When Baldwin completed his testimony, Frank escorted him out of the courthouse. “It’s not over between you and me,” he said. “I’m going to get you for this.”
“Is that a threat?” Baldwin asked. “Are you theatening me?”
“It’s not a threat,” said Frank. “It’s a promise that you and I will cross paths again.”
Baldwin, it turned out, had been writing a screenplay about the murder in which he claimed to know the killer. A few months later, an article appeared in Mitchell Fink’s gossip column in the Daily News, saying Baldwin had just sold his screenplay to Ben Affleck’s production company, Live Planet.
Frank called Fink. “I just want you to know to be careful what you print about this guy. His information is, shall we say, less than reliable.” He then called Live Planet and repeated the same.
Apparently, the calls served their purpose. Nothing more was heard about Baldwin’s screenplay.
•
On the morning of January 19, 2000, Jonathan Benedict held a news conference in Bridgeport. He announced that the grand jury had found probable cause to indict Michael Skakel for Martha Moxley’s murder.
The news conference was held at the Holiday Inn across the street from the courthouse, and it was packed with reporters. Benedict began by saying the case would begin in juvenile court because Michael was fifteen years old at the time of the murder but that he would seek to have it moved to adult court. This, he said, would require a series of court hearings, which he estimated would take a year. When asked about his predecessor Browne, Benedict said only, “I think Donald struggled with the case.” It was the closest he would come to criticizing him.
Frank had had a special team of Florida cops in place to arrest Michael, who was living with Rushton in Hobe Sound, where he had retired. But Benedict said that Michael, who had learned of the grand jury’s decision, would present himself that afternoon at Greenwich police headquarters for arrest.
•
That afternoon, Michael arrived in an SUV with his criminal attorney, Michael Sherman, at Greenwich police headquarters. Frank was ready for them. Seeing the throng of reporters outside—including me—he ducked inside the police garage, two buildings from headquarters, with Greenwich Chief Peter Robbins, the rookie officer he had broken in thirty years before.
The walkway door connecting the garage to headquarters was open, and a female reporter approached him. “Frank,” I could hear her saying, “how does it feel after all these years to finally get your man?” I felt a surge of pride for him. That reporter had it right. This was his moment of triumph.
Yet Frank’s face remained expressionless. I knew that look. He merely nodded his head in acknowledgment.
Moments later, as Michael arrived with Sherman, the mob of reporters closed in. “Did you do it, Michael? Did you kill her?” they screamed.
I watched Frank hustle out of the garage to guide Michael through them. He navigated him back through the garage up a rear stairway to the second floor of headquarters, past the detective bureau into the identification office. Later, he would tell me that he took out an arrest warrant, showed it to Michael, then spoke his first words to the man he’d pursued for eleven years.
“Mike,” he said, “I have an arrest warrant, charging you with the murder of Martha Moxley. I have a copy for your lawyer. Obviously, you know you don’t have to speak to me. You have the right to remain silent.”
Sherman had primed Michael. He didn’t say a word.
Frank and I had talked of having dinner at Dominick’s in the Bronx the night Michael was arrested. But there was processing for Frank to do that would keep him busy at headquarters until midnight. Our dinner could wait. Twenty-five years had passed since Martha’s murder. Two more would pass until Michael went to trial. There would be time to celebrate.
CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE
“I’m a Kennedy. I’m Going to Get Away with Murder”
CONNECTICUT
2000–2002
The Skakels’ first mistake after Michael’s arrest was having Sherman try his case. A local lawyer and former local prosecutor, he had grown up in Greenwich and liked to tell people during the trial that he had lived near Frank.
Frank didn’t remember him. At least not then. “We may have been in school together but we never had any contact. Hell, he was on an academic track and I was on a vocational one.”
Mickey, as he liked to be called, was in his fifties when the Skakels hired him, short, dark-haired, boyishly handsome, recently divorced, and dating women half his age. He had expanded his practice to include some grade-B celebrity cases when the Skakels called with the biggest offer of his life.
Michael’s first cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr.—who would emerge as Michael’s most passionate defender—would later write that Mickey had marketed himself as media savvy. Indeed, his introduction to the case occurred not in a courtroom but a Los Angeles television studio. Four years earlier, Dorthy had appeared on the nationally syndicated Leeza show. At her urging (and on Leeza’s dime) I flew to L.A. to appear with her.
As we chatted backstage, Mickey materialized.
“Who is he?” Dorthy whispered.
“Never saw him before,” I answered. With no connection to the case, he had somehow talked his way onto the program as a “local expert.”
But Mickey proved less media-savvy than media-friendly. A few hours after presenting Michael to Greenwich police headquarters for arrest, he was dining in New York City with the cast of The Sopranos. During the trial, he and Dominick Dunne—who, perhaps even more than Mark Fuhrman, the Skakels regarded as their personal enemy—appeared on CNN in New York, then arrived together at the Norwalk courthouse in a cab.
The day after the verdict, Mickey attended a Court TV party for Dominick. When Bobby Kennedy Jr. questioned the propriety, Mickey answered, “We’re friends. What can I say? I’m a kiss-ass.”
Six months before the trial began, Mickey spoke to a lawyer’s group in Las Vegas. In his presentation, entitled “High-Profile Cases” —which was recorded on an hour-long CD and sold by the Nevada Bar Association—he acknowledged that he had forgotten the cardinal rule for trial attorneys: “This case isn’t about you. It’s about your client.”
He then described to the group how he had traded an interview about the Skakel case with now-defunct Talk magazine for a ticket to the Academy Awards and “all the cool parties.” Talk’s editor, Tina Brown, had called him, seeking an interview on his courtroom tactics. When Mickey resisted, she “started having me invited to all the ‘A’ parties in New York.”
Finally, she agreed to interview him “anywhere you want.” Mickey suggested the Academy Awards in Hollywood. “I said it as a joke and wound up doing it,” he told the bar group. “Horrible, horrible,” he said, as though that absolved him.
Watching Mickey in the courtroom, I sensed something in his manner that seemed all wrong. His glib and jaunty charm appeared to mock the solemnity of the proceedings. Murder is, after all, a serious business.
Later, he seemed careless, almost carefree, in his jury selection. There were six men, six women, and four alternates. Most were professionals, virtually all of them college graduates, some with advanced degrees. One of them he allowed to be seated was a cop; another was a friend of a friend of Dorthy. Cops are regarded as sympathetic to the prosecution. A friend of a friend of the victim’s mother speaks for itself.
In trying the Skakel case, Mickey believed he had a lock. No physical evidence. No eyewitnesses. Twenty-seven years had passed. Many, if not most, of the prosecution’s witnesses were suspect because of their pasts. In short, Mickey saw Michael Skakel as his ticket to stardom.
Frank, who had come to respect Sherman as a prosecutor, said I was being too harsh. He viewed Mickey merely as a grandstander, like all criminal lawyers. Frank saw Mickey’s allowing a cop on the jury as mere flamboyance, Mickey’s way of placing himself apart from everyone else and getting on TV
After the trial, I aske
d Mickey about his courtroom strategy. “Classically,” he said, “criminal defense attorneys don’t ask their clients whether they did it. But I asked Michael. He always denied knowledge. I asked him about his admissions; about his blackouts; about the meeting at Elan with Sheridan and Father Connolly; about Sheridan’s memo in the Sutton report that he and Tommy might have conspired to move Martha’s body, about Julie’s statement that she was scared to death of him. Michael always denied everything. The only time he made admissions, he said, was when he was pummeled at Elan.”
I then asked Mickey how many other clients he had fallen in love with—a phrase that in the criminal business means uncritically accepting their stories.
“Only one other. Roger Ligron. He was a Vietnam veteran who shot and killed a drug dealer. He pleaded post-traumatic stress disorder. A jury found him not guilty. It was the first full-length trial on Court TV”
I got my first look at Mickey in the courtroom during a pretrial “probable cause” hearing in Stamford eighteen months after Michael’s arrest. Frank had discovered a new witness, a second eyewitness to Michael’s confession. He was a drug addict named Gregory Coleman. Like John Higgins, he had attended Elan with Michael. “I’m a Kennedy. I’m going to get away with murder,” Michael told him.
Coleman was living in Rochester when Frank found him in 1998. Coleman had seen a television program on the Moxley case and called the station.
“He was a great big teddy bear of a guy with enormous problems, but he was one of the most believable guys I ever talked to,” Frank said of him. “Your worst day is a good day for this guy. He couldn’t climb out of it. He had nothing. He had no future. He was sick, physically and probably mentally because he had this monkey on his back. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth.”
Like many kids who attended Elan, Coleman’s father had money. There was a trust fund and an executor to whom Coleman came for his expenses. The executor was aware of Coleman’s drug habit and insisted that Coleman appear before him in person each time to collect his money. That, said Frank, was probably what had kept him alive.
But at the pretrial hearing in Stamford, a problem developed. On the witness stand, Coleman began to sweat and twitch. He was getting sick. Mickey picked up on it. As Mickey questioned him, Coleman admitted that when he’d testified against Michael at the grand jury, he had been high on heroin.
Frank had put Coleman up in the Howard Johnson motel in nearby Darien off the turnpike. When the hearing ended, he had two Greenwich cops return him there and remain with him. Coleman had to testify again the next day.
Later in the afternoon, the cops called Frank at the courthouse. The guy is getting sick. He needs something. Maybe methadone. From the courthouse, Frank started calling local clinics. No place would take Coleman. He called Rochester, where Coleman had been in a program. Because of privacy concerns, they wouldn’t talk to him on the phone.
It was growing late. The clinics were closing. Frank drove over to the Howard Johnson’s. Coleman was lying in bed in his clothes. “I am dying. I have to cop,” he began shouting. “You are either going to get me drugs or I’m going back to Rochester. I can fly back, get it on the street, and I’ll be back tomorrow. Or I can cop around here. Just take me into New York City. Let me out somewhere in Harlem. I’ll go cop and I’ll be all right.”
“Gregory,” said Frank, “I can’t do that.”
Instead, Frank started driving. They drove down the turnpike toward Stamford, searching for a clinic. Desperate, Frank headed toward Greenwich Hospital. “I’ve been a cop here for twenty-seven years,” Frank told a nurse and a doctor. “I got a guy here who is sick.”
In the end, they took Coleman into a treatment room and gave him something. Instantly, Frank saw Coleman picking up. They gave Frank two pills to get Coleman through the night. The next morning he was ready to testify.
A few weeks later, Frank was driving to Bridgeport when his cell phone went off. He had been in contact with the Rochester Police Department’s narcotics squad because Coleman had approached them, seeking to make some money as an informant. He had told them of his work for Frank and they had called him. Frank didn’t tell Coleman of the call, or that he had asked the Rochester police not to use him. He didn’t want to risk anything happening to him. He needed Coleman.
“I’ve got some bad news,” a cop from Rochester said. “Greg Coleman is dead.”
It hit Frank like a thud. It hit so hard he had to pull the car over. Yes, he’d lost a key witness, although Coleman’s testimony would be read into the record at Michael’s trial.
But it was more than that. “I liked this guy,” Frank found himself saying out loud. “I really liked this guy.”
Coleman had told Frank he had a thirteen-year-old son who was starting to use pot. Coleman had warned the kid, “Look at me, do you want to end up like me?’”
What could be worse? Frank thought. Bad enough to wreck your own life. Multiply that by a hundred, a thousand times if you have to watch your child wreck his life and you feel you are responsible for it because of how you lived.
Coleman had wanted to get a trucking license, Frank remembered. “In his heart, I think he really wanted to pull himself together, but the monkey was too strong. There was just nothing I could do for him.”
“We found him in the driveway this morning,” the Rochester cop told Frank on the phone.
“Straight OD?” Frank asked.
“We’ve been getting some hot stuff coming in,” the Rochester cop said. “Ten percent pure. He was used to the two percent kind.”
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
“Frank Garr Is the Reason We Are All Here”
NORWALK, CONNECTICUT
April–June, 2002
Michael rose from the defense table and stalked a few feet over to Frank at the wooden railing, which separated the trial’s participants from the spectators. The courtroom was emptying after the jury had just heard the testimony from Andy Pugh, a key prosecution witness.
Michael thrust his face into Frank’s. “Good coaching,” he said.
I was in the second row and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I caught the tension and heard Michael’s next two words, “Just wait.”
Was Michael threatening Frank? Was he looking to start a fight in the middle of his trial?
Frank said nothing. He made no move. Better than anyone, he knew Michael was out of control. Michael had taken every opportunity out in the hallway to brush up against Frank, to make sure his elbow struck Frank’s arm. Frank had disciplined himself never to respond or retaliate, never to get into a confrontation. He had forbidden himself the luxury of even speaking to Michael.
Now inside the courtroom, just after Michael said to Frank, “Just wait,” his bodyguard, a huge, bald black guy, and Michael’s brother Stephen, stepped in between Michael and Frank.
“The tension is getting to him,” Frank tells me later when I ask him what the hell this had been about. “Michael is probably terrified.”
Later that day, I ask Mickey Sherman about the confrontation. He shrugs. “That’s what Michael believes,” he says. “I think he hates Frank Garr. And he is entitled to his feelings. Frank Garr is the reason we are all here.”
But Mickey denies that Michael’s words imply a threat. He spins them another way. “‘Just wait,’” Mickey explains, “means, ‘Wait until we win.’”
This happens the spring of 2002 in the midst of Michael’s month-long trial in Norwalk, Connecticut. The prosecution had wanted the trial in Bridgeport, in the State Supreme Court building where its office was located. The Skakels had wanted Stamford, which was contiguous to Greenwich.
Instead they settled for Norwalk, halfway between, with its modern courthouse and cavernous first-floor courtroom that could hold the overflow crowds. The lanky, white-haired Jonathan Benedict was at the prosecution table. Next to him was Chris Morano from the chief state’s attorney’s office with his mop of black hair, and a second assistant, a pr
im appellate lawyer, Susan Gill.
Frank, in his black pinstriped suit, his ponytail cut off, and still furious at Morano for courting Fuhrman, sat a few feet apart in a wooden chair at the railing. The Skakels filled the courtroom’s far right side. But now there was a supporting cast of hundreds of spectators and reporters.
I was covering the trial for Newsday. That was vindication for me, considering they’d balked at running my stories of Tommy’s and Michael’s changed accounts. Still, resentments lingered. Before the trial, an editor called to say the paper had decided not to submit my stories for a Pulitzer prize. “You didn’t write that much on it for us,” he said. “Let the Connecticut papers put you up for it.”
Why he felt it necessary to tell me this I had no idea. I was not even aware Newsday was considering me for an award. I certainly had never promoted myself. As the editor’s call indicated, neither had anyone else at Newsday.
Dominick Dunne was covering the trial for Vanity Fair. He and I had made our peace. Convicting Martha’s killer was more important than my hurt ego. Nurturing grudges never got anyone anywhere.
One afternoon when testimony ended, I gave him a lift to the train station and mentioned I was going to my son’s baseball game. He was a junior in high school. When I’d begun this case he hadn’t been born. Now he was seventeen, and I tried to catch the last few innings of his home games.
Dominick wrote in Vanity Fair (“Triumph by Jury,” August 2002): “…Len Levitt of Newsday, who finds time to go to his son’s baseball games.” I liked that.
In another article he wrote that we had had our differences but that was all in the past. I liked that, too.
Mark Fuhrman was also in the courtroom, seated behind Dorthy and covering the trial for Court TV, having flown in from Idaho or wherever in the West he lived. Despite Dorthy’s entreaties, Frank refused to acknowledge him. Early in the trial, he had led Dorthy away from the courtroom down the stairs to a basement office the state had arranged for its witnesses, warning her that some of the testimony might be too graphic for her to listen to. Fuhrman had tagged along. But at the top of the steps Frank stopped him. “Mark,” he said, “you can’t come down here. This isn’t for you. Go back to the courtroom. You’re only a spectator.”
Conviction Page 24