Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  Evans, at one point, told the Son of Sam how much he missed seeing him. I miss visiting you, too, the Son of Sam wrote back. In the same letter, he thanked Evans for supplying him with what was an endless array of fruit cocktail, juice and other snacks.

  One note that somebody had slipped into the Son of Sam’s cell had frightened him, and he expressed to Evans that he was afraid to “go to sleep at night.” The guy had called him a “cheap cocksucker” for not having snacks in his cell to steal, then went on to say that if the Son of Sam didn’t fill his cell with doughnuts, oatmeal pies, nutty bars and chocolate, he was going to “rip” the “veins out of” his neck while he was sleeping.

  Evans was totally absorbed by the stories. He felt important that the Son of Sam was sharing it all with him.

  In his final few letters, before getting out of solitary, the Son of Sam talked about collecting mouse droppings on his cell floor. He’d shoot the “shit pellets,” he explained, using a slingshot, at people who walked by his cell. He promised to bring a bag of shit pellets with him so he could show Evans how to do it.

  You’ll be impressed, he wrote.

  The Son of Sam had sent Evans a copy of Muscle & Fitness magazine one day, but Evans sent it right back. To Evans’s sheer horror, the editors had chosen to use an African American bodybuilder in an article, which turned him off.

  I forgot, the Son of Sam wrote, how prejudiced you are.

  According to Evans, the relationship he had with the Son of Sam ended when he called him “David Berserk-o-witz” one day while they were lifting weights together. He got really pissed, Evans wrote to Horton. Then Evans came up with a rather bizarre theory regarding the Son of Sam’s pedigree. He claimed a new article he’d read said the Son of Sam was really adopted: His name at birth was…are you ready? Richard Falco, son of [Michael Falco’s parents]! I almost shit reading that!! I haven’t said anything to him because that’s personal and I don’t want him catching an attitude at me.

  Asked later about the connection between Berkowitz and the Falcos, Horton said, “I do remember [Evans] telling me that. But I didn’t take it any further. I really had no reason to at the time. It was meaningless to what I was doing with Gary. And, to be honest, it was one of those Gary statements that just seemed to be so far out there, I didn’t put much credence into it.”

  Certain people behind bars scared Evans, and he was quick to point out who they were: Baby fuckers; half-man, half freaks; guys with tits and no balls who would be glad to give you AIDS in a minute; three big, black ugly fuckers…with big tits. He was “scared one of them” would “beat the shit” out of him and “suck [his] dick!”

  Horton would later speculate after learning of a proclivity Evans had for transsexuals that this was perhaps his way of further trying to disguise who he truly was. Otherwise, why mention it at all?

  In his letters, Evans also claimed that Michael Falco was going to give him trouble when he got out of prison. Again, he was thinking ahead, subtly dropping Falco’s name to continue the facade of Falco’s being alive and well and hiding out.

  Near the end of the letter, Evans asked Horton to voice his opinions: Do you have any suggestions? Can you see any solution? You know my situation, what do you think?

  Then came the same role-reversal ploy Horton had heard from scores of hard-core criminals over the years: Your almost job of a criminal profiler sounds interesting! I wish I could’ve gone your way instead. I’d like hunting people down, surveillance, and the excitement involved, spying on shit and having access to all kinds of great stuff, and getting PAID for it! I’d shoot all the sex criminals, too, that’d be the best part.

  It was almost too much for Horton to swallow. Evans was buddying up to him more than he ever had—something Horton had never seen from a hardened criminal in his nearly ten years behind the badge. He now felt Evans was going to be hard to get rid of once he was released. There was no way to avoid it.

  Just before Christmas, 1988, merely weeks before his release, Evans had a brush with violence. He had gone into a child molester’s cell and, he claimed in a letter to Robbie, body-slammed [him] all over…. Got some good shit off.[But] also got locked in for fifteen days (very lenient).

  By Christmas, he had made a decision about what he was going to do when he got out: I think I’m going to end up renting a room in Troy while looking for work/$/apt…. Yeah, right! I can see trouble coming. Scumbag Jew parole officers are waiting for me again.

  Days before his release, he wrote one last letter. He seemed excited to be getting out. He was going on three years behind bars with this latest bid, and it was obviously wearing him down. I have a ride out of here, he wrote, not a bus like a lowlife. Then, in true Evans racist fashion, he took the opportunity to berate his parole officers at the expense of an entire race of people: The 3 I’ve dealt with were all N.Y.C. Jews—the scumrace of the world, ranked right down with niggers!

  Every day Evans spent behind bars seemed to harden him. Instead of teaching him the age-old lesson that crime didn’t pay, prison allowed him time to plan what crimes he was going to commit when he was released. Yet no one, perhaps not even Evans himself, could have foreseen the horror he was about to bestow on the people he saw as mere obstacles in his way toward a better life.

  CHAPTER 55

  The state of New York paroled Gary Evans, who was already a murderer, hell-bent on murdering again, on March 1, 1988. As Evans hit the street as a free man, Horton was digging his feet even deeper into his work at the Bureau, juggling no fewer than two hundred cases that year: murders, rapes, burglaries, drug deals and assaults—anything and everything.

  In early March, Evans called Horton at his home to let him know he was out. “Hey, Guy! What’s going on?”

  “How are things, Gar?”

  Whenever he called Horton, Evans would open the conversation by telling him stories about prison life, which generally led into a rant, whereby he ridiculed every criminal in Troy whose name he had given Horton, always ending with the question: “Have you arrested any of those fucking assholes yet?”

  He was frustrated with Horton for not going out and arresting people on every single piece of information he had given him. Although he never told Evans, Horton was fed up with a system that seemed to, at times, favor the criminal.

  “Gar, I just can’t go out and arrest people on what you tell me,” Horton told him. “I need proof. I need a case.”

  “You gotta arrest those motherfuckers, Guy. They’re bad people.”

  “So, you want that job I promised you, or not?” Horton said, changing the subject. “Forget that criminal shit. Let’s focus on your life.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have a friend at a local nursery who needs help. Lots of heavy lifting. Meet some people. Show off your muscles. It’s perfect for you.”

  “Sounds pretty good.”

  In the course of a few months leading up to his release, Evans had turned the tables on Horton. “People ask me why I got him jobs and became what some said was ‘friendly’ with him,” Horton recalled later. “Well, when he befriended me, I believed, perhaps very naively, that I could change him. I tried to talk him into a life of good things because I saw good in him. He was smart. Articulate. Well read. I wanted to help him.”

  A few days later, Horton met with Evans in the parking lot of Troop G. Evans seemed seriously interested in pursuing the nursery job. It was not only two city blocks from Horton’s home, but it was right around the corner from the motel where Evans had been living since getting out of prison.

  Evans had what Horton later called “prison muscles.” He was extremely beefy, and wasn’t afraid to show it off by wearing tank tops and tight-fitting shirts. When he walked into the nursery around mid-March, the owner saw someone who could possibly lift shrubs and small trees onto customers’ vehicles without any help.

  When it came down to it, however, Evans was never one to be bossed around by anyone; he just couldn’t stand someone telling
him what to do. On top of that, his boss at the nursery turned out to be a female, who managed the place, and not the person who had hired him, a male.

  After two weeks, he called Horton and told him that “it was way too hard. Anyway, I can’t work for a dyke,” he added. “It’s too busy a place. They push me and push me to do more.”

  “Come on, Gar. Tough it out.”

  Evans paused. Then, “I can make more money doing what I do!”

  Horton wasn’t going to give up on Evans that quick, however. So he called a good friend who managed a local depot in town.

  “Listen, I have this buddy of mine who needs a job,” Horton told the guy. “He’s a hell of a worker. He’s big, muscular. He can be a loader.”

  At the time Horton was working to find Evans a job and keep him focused on an honest life, Horton’s family—his wife, Mary Pat, and kids, Jim and Alison—began to get to know Evans more personally. Evans would call and say hello to anyone who answered the phone. He would carry on conversations with Mary Pat as if they were old friends.

  As Horton continued to work on his friend at the warehouse to hire Evans, he came up with an idea. “Listen,” he said to his friend one day, “Gary is a convicted felon. I know it’s hard to trust someone like that. But why don’t we have him act as an undercover while he’s working? He can keep an eye out for those workers who are robbing you.” There had been a rash of larcenies at the plant in recent months. Horton knew Evans would jump at the opportunity to act as a cop.

  “Okay,” Horton’s friend reluctantly agreed. “That might work.”

  Because Evans was a felon, the warehouse agreed to hire him—but only under a pseudonym.

  It had taken Horton three weeks to convince his friend at the warehouse to hire Evans. It took Evans three days to decide that the work wasn’t for him. Again, he went back to his old way of thinking, and spared no words when giving Horton an explanation.

  “You fuck,” Horton said when he found out Evans had quit, “you screwed me!”

  “Come on, Guy, that shit was rough. Lifting boxes, loading trucks under the crack of a whip. It’s too hard. I’m not taking orders from those fuckers. I can make better money and not break a sweat doing what I do.”

  Point in fact, he had never stopped stealing. Although Evans was complying with Horton’s suggestion to try out the high road, Evans was committing more burglaries during that time than he ever had, Horton found out later.

  CHAPTER 56

  Gary Evans had heard the name Damien Cuomo in the past and had run into him once in a while, but he had never considered working with him. During the early part of the summer of 1988, Damien was living in an apartment on Industrial Park Road in Troy with his longtime girlfriend, Lisa Morris, and their daughter, Christina. Damien loved the place, mostly because it was located just behind the old-fashioned red-brick home where he grew up.

  Around town, Damien was known as a “good thief,” a former friend later said. He was small—“about 130 pounds soaking wet”—and could scale walls and fences like a cat. As a teenager and into his early twenties, he would show off by shinning his way up two adjacent walls as if he were Spider-Man. He could get in and out of houses quickly, without waking anyone up. For years, police had suspected an African American man of being what locals had dubbed “the hillside burglar,” because several burglaries had been committed in one “hillside” neighborhood in Troy. But Horton and friends of Damien’s later said the hillside burglar was Damien Cuomo.

  Born on September 10, 1961, Damien was almost seven years younger than Evans. When they hooked up in 1988, Damien had just turned twenty-two. At five feet six inches, he was nearly as tall as Evans, but Evans had close to sixty pounds—all muscle—on him. Standing next to Evans, Damien looked scrawny, frail.

  Where Evans excelled at burglarizing antique stores and jewelry stores, slipping in and out seemingly at will, Damien was a professional residential burglar. He had broken into homes since he was a teenager, some claimed. It started, according to an old family friend, with bicycles.

  “As a kid,” a friend later recalled, “Damien would steal bicycles in the neighborhood. His parents were really strict. His father, who went to church, I think, every single day of his life, would lock him in a back barn whenever Damien got into trouble.

  “They had this [water] well in the front yard that had dried up. Damien would steal the bicycles and put them in the well so no one could find them.”

  Evans just showed up at Damien’s apartment one afternoon and knocked on the door. Lisa Morris was home at the time. Damien was gone. She had never seen Evans before, nor had Damien ever mentioned him.

  “Me and my girlfriend,” Lisa said later, “were sitting behind Damien’s parents’ house one day [not too long after that] sunning ourselves when Gary came up. He was looking for Damien and then he said something. After they met, he was always pulling Damien out of the house. They would be gone for a long time. I didn’t like him. He took Damien away from us, his family.”

  The hatred Lisa had for Evans began after Lisa and Evans “had words” one afternoon and Evans threatened to “throw her off the balcony if she gave him any more trouble.” Lisa was working two jobs at the time, trying to make the best of what she saw as a pretty good life with Damien and Christina. She knew Damien was a thief and took off to commit burglaries, but she was determined, she recalled, to have a family with him and Christina.

  Throughout the next year, Damien and Evans became inseparable. They hung out together. Traveled together. Committed burglaries together. And enjoyed what had become a rather reclusive life as two of Albany’s most notorious, and successful, burglars. Other thieves in town envied their successes.

  While Evans worked on his relationship with Damien Cuomo, he still kept his eye on Horton. At one point, he went to Horton and explained how he could set up a sting to buy two stolen weapons from a local Troy burglar.

  “What do you want, Gar?”

  “Nothing! I just want to fuck this guy hard.”

  So Horton gave Evans the money and told him to set up the deal.

  A day later, Horton had two stolen weapons off the street and a local burglar in jail, and Evans was back on his way.

  “He would come to me and talk about what was going on in Troy,” Horton recalled. “He needed to stay in touch with me. Keep me thinking he was doing good things for me—which, in many ways, he was. But it was all a ruse.”

  On June 28, 1989, Cuomo and Evans were driving north on Interstate 87 from New York City in Damien’s Chrysler Fifth Avenue. They had just finished meeting with someone who was going to start fencing stolen merchandise for them when a state trooper pulled them over for speeding.

  “Fuck,” Evans said. “We’ve got the trunk full of shit.”

  “Relax,” Cuomo said, slowing the car down. “Let’s play it cool.”

  While the trooper was asking Damien for his license and registration, Evans began to shuffle in his seat. Trained to snoop out any suspicious behavior, the trooper had enough sense to ask Damien Cuomo and Gary Evans to get out of the car. Then, “Pop the trunk,” he said as another trooper pulled up. “We’re going to have to take a look.”

  There on the floor of the trunk were several items one might use during a burglary, kidnapping or both: three black ski masks, two stun guns, a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, a slim jim, crowbar, screwdrivers, duct tape, rope, two sets of handcuffs, two sets of thumbcuffs, a plastic Uzi machine gun, gloves, hats, several maps of the Northeast and a book of police radio frequencies.

  Looking at everything, the trooper assumed Evans and Damien weren’t heading to a masquerade ball, but were perhaps either coming from a burglary or en route to committing one.

  The stun guns was Damien’s, Evans said later. Cuomo had a habit of breaking into homes when people were asleep, and would often use the gun to put people down who woke up. Evans hated him for it. If there was one thing Evans never did, he claimed, it was break into homes while peop
le were inside. He found it too risky. Not to mention there were plenty of homes where people weren’t home.

  “‘I’m the good burglar,’” Horton recalled later in a sarcastic tone. “That’s what Evans always wanted me to believe. He’d tell me that he was a better person than Cuomo or Falco because he never did what they did. The truth of the matter is, Gary would break into homes if people were home if he thought he could get away with it.”

  In a scene straight out of the children’s classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Cuomo once broke into a home while a family was sleeping, a former girlfriend of Damien’s claimed, and woke up a small child, who ended up walking down the hallway and staring at him as he rummaged through the home looking for items to steal. Upon seeing her, Damien told her to scoot back to her room without saying a word.

  The child said she was thirsty.

  So Damien got her a glass of water and sent her off to bed before cleaning out the house.

  After spending nearly the past year turning dozens of jobs together—homes, businesses, antique shops, jewelry stores—Evans and Cuomo had become good friends. When they committed burglaries, one of their favorite ways to throw off authorities was to wear sneakers three or four sizes too big. This way, any footprints left behind wouldn’t match. By all accounts, they were good at what they did. Professionals. Where one man lacked a certain flair for climbing walls or cutting a hole in a window without being heard, the other made up for it.

  It was common knowledge inside the confines of the state police that Horton and Evans had a relationship that perhaps stretched a bit over the cop-informant line. So with Damien and Evans in lockup at the Albany Thruway State Police barracks, just outside downtown, it was no shock to Horton when he got a call at home alerting him that Evans and his “partner” had been pulled over for speeding, but were suspected of possessing burglar tools.