by Luke Waters
Eddie Rodriguez did not adjust well to life behind bars, and by the time I retired he had not begun to cooperate with the system, making any chance of parole highly unlikely. Even if he does come to terms with his new reality, he will be in his sixties when—sometime around 2040—he walks the streets a free man again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JUSTICE DELAYED
Sometimes a cold case can be revived by a phone call, sometimes by a confession. On rare occasions it’s through a combination of both, but as I learned on one investigation the enthusiasm of the most motivated witness can cool when faced with the dysfunctional state justice system.
*
Sean O’Toole invites me to take a seat in his office and tells an intriguing story.
Two states away a woman called Catherine has just telephoned the NYPD and told the officer at the end of the line that a man whom she has been dating confessed, after their Bible study class, to a murder. According to the caller, her boyfriend, whom I’ll call Jayson Smith, told her he had shot the victim dead in revenge for killing his brother in the Bronx, back in the day. Revenge hits like this were pretty common in New York in the eighties and nineties when the city recorded about three thousand homicides a year, but Catherine, a hardworking legal aide and single mother of two, is appalled.
Our caller is originally from the South but now lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and she has details of the crime which were withheld from the media. Getting this kind of information is customary in investigations so as to weed out the usual attention-seekers and serial confessors. While Catherine’s claims spark our interest, on the face of it the alleged confessor seems an unlikely murderer.
Jayson has carved out a successful career in Wilmington in IT support with a huge international law firm that would have vetted its employees carefully.
Still we feel there is merit to the woman’s claims and I partner with Detective Billy Simeon from the 42 and travel to Delaware to interview Catherine. She impresses us both with her clarity, candor, and straightforward manner. We report back to the Bronx ADA assigned to the case, Larry Piergrossi, that he has a very credible witness regarding a homicide.
Simeon and I turn to the unsolved murder of Jayson’s brother, which Jayson has allegedly avenged. That crime took place in a different county, meaning a different jurisdiction, different detective squads, and different courts. Once we manage to cut through all the red tape, we establish that Jayson’s brother may have been killed in a dispute over a woman named Monique. We set off to interview her but within a minute of the introductions she tells us that she has hired a lawyer to whom we must now direct our questions. This is a most unusual move for a witness in a homicide dating back a decade and a half.
We try another approach, and clock up more air miles, flying across six states to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to interview another witness who was in the car the night Jayson’s brother was shot—our trip was a futile endeavor, as he could not or would not cooperate.
With only Catherine’s testimony to support our case, we and the ADA decide we should speak to Jayson in Delaware. Apart from confirming the known fact that his brother had been murdered in Manhattan back in 1992, he keeps his mouth shut. A confession is always welcome, particularly in cold cases like this, which present all kinds of technical and legal problems. Witnesses get older and forget details, others move away and leave no forwarding address, while some, by now, are deceased.
After our conversation with Jayson I get a call from the huge international law firm that employs our suspect. Their director of security is Peter Tuffey, a forty-year-old former inspector in the NYPD, where he headed the 71st Precinct. He has been told that the feds like one of his technicians for a homicide and wants to arrange a meeting to discuss the case. The relief in his voice when he realizes he is talking to a cop, and not the FBI, is palpable. It also means we can avoid a lot of paperwork even before we meet at the company’s office, in a tower of blue glass and steel which soars over the heart of Times Square.
Tuffey tells me that he is flying to Switzerland for a face-to-face meeting with the company’s CEO, whom he predicts will immediately sack our suspect, and who is understandably worried about the likely fallout from the banner headlines sure to follow.
The firm does a lot of work providing political law advice on campaign finance, conflicts of interest, and other related issues for politicians at every level, right up to presidential campaigns. Murder trials are not part of this picture. Tuffey knows that the tabloid press will have a field day covering a homicide even loosely linked to the company and the simplest way to protect the firm’s reputation is to fire Jayson.
It transpires he already has a conviction for armed robbery back in 1991, which he did not mention on his application. Our suspect has also been arrested for domestic violence involving money since moving to Delaware. That is another red flag, because any issues relating to financial irregularities leave legal firm employees open to blackmail or bribery, which can compromise clients’ cases. I am worried if our suspect loses his job he will disappear, so I ask the former cop to hold off until I can build my case.
“Look, Peter, you can’t let him go,” I plead. “Think about it. He can start a lawsuit against you, which is your problem, but it will make my life a lot harder.”
“Oh, yeah? Let him try. We’re not exactly short of attorneys, Luke,” Tuffey replies.
“Okay, but my problem is that I don’t need to start a manhunt on the guy, if he decides to go on the run. I need you to go back to your CEO and do me a favor. Give me two months to build a case and indict this guy. Why not wait to sack him when he’s convicted?”
Tuffey agrees. Following the meeting in Switzerland he calls me to say that I’ve got my eight weeks—after that the firm will tell Jayson to clear out his desk and take their chances with any future lawsuit.
Weeks pass and we exhaust all avenues and leads open to us, so it is agreed with some trepidation—as probable cause is weak—that Piergrossi will present our case to a grand jury. They come back with an indictment and when we approach Jayson for the second time in Delaware with an arrest warrant, I can see almost a sense of relief in his face. His new cooperative attitude is highly beneficial, as we do not have to fight for his extradition across state lines back to New York. Once Jayson waives his rights in that extradition process, we hand the case over to the district attorney and Jayson is arraigned before a judge in New York, who sets his bail at half a million dollars.
While this makes front-page news back in Wilmington, the journalists don’t realize that the Bronx DA may ultimately accept a soft plea bargain from our suspect, as the evidence is not so strong. Jayson, in the eighteen months he spends on remand, refuses to comment about his involvement in the killing.
“Plead guilty, Jayson, maybe you’ll get two years in prison and maybe five years’ probation,” I tell him during one of our interviews. “You’ve already done a year and a half. Another eight months and you could be out of there, a free man, able to get on with your life and start again.”
“And what if I don’t take a plea?”
“Then you roll the dice and go to trial, but don’t forget, you’re playing with your life,” I respond.
*
In Manhattan this would have been a slam-dunk case, but in the Bronx nothing was ever straightforward, and Larry Piergrossi started having second thoughts on his prosecution, and initially I agreed with his concerns.
“Detective, the more I read over this case, the more I think we might have made a mistake. Three witnesses said it was a male Hispanic who shot the victim. Jayson is black,” he mused.
This identity issue raised serious questions, so I contacted the witnesses again and they revealed that in their statements to the cops in 1992 they thought the shooter was either Hispanic or black. They couldn’t be sure. This uncertainty was good news, since it meant the detectives back then either misunderstood or were as overwhelmed with cases as we were. Some of my worrie
s over a potential miscarriage of justice had been eased, and I returned to the squad thinking that was the end of the matter. Until I got another call from Catherine. Our complainant had just seen Jayson, the man she’d said had confessed to murder, walking past her down the street.
“Why didn’t you tell me he had been released?” she demanded. “And how come he’s not in jail waiting for his trial?”
“I think you’re mistaken,” I replied, trying my best to soothe the understandably agitated woman. “There is no way Jayson has been released, believe me. Perhaps it’s someone who looks like—”
“Don’t patronize me, Detective Waters. I know what I was told, and I know who I saw,” she responded firmly.
I was straight back on the phone again to Piergrossi, who, to my amazement, confirmed the suspect’s release on a bond of just five thousand dollars, a fraction of the original bail. I was furious.
“The grand jury indicted this killer—how come you see fit to release him on such a low bond?” I demanded.
“Yes, actually I wanted to talk to you about that, Detective. You know what, I’m thinking maybe we should dismiss the case altogether. I’ve learned a little more about this witness, Catherine. There are some prior issues there which lead me to doubt her statements,” the ADA replied.
“Well, you screwed up on this one, Counselor. I hope you’re right, because if you’re not, you have a killer walking around the same town as the one woman who could put him in jail for decades,” I replied, slamming down the phone.
A month later I got a call from Piergrossi again to tell me he’d had a change of heart. Jayson was, he now believed, guilty, so we took another field trip to Wilmington, Delaware, this time to meet with a lawyer who I suspected was about to effectively kill off our entire case.
Catherine, who originally picked up the phone to ring us, was now totally disillusioned with the process, so much so that she had hired a former federal prosecutor named Dan Lyons to represent her.
Speaking on his client’s behalf, Lyons told me that it was Piergrossi whose call to our complainant convinced her that she no longer wanted to testify. Although I tried to put our case to him, I couldn’t blame his client for her change of attitude. The whole thing was now an unmitigated disaster.
“Look, your ADA rang Catherine and told her she might be putting an innocent man in jail, Detective,” Lyons explained. “That’s when my client realized that she must protect herself in this matter.”
“All I can do is apologize,” I said to the woman sitting beside me. “This was the DA’s decision. On behalf of the NYPD I want you to know that we believed what you told us, right from the start, and we still do.”
I was in a rage when I left the meeting, and my mood improved little on the flight back to New York. Larry Piergrossi was a nice guy, but without Catherine’s testimony the case was shot.
Jayson never faced trial, and the charges against him were dismissed.
The whole episode was another reminder of the screw-ups that passed for a week’s work in the DA’s office, my jaded view of the system reinforced with every passing year.
*
To most of New York, the Bronx, not Manhattan, was the Place-Where-People-Shoot-People, and the Job would do what it could to ensure that this was the narrative presented to the reader even when the facts told a different story.
On one occasion I responded to a call that a perp had just shot and killed a number of people on the Willis Avenue Bridge, 350 feet of concrete and steel which turned on a pivot to link the Bronx with First Avenue, nicknamed “the Wall” by competitors in the New York City Marathon, as it marks the make-or-break twenty-mile marker in the event which literally unites the entire city.
Our killer sprinted past astonished cyclists and pedestrians towards Spanish Harlem, with an NYPD captain, who’d witnessed the shooting, in hot pursuit.
The perp made it to the other side, racing up East 128th Street and disappearing down Harlem River Drive, while back on the bridge we called Manhattan North Homicide to let them know about their DOAs. A few minutes later word came from the Brass that our victims were killed in the Bronx, no matter what we or the map said to the contrary.
Nobody was going to notice another homicide in our borough. And none of us was to question Mayoral Infallibility. The stiffs were our problem.
Back in the South Boogie you knew the killings would keep on coming—you just didn’t reckon that the bodies could slide several hundred feet from one borough into ours. But we shouldn’t have been surprised: hit men regularly dumped bodies on us which had been killed elsewhere, knowing their victims would be less conspicuous in a long line of cases.
Within a few days another murder landed in my lap—it, too, barely made the inside pages. A couple of detectives following a lead on an unrelated investigation literally stumbled across the dead body of Thomas Jones lying on the rooftop at 1500 Popham Avenue in Morris Heights. The man had been shot to death, his pockets still stuffed with cash and his red Lamborghini parked on the street fifty feet below.
The notifications were made. Initially there was some media coverage, since the body had been missed by cops on a sweep the previous night. Tales of mix-ups, Internal Affairs investigations, and red sports cars sold papers, but nobody cared much about our victim, so just the usual two-man-strong team was assigned. I found myself partnering up with Detective Tim Donovan from the 46 as we started a canvass for witnesses, and learned little except that our victim’s death followed an alleged violent altercation linked to gambling.
A week later I found myself in the 41, pouring a cup of coffee for Detective Rene Cabazas as we discussed the details of the Jones shooting. Not Thomas Jones, you understand. No, that investigation was already consigned to a distant back burner and might never be solved. On our hot plate right now was the murder of Ollie Jones, committed four and a half miles away from Morris Heights, and as usual there was little to explain why a gunman broke into the apartment our victim shared with his wife at 1010 Longfellow Avenue.
Jones was initially wounded in the attack, so the Wheel, the central office which liaises with all Bronx detectives, sent an ECT—Evidence Collection Team—made up of plainclothes cops as opposed to the Crime Scene Unit, part of the borough’s never-ending struggle to save money. In Manhattan the CSU is dispatched as a matter of course to almost every incident, and I know that if any member of my family was seriously assaulted I would want experts on the investigation from the very start.
When Ollie Jones died of his wounds the ECT stepped aside to let the Crime Scene people take over, and I sat down and compared notes with my latest partner.
“Okay, Rene, let’s see what we have here … ‘A Ford Explorer was spotted leaving the scene after the shooting with several males inside,’ ” I said sarcastically. “Great, eh?”
“Yeah, not much, Luke. This ain’t gonna be no easy ground ball. Just gotta work it. What about mistaken identity? More I think about it, more I figure our shooter maybe mistook Jones for one of his neighbors,” my pal replied, rearranging the silk handkerchief in his top pocket before easing himself into the chair behind his desk.
Ollie Jones had no criminal history, so with no other leads we got a subpoena of his neighbor’s phone records, which quickly arrived on my desk, hopefully holding the key to unlocking the case. Whether they do is still a mystery, though, because there they remain, unopened, to this day, and will probably stay that way unless someone else is murdered and it crosses that investigation or a Cold Case team reheats the investigation.
For all our progress with new technology, a lack of manpower means that justice is delayed at best and often denied for our victims and those who mourn them. I remember being up in Homicide one afternoon and blowing the dust off one unsolved murder dating back to my first days in the city in the early eighties. I tracked down the detective, now retired, who had caught it to ask why he hadn’t done anything with the case. His answer was honest, but unnerving.
“I t
ake your word about what’s in the file, Waters. I don’t recall anything about it, to be honest. I ain’t gonna lie. And you know what? I don’t really give a crap, either.” It’s easy to be critical, but he summed up the attitude of the generation which followed him, and ours, too, after a few years on the Job.
“Priorities in Homicide” was a short list:
1. Cop shooting.
2. Dead kid.
3. Case some boss wants solved.
4. Some vic. He can wait.
Before you retire, the relentless workload takes its toll on every investigator, myself included.
If one partner was on vacation, the other had to catch every investigation for the duration of the holiday. All this would change with a media case, when, whether warranted or not, twenty detectives would suddenly and mysteriously descend to ease the duo’s workload. The system was clearly dysfunctional, but there was no appetite to change it.
A human being has only so much empathy, and after a while you had to check yourself or you simply stopped caring. We all had different ways to relieve stress when the workload got too much, and we got tired and emotional after thirty hours with little or no sleep. DT Tarsnane? He simply went insane.
“Why the hell should I even care anymore, you guys?” Pete would suddenly demand of nobody in particular, launching into a monologue which, though comical on one level, also summed up exactly how we all felt.
“Nobody cares! None of you guys care. Cops are the worst! The Job doesn’t care. And we know that our mayor don’t care! Bastards! You know what? I am tired of caring, too. To hell with all you assholes, and fuck this bag of shit!” Pete would snarl, storming out the door, returning a few minutes later to reopen the file he had just thrown in the trash can.