by Bill James
It is therefore my view that the American government should do whatever it can to encourage and support competition within the automobile industry. Instead, the last two times a competitor to the big car makers has arisen—DeLorean and Tucker—the government has stepped in to crush the upstart with allegations of vague or imaginary crimes. I think it’s totally backward, and I think it’s a misuse of the power of government.
Another 1980s case in which the sympathies of the public were largely with the accused was the murder of Dr. Herman Tarnower by Jean Harris. Dr. Tarnower was the author of a famous diet book, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet; Jean Harris was the headmistress of a ritzy girl’s school in Virginia. They had been lovers since 1965; Harris shot the 69-year-old Tarnower when he took up with a younger woman. A 2005 movie about the case starred Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley. Although I don’t endorse the sentiment, a lot of people felt frankly that Tarnower had it coming.
The other three cases that divide our sympathies are the “vigilante” cases—Bernard Goetz, Jody Plauché, and Kenneth McElroy. In February, 1984, a man named Jeffrey Ducet (also spelled Doucet and Doucette … I am unable to sort out the correct spelling) abducted and sexually abused a Baton Rouge eleven-year-old student in his karate class, Jody Plauché. Arrested in Anaheim on March 1, 1984, Ducet was being returned to Louisiana to face criminal charges when Plauché’s father, Leon Gary Plauché, stepped out of a phone booth and shot him in the head, in full view of rolling television cameras. Charged with manslaughter, Plauché pled no contest, but the jury refused to convict, and Plauché went free.
On December 22, 1984, Bernard Goetz shot four teenagers on a New York City subway. There had been 13,000 felony crimes reported on New York City subways in 1984; Goetz, who had been mugged and badly beaten three years earlier, was about to become 13,001. Goetz didn’t kill any of the four youths, but did cause very serious injuries.
New York City mayor Ed Koch, who had said hardly a word about any of the previous 13,000 subway felonies, was horrified. It was bad enough that citizens were regularly beaten, robbed and stabbed with screwdrivers on the New York City subways, Koch said in effect, but when citizens started to defend themselves, that was going too far.
Goetz was charged with four counts of attempted murder, and aggressively prosecuted by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Public sentiment—initially favorable to Goetz—swung gradually against him, and he was convicted of carrying an unregistered firearm. He served eight months. In 1996 he was ordered in a civil judgment to pay $43 million to one of his victims or assailants, who was permanently disabled in the incident. Goetz has been forced into poverty and bankruptcy. In 2009 a judge ruled that, despite the bankruptcy, Goetz still owed his victim the $43 million.
There is, finally, the Skidmore case. On July 10, 1981, a crowd of people surrounded Ken McElroy on a public street in a small town in Missouri, and somebody shot him. They had cause; McElroy had been terrorizing the town for years. He had been accused, among other things, of running prostitutes, burglary, theft, rustling livestock, and assault. Lots of assault; he was big on assault. He had fathered children with more than one under-aged girl. He had been indicted 22 times for various crimes, and had recently been convicted of attempted murder for shooting a 70-year-old grocery store owner.
Convicted, but he was still walking the streets until they shot him. He stayed free by a combination of intimidating witnesses and hiring skilled and aggressive lawyers. After the posse shot him nobody would tell the police anything about it, and no one was ever prosecuted for the shooting, but then, nobody was ever given a reward for it, either.
OK, I won’t defend Bernard Goetz, exactly, but I will rise to the defense of the people of Skidmore. The modern, enlightened way to think about this case is that vigilante action is terrible, all vigilante action is terrible, justice must be left to the system of justice, and any effort to take the law into your own hands pushes us backward toward anarchy, or, if you like anarchy, toward Bloody Anarchy. Nobody likes Bloody Anarchy.
This is, I would argue, a biased and primitive way to think about the issue. Yes, of course society must not be allowed to fall back into anarchy—but what do you do when the lawful authorities refuse to act? Here is a story about Ken McElroy; it comes from In Broad Daylight, by Harry MacLean (HarperCollins, 1984). A County Sheriff’s officer saw a car racing through the night on dirt roads, obviously speeding. He stopped the car to write a ticket, but as he approached the car he realized that it was McElroy. McElroy had a gun in his lap. Facing a dangerous, armed criminal without backup, the cop tiptoed back to his own car and drove away.
How does the system of justice get so messed up that something like that can happen? You may buffalo a cop in the middle of the night in a situation like that, but the next morning there are going to be 75 cops on your lawn, and you’re going to jail. McElroy had sued the police and prosecutors for harassing him, and had obtained court orders instructing the cops not to go out of their way to pick a fight with him. They didn’t know what to do anymore, and they were just letting him walk all over people.
My argument is that there is more than one way for society to fall back into Bloody Anarchy. If the police stop enforcing the law and allow a criminal or a set of criminals to abuse the public, is that not anarchy? Is that not at least a step toward anarchy? Is it not the responsibility of citizens to organize and prevent society from slipping back into anarchy?
I think it is. To assert the opposite, it seems to me, is essentially to argue that the forms and customs of the law must be given precedence over the need to protect the citizenry, even if those forms and customs have been demonstrated to be an empty suit. I think that insisting that the Skidmore incident must be condemned as vigilante action is just name-calling.
I couldn’t actually read In Broad Daylight; it gave me nightmares. In all my years of reading grisly murder stories in the moments before drifting off to sleep, there are only two books that have ever given me nightmares: that one, and The Shoemaker (Simon & Schuster, 1983). The Shoemaker, by Flora Rheta Schreiber, is a book about Joseph Kallinger, a mid-1970s cobbler-cum-serial murderer in the Philadelphia area. The Shoemaker gave me nightmares because Ms. Schreiber so successfully drew the reader into the murderer’s disturbed mind. People who write crime books often try to draw you into the mind of the murderer, but Ms. Schreiber had done such a good job of it that it gave me the creeps.
The only other thing I remember about that book—which I read twenty-five years ago and am not going to re-read just so I can write this paragraph more accurately—was that, while Mr. Kallinger was evaluated at length by several psychologists and psychiatrists who pronounced him perfectly sane while he was regularly killing people, there was one psychologist who interviewed him informally for just a few minutes and picked up the fact that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. The psychologist asked Kallinger whether he had ever been walking down the street and thought that he heard someone call his name. Kallinger vehemently denied that this had ever happened to him. In reality, of course, it happens to everybody. The psychologist realized that Kallinger over-reacted to this innocent suggestion because he was hearing voices in his head, but, knowing that hearing voices in one’s head is considered crazy, was loudly denying that he had ever done so.
XXVII
NEW JERSEY
On July 1, 1981, Louis Masgay took almost $100,000 in cash to a meeting with a business associate. Masgay failed to return.
Despite the pleas of Masgay’s family, police were inclined to believe that Masgay must have taken the money and fled with a comely companion. They believed this until his body was found in September, 1983, wrapped in several layers of garbage bags. At first concluding that he had been dead only a few hours before he was found, police re-considered when they realized that
1) He was still wearing the clothes he had been wearing when he disappeared two years earlier, and
2) His insides were frozen.
W
hoever had killed him had apparently put him in a freezer, hoping to let the trail get cold, and also to confuse the police about when the crime had occurred. If the killer(s) had gotten a little lucky, this would have succeeded, but the body was found quickly after it was dumped, so that the autopsy was performed before the carcass was fully thawed, thus exposing the ruse.
This focused attention on the business associate whom Masgay had gone to meet, Richard Kuklinski. For the next three years that attention would grow constantly more intense. As it turned out, Masgay was not the only man to disappear from the face of the earth after carrying a large amount of cash to a meeting with Kuklinski. There were at least three others of those, and then, too, other investigations had tended to lead in his direction.
Richard Kuklinski got into crime by way of Walt Disney. Working at a studio where copies of films were made, he discovered that he could turn a quick buck by making bootleg duplicates of Disney cartoons. He sold these out of the trunk of his car for a while, a few copies at a time, but then decided there was more money to be made at the other end of the spectrum. He started doing the same with pornography.
He got a loan from a loan shark to expand his business. When he missed a couple of payments, the shark sent an enforcer. The enforcer and his friends beat the crap out Kuklinski, but it wasn’t easy. The enforcer, Roy DeMeo, also noticed that Kuklinski had certain attributes which were useful in his business. Kuklinski was a great big dude, scary-looking, fearless, and naturally mean. As a matter of fact, Kuklinski by this time had already killed several people, if you can trust his later statements, not for any financial reason but just because he didn’t like them. He had killed out of anger.
DeMeo—connected to the Gambino crime family—made Kuklinski a part of his crew. Kuklinski was useless as a leg-breaker, because he was just too mean, so DeMeo started using him for heavier work. Eventually Kuklinski got his own group together, got into stealing cars off of used car lots, knocking off convenience stores, and collecting debts for the mob. He apparently became—although some sources dispute this—one of the leading hit men on the East Coast. His biggest profits, in any case, came from luring businessmen into shady deals. The businessman would buy things from Kuklinski at cut-rate prices, things like blank videotapes or pharmaceuticals. Eventually, the businessman would show up with $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 in cash, expecting to purchase a large quantity of whatever it was he had a way to retail. Kuklinski would make him disappear.
In the early eighties, after the discovery of Louis Masgay’s body, police began to close in on Kuklinski. Kuklinski attempted to seal himself off by murdering everyone who could connect him to his crimes. He murdered the men who worked for him, who had been his crew. He claims to have murdered Roy DeMeo (and if he didn’t, somebody did). He murdered Robert Prongay, another mafia hitter who had been his partner in a number of crimes. It was Prongay, apparently, who had helped him to kill Masgay, and whose idea it was to freeze the body to confuse the police. Prongay was full of those kinds of inspirations.
At the time that these murders occurred, very similar things were happening in the branch of the Gambino family with which Kuklinski was associated through DeMeo. The FBI, the IRS and other law enforcement agencies were closing in on Roy DeMeo and his criminal cadre. DeMeo’s associates started murdering one another to seal themselves off from the investigation. Similar things were also happening at the same time in the Lucchese crime family, many of whose members were also known and connected to the Gambinos. These many murders make it impossible to evaluate the veracity of Kuklinski’s later claims to have killed his associates. Kuklinski, facing life in prison, may have been trying to project as large a shadow as possible to scare people away from him.
The murders, in any case, slowed the advance of the investigation, but eventually an undercover policeman, Dominick Polifrone, was able to lure Kuklinski into an arms plot by selling him some fake cyanide, and dangling in front of him the possibility of making several hundred thousand dollars on a deal with the Irish Republican Army. Apparently intending to kill Polifrone, Kuklinski talked a little too freely about some of his past crimes. A tape recorder was running. Polifrone was the point man for a large combined force, involving state, local, and federal police, who moved in on Kuklinski after he purchased the fake cyanide.
They had enough on him to convict him of two murders, and he pled guilty to two more to get the feds to stop hassling his family. In prison, he agreed to talk to an independent filmmaker, Jim Thebaut, who hired the renowned psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz to interview him. The first documentary about Kuklinski was shown on HBO in 1991.
Kuklinski was intelligent and articulate. As a murderer, he was virtually an artist. He killed people with rifles, handguns, automobiles, fists, knives, ropes, dynamite and cyanide. He was equally creative in disposing of bodies, although of course he didn’t dispose of the body unless there was some reason to, unless he could somehow be traced to the victim. He was patient. Although he was filled with hatred and contempt for almost everybody he met, he learned to control his anger until the time was ripe, until he could profit by the commission of the crime. By his own estimate, he killed about a hundred people. While no one can confirm this number, nobody who knew him wanted to argue about it, either.
Thebaut’s first documentary, most of which is simply Kuklinski talking about his crimes, is riveting. Kuklinski was a frightening man, a thug’s thug, a murderer among murderers. His underworld associates used to refer to him as “the devil himself.” Yet on a certain level, one can’t help but identify with him, as we must identify with anyone who faces frankly what he is and can explain it in a way that makes some sense. As a child Kuklinski was beaten regularly by his father, and also by neighborhood toughs. As a teenager, he killed one of the neighborhood toughs—and, by luck, got by with the crime. This changed his relationship to the world. He began to take control of his life. He married, started a family, and, although he was abusive, he truly loved his family. He drew them around him as a shield. He provided for them.
But no one else was real to him. He made a decision, simply enough, that he would love that woman and those children—but that nobody else in the world meant anything. The people he killed, he says, were mostly just scumbags. While the law does not regard the “scumbag defense” as a justification for homicide, this does appear to be literally true: most of the people he killed were scumbags. He also killed one guy just because the kid cut him off in traffic.
The first film was called The Ice Man, which is also the title of a book about Kuklinski by Anthony Bruno. Bruno’s book is also quite good. It’s a B+ book, not a work of art but a thorough, well-organized, easy-to-read explanation of the crimes, the criminal, and the investigation which brought them to light.
Later, because Kuklinski’s interview was such riveting television, HBO went back to him and made two more documentaries in the same style. After he had been in prison a few years Kuklinski started telling stories that are obviously not true, and this undermined his credibility, which made his story less interesting. But then, all serial murderers are compulsive liars; it is just the nature of the beast.
For me, an unanswered question about Kuklinski is to what extent he was the model for Tony Soprano. James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, looks very much like Kuklinski and talks like Kuklinski; Edie Falco, who played Carmela Soprano, looks very much like Kuklinski’s wife Barbara, who was a strong woman and was interviewed for the HBO documentary. Kuklinski, like Tony Soprano, was a very large man who was physically intimidating. Soprano dresses like Kuklinski dressed, lives in the area where Kuklinski lived, and commits some crimes that are similar to Kuklinski’s crimes. Kuklinski was interviewed by a psychiatrist, with whom he had obviously established a bond; Soprano is shown in almost every episode talking to his psychiatrist. David Chase developed the Sopranos series for HBO after the Kuklinski interview had drawn very high ratings on HBO.
I don’t mean to diminish David Chase’s
genius in creating The Sopranos. I think he may have used Kuklinski as a template, but he also used Roy DeMeo, the Gambinos, the Luccheses, and other criminal gangs. There was a richness of invention that drove The Sopranos, borrowing from many sources. Kuklinski died in prison on March 5, 2006. His death was officially considered a suicide, although he was scheduled to testify against a Mafioso in an upcoming trial, and he may well have been murdered.
How many serial murderer stories can you stand? In the world of popular crime, the 1980s were the decade of the serial killer. The stories of serial murderers are repetitive and gloomy, but I will tell a few of them and then meet with my editor to decide which ones to throw out, and the ones we throw out I will throw up on the internet.
Robert Hansen was a serial murderer who operated in and around Anchorage, Alaska, from 1971 to 1983.
Hansen was born and raised in Pocahontas, Iowa, the son of a Danish immigrant who ran a small-town bakery. An indifferent student, Hansen graduated from high school in 1957, spent a little time in the Army Reserve, and hung around Pocahontas working in the bakery and getting into trouble. In 1960 he set fire to the barn which housed the local school buses.
Out of prison in a year and a half, Hansen married, took some classes in baking and cake decorating, and moved to Minnesota. A true kleptomaniac, Hansen stole thousands of things, and was arrested for theft several times between 1965 and 1967.
He and his wife moved to Alaska in 1967. They had children. Hansen was a hunter, a big-game hunter, and in Alaska his skills with a bow and bullet flourished. The Pope and Young record books list records for the largest animals of each type brought down, like the 17th-largest Hereford steer ever killed with a tire iron and stuff. Hansen came to be listed in these record books several times, and held a world record: the largest Dall sheep ever killed with a bow and arrow.