The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “Yeah, well … but hey, crazy people make some of the best waiters.”

  According to Borchew, Ricardo had definitely been one of Harry Caray’s best, at least at first. He’d been fast, efficient, and so ingratiating that customers used to ask to be seated at his station. He’d also shown a talent for winning the periodic competitions the restaurant sponsored among its waiters—competitions to see who could sell the most of a particular dessert or a particular dinner special. And he’d been exceedingly considerate toward certain members of the restaurant’s staff—the female staff members. When one of them had said she wanted to repaint her kitchen, he’d volunteered to help; when another had needed assistance in moving from one apartment to another, he’d offered to provide it; and frequently, when women waiters had complained about their aching backs and shoulders, he’d given them back rubs. “One of the women waiters told me,” Borchew said, “‘Franco’s got the best hands. Absolutely the best!’”

  Borchew paused to let me marvel at the irony of this, then went on, “So, like I said, I didn’t see anything wrong with him. Not for a long time. But then we started getting complaints. A customer said Franco had given him the wrong change when he paid his bill. Another one said he hadn’t made clear that there was going to be an extra charge for dessert. Someone else said he brought and opened up for them some additional bottles of wine when they hadn’t been ordered. He was doing what we call gouging the customers—driving up the price of the check so his tip would be proportionately higher.

  “So I spoke to him about these things, put them in his evaluations, and warned him to stop. But he didn’t stop, he kept it up. And the complaints kept coming. And finally, when he’d been here about three and a half years, we told him that we were putting him on probation and that if we got one more complaint, he’d be terminated. Then we got one, and I had to fire him.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Scary. He didn’t explode or anything, but he got this look in his eyes. I’d seen something like it before. Once, he’d had a run-in with another waiter and he’d gotten a real mean look in his eyes and said, ‘Keep this guy out of my way, or I’ll kill him.’ And I’d kept them apart, because, hey, waiters are excitable. But the way he looked then was like nothing compared to how he looked the day I fired him. I mean, I was glad to see the back of him, because you could see he was real bothered.”

  After he was fired from Harry Caray’s, Ricardo decided to move again. Detective Hines told me that part of the story: “Ricardo had bought himself a slew of household goods on credit. Television sets. Kitchen appliances. He wasn’t making payments, and American Express was dunning him. For more than ten thousand dollars. So maybe that’s why he made up his mind to go—we don’t know for sure, but what we do know is that about a month after he was fired, he sold his house, put fifty thousand dollars in his bank account, and bought Susana and the kids plane tickets to Mexico City.”

  What happened next almost resulted in Ricardo’s capture. Susana went to O’Hare Airport, but before she could board her plane, she was stopped by U.S. customs officials conducting a routine currency check. They asked for identification and Susana showed them a social security card. They also asked how much money she was transporting, and she told them she had two thousand dollars. But for some reason, the customs officials were suspicious of her and insisted on searching her purse. When they did, they discovered she was concealing an additional thirteen thousand. And they also discovered that the social security number she had given them was registered to someone else. “A dead white baby boy!” Hines exclaimed, leveling his steely gaze on me. “That innocent little wife of Ricardo’s, that mouthpiece for him on PrimeTime Live, was going around with fake identification. Just like him.”

  “Maybe that’s what kept her safe,” I interrupted Hines. “I mean, she’s the only woman we know about who got close to Ricardo and didn’t get murdered. Or attacked. Or have to disappear. Maybe she had to go along with him to ensure her survival.”

  Hines had little sympathy for that view. “Yeah, well, she survived all right,” he brushed it off. “But she didn’t have to go on national television and paint Caputo like a saint. ‘The man I married would never have harmed anyone,’ or whatever that garbage she said was.” Then, “Anyway, she didn’t just use false ID,” he went on harshly. “Or try to leave the country with hidden funds. She also lied to Customs, told them the money they’d found on her was legitimately hers, part of the proceeds from the sale of her and her husband’s house.”

  “And it wasn’t?”

  “Well, she didn’t try very hard to get it back. Customs confiscated the money and told her if she wanted it returned, she should file an affidavit. So she gets on her plane and later she tells Ricardo, who’s still in the U.S., to file the affidavit. But he doesn’t go through with it. I mean, he starts, he sends Customs this notarized affidavit on behalf of Franco Porraz and his wife. But right after he turns it in, he has second thoughts, realizes he’s asking for trouble. And by the time Customs attempts to verify the facts, she’s nowhere to be found. Neither is he.”

  Where was he? Mexico, again, it developed. “He joined Susana there,” Hines said, “had another baby with her, and got a job as a salesman—a job that had him going back and forth between the United States and Mexico.”

  “What was he selling?”

  “Medical supplies. He claims.”

  “Sounds like drugs to me.”

  Hines didn’t comment, just continued, speaking with the bitterness that law enforcement people often manifest when talking about the ineffectualness of some of their peers, “So there he is in Mexico, going back and forth. Back and forth. And no one figures out who he is. Not till he shows up in Argentina and all on his lonesome breaks the news to the world himself.”

  I was in the process of gathering these details when, in the middle of January 1995, I received an unexpected call from Elise McCarthy. “They want a plea!” she told me excitedly. “They’ve been calling all morning and saying they want a plea.”

  “Won’t that make it hard for Kennedy to argue insanity in Caputo’s other cases?” I asked, remembering that she’d once told me this consideration would stand in the way of the lawyer’s going for a plea in her case.

  “Kennedy’s pulling out,” she said. “A legal aid attorney is going to handle Caputo in Westchester.”

  “Legal aid!” I exclaimed. “What happened? Why’s Kennedy quitting?”

  “I guess Dietz has refused to find Caputo insane,” McCarthy trilled, sounding positively jubilant.

  I felt pleased by the news, too. If Kennedy is pulling out, I thought, maybe he’ll finally be willing to speak with me. And if he does, maybe I’ll be able to press him about helping me get in touch with Ricardo’s brother, Alberto. I was keen to do so. I’d learned so much about Ricardo, and yet I felt I didn’t know him. I needed to speak to people who did. To his mother. His father. His brother. After months of calling around, I’d turned up no one I knew, other than Kennedy, who knew Alberto. And one day, I’d finally done what I hate to do—called him up out of the blue. I hadn’t gotten past his secretary. After making me state my name and business, she’d said that Mr. Caputo wasn’t taking calls from members of the press. Kennedy could get me a better reception.

  “Caputo allegedly tried to commit suicide last week,” McCarthy was going on. “Saved up a bunch of pills and swallowed them.”

  I tried to keep my mind on the matter at hand. “How is he?” I inquired.

  “Okay. I doubt it was a serious effort. He probably just wanted attention.” Her prosecutorial scorn must have reminded her to be a little less open with me, for then she returned to the subject of the plea, saying, “Of course, you realize there’s no deal yet. We’re just thinking it over.”

  “Sure.” Still, I figured the plea had already been worked out. District attorneys, no matter how open they seem to be, never tell you something that’s going to happen, only that which has already hap
pened.

  Two weeks later on an unseasonably warm and springlike day at the tail end of January, Judge Dunne explained to a sparse handful of spectators and press people that Caputo would be pleading guilty to manslaughter in the first degree and receiving the maximum sentence for that crime. Then Dunne questioned the once-handsome defendant, who was even more paunchy and glabrous than usual.

  “How old are you?” Dunne asked.

  “Forty-five.” He looked so much older that I found it hard to believe.

  “Are you under the influence of any drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Are you suffering from any mental disability that would affect your ability to take a plea?”

  “No.”

  A moment later, Judge Dunne asked Caputo to state in his own words what he had done.

  “I stabbed Natalie to death,” he whispered, his words so muffled that they seemed to be coming from underwater. “And I was very emotionally disturbed at the time.”

  “Did you intend to cause her death?” Elise McCarthy, rising, asked coldly.

  “Yes.”

  And that was that, the brisk, anticlimactic resolution of a murder that had preoccupied Ed Brown, Judy Epstein, James Gay, and a host of Natalie’s friends and relatives for twenty-four years. None of them were present. They had not been alerted to attend, for a plea, no matter how carefully worked out and assiduously agreed upon, is never a sure thing until the defendant actually announces in open court that he’ll take it. Nor was Alberto Caputo present. Ricardo had only Kennedy on his side.

  The tall, well-tailored attorney offered Ricardo some lawyerly comfort, patting him on the back of the gray sweatshirt that had replaced the sleek leather jacket he used to wear to court. And then Ricardo was led away, while Kennedy went into the corridor to face the usual barrage of questions.

  “Why did you give up the insanity defense?” a television reporter asked him.

  “I can’t comment on that,” he said.

  “Did you advise Caputo to plead guilty to manslaughter or was it his own decision?” another reporter asked.

  “I can’t comment on that.”

  “Is there anything you can comment about?” asked a third.

  “Only this. That whether he goes to a jail or a hospital, he’ll be treated by a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and he’ll remain on medication wherever he goes.”

  What medication was that? No one asked, and I didn’t either, just added the question to the burgeoning list of unknowns about Caputo—the blank in the center of my canvas—that I carried in my head. But I was more determined than ever to try to fill in that blank, and as soon as Kennedy ended his press conference, I went over to him and once again asked if we could make an appointment.

  “No problem,” he said. “Just call me in the office and we’ll set it up.”

  Well, that’s progress, I thought. But just as before, when I called, he didn’t call back.

  I called a second time. And a third. Still no call back.

  “What’ll I do?” I moaned one day to a friend, a gossip columnist whose business it was to get the hard-to-reach to talk to her.

  “Just phone him every morning,” she said. “You know, you brush your teeth, have your coffee, call this guy.”

  I did that for about four weeks. I also wrote to him. Still, he didn’t get back to me. And then finally, I received a note from Kennedy’s secretary: “Mr. Kennedy wanted to let you know,” she wrote, “that he will talk to you at the sentencing.”

  11

  The day of Ricardo’s sentencing dawned windy and cool, but it was brilliantly sunny, true spring at last, and later that morning as I trekked the few blocks between the Mineola station and Nassau’s courthouse, I thought I detected a decidedly festive air in the streets. Certainly, there was such an air outside Judge Dunne’s courtroom, for the media, partying on containers of coffee, sticky buns, and muffins, had returned in some semblance of force.

  Perhaps the editors and news show producers were there because, like the Hungarian psychiatrist who first identified the phenomenon and for whom it was named, they subscribed to the theory that most people crave the Zeigarnik effect, the experience of closure. But more likely it was simply because sentencings make good copy, good footage, offering as they do at least a minor sop to the appetites of a public once addicted to hangings and still hungry for the spectacle of punishment being meted out.

  In any case, the crowds were so thick that I had to elbow my way into the courtroom, where, as soon as I saw Kennedy, I made a beeline for him and said, “Your secretary tells me that you’re finally going to talk to me today.”

  Kennedy must have forgotten. Or maybe he’d never intended to see me. “I’m sorry but I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to be in a Manhattan court right after this sentencing.”

  “Let me come with you,” I pressed him anyway. “We can talk en route.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “I just don’t have the time today.”

  “What about tomorrow, then?” I was embarrassed by my brazen, if futile, pursuit of Kennedy, but I had no intention of abandoning it. For one thing, I could see no good reason for him to deny me a few minutes of his time, however precious it was. For another, I was beginning to enjoy the game he and I had been playing all year—his resistance, my relentlessness. It was almost comical, an amusing contest he and I had devised to lighten the drudgeries of our respective occupations.

  He won this round, won it as he’d won all the others, by appearing to give me the win. “All right, all right,” he said. “Call me in my office at four o’clock, and if I’m there, you can come over.”

  I nodded as if I actually believed he’d be there, and took a seat. The courtroom was filling up, mostly with reporters and camera people, but here and there with people I’d interviewed, people whose lives had been devastated by Ricardo. I noticed a good friend of Jacqui Bernard’s, an older woman who was sitting in a back pew, looking frail and tense. I saw Judith Becker’s sister, Janie, sitting up front with eyes that looked red from crying. And I spotted Ed Brown, his generally mobile face set in an unsmiling, stony mask. For the first time in twenty and twenty-four years, respectively, Janie and Ed would once again be seeing Ricardo, this man whom they had once liked and considered an appropriate suitor for their sisters. Janie was there out of curiosity, I supposed. Not Ed. He was going to be called upon to address the court.

  He did so almost as soon as an equally unsmiling Ricardo was led in and the proceedings got under way. “I know you have limitations on what you can and can’t recommend in terms of sentencing,” Ed told Judge Dunne, “but I want you to do whatever you can to make sure that Caputo is never again free. My parents are dead, sir. But while they were alive, they lived in a prison that this man created—a prison of grief.” At this, Ed paused and cast a baleful glance at Ricardo, who offered him no sign of recognition. Then he turned back to the judge and said, “It was a prison from which they never even had a chance to apply for parole.”

  Kennedy spoke next, rising magisterially and quickly commanding the attention of the room with his powerful voice. “Your Honor, Mr. Caputo is a man who was brutalized as a child. Raped as a child. Abandoned as a child. I am not saying that these things excuse his conduct. I am saying them in the hopes that the court, and maybe the public, and maybe even, with God’s help, Mr. Brown will be able to see Mr. Caputo’s crimes in a context.”

  Kennedy’s connection to Ricardo was rapidly drawing to an end. But he still felt an obligation to speak up for him, and to do it with as little acknowledgment of the damning information about Ricardo that the prosecution and police had turned up as he could. “Mr. Caputo and Natalie Brown were to be married,” he said, although that declaration, based on an assertion of Ricardo’s, had been disputed to the prosecution by Ed Brown and Natalie’s friends. “And for reasons that none of us can fully comprehend, he killed her,” the lawyer went on. “And he killed again. And again. Then, seventeen years passed, Judge
, seventeen years during which he maintained—and here is the most extraordinary aspect of this gentleman’s complex personality or personalities—he maintained a good job and a family relationship.” Again, it was a statement that seemed based more on Ricardo’s version of his life than on what Detective Hines had determined.

  After that, Kennedy waxed eloquent. “And then fifteen months ago, he began having recurrent nightmares, recurrent flashbacks, recurrent memories of these terrible, terrible homicides. And at a time in his life when he could theoretically have stayed free, he chose to voluntarily come in. Why? Because as he said publicly … ‘I would rather that my body be in jail and my mind free than have my mind in jail, as it is now, with a free body.’ Now, that’s an extraordinary thing. That’s a great service to society. And I respectfully suggest that it deserves Your Honor’s consideration. And there’s a second thing about him that I think is significant for Your Honor’s consideration. It’s his obvious remorse. When he came to my office, he said, ‘I want to make a public statement because I believe that after I turn myself in, I will never get an opportunity to publicly apologize to the families of the victims for all their pain.’ And he did that.”

  Behind Kennedy, Janie Becker was weeping at those inadequate words. But the lawyer didn’t turn, just continued urging the judge to be compassionate, concluding his remarks with, “I won’t presume to tell you what sentence to give here. You have passed on these kinds of things many times. But this is a unique circumstance.”

  A moment later, Kennedy requested the court’s permission to allow his client to speak and, obtaining it, stood alongside Ricardo as he murmured a brief apology. “Well, I turned myself in, Your Honor, in order to avoid any more killings. And I wanted to say to the families of the victims that I am very sorry because of what I did. I was sick, and I hope that now that I am to be incarcerated, I can be cured. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  The usually gentle-looking Judge Dunne had a cold look in his eyes. “All right,” he announced, “there being no one else, it finally comes down to myself to make a determination in this particular case.” The courtroom, already quiet, grew even stiller, and Dunne launched into his sentencing speech. His tone was hesitant at first. “This was not an easy decision to make because there appear to be many complications here that are unusual even in criminal court. I was, for example, troubled by the question of remorse. Was there true remorse here or was this just simply more of the manipulation that has been referred to in the various probation reports and psychiatric notes and conclusions?”