds Deputy Inspector McGuire of their relative positions in life by instantly demoting him], as I said to you before, I’m not going to lie about it. If there is anything I can do to help you I will be glad.
MCGUIRE: That’s what I like to think, because I can’t see why any guy wouldn’t tell us the truth about two innocent children and that goes particularly for you, Tony. You had an association or a friendship—you pick the word-with Alice?
GRACE: That’s right.
MCGUIRE: Despite that. . . I don’t know whether you have a deep affection for her or that she has for you. . . . Regardless of that, in view of the circumstances now existing today with these two children dead, I still will expect the truth from you.
GRACE: That’s what I’m going to give.
MCGUIRE: I really mean it.
GRACE: Yes.
MCGUIRE: But one consideration of this as far as the police are concerned . . . we have spoken with almost a thousand people in connection with this including your own friends who were here this morning, and I have told them I expect them to be telling the truth. If this case goes . . . remains unsolved . . . if this case continues . . . this is not a threat, it is just an observation . . . we are not squeamish . . . I’m not squeamish about using any means in order to arrive at the truth. Now, I have refrained from any public exposure of witnesses in this case . . .
GRACE: Yes.
The threats were there, however, just under the surface politeness.
MCGUIRE: It is the policy that I use and everyone in this room has been using, but if the situation reaches a point where because of problems that we are constrained to put witnesses before the grand jury . . . if we do so, of course, it will be far beyond my province to safeguard their identity.
GRACE: I know.
MCGUIRE: I mean, I’d like you to know.
GRACE: I know.
It was not necessary for McGuire to spell out what he meant. Tony Grace knew he could not shield his relationship with Alice and he would have to expose those parts of his life where his dignity was invested. He was vulnerable to the kind of scandal against which there is no defense. He could salvage his power and his higher friends, but he was in for more than a dollop of shame. He seemed to sag a little in his chair as he endured McGuire’s questions about his affair with Alice Crimmins.
Yes, he had helped Alice when she was served with custody papers. She had asked for legal help and he complie
d.
GRACE: I think I called Sal LoCurto [then Deputy Sanitation Commissioner], who used to be my attorney in my construction business—not personal, but in the construction business.
MCGUIRE: Yes.
GRACE: And, actually, he couldn’t handle the case . . .
The other lawyer recommended by LoCurto was Michael LaPenna. Grace had spoken to Alice four or five times about the custody battle. McGuire wanted to know about Alice’s attitude. Had she been desperate?
GRACE: Well, she once told me that in her separation agreement that he couldn’t take the children. I naturally had not read the agreement and I am not a lawyer and I said, Rusty, I think you are wrong.
MCGUIRE: Of course she is wrong. If they could prove some way that she was an unfit mother that agreement is vitiated.
GRACE: I think it was a Friday night she called me and Sal came to the office this Friday night and we went to the doctor’s office in Whitestone for an injection. That’s the night we went to Ripple’s—Sal and myself alone and nobody else. We were there awhile and I told Sal I had spoken to Rusty and she told me that in her agreement the kids couldn’t be taken and I told her I thought she was wrong, but anyway would he mind talking to her. I called her from the Ripple’s. I think this was about two or three Saturdays before it happened and Sal spoke to her for about 20 minutes I think. I don’t know what they talked about. I wasn’t near him. I walked back to the bar. I think he told her that if she were unfit they could take the children away.