The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

  LARRY POWELL (ST. MATTHEWS POLICE SERGEANT): When I arrived at Bacon’s and got to the third floor, I could hear someone saying, “There’s been a big mistake here,” outside the office door.

  When I walked into the office, he stopped arguing, and Hope Johnson told me what happened. I asked him for his driver’s license, and he handed me a Kentucky operator’s license with the name Patrick Salamone and his picture on it. He had a South American type of look to him—Ecuadorean or something, with that Fu Manchu goatee.

  ED HORNING (ST. MATTHEWS ATTORNEY): That’s where Pat screwed up big-time, by not having his Pat Livingston, FBI agent credentials on him. Instead he showed them his Pat Salamone, Florida scumbag license.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: When they asked, “Who are you?” I pulled out my wallet and gave them my Salamone license. I knew I had the Livingston license on me, but I went through all the actions of being Salamone. I think I just reacted.

  Livingston came in, but I didn’t have any way of bringing him to the forefront. I had a license to show I was Livingston, but I chose to identify myself as Salamone.

  I guess I was Salamone.

  ED HORNING: That major stumble by Pat started the whole roll of dominoes tumbling. I think if the St. Matthews Police realized he was an FBI agent from the start, they would’ve said, “No, we’re not gonna do this. We’re not arresting an FBI agent.”

  LARRY POWELL: I filled out the offense report first. Then I walked over to him and told him he was under arrest for “theft by unlawful taking” and read him his rights. I had him stand up, turn around, searched him, and then I put the handcuffs on him.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I said, “Look, I’ve got my son in the car.”

  LARRY POWELL: I saw a little boy sleeping on the front seat of a red Mercury. Salamone was still handcuffed when I asked him, “Why did you leave this little boy out here?”

  He says, “He was asleep, and I didn’t want to wake him up.”

  I says, “What if he woke up, and there’s nobody here? He could try to get out of the car, scared to death.”

  He says, “I don’t know.”

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I had never left Gregory in the car before. That is bizarre in and of itself. It was irrational, illogical. I had a myriad of questions going on in my head about what I was doing and why I was doing it: Why did I leave Gregory in the car? Why did I find myself in that position? Why did I identify myself as Salamone? Why didn’t I have my FBI credentials on me? Why did I leave the house with Gregory in the first place? It was a bureau car. I shouldn’t have had Gregory there to begin with.

  LARRY POWELL: He didn’t mention anything about his other son until we got to the station. He was looking at his watch and says, “I got another son who’s gonna be home in a little while.” He said his wife was at school, and he didn’t know if he could get ahold of her. I asked about neighbors; and he said there was someone who could go over and intercept the boy when he got off the school bus.

  VICKIE LIVINGSTON: The door was open, and there were cars in the driveway. I was a wreck because I didn’t know where the kids were. The first thing that came to my mind was that one of those mob guys had come and hit Pat and taken the kids. I called my sister, and she didn’t know where they were. Then Michael called from across the street and said, “Mom, we’re over here.” He said a policeman brought Gregory home.

  MICHAEL GRIFFIN (FBI SPECIAL AGENT): It was approximately 5:00 P.M., and we were preparing to go to a going-away party for an agent being transferred—when I was notified that I had a phone call.

  It was Pat Livingston. He wanted to know if I was sitting down. I said no. He said, “Sit down,” and I sat down. Then he said that he had been arrested for shoplifting and was currently being held at the St. Matthews Police Department.

  I was waiting for the punchline. I asked, “Are you joking?”

  He said, “No, I’m not.”

  I asked him, “Did you tell the policeman who you work for?”

  He said, “No, I haven’t.”

  I said, “Well, who do they think you are?”

  He said, “I told them my name was Pat Salamone.”

  After that I spoke to the arresting police officer.

  LARRY POWELL: Salamone handed me the phone and said, “Here, he wants to talk to you.”

  So I take the phone and say, “Yes?”

  The guy on the other end says, “Can you tell me—just briefly—what happened?”

  I says, “A Bacon’s security guard caught him leaving the store without paying for merchandise. It was a hundred-and-fifty-seven dollars, and they caught him trying to go out the door with it. So we placed him under arrest, and we’re taking him down to be booked at the Hall of Justice.”

  The guy on the other end of the phone says, “My name is Agent Michael Griffin with the FBI, and the man you have is an FBI agent, and he’d like to give you some more information.”

  He said, “Follow your normal procedures.” They wanted it by the book.

  MICHAEL GRIFFIN: I asked the officer what his procedures would be after the booking at the St. Matthews Police Department. He said he would take him downtown to the county lockup.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I guess I expected it to end there, but they sent me to Johnson County Jail. The cop took me downtown, didn’t handcuff me. Told me about other agents he knew. Kind of bizarre. Almost like we were going down to the jail to interview a prisoner or something.

  FBI Agents Michael Griffin and Tom McQuade were already at the jail when I came in. I went through the booking process, and they said, “Look, we’ll get you out of here as quick as we can. Meet us at over at—Jolly’s or Lolly’s, a cop bar about a block or two away—when you get out.”

  VICKIE LIVINGSTON: I got the kids back. They didn’t know what in the world was going on. I kept saying, “Are you sure a policeman brought Gregory home?” But Gregory didn’t have any clue about what was going on. I hung in there, in limbo, until Pat called at about 9:30 P.M. He said he had a problem. I don’t think he told me what it was until he got home.

  He was just a basket case. He did admit he’d been arrested, but kept saying, “It’s a big mistake. It’s a big mistake.”

  I said to him, “I hope to God that this isn’t true.”

  He said, “You know it’s not true. You know I wouldn’t do something like that.”

  When I saw in the papers the next day what the items were—designer jeans, and that type of thing—I knew he did it.

  ED HORNING: I didn’t know Pat. The first I heard about him was when I picked up the local paper, and it said that an FBI agent had been arrested at Bacon’s for shoplifting. I thought, “What a buffoon.”

  BILL BROWN: Frankly, it did not surprise me that Pat had been caught shoplifting because I knew something weird was going to happen to him. I mean, I could see the excitement—the rush of being undercover again in Louisville—was just consuming him.

  BRUCE ELLAVSKY: I was working out when I heard that Pat had been arrested.

  I wasn’t totally shocked, to tell you the truth. Did I want to go up there and ask, “What the hell is going on?” Not really. There was nothing I could add. And Pat didn’t go out of his way looking for my help. I don’t think there was anything I really could have done for him.

  FRED SCHWARTZ: I said, “Oh shit, Salamone got us again.” Pat’s arrest didn’t shock me as much as trouble me. I certainly didn’t anticipate the effect it would have on the case. I thought that Pat would get out of it because I thought Pat could get out of virtually anything he wanted. I thought he’d talk his way out of it somehow.

  MARCELLA COHEN: There is no way we could ever have anticipated what happened with Special Agent Patrick Livingston in Kentucky with regards to the shoplifting. It was extraordinary. And of course we had to notify the court, and we did.

  ED HORNING: If I was a defense attorney in the MIPORN case, and I heard about Pat’s shoplifting charges, I would have thought I’d just won the lottery.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I
didn’t want to admit that I did it. I was embarrassed because I screwed up good cases that the bureau had made in MIPORN. The fact that I was arrested for shoplifting made it more difficult to prosecute them. As an agent, you can’t embarrass the bureau—that’s the cardinal rule. The cardinal sin is to embarrass the bureau. It shouldn’t be that way, but the bureau is the bureau.

  On the Lam

  LAS VEGAS/MONTANA/ARIZONA/MISSISSIPPI/MIAMI

  1981

  DAWN SCHILLER: It was my understanding that Sharon was going to meet up with us later. I had no idea that she said no or that she was not going into protective custody with us, either. John had told me she said, “Yeah.” So I thought, “Oh, we’re working toward getting better. There’s no drugs; we’re leaving the area that caused us all this shit.” And John was holding my hand again; he was being romantic.

  Then we hit the hawk.

  SHARON HOLMES: John was the youngest of four children. He grew up in rural farm country in Ohio. His father was an alcoholic, and whenever John talked about him it was about arguments and yelling, and his father falling across beds and vomiting all over the kids.

  His parents separated when John was three or four. John had two older brothers and an older sister.

  Mary, the mother, had not worked—she was a housewife—so John, his mother, sister, and two brothers moved into a project in Columbus, Ohio, and became a welfare family. They moved in with another woman who had two children—both boys—that was in the same predicament.

  They lived there until John was about seven.

  DAWN SCHILLER: The first place we stopped was Las Vegas. John went into the casino while I waited in the car because I wasn’t old enough to gamble yet, and we didn’t want to take any chances.

  So John went in—I don’t remember if it was the Aladdin or the Stardust—and he came back really quick and was scared to death, and I’m like, “What’s the matter?”

  He told me a very scary person had sat down next to him at the roulette table, and I was led to believe that it was one of the people who had a contract out on him.

  SHARON HOLMES: Dawn said that John got in the car—he was white as a sheet and trembling—and they got the hell out of there.

  I have no idea who this man was, but John always called him “H the P” after “Harry the Pick.”

  John came home one day and said, “This is a poker buddy of mine—I want you to hear his voice.” I have never heard a more chilling voice on an answering machine in my life.

  I mean, talk about the “Godfather”—it was that type of thing. An ice pick, that was his choice of weapon.

  John said, “Harry came from the Chicago mob, and he’s out here supervising the legitimate laundering of money from various interests of theirs.”

  I mean, the voice on the telephone was enough to scare the shit out of you.

  DAWN SCHILLER: “H the P”? I’m not going to say that. I’m not saying it. What did Sharon say?

  SHARON HOLMES: John had an early introduction to pornography at about the age of between four and a half and five. He was home with the chicken pox, and when his mom came home from working a night shift she noticed this little collection of boys and girls underneath their first-floor living room window.

  When Mary finally got closer, she realized that John had a nudie magazine, and he was in the window, showing the centerfolds to the four-and five-year-olds. They were all laughing and hamming it up, until mama got into the house, grabbed the magazine, and paddled his fanny with it.

  DAWN SCHILLER: We decided to go stay with John’s sister in Montana because it was safe there. It was in the woods, and it was with family. Maybe we could get a fresh start. So we went to Montana via Utah; we had money for motels then. John wasn’t thieving yet—he had become the person that I knew in the beginning.

  It seemed like we were trying to heal a bunch of bad stuff that had happened between us, that was all supposedly because of dope.

  SHARON HOLMES: John was eight or nine when his mom remarried Harold—who worked for the phone company as a lineman—and they moved from Columbus to a rural area in Ohio called Pataskala.

  Harold had bought Mary her own house. I think it was probably about two years later that David—John’s half brother—was born. Harold must have been in his late thirties or early forties. He was about twenty years older than Mary and he was really good to the kids until David came along.

  David was his, and these other four children weren’t. So it became, “I don’t have to be nice anymore.”

  DAWN SCHILLER: Was John’s sister happy to see him? Not really. She probably just wondered how long we were going to freeload off her. She had a small apartment, a job, hadn’t seen her brother in years, and hadn’t heard good things about him.

  SHARON HOLMES: John was the youngest and probably the most insecure of the four of them. He was still wetting the bed when he was seven. In the projects, the three boys had slept together in the same bed. Then suddenly everybody had a room of their own, and they thought it was wonderful. John discovered the woods and the stream and the fishing and frogging, and he was really happy there—until David came along. Then his stepfather turned on all four of the kids. You know, “These are your kids, and I’ll tolerate them—but David is mine.”

  DAWN SCHILLER: We stayed with John’s sister for about a week—just kind of laid around on the couch and fattened up, ate, and slept. Then we got a call from his mother in Ohio saying that the FBI had been there looking for us and that we were listed as armed and drug-crazed.

  We didn’t have a weapon, and we hadn’t been on dope since we left, you know?

  So I said, “Let’s go to Florida and try to make a new life. It’s like, you know, far enough away, and it used to be my old stomping ground. It’s a good place.”

  John thought, “Why not?”

  SHARON HOLMES: Because John was the youngest, he took the brunt of Harold’s anger. He was the one that was always getting beat up because he wasn’t smart enough to get out of the house when he saw Harold coming. The other boys were older, so they were in junior high school and high school when John was still in elementary school.

  DAWN SCHILLER: After we left Montana, John got pulled over for speeding. I swear to God, I thought we were busted. We didn’t want to swallow, waiting for the cop to come back from checking the license. But it turned out it was okay—I guess we weren’t on the computer yet—and the cop just gave us a warning. He didn’t even give us a ticket, just sent us on our way.

  SHARON HOLMES: When David was born he became the center of Mom and Dad’s attention. Mom was good to all of their children, but an infant requires a lot more of her attention. And of course Harold, being older, thought the baby was great—you know, “This is mine, but I’m not going to change those diapers or feed him.”

  As David got older and began to walk and talk, John—being the closest in age to him—got tattled on. The others were smart enough to stay away from home as much as they could. It wasn’t a tremendously happy household.

  DAWN SCHILLER: We drove through Arizona and Wyoming. We stopped at Custer’s Last Stand, and we saw the Grand Canyon and Scottsdale or Flagstaff where there’s that Giant-Meteor-Crater-thing. We, like, got a magnet and picked up pieces of the meteorite. Then we went to the Petrified Forest and stole a bunch of petrified trees in our socks.

  We were having fun—doing tourist stuff—but when we hit Oklahoma we started to get low on cash, so we slept in the car as much as we could. Then, right around Mississippi, John started creeping around and breaking into cars again.

  He came back one night with a gun. So we did have a gun—I think it was a .38—and we got some cash that way. I’m not sure about any jewelry, but I remember camera equipment and pawning it in the next town or maybe the next state.

  SHARON HOLMES: When Mary and the kids were on their own, mealtime had always been a big event—everybody talked about what their day had been like. But at Harold’s table you kept your mouth shut. Mom and Dad coul
d talk, but nobody else could put in their two cents’ worth. Things escalated when John reached his teenage years, and Harold was backhanding him—off a chair or across the room.

  DAWN SCHILLER: We finally got to Florida—Hollover Beach and Collins Avenue is where I grew up for awhile—and we stopped at a place called the Fountainhead Hotel. We had enough money to pay for a couple of nights, but then we started to run out. John is a great one to befriend people and shoot the shit with them, so we got to be friends with Big Rosie, the manager, and she hired me as a maid. Her boyfriend, the handy-man, put John to work on a couple of things, but they didn’t really need him. So Big Rosie’s boyfriend got John a job working construction on another hotel down the road.

  SHARON HOLMES: When John was sixteen, his half brother, David, snitched on him. Daddy comes home and David says, “John did this!” Guess who got beat?

  Harold threw John down the stairs and came after him.

  Even though John only weighed 110 pounds, he was six feet tall, so when he got up off the floor he decked Harold. And John told Harold straight out—as his mom was coming through the door—“You touch me again, and I’ll kill you.” John went into the army soon after that.

  DAWN SCHILLER: We changed our names. I was still Dawn, but John was now “John Curtis.” And he was really nice at first. John was a really good artist, and he would sit and draw pictures of me or my dog. And he would buy me a strand of garnets—which is my birthstone. It was really nice.

  But then his paranoia and possessiveness started coming back. He started saying, “We’re never going to get out of here unless we get more money!”