The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  “I could never prove that.”

  “But you believe it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he do it?”

  “I was never sure. But you have to understand something. Lawton was a golden boy at the precinct—on the force—even back then. He’d already made a big name for himself by making a lot of drug and gang arrests on the street. He was an up-and-comer in the department, everyone knew that. Maybe we didn’t know he would rise as high as he has—practically the next police ­commissioner—but everyone knew back then that Lawton had a big ­future. My guess—and it’s only speculation—is that something about the Reyes case scared him. Something that might have messed up that bright future. And when I started asking too many questions about Reyes, he pretty much destroyed my career so that no one would ever listen to anything I said. I was damaged goods after that. I had no more credibility.”

  Just like me, I thought. Seemed to happen a lot to people who got in the way of Brad Lawton.

  “There were a couple of other things that happened I didn’t understand,” Nowak said. “First, Lawton and Garcetti, they weren’t really together at the crime scene. Not at first. Lawton showed up by himself. Garcetti didn’t get there until just before I left.”

  “Don’t homicide detectives usually work in pairs?”

  “That’s what I thought. But they weren’t that night. It was Lawton on his own until Garcetti finally made an appearance. I know the official police record doesn’t show it that way—I went back and read the records later—but that’s the way it was.”

  “Like Lawton was around nearby and could show up quickly, and Garcetti wasn’t?”

  Nowak shrugged.

  “It didn’t mean much to me at the time. But later, when things began to fall apart, I started thinking about it and wondering what was going on with the two of them that night. I asked them at one point, I think, why they showed up separately, but never got an answer. A rookie cop’s not supposed to ask questions like that. I guess I never knew my place.

  “I tried to think about a possible reason that Lawton showed up earlier than Garcetti. The most obvious one was that he was close to the crime scene. But why would he have been in that neighborhood and why without his partner?”

  “You said there were two things that bothered you,” I said to Nowak. “What was the second?”

  “After I picked up Ortiz only to see him released, I was talking to the desk sergeant about it. He mentioned something about it being the second time in a couple of days that he saw that guy in the station house. I asked him what he meant. He said he’d seen him there in one of the interrogation rooms a few nights earlier. Turned out to be the same night Reyes was shot. Based on the timing he gave me, Ortiz was being held in the station house already for questioning on some other crime at the time Reyes was shot.”

  “The perfect alibi,” I said. “That means someone else must have shot Reyes.”

  “So I thought, but it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “When you told someone about it, the desk sergeant changed his story. Said Ortiz wasn’t there that night, that he’d confused him with some other suspect on some other night.”

  Nowak smiled sadly. “Better than that. He said he didn’t even remember talking to me. Everything I did, every time I tried to dig myself out of the hole I was in . . . well, it just got me in deeper. Like I said, I was damaged goods. When you’re damaged goods, no one wants to be associated with you.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Nowak looked down at the cold coffee in front of him.

  “So I put in my resignation from the force a few months later. I didn’t know what else to do. I went back to school after that and got my teacher’s certificate. Then I left New York City and started a new life as a teacher here.”

  “You look like you’ve been pretty successful at it, Gary. That your life has turned out pretty well.”

  “More or less.”

  “What’s the less?”

  “I wanted to be a cop. I wanted to be a good cop. I should have been a good cop. I still don’t understand what happened back there. And I guess in some ways I’m still a cop at heart. I don’t like to leave cases open with unanswered questions. And I don’t like to see people get away with crimes, no matter who they are. The bottom line here, Malloy, is that I want to know who shot Victor Reyes just as much as you do.”

  Chapter 45

  ON THE WAY back to the airport, I took out my cell phone and checked for messages. There had been three of them that morning while I was talking to Nowak. All from Nikki Reynolds. That surprised me. No explanation, just three successive messages asking me to get back to her. I dialed the call-back number, but it went to her voice mail. I left her my cell phone number again, said I was getting on a plane soon but would try to reach her when I landed back in New York.

  I dialed another number. A number I hadn’t called in a while.

  “Hello, Susan,” I said to my ex-wife when she picked up the phone in her office. “How’s the wedding planning going with Dennis?”

  “Dale.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to do this again.” She sighed.

  “Sorry, but this isn’t a personal call.”

  “What kind of call is it?”

  “Professional.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, you don’t have a profession anymore.”

  “Technically, no.”

  “I really don’t have time for this, Gil . . .”

  “I’m working on a story.”

  “Even though you don’t have a job.”

  “I can still do a story.”

  “You mean like freelance?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “In the late ’90s, there was a big drug theft from the evidence room of a police precinct in the South Bronx. Lots of heroin and crack and cocaine and pills and other stuff that had been seized off the street suddenly disappeared. As far as I know, none of the drugs were ever recovered or anyone charged with the theft. I just need you to check into it, see what you can find out.”

  “Why do you care about a drug theft from back then?”

  “I have a thirst for knowledge.”

  “C’mon, Gil, give me something if you really want me to help you.”

  “Okay. Here it is. I need you to find out if there’s ever been any connection made between the drug theft and someone who worked in the precinct back then. Brad Lawton.”

  “Brad Lawton? The deputy commissioner?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “The Brad Lawton who probably will be the next police commissioner.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “The Brad Lawton who’s the golden boy of the department right now.”

  “That’s the—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “What are you telling me? That Brad Lawton stole a bunch of drugs? That he’s a drug addict? Because, I gotta tell you, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

  “I don’t know. And I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I need more information. I need help. I don’t have a lot of people to turn to for help these days. Will you help me?”

  There was a long pause on the other end.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “I’ll nose around a little and see what I can find out. Tell me what you know . . .”

  Next I called Carrie Bratten at the Daily News. She picked up after the first ring. Probably hoping it was someone with a big story for her. Her mood changed as soon as she heard it was me.

  “I don’t want to talk to you ever again,” she said.


  “I’m doing fine, Carrie. Thanks for asking.”

  “Just stay away from me.”

  “Gee, I wonder if Bernstein ever said that to Woodward.”

  “Look, Malloy, you’ve screwed up your career. And you came close to screwing up my career too. I survived this only because everyone blamed you for what happened, as they should have. But the damn stench of all your mistakes and sloppiness and overall lack of integrity is on me still too. I have to do my best to make sure people forget I was ever with you if I want to get back to the top again. I’m going to do that. I have to do that. So just stay away from me.”

  “I just have one question, Carrie.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Who was your source?”

  “What source?”

  “The source in the police department who told you about the Kennedy half-dollars at the crime scenes?”

  “I’m not telling you my confidential source.”

  “Was the source Brad Lawton?”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. I knew I was right from her stunned silence.

  “He’s the one that set this all in motion, right?”

  Carrie hung up the phone. Damn, I thought as I stared at the silent cell phone, Brad Lawton just kept turning up everywhere I looked in this story.

  As soon as I was off the flight and in a cab headed to Manhattan, the phone rang. It was Nikki Reynolds. She sounded very upset.

  “You’ve got to stop,” she said to me.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop what you’re doing.”

  “You mean asking questions?”

  “Don’t even try talking to me again. I mean it. You have to stay away from me. Don’t ever show up at my apartment or try to contact me again.”

  “What’s the matter? Your boyfriend Brad Lawton is upset over that?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “I thought you two were really tight.”

  “Oh, we’re tight,” she said. “He’s in love with me. He told me so. He’s going to marry me. He told me that too. He thinks he’s going to be mayor one day, and he said I’d be the first lady of New York. I believed that too. I believed everything he told me. That’s the thing about old Brad. He’ll tell you anything to get you to do what he wants. And he always gets what he wants in the end.”

  “Was he the one who told you to take me out to lunch that day and get me excited about the book?”

  “It was supposed to be a joke. That’s what I thought, anyway. I’d told him about the crazy guy who’d sent me the manuscript claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret son. He got all excited, and he convinced me to push the idea to you. Brad could be very convincing. Back then, well . . . I’d do anything he wanted.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I know what kind of person Brad really is.”

  I heard some kind of noise in the background. Like a PA system. Someone was saying something about a doctor being summoned to a floor.

  “Where are you, Nikki?”

  “In a hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “I fell.”

  “You fell?”

  “It’s not serious. I’ve got a black eye and some bruising on the side of my face. They put in a few stitches, but they say I’ll be okay.”

  “Did Lawton do that to you?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Why did he hit you?”

  “This is the last time I will ever talk to you,” she said. “Just stay away from me. Stay away from him. For my sake. And for your sake too.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” I said. “I don’t have a career to ruin.”

  “It’s not my career I’m worried about.”

  “What else is there?”

  “I’m worried about my goddamned life!”

  “Because he hit you?”

  “Did you hear anything I just told you about Lawton? He’ll do anything to get what he wants. Anything. Everyone says how everything always seems to work out so great for him. Everything just falls into place for ol’ Brad. He’s one lucky guy. Well, what if it isn’t luck? Maybe Brad makes sure that things happen the way they do for him. Like your friend Santiago.”

  “What are you saying, Nikki?”

  “Don’t you find it just a little bit odd that Santiago got killed by a hit-and-run driver right at the same time he’s looking into the Victor Reyes case?”

  “Are you telling me that Lawton had something to do with Santiago’s death?”

  “Look, you saw what happened to Santiago. He starts digging into a case from Brad’s past, and then he winds up dead. Lucky break for Brad that your Santiago died, huh? But then, like I said, Brad Lawton always gets what he wants. One way or another. Think about it. Think about that before you make things even worse.”

  Chapter 46

  THE IDEA WAS so shocking, so mind-boggling, so preposterous on the face of it that I hung up the phone with Nikki still telling myself that it was simply the paranoid delusions of a woman who was going through some kind of nervous breakdown.

  I mean, Lawton was a deputy police commissioner. A highly decorated and awarded member of the force. He might be a dirty cop, he might be guilty of a lot of things—but there was no way he could have played a role in the death of a fellow officer. Was there?

  The minute I asked myself that question, I knew the answer.

  It depended on what Lawton stood to gain from Santiago’s death.

  On the face of it, the Santiago hit-and-run case seemed open and shut.

  After his evening duty shift ended, Santiago had been crossing the street to get to his car that was parked on the other side. Witnesses said a blue Buick—later determined to have been traveling at more than 75 mph—blew through a red light and hit him in the middle of the crosswalk. The car never stopped, just kept barreling down the street. But it was a nice spring night, and the street was crowded with people who saw the incident. At least three of them got the license plate number of the speeding car.

  The plate was registered to George Sledzec, a forty-four-year-old unemployed mechanic with a history of vehicular and alcohol violations. He was already on probation for a DUI that left a young boy seriously injured after he plowed into the kid on his bicycle outside a schoolyard. Three weeks before Santiago’s death, he’d had his license suspended for crashing his car while drunk into his neighbor’s front porch at four in the morning. So Sledzec shouldn’t even have been behind the wheel of a car the night that Santiago died.

  The cops found him passed out at a bar. When he woke up, he claimed he’d blacked out and had no idea what happened. His car, with the same license plate that had been identified by the three individual witnesses, was parked nearby. The left front headlight and the front end of the car were smashed in, where the car hit Santiago as it sped down the street. There were also blood and DNA samples found on the front end of the car that matched Santiago. There was no question that Sledzec’s car was the vehicle that struck and killed Santiago.

  Sledzec continued to claim that he couldn’t remember anything about what happened that night after he passed out.

  He also insisted he was innocent.

  But since he was already on record as admitting that he had no idea what he did or didn’t do during his blackout, no one believed for a second that he wasn’t the person who killed Santiago.

  He was charged with vehicular manslaughter, and the prosecutor threw the book at him—hitting him with the most severe count, which could send him to jail twenty-five years to life. The prosecutor also delivered a blistering attack in court, saying he wished he could have sought even more time and he hoped Sledzec never tasted freedom again. Sledzec was remanded without bail to Rikers Island until his trial, where a speedy conviction seemed a foregone
conclusion at that point.

  I met with George Sledzec in the visitors’ room at Rikers the next day. He was a balding, overweight man who looked particularly slovenly and dumpy in his prison uniform. I’ve interviewed a lot of prisoners. Some of them are threatening and potentially violent. Some are belligerent and angry. Some are scared. Almost all proclaim their innocence. But Sledzec was different. He just seemed . . . well, bewildered by where he was and what had happened to him.

  “I still don’t understand,” he told me. “I know I’ve got a drinking problem. I know I forget things when I drink. But I just can’t believe I would do something like this—something so horrible—and not remember any of it. Even me. I think about that night all the time in here, go back and try to reconstruct the events all over again. But I don’t remember anything until I was arrested.”

  “Tell me what you do remember.”

  “I spent that day looking for work. I’d been unemployed for six months. The accident with the boy on the bike, and the subsequent court action and all, cost me my last job. And, as you can probably imagine, it didn’t make looking for a new job very easy. Not when prospective employers found out I had a police record. I was depressed. I didn’t want to go home and tell my wife and my family I’d failed again. So I did what I always do when I want to feel better. I drank.”

  “At the bar where they found you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “About five or so.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Asking for another drink,” he said sadly. “That’s usually the last thing I remember before a blackout.”

  “What time was that?”

  He shrugged. “After nine maybe. Or maybe closer to ten. I’m not sure.”

  “And had you gone to this bar before?”

  “Yes, it’s been a favorite place for a while.”

  “The people there knew you?”

  “The bartender did.”

  “Why didn’t he stop serving you when he saw how drunk you were?”

  “They never do. As long as I can pay. That’s why it was my favorite bar. They never told me I’d had too much to drink.”