The Alice Crimmins Case

by Ken Gross

  Hentel decided to convene a grand jury. “What’ve you got?” he asked Devlin again.

  “Nothing,” said Devlin. “But maybe the sight of the grand jury will make her want to open up. Maybe it just might do the trick.”

  39

  The detectives who had attached themselves to the case with such zeal began to display a disproportionate clout. For a while they tolerated within their midst those they considered “nonbelievers”—that is, those policemen unconvinced of Alice’s guilt or complicity. But when the leaks remained unplugged, when they began to feel embattled and isolated—developing symptoms dangerously close to paranoia—they decided to enforce ideological unity. In late 1966, after the believers felt that the District Attorney’s office had betrayed them, the nonbelievers began to be cut off from the case.

  When Deputy Inspector Wolfgang Zanglein started to have second thoughts about the target of the investigation, he had to take his suspicions to Detective Phil Brady. The others—Piering, Kelly, Shields, Byrnes—were a “closed corporation.” Zanglein and Brady discussed other possible suspects. The inspector had held a secret meeting with Nick Farina, the former detective broken to patrolman because of his relationship with Alice Crimmins, and had devised a scheme to approach Alice in a totally different manner. Zanglein’s first step was to re-establish official contact with Alice. He planned to have Farina transferred to the precinct where Alice worked. There would be a chance encounter on the street, perhaps one thing would lead to another. Zanglein also wanted to approach Alice himself and try to convince her that not all the police were certain she was guilty.

  Brady set up a series of meetings. At first they were tentative “drinks” or “dinners,” at which Zanglein would be accompanied by a policewoman and Brady. It was a way of getting to know and trust each other. Alice still hoped the police would solve the case, without implicating her.

  One evening Brady invited Alice to his home. Zanglein showed up about 11:30, wearing a turtleneck sweater and carrying a bottle of Chivas Regal. It was a famous night. Three detectives in the basement were taping the entire session—which lasted until 4:00 a.m., as Alice and Wolfgang drank their way through the first bottle and sent one of the detectives scrambling home for another. All it produced for Zanglein was a massive hangover and continuing doubts about Alice’s ability to commit murder.

  Shortly afterward Zanglein was transferred. The plan to reintroduce Nick Farina and Alice Crimmins was forgotten. Brady would be taken off the case later, convinced that he and Zanglein had been removed because of their skepticism about Alice’s guilt.

  At the same time that the hard-core believers were dealing so effectively with what they regarded as traitors in their midst, they felt that they themselves were embattled. Anthony Lombardino, by now a trusted member of the inner circle, noted that the number of full-time detectives assigned to the case began to dwindle—from twelve to ten to eight to six. Jerry Piering had to work on the case on his days off and was given “shit” assignments.

  “We had some idea that a call was placed from some important people to lay off the Crimmins case,” Lombardino would recall later. He could never trace the source of it, but he was certain that major pressure was being exerted to protect Alice Crimmins.

  The grand-jury system has one great advantage—it is removed from the professional interests of police and prosecution. A Queens grand jury is composed of twenty-three men and women drawn from the community, who sit in an oak-paneled room on the fifth floor of the Kew Gardens Courthouse and listen to the proposed case presented by the police and an Assistant District Attorney. There is a presiding officer, but the grand jury can decide to ignore the strictest interpretations of the law and vote indictments on instinct or feelings. The rules of evidence before a grand jury are looser, more flexible than those in a regular courtroom. There is a certain unpredictability about grand juries, and experienced prosecutors are always apprehensive about the system. The term “runaway grand jury” usually applies to people who are moved by passion, rather than by narrow interpretations of the law. Another purpose of the grand jury in the case of Alice Crimmins was to take the heat off Nat Hentel. If he presented his strongest evidence and the grand jury failed to indict anyone, Hentel would be off the hook.

  In November 1966, against police advice, Hentel threw the problem of Alice Crimmins into the lap of the grand jury. In effect, he was saying, we haven’t been able to crack her; maybe you can.

  Piering, Shields, Kelly, and Detective Walter Anderson from the District Attorney’s staff appeared before the grand jury, presenting whatever fragments and solid nuggets of proof they possessed. Joseph Rorech testified, without seeming to add anything except a bit of mystique. On Thursday, December 1, Nat Hentel called Harold Harrison and requested that his clients Eddie and Alice Crimmins be present the next day after the lunch break.

  In the morning Eddie Devlin told Nat Hentel something that the District Attorney already knew: “There’s no case.” But Hentel had other reasons for calling Eddie and Alice Crimmins to face the grand jury. “You can’t tell what’s going to happen in there,” he said to Devlin.

  Alice and Eddie spent the morning at the office of Harrison. “You don’t say a word,” said Harrison; they were to take the Fifth Amendment.

  Under normal circumstances, a lawyer whose client is the target of an investigation will advise him/her to cooperate as little as possible. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect citizens against self-incrimination. In a textbook sense, Harrison was correct. But in the emotional climate of Queens he was terribly mistaken.

  Harrison was smiling as he escorted his clients through the empty fifth-floor corridors. Several days before, Hentel and Cerney had taken Harrison aside and offered Alice Crimmins any kind of immunity if she would tell who had helped her dispose of the children. Harrison read that as a sign of desperation by the District Attorney. When he informed Alice of the offer, she still denied any knowledge of the case, but was fetched with the idea of ending the harassment. “Who do you have a grudge against?” she asked Harrison jokingly. “I’ll name him.”

  Alice’s and Eddie’s appearances before the grand jury were brief. They refused to answer questions on the grounds that answering might tend to incriminate them. When Harrison came out into the corridor, he found that Nat Hentel had assembled a platoon of reporters and photographers to play witness to the Crimminses’ lack of cooperation.

  “As a parent myself, I am shocked by the whole thing,” said Hentel, turning into the microphones. “People in this area are still worried about the safety of their children. My feeling is that if they had cooperated we would have solved this case a lot quicker. Now we will have to subpoena more witnesses.”

  Alice’s head was buried in a Garbo-style floppy hat, her powder-blue sweater-dress hidden under a brown coat. Her husband, in a snap-brim hat and thin tie, hovered protectively around his wife, fending off interviewers. The corridor became a madhouse. Hentel, playing it for all he could get turned to Harrison. “We want their cooperation in solving this case. After all we are the People’s attorney.”

  “My interest is in these people,” cried Harrison, drawn against his will into a media contest. “I won’t do anything at their expense. My clients have been called suspects in this case.”

  Wherever they turned, radio microphones waited like an encircling army. Then Howard Cerney joined in. His voice was lower, trying to sound restrained. “The reason that we asked them to come here is because they have more information than anyone else. The mother was the last to see the children.”

  “They are here to assist us to find out who took them,” said Hentel.

  Harrison’s voice was out of control now: “Who put the telephone-taps order out for them? You did.”

  Cerney: “No we didn’t.”

  “They’ve been bugging them! They’ve been tapping them! It’s an inquisition!” shouted Harrison.

  Eddie
Devlin joined in with the question that was implicit in the whole drama, but that had so far been unspoken: “Aren’t they interested in finding out who committed the crime?”

  It was a simple question, free of the complexities of the past seventeen months, striking the precise nerve of the case.

  “They’re interested in being left alone,” replied Harrison lamely.

  Harrison led them out of the building. “We helped them already,” said Eddie, sounding a little too apologetic. “We want to know how come they haven’t found the killers of our children.”

  The grand jury would expire without returning indictments. But Devlin’s single question—“Aren’t they interested in finding out who committed the crime?”—would haunt the headlines, capture the evening television news, and stick tenaciously in the minds of people who lived in the borough of Queens.

  40

  Thomas Mackell looked older than his fifty-three years, his body swollen from eating his way through all his political campaigns. But when he took office as District Attorney in January 1967, it was with sincere gusto. He was like a man enjoying a Fourth of July picnic, winning every event from the one-legged potato race to the beer-drinking contest. When he laughed, it was with pure, untroubled glee.

  Tommy Mackell was a Queens success story, and his pleasure seemed unmarred. His parents were immigrants from Ireland; he was graduated from All Hallows High School on the day his father died. The coincidence lent a tragic coda to his saga, an oral history that would unspool for his cronies over drinks in the aftermath of a long day. Mackell studied at City College at night, while working during the day as a relay tester for Consolidated Edison. The juxtaposition was important for him. His college degree was complemented by an authentic test of hand. Before receiving his law degree from St. John’s University School of Law in 1942, he worked in the subways. That same year he joined the Police Department, where he served for ten years. In 1954 he was elected a State Senator, and although he became a powerful man in Albany, he never lost contact with the people of Queens—the people who still lived off the punched Con Edison checks. And he never forgot that he was a blue-collar child.

  The election of Mackell was only to fill the unexpired term of Frank O’Connor. In November he would have to run again for a full four-year term. And so he came in on the gallop, facing the same dilemma as Nat Hentel—a looming election. Of course Mackell had all the advantages. The police were ready to cooperate with the former cop. And he brought with him a specialist—an imported gun hired from the staff of Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan. James Mosley and Tommy Mackell were as different as the Manhattan and Queens District Attorneys’ offices. While Mosley seemed quiet and understated things, Mackell had a Texas-size imagination. Where Mosley was reserved, Mackell had a talent for instant intimacy. At first the combination seemed promising. Mackell might swoop over the landscape, blurring fine details, while Mosley plodded behind, worrying over every point. At the age of thirty-eight, James Mosley had an unbroken record of fifteen homicide convictions in Manhattan. Of course, an indictment in a major case in Manhattan—until recent political trials—usually meant a conviction. It was common knowledge that Manhattan prosecutors didn’t go into court unless they had defense-proof cases. In point of fact, the conviction rate was better than ninety percent. Manhattan never overindicted.

  But James Mosley was coming to Queens—a place where rumors were treated like Balkan curses; where one could never be certain whether the whispered conferences at lunch were political plots. And there was an undercurrent of resentment at the superior implications of Mosley’s appointment. It was all very different for Mosley, trained in the sterile law laboratories of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, where points of law were recited and mulled over with Protestant detachment.

  Mosley, a tall, droopy, professional man, seemed miscast in the frantic new environment. He had a tendency to treat people with exaggerated formality—this among people perpetually hoarse from screaming at each other. Mosley’s questioning technique was calm and polite. He would call a man “Mister” until the moment a jury pronounced him guilty of something. The subdued presence was a handicap. Some people saw each tentative stammer as a statement of superiority. Instead of uncertainty, they saw vanity. In the hectic Pastrami King, where members of the staff snatched quick sandwiches washed down with Doctor Brown’s soda, Mosley stuck out like a motionless stone. He couldn’t seem to master the technique for holding the bulging sandwiches together—and some of the investigators concluded that such a man could not handle the mysteries of Alice Crimmins.

  Mosley was brought to Queens to crack the murder of the Crimmins children. Tom Mackell hoped that the sophisticated Manhattan perspective would reveal some elusive avenue for prosecution. But when Mosley examined the information, he found a vast, formless mess. He was accustomed to the fastidious logic of Manhattan trials. If there was a case against Alice Crimmins, it was still developing, and so Mosley was thrown into the trial of a mobster. It was a rude introduction to the frontier style of Queens courtrooms. Mosley bungled the trial badly. He seemed nervous in the courtroom and was never able to muster the drive necessary for conviction. His style was dry, compared to the flourishes of the local talent. The defeat was a huge disappointment, but Mackell was willing to write it off as opening jitters.

  Mackell’s victory did not result in wholesale firings of Republican holdovers, and Anthony Lombardino was building up a reputation as a “son-of-a-bitch” inside a courtroom. Assigned to the felony trial part in the District Attorney’s office, he compiled an impressive winning streak. The word was passed in the men’s detention pens and over coffee in the police precincts—where gossip often overlapped—that this new man, Lombardino, was one tough hombre.

  Lombardino would never settle for obscurity. He carried himself like a star, strutting around the courthouse, boasting about his latest conviction. “Tough Tony” was bound to be noticed. One day when Lombardino turned from the bench to face the audience with an overdrawn dramatic gesture he noticed Detective John Kelly in the second row of the courtroom. The next day Detective Bill Corbett sat in the second row. When Lombardino moved to another courtroom for another case, Detective Jerry Piering sat in the audience. By now Lombardino understood that he was being scouted like a talented high-school pitcher. He had gone to some lengths to be noticed, and he was pleased that the Crimmins team had picked up the signals. When John Kelly asked him to lunch, Lombardino coyly played out the seduction. Kelly picked an obscure table at Luigi’s, a place where serious business could be discussed safely. Lombardino found himself sandwiched between Kelly and Jerry Piering.

  “How would you like to be the Alice Crimmins prosecutor?” asked Kelly.

  “It seems like a closed corporation,” replied Lombardino.

  Kelly smiled. Piering spoke, bending over the table. Jim Mosley was a muddled failure, said Piering. It would have to be someone who would not be afraid to attack Alice Crimmins in a courtroom. It would have to be someone who would not be afraid of mercilessly shredding away Alice’s dignity, someone who would viciously assault her character.

  “We want a successful prosecution,” said John Kelly.

  “Well,” said Lombardino, a forkful of pasta poised under his lips, “I’m your man.”

  No one told Mosley about the luncheon meeting in Luigi’s. He was left alone to continue the technical work of assembling a case. Lombardino was brought into the investigation under the oblique guidance of the detectives. He began attending the weekly briefings at the 102nd Precinct. Kelly or Piering or Corbett would escort Lombardino into the squad room and introduce him around, and soon the presence of the squat prosecutor was taken for granted. Later the detectives would be able to promote Lombardino’s inclusion in the prosecution team by claiming that he was familiar with all the details of the case.

  At the end of each briefing session, the men would cast paper ballots on whether or not to indict Alice Crimmin
s for murder. “No one wanted to go in with a loser,” said Lombardino later.

  The hinge upon which the case turned was Joe Rorech. “We knew that unless we got Joe Rorech to crack, it would be thrown out,” Lombardino would say.

  Mosley had been handling Rorech, and the police investigators agreed that he was doing it all wrong. When Rorech appeared for questioning, Mosley would offer him a seat. He would speak softly. “Rorech knew he could take Mosley,” Lombardino would recall.

  But Piering and Kelly would take Rorech aside and warn him about “Tough Tony.” “Oh, you don’t want to meet Lombardino; he’s a son-of-a-bitch,” Kelly told Rorech.

  By the time Lombardino was ready to meet Joe Rorech, he had been accepted as Mosley’s partner. Tom Mackell had agreed to Lombardino as the cruel half of the classic Mutt-and-Jeff routine (a questioning tactic in which one person acts tough while the other befriends the subject). Lombardino was convinced that Rorech was terrified of the encounter. The contractor was dragged into Lombardino’s office by detectives. Lombardino stalked heavily around the room, then burst into a sudden rage: “I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit. I’ll put your ass in there [jail] with her [Alice].” Rorech continued to dribble out information selectively, but his aplomb had been breached. He was genuinely afraid of Lombardino, who was theatrically playing a madman.

  If Lombardino played one role with Joe Rorech, he played quite another with Milton Helpern. He rinsed the Brooklyn accent out of his speech and appealed to the doctor’s emotion through intellect. The campaign to get Dr. Helpern on the prosecution side was relentless. “We had a constant string of meetings with Helpern,” Lombardino recalled, “to bolster him.”

  Lombardino was nervous about Helpern. He was never certain how well the doctor would hold up as a witness. Finally, after one long session, Dr. Helpern agreed. “OK, OK,” he said. “I’ll put my entire background on the line that this child couldn’t have been alive when she [Alice] said she had taken him to the bathroom.”