by Neil Gordon
Now then. It seems to be my turn to pick up the thread of this little narrative, so let me clue you in to one important thing: when, on that June day in 1996, your father and Billy Cusimano came out of their little rabbit hole, I was a busy and happy person and had no need of either of them in my productive and useful existence. Or at least, to stick a little closer to the facts—yes, yes, J, I see the irony—I was busy. General Electric was getting their ass sued for dumping a planet worth of dioxides into the Hudson, Empire-Besicort was trying to divert millions of gallons of water out of the Esopus River, and some bozo had come up with a plan to get a few Native Americans to file a federal claim and turn the Rondout Valley watershed into a casino. In 1996 there was plenty of important work in the Hudson Valley, and I didn’t know either your father or Billy Cusimano but by reputation, which was just fine with me. My time of innocence, though, was dwindling fast: by the night of June 14 I would be part of this story, and in the weeks to come I would learn more about the pair of them than I had ever wanted to. And one thing I would learn was exactly what happened as they walked out onto Billy’s lawn—as exactly, in fact, as if it had been videotaped by hidden surveillance cameras and, later, shown to me.
Which, of course, it was.
I can watch it whenever I want, right here on my computer screen, as I write to you. In the video of the lawn, brilliant spring light is angling in from a pure blue sky. Big clouds are rolling in from the north, throwing a shadow that runs from the peaks of the Blackheads, over North and South Lake, across the valley of the Katterskill and then over the plateau of Platte Clove. On Billy’s lawn they stood a couple of minutes, watching the clouds on the wind: two old-timers, too stoned to talk, almost comically various: Billy with his ponytail and massive stomach in an old T-shirt; your father slim, bald, and in a suit and tie.
James Grant, at forty-six. I can freeze the frame and zoom in, close enough to see his eyes, pupils huge with Billy’s weed, focusing on distance. It is a clean-shaven face I’m watching, still showing a few freckles, a rounded nose bent remarkably to the left, a funnily winning smile, winning enough to support the fact that his still faintly red hair had thinned to just this side of the vanishing point. Nonetheless, there was still enough of it to make it something of a surprise when you saw his eyes. The freckles, the red hair, the round face and broken nose: clearly, what you had to do with, here, was a mick. The eyes, however, were brown: a big, dark maroon that had nothing Irish in it at all, as if his mother had really been raped by a dago, as he liked to say. In a white shirt, open now to reveal the red hair of his chest, which had not thinned, he stood most of six feet, and while his body did not have much left of the nervous, infectious energy that had characterized James Grant for most of his life, it was beginning to have the slim solidity that was going to be the mark of his middle age.
After a moment, the camera followed him to his car, a Subaru Outback, not new, and after exchanging a few words that the camera didn’t pick up, your father drove away.
Billy went back into the house once your father was gone. He emerged some minutes later, accompanied by a dark-haired, middle-aged woman, angular of face and wearing a gray skirt suit. The pair climbed into the remaining car and drove away.
Next, and last, to emerge from the house were two Mexican workers, perhaps a quarter hour later, carrying mason’s tools. Presumably they had closed the Sea of Green to finish its growing cycle, and now they cleaned their mason’s tools under an outside tap, then climbed into the cab of the truck and in turn drove down the dirt road, leaving the house locked and empty until, in an hour’s time, Ruth Cusimano was to return from the Steiner school in Woodstock with her four children.
Or almost empty. Because, after a stage wait, a Greene County Telephone Company van came up the drive and parked.
As such, it was the first of several extremely serious things that were going to happen that night to Billy Cusimano, your father, and by extension, you.
2.
We now know that while your father was driving down the mountain to pick you up from Molly Sackler, who was baby-sitting you; and while Billy Cusimano was driving down the other side of the mountain toward Rosendale with his mystery guest; and while, in fact, Ruth Cusimano was picking up her children from the Steiner school in Woodstock, each and every one of them was being followed by a vehicle containing FBI agents.
We know it, of course, because I, Benjamin Schulberg, beat reporter for the Albany Times, spent the rest of that summer of 1996 writing about your father, and how I knew everything I wrote was a subject of some speculation at the time. For what I knew about those FBI agents was very precise indeed—so precise that I could only have known it if the FBI was leaking it all to me while it happened.
Which, oddly enough, they were.
And therefore, I knew that each of the cars following Billy and his friends was reporting to the Greene County Telephone Company van in Billy’s driveway, one after the other. The first, following your father, reported that “Bleeding Heart”—your father—“has passed Katterskill Falls,” the second that “Jerry”—the agents weren’t blind to the resemblance either—“is on Sixteen,” and the third that “Mrs. Garcia is in the school.” And I knew that having received these messages, three uniformed telephone workers exited the van, entered the house, and filed directly into the living room, where they began dusting for fingerprints.
In hindsight, it always struck me as kind of funny, though exactly what’s funny, in hindsight, only comes clear when you know what was ahead. If you did know, though, you’d have thought it funny that your father wasn’t being followed because they were suspicious of him. At that time, although Jim Grant had FBI files, they were only the normal ones that end up being held on folk who tend to bring suit against the government.
That the FBI was following your father tonight, however, was in fact part of an investigation of Billy Cusimano—with whom, you remember, your father insisted on starting this story. Following your father was absolutely pro forma: when a subject’s premises are being searched, and the subject is known to have a personal relationship with his lawyer, it’s only common sense to keep track of that lawyer during the operation.
And that, in fact, was the story: Billy Cusimano’s premises in Tannersville were being searched under a federal sneak-and-peek that afternoon. And when, twenty minutes later, your father had been followed all the way to Molly Sackler’s house in Saugerties, and the agents following him heard that the search of Billy’s premises was completed, they pulled out of their parking spots in a neighbor’s driveway and went back north, their job done.
If this surveillance had nothing to do with your father, however, its consequences were to come to mean a lot to him. It’s worth explaining, therefore, a little bit about what we now know to have happened behind the scenes that night, and how I learned about it.
3.
It was a Friday afternoon when your father and Billy met in his Sea of Green and, later, Billy’s house was searched. And it was in the very, very early morning of Saturday that my telephone rang at my desk in the Albany Times’s newsroom, and I answered.
Calling was a man with a reedy voice and a slightly western accent, the kind upstaters like to assume for no real reason. And what the man said to me was that Sharon Solarz, a federal fugitive of twenty-five years’ standing, sought by the FBI and U.S. marshal on charges of accessory to murder, was known to be in the region.
I listened carefully, though with some suspicion. Now, of course, I am a staff writer at World News New York and am always being used for government leaks, but in the summer of 1996 Benjamin Schulberg was not yet a household name, incredible though that might seem, and I was not at all sure why I had been chosen for this tip. I listened carefully, but all the while I listened, I was logging the name Sharon Solarz in the Times’s electronic archives. While the computer worked, I tried a question.
“What is she doing in the region?”
The voice answered readily. “We
think she came to see an old friend.”
“Called?”
“Billy Cusimano.”
That name was familiar to me, as to anyone who followed the court docket. “The dope dealer? Why?”
“You ever heard of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love?”
“Nope.”
“Well, why don’t you go find out what it is?”
That pissed me off. “Save me some time, Deep, will you?”
“Why should I?”
I answered conversationally. “Because otherwise I’ll hang up and forget whatever bullshit this may be about.”
The voice chuckled, then spoke in a singsong. “Let me put it this way. Billy Cusimano and Sharon Solarz are old friends from the Summer of Love in Mendocino. No one knows that but you, boy. Run with it, is my advice.”
On my computer screen, hits were coming in on Sharon Solarz, and I read while I kept the guy talking.
“Are you planning to identify yourself?”
“No, sir.”
“Okay.” I did not have to simulate the boredom in my voice. “Thanks for the tip.”
“Mr. Schulberg?”
“Yes?”
“Do me a favor, would you?”
“Sure. If it doesn’t take me more than the next five seconds.”
“Okay. Inform yourself as to who Sharon Solarz is, would you? Then start doing your job. Dimes to doughnuts says you’ll be printing a story about Sharon Solarz tomorrow night, and if you do it right, you’ll be out in front of a national story. With me?”
“Um-hmm.” I answered as noncommittally as I could. “That was twelve seconds.”
The conversation over, I returned to work, a back-page article about the new cement works in Athens. And only toward dawn, when the article was filed and done, and when I had stepped to the window to smoke a cigarette—the newsroom was deserted now—did I think again about the call.
On one hand, it was nearly dawn, and there was no real reason why I couldn’t go home and go to bed.
On the other hand, if I went home, there was nothing to do but go to bed. And once there, the most likely scenario had it that I would be lying in the dark feeling my heart beat out the nicotine and caffeine I had been feeding it for nearly twenty-four hours, and waiting for dawn, when I could start ingesting more caffeine, and more nicotine, and go back to work.
Until then, of course, I could while away the time thinking about the bills I hadn’t paid for months, the exercise I hadn’t gotten in years, the laundry I hadn’t washed for weeks, and other less important things. The girlfriend, for example, I hadn’t found in the year since a certain ex-colleague who had seen fit to share my bed for a time and whom I shall never name to protect her virtue—Dawn Mahoney, late of the Style Section, now resident of Sunnyvale, CA, and, I can tell you, in the phone book—decided that the love of a small-town beat reporter with a penchant for low-profile environmental stories was less important than a new job at the San Jose Mercury News.
In her defense, I should say that she only finally dumped me when I turned down a five-figure raise to cover the movie business for them, which would have allowed me to move west with her.
In fact, given the facts, an impartial observer could reasonably conclude that it was I who had in fact put work over love in that situation—a fact that would not be lost on me as I lay in the dark thinking about how much less important the bills, the laundry, the gym would seem if Dawn Mahoney’s naked body were next to mine.
Which was why, as was often the case, I shortcut the entire process by simply not stopping working. I went back to my desk, switched screens, and read more carefully through the Nexis yield I had gotten in response to my computer query about Sharon Solarz.
Then, dutifully, I flipped through my Rolodex and placed a call to the Albany FBI duty desk.
Which was the point that this stopped being business as usual.
Twenty minutes later, having been interrogated brutally as to the identity of my source, lied to, threatened, and cajoled, I had agreed with the Albany FBI to withhold my story about Sharon Solarz in return for an exclusive first publication on the manhunt that was going on that night. And the first installment of that exclusive was given to me when, twenty minutes later, in the early dawn of an upstate June, I arrived at FBI headquarters in Albany and was greeted by a black-haired man the size of a refrigerator who introduced himself as Kevin Cornelius, and proceeded to take me into the operations room while explaining the progress of the biggest manhunt New York State had undertaken since the Brinks robbery.
4.
The search papers on Billy’s premises had been served at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, acting, in turn, on behalf of the FBI. The court had been less than perfectly happy about it. For one thing, Cusimano’s case was under the state’s jurisdiction, as was his care and feeding. As a felon awaiting trial who had made a $150,000 bond and still didn’t seem to be going begging, there was enough reason to keep an active monitoring in progress, the judge saw that, but they didn’t need the federal court to authorize a sneak-and-peek for that.
What did fall under federal jurisdiction was the fact that the FBI was requesting license to search at discretion and take fingerprints on other evidence altogether: evidence that was gathered during the state’s surveillance but was immaterial to the state’s specific prosecution of Billy Cusimano on marijuana charges. In other words, the FBI wanted to investigate Billy’s house for a federal crime that had nothing to do with the state’s drug charges. The crime was harboring a federal fugitive.
This evidence was moreover very scant: a woman had arrived at Billy Cusimano’s house the night before, and left somewhat after Jim Grant’s visit. During a conversation between Cusimano and Grant, the name of Sharon Solarz had been mentioned. On those grounds, the FBI teams surveilling Cusimano and his associates requested and received from a federal judge based in Syracuse permission to take fingerprints from the house. While they did so, they in addition followed the woman, traveling in Billy’s car, to Rosendale and observed that Billy dropped her off at the summer house of a New Yorker, currently unoccupied. She had, they observed, known where to find the key.
Now, who was this woman, and why did she need to meet with a dope grower and his lawyer? This was the question Kevin Cornelius set about to answer that afternoon after your father left Billy Cusimano’s house. First, he eliminated known prints belonging to Billy, his wife, his four children, his maid, his lawyer, and his lawyer’s daughter, who was a frequent visitor. The five remaining latents he sent to West Virginia, which would in turn notify relevant field offices of any hits. Seattle, Washington, was, some hours later, the surprised beneficiary. Four were unknown. But they believed a thumb partial to be that of a resident of Port Angeles, Washington, who had been arrested and fingerprinted during the Seattle protest against the WTO. The duty officer in Seattle, in turn, called in a favor from the state police, who—a neat symmetry, I thought—used contacts in local law enforcement to identify the woman as a quite recent arrival in town, a new hire at a small Internet advertising company, who was said to have left on a car trip some days previous.
From here, it was all very simple: you want to learn about anyone in Port Angeles, go to the single café and wait for the first chilly, lonely local to come in and start to chat. By six o’clock that evening, Kevin Cornelius had a social security number, and was running it through what was known as the “array”—a series of different electronic sources that included databases as banal as Nexis and PACER Legal and extended to the Internal Revenue Service and, literally, thousands of medical records storages.
As always, the array gave out a lot of garbage: minority percentile hits, doubles, self-contradictions, errors. Thousands of databases relying on tens of thousands of input sources had been visited. Cornelius, in this as in all investigations, used more art than craft. What he noticed was not the garbage but the fact that one of the few 90-percent-or-over hits was the IRS, which reported that the social had
no other trace and was less than six months old.
That didn’t necessarily mean anything—social security numbers are not terribly reliable. But Cornelius knew that by the FBI’s own analysis, it was a datapoint that had been shown to be over 65 percent reliable in the identification of fugitives.
And therefore Cornelius was more than interested enough to start assembling a full surveillance routine on the house in Rosendale. No known fingerprints existed of Sharon Solarz. But if they could find grounds for probable cause, they could stop her and question her. This, in fact, was what they planned to do.
The record is crystal clear. Albany field office logged Seattle’s call at 6 P.M. and notified Special Agent Cornelius immediately. Surveillance on the Rosendale home, which was found to belong to a New York City labor lawyer and his psychologist wife, was quadrupled by nine. By morning parabolic listening devices had been put on the kitchen windows, and the telephone had been redirected through an FBI switchboard. The woman spent the entire day inside, talking to no one. At 5 P.M. she got in her car and drove northeast, apparently returning to Cusimano’s. When, however, she bypassed Billy’s and headed up toward 23, agents began to have doubts, and a roadblock was set up on the Catskill Thruway entrance. She stopped for an hour in Catskill, talking on pay phones, but due to her frequent changes of telephone, no reliable trace could be set up. She could, however, be digitally photographed, the image sent back to the office and computer enhanced, by means of comparison with photographs taken in the early seventies, before Sharon Solarz went underground, to remove the effects of aging. These results, Kevin Cornelius felt, were unambiguous. And therefore, when she went for the Thruway, which was of course the road to Canada, the roadblock was deployed, and at eight o’clock that evening Sharon Solarz was quietly, smoothly—and, Cornelius noted with satisfaction, in time for the Times’s deadline—arrested from twenty-five years as a federal fugitive.