by Ken Gross
“We want to talk to you about the Crimmins case,” said one of the detectives, and the man started to tremble violently. The detectives exchanged meaningful looks, as if they had both detected an unmistakable sign of guilt.
“He’s a drunk,” whispered the doctor, noting the detectives’ heightened interest. “He’s been shaking like that for days.”
The detectives bore down on the man’s story. He had left New York two days before the disappearance. He had gone to his sister’s house in Philadelphia, then drifted on a stream of cheap wine, landing, finally, in a Detroit hospital ward.
The man’s story checked out. The sister in Philadelphia said he had been with her on July 13. She remembered reading about the disappearance and asking her brother if the location was anywhere near where he used to work. And so he was eliminated from the list of suspects.
The time for a breakthrough was past and a kind of plodding inevitability settled over the case. Veteran detectives know that if a case isn’t solved within the first few weeks, it is likely to be dismissed or forgotten. The fickle public wants fresh outrages on the front pages and the commanders are slaves to the public.
There were weekly update meetings at the 102nd detective command headquarters for Queens. But the silences became longer and more painful. Inspector Joseph (“The Clam”) Coyle, the borough commander, would sit back in his chair, chewing on his cigar, reproachfully waiting for his subordinates to announce the breakthrough.
But there was seldom anything new. They could drag out a tape on a new lover, but the men around the table had already grown tired of playing tapes. At first they had fascinated the police as if there were some mysterious clue in the fierce couplings. At the early weekly meetings, doors were guarded for security. Shades were drawn, as if the sound itself could be seen. Only those closest to the case were allowed inside the room. The tape hummed for a moment as the machine found its voice, and then there was the jangle of a telephone.
Alice’s voice was light and, as always, seductive. The man on the other end asked if she were busy and she said no, come over. Bring Chinese food, she said. What kind? asked the man. Any kind, she said, I like any kind.
They skipped over the sounds of preparation: cleaning glasses, putting away clothing, straightening pillows, setting a table, freshening her makeup. Then the man came in. She had drinks ready, in her thoughtful fashion. They had dinner, laughing a lot, refilling their glasses. Only the men crouched over the winding machines in hidden compartments seem to brood about the dead children; at least, that is what they told themselves as they listened. After dinner Alice and her date had more drinks and there was that awkward pause before someone made a move, one way or the other. “Let’s dance,” said Alice, turning on a record player.
“When she moved against you,” explained a man who had once fallen under Alice’s charms, “it was a unique experience. It was as if every surface of her body strained for some sensual interface. There was a kind of melting that took place; she dropped all her inhibitions.” It had been several years since the encounter and the man was still awed by it. “She reached down to touch me and then she was pulling me in the bedroom. The thing I remember is that there were no lights in the entire apartment. It was black. She disappeared into the bathroom and left me on the bed. I was naked when she crawled in beside me—and she was also naked.”
He was a middle-aged man and had known many women under many circumstances, but the memory of that single night still burned like a pilot light. “I can’t describe what it was like. I can say that she was an animal, but that demeans it. She was all over me. Touching. Crying. I still had possession of myself, mind you. I was thinking about the lights and the darkness. But I’m certain, I’m positive, that she didn’t have another thought in her head. She was possessed in a way that I have never seen another woman sexually.”
The sounds coming from her—the cries and whispers of passion—“Fuckmefuckme, oh, please fuckme”—rolled into perfect circles on the tape machines.
The man who went through the experience with Alice Crimmins that night he brought the Chinese food was shattered. “I guess she was a nympho,” he said, then regretted the description. “No, I can’t say that. How can I say that? But you have to appreciate, here I had just gotten through dinner with this perfectly controlled person; this person who cleaned every dish almost before it was dirty, and I was overwhelmed. I have my own normal passions. But I’ve thought about it a lot ever since—what it must have been like to reach that level. She was on an entirely different level—screaming, whispering, scratching, pleading, whimpering. It was as if the whole experience was orgasmic—a continual climax. Afterward we got dressed—again in the dark—and she pecked me on the cheek goodnight.”
At first, when Inspector Coyle asked them, “Where is your proof?” they would play him the tapes, watching his face for some sign of agreement, a raised eyebrow or at least some bawdy laugh. But Joe Coyle was called “The Clam” because his feelings and thoughts were hidden under layers of defenses. Where is your proof? he would ask with his eyes, but all they had were their suspicions and the miles of tape.
For the hard-core—Jerry Piering, Bill Corbett, Jerry Byrnes, John Kelly, and Harry Shields—the tapes were solid evidence of guilt. These men were Catholics and there was a blurring between their religious and professional dogmas. All cases are susceptible to solution; if they didn’t crack the Crimmins case, it was a failure in understanding the testament of their work. What they had to do was seek some sign of guilt; and Alice Crimmins provided that, but in the religious sense. They would play the tapes and hear the guilt and eventually became confused about precisely which guilt they were accusing her of.
And Alice did not help herself. When John Kelly asked her out for a drink, she went, impervious, tauntingly indifferent to his intentions.
By late summer Joe Rorech was urging Alice to get a lawyer, since the police surveillance was intense and hostile and she was obviously the target of the investigation. Rorech suggested that she hire his own attorney, Harold Harrison, since they were on the same side and it would save money and duplication.
So on September 27, 1966, Alice Crimmins walked into Harold Harrison’s office at 89-02 Sutphin Boulevard, across the street from a complex of civil and surrogate’s courts. It was a cool day and Alice had on a sober hat and a pink coat, adding an extra glow to her strawberry hair. And when she entered the sober law offices, she created that special murmur that comes to scandalous women. Harold Harrison was at the door to meet her. He held her chair. He lit her cigarettes. Did she want something to drink? They sat in the office of his partner, Martin Baron, a guarded man who could not resist Alice’s spell—she was wearing a tight dress with the incongruity of a little-girl collar, and that face! It was a face that sucked a room of attention.
She carried herself with the pride of someone unapproachable, someone enduring an unspeakable wrong. Harrison asked her a few preliminary questions, until he realized that he was on trial. Under her half-lidded gaze Alice was making her judgments. She knew many men like Harold Harrison; perhaps too many . . . men living on the lip of success in white-on-white shirts, men who threw nothing less than a twenty-dollar bill on a bar . . . men who would extend themselves to impress her. She could manipulate such men, charm them into granting her wishes. She preferred this kind of relationship, now that she had found herself abandoned by men of larger ambition. She would choose men she could control rather than the fickle men of convenient loyalties.
Alice Crimmins answered Harold Harrison’s questions, asserted her innocence, and made clear that there were aspects of her life that would remain closed to Harrison. She would not be badgered again. Her sex life was private, or, at least, as much of it as she could control. She closed her eyes against all the intrusions of the past year.
Alice had decided to hire an attorney because of an incident that took place on September 9.
Rorech had picked her up at the W
estbury station of the Long Island Railroad, having reserved a room at the Kings Grant Inn.
He was armed with a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of champagne, but first they stopped for a drink. At the inn, Alice disappeared into the bathroom for her ablutions. She had bathed and was in the process of shaving her legs when she saw a headline in a copy of the Long Island Press: “Thirteen Top Hoods Arrested in Queens Restaurant.” She covered herself, came out of the bathroom, and lay on the bed reading the story.
During the last desperate months of his incumbency, Nat Hentel had resorted to supercop-style prosecution to steal the thunder of the apparent front runner, Tom Mackell. The raid on La Stella Restaurant on Queens Boulevard was supposed to be an example of his fearless brand of law enforcement. To his friends in the press corps, Hentel privately confided that the raid amounted to a “little apalachin,” since he had caught thirteen mob figures having dinner together. The story never reached Hentel’s expectations, but it did fascinate Alice Crimmins as she sat on the bed of the Kings Grant Inn. There was one name she had heard before that bothered her, a name that had come to her through Tony Grace, Rorech would later testify.
When Rorech got home that night—or, more precisely, in the early morning hours of September 10—he called Detective Phil Brady.
He told Brady everything that had happened . . . how he had attempted to comfort her and how Alice had said that the children were “better off where they are; you’d understand if you were Catholic.” Brady stayed on the telephone with Rorech for two hours. He hammered at the story. Had Alice said anything really incriminating? No—she had just read a name in a newspaper that had triggered memories of the children.
Brady persisted: Damn it, Joe, if there is anything you’re holding back . . .
Rorech swore he was holding nothing back. The only thing that had happened at the motel was that Alice had become upset by the newspaper story, and then sad over her children. She had never made any incriminating statements.
“I recall the conversation and my questions to a great extent,” Phil Brady would say after he retired from the police force, “and I asked if she had said anything as to how the children died. He said no, she hadn’t. I emphatically asked if she had implicated herself in any way on several occasions, and he said she had not.”
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The Alice Crimmins case had by now spawned Byzantine suspicions in the Queens criminal-justice system. The police didn’t trust the District Attorney because they were convinced that Nat Hentel was out for a quick kill merely to get himself elected, and didn’t have a real stomach for the case. The District Attorney’s staff did not trust the police because it suspected that information was being held back by them; the Hentel loyalists believed that the police wanted Tom Mackell—a former cop—to get credit for cracking the case.
All of this was compounded by an intricate network of subplots within both staffs and outside. Inside the Police Department there were detectives who believed Alice Crimmins was the key to the solution. Anyone who questioned that point of view was cut off from the inner councils. Neither side trusted the informants, and when people were wired and the tapes malfunctioned, it was always regarded as deliberate.
There were jealousies and divisions within the District Attorney’s office as well. One prosecutor who wanted the case sought out the hard-core detectives. “If I were prosecuting Alice Crimmins, I’d have her behind bars in a hurry,” boasted young Anthony Lombardino. Lombardino was being indoctrinated into the fine points of prosecution by Eddie Devlin, a sixty-year-old attorney who had worked as a prosecutor for more than a dozen years.
Nat Hentel was dissatisfied with the progress of the case. If he could say something concrete about it to the press before election day, his chances might be enhanced. Hentel told his chief assistant, Howard Cerney, to find out what the hell was going on out in the field.
One morning in July, Cerney visited Devlin’s second-floor office in the Queens Criminal Courts Building. Devlin had just completed the three-month trial of a murder case and was clearing up a few motions. He smiled at Cerney as a man might before packing up for a vacation. Devlin didn’t have much intention of coming back. He knew that Tommy Mackell would be the next Queens District Attorney, and although he was a lifelong clubhouse Democrat, Devlin wouldn’t work for him. Mackell had publicly announced that his assistants would not be able to hold outside jobs, and Devlin made the bulk of his income from his private law firm. Hentel had winked at Devlin’s moonlighting, but Devlin knew that under Mackell he would have to quit.
“We got a job for you, Eddie,” said Howard Cerney, and Devlin could see little Nat Hentel standing behind Cerney. “We want you to take over the Crimmins case.”
Devlin laughed as if Cerney had made a disgusting joke. Not me, he said. I’m going on vacation. Besides, I got a job—breaking in that fellow across the hall. He was pointing to the eight-by-ten office of Anthony Lombardino.
When Devlin returned from vacation in August, Hentel and Cerney told him he had to take over the Crimmins case.
Devlin hesitated. “What’ve you got on the case?” he asked Hentel.
“I have no idea,” replied Hentel.
That month Eddie Devlin reluctantly assumed the criminal-prosecution responsibilities for the Alice Crimmins case. At first glance, he might have seemed a bad choice—he was not graceful, in the sense that he spoke with a kind of Flatbush lilt; in a courtroom his mind sometimes fogged and sputtered at surprise; and he dressed with almost fanatic blandness. And yet there was something reassuring in the grandfatherly effect of his theatrical senility, and there was undeniable trustworthiness in his face, terraced by years of experience and honored by a sparse patch of gray hair.
A Queens juror would find it hard not to identify with the plainness of Eddie Devlin. If the case ever came to court, Devlin would provide a devastating counterpoint to the flourishes and legal guile of the firm of Baron and Harrison.
But before he could convince a jury, Devlin had to convince the police. The meeting was staged with conspiratorial secrecy at the 102nd Detective Command Headquarters. The cops wanted Devlin on their turf. They had ears inside the District Attorney’s office and they knew Devlin’s opinion of them.
“Sloppy,” he commented after reading the reports and going over the crime scene. “There was no effort to protect physical evidence, and the detectives focused on one suspect.”
He read through the stacks of paperwork and found nothing of prosecutorial value. Oh, it was rich in gothic detail about every aspect of Alice’s sex life. But, my God, they hadn’t even photographed the interiors properly. They had lost the blanket that Missy was found in. No one had saved the crucial piece of evidence that would have proved what Alice fed the children that night—the discarded box that had contained veal or manicotti, depending upon whom you believed. Piering even claimed to have seen a plate of leftover manicotti in the refrigerator, and that hadn’t been preserved. Devlin knew it all had started as a report of two missing children, but there was no excuse for this unprofessional carelessness. Even the fingerprinting had been botched. Technicians had dusted the window and bureau, the bed and some toys, but none of the crucial surfaces—walls and doors outside the children’s room.
So when Devlin and the detectives met in late August, their opinions of each other were mutual. Inspector McGuire was present, as were Jerry Piering and John Kelly. Devlin had come to find out what evidence the police had beyond the reports, but before he could speak, Jerry Piering stuck his finger in Devlin’s nose.
“You’re not trying to make this case a political football, are you?” said Piering, more accusing than questioning.
Devlin tried to calm the men down, but Piering kept pacing and saying that they weren’t going to allow this case to be mixed up in politics.
“What about if I talk to Rorech?” said Devlin.
“Stay away from Rorech,” said John Kelly. “He is ours. We’ve been cultivating hi
m and we don’t want anyone to spoil it.”
Devlin was in a curious dilemma. He was certain that the police were holding things back—perhaps even mystery witnesses that they would introduce later—but he was helpless against the tactic. He was given a free hand by Nat Hentel in one area: Tony Grace. Devlin brought in “the bowling girls,” trying to double check Grace’s story, that he had been occupied the night of the murder. And he talked to Tony Grace.
“Oh, the stories this guy used to tell about this dame,” Devlin would recall years later, laughing. “But he never sold her out He never said she did it or had anything to do with it.”
Devlin’s other major contributions centered on certain telephone calls. They were always muffled affairs from men trying to imply their importance. “I am the attorney for Mr. Such-and-such, a very happily married man,” the calls would invariably begin. “We would appreciate, if my client is to be questioned in connection with this Crimmins matter, a phone call to my office instead of a subpoena to his home.”
“If your client is such a happily married man, how come he was dipping Alice?” Devlin would reply mischievously.
He lost count of the number of such calls, and he began to be impressed by Alice Crimmins’ energy.
By the fall, after the “little Apalachin” bust, Nat Hentel came to Eddie Devlin again. “Have you got a case?” he asked.
“Nothing,” replied Devlin.
Hentel was desperate. Even if there were no case, he would make a public announcement that there would be some activity on it “soon.” The implication was that he was going to call a grand jury to hear evidence and possibly present indictments.
On the first Tuesday of November, Nat Hentel became a lame duck. He was trounced by about two-to-one at the polls by Tom Mackell—who was already being called “Tough Tommy.”