An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  On the morning of Sunday, May 14, two days before Rey goes missing, Allison and Rey go to church, a special service for Mother’s Day. When they get back home and are walking up the front steps of their house in Northwood, Rey makes a phone call to someone who does not pick up, and leaves them an excited message. “Hey man, call me back,” he says. “I finally got it all figured out!”

  Allison does not remember whether anyone called him back. Later, when Rey is missing, Stansberry admits he was the person Rey called that morning. He plays the message for Rey’s brother, Angel. Stansberry says he had no idea what Rey was talking about. Neither Porter, Angel, nor Allison can make sense of it. What has Rey finally got “all figured out”? And why would he call Stansberry to tell him so?

  * * *

  Suddenly, the security alarm in Rey and Allison’s house starts going off in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. It happens on Monday, May 15, at one a.m., then again, according to the houseguest, Claudia, at three a.m. the evening Rey goes missing. By then, Allison and Rey have lived in the house for almost two years, setting the alarm every night (the neighborhood is a safe one, but after all, this is still Baltimore). They have never heard it go off before. The Northeast District police precinct is a short walk away, so the first time the alarm goes off, they ask officers to come and investigate. The cops suggest that maybe squirrels are triggering it. This sounds absurd to Allison. Even if she or Rey had left a window open, a squirrel would still have had to push out the entire screen to trip the alarm, and the screens are all intact.

  But what makes even less sense to her is Rey’s reaction. When the alarm goes off, Rey leaps out of bed, terrified. For the first time, Allison sees fear in his eyes. “He was a big Latin guy. He was macho. It wasn’t him,” she says. “Rey was scared.”

  To get a better picture of the events of the week after Rey went missing, I ask those involved in the search to recount for me what they can remember about those eight terrible days, and, in particular, at what point they first heard the word “suicide” being used.

  Lisa O’Reilly remembers that on the afternoon of Thursday, May 18, she received a phone call from Allison asking whether she had seen or heard anything of Rey, as he’d been missing for two days. Lisa, shocked, goes over to Allison’s house with her husband to help make “Missing” posters. Allison’s parents are there, recalls Lisa, along with a couple of other families. When the posters are finished, Lisa and her husband drive around Baltimore taping them to utility poles and looking for the black Mitsubishi Montero Rey was driving. Lisa recalls the discovery of the car as a mystery in itself. “About a week later,” she remembers, “somebody—either Allison’s mom or dad—was going to the airport to pick somebody up or drop them off, and on the way back they decided to have one more look around the area near Mount Vernon, and that’s when they found the car.”

  * * *

  Lisa O’Reilly remembers everyone gathering at Allison and Rey’s house on the evening of Wednesday, May 24, the day Rivera’s body is found. All their friends and neighbors have brought food, recalls Lisa, and they have a sort of improvised wake for Rey. Lisa is in the kitchen when she first hears someone mention suicide. She remembers Rey’s friend Marco, who has just flown in from Florida, responding angrily, saying, “There’s no way.” There was an awkward moment after that. “Most people in the kitchen just let it go,” Lisa tells me. “But I thought, ‘He’s right, there’s no way.’ My God. Honestly, I can defend suicide. If it were even a possibility, I’d admit it.” She knew of people committing suicide in a moment of irrationality. Then she remembered how calculated Rey’s final movements must have been in order for him to get access to the roof of the Belvedere without being seen.

  I ask Lisa whether, as someone brought up in a Catholic home, Rey would have considered suicide to be a mortal sin, but she says no. “He wasn’t of that generation,” she tells me. “He wouldn’t have paid attention to those kinds of sanctions. Like I said, he wasn’t really much of a believer.” Lisa does not think Rey took his own life for the simple reason that he was always upbeat and happy, and had so much to live for.

  That afternoon, the deacon of St. Mary’s arranges a gathering for Allison and Rey’s families and friends at St. Mary’s. Then, at six o’clock, the church holds a memorial mass.

  * * *

  Cynthia also finds it suspicious that Allison’s parents discovered the car, especially given that it was Rey’s colleagues who found the body. “At that time,” she says, “Baltimore was number one in the country for homicide. There was no investigation at all. The police just did not want to investigate anything.” She, too, first heard the word “suicide” used in connection with Rey’s death at the family gathering. At the time, Cynthia was in so much shock she managed to repress all her emotions. “I was just caught up in feeding everybody, making sure everybody was okay. I just kept busy. I was too busy to cry. But later, it all came out. I cried so much I got adrenal fatigue.” When she overheard someone referring to Rey’s death as a suicide, Cynthia was shocked. “That just seemed completely wrong to me. He was just too vital for suicide. He never even seemed depressed or anything. For them to say that—it’s just so out of character.”

  Rey’s mother, Maria Rivera, tells me, “When Allison called and said, ‘Mama, Rey is missing,’ we went over there, but we were not concerned really because we did not believe anything bad had happened. Nothing unusual had been going on in his life, really. Of course, we were worried, but we thought that he had an accident, got lost somewhere, or got sick, something like that.”

  What she tells me next sends chills down my spine. “The moment I went into his house, I could not feel his presence. And I just knew it at once. Oh my God, my son is dead.” Naturally, Maria says, she still went through with the search. But at the bottom of her heart, she tells me, “I knew. I knew.”

  Maria cannot remember when she first heard suicide mentioned in connection with the death of her son, only that she never countenanced the idea for a moment. “I know Rey would not commit suicide,” she tells me. “I know because of my own observations of his behavior and because of things that came out of his mouth. When anyone we knew was depressed, it was always Rey that would help them, talk to them, give them reasons to live. And not only was Rey afraid of heights, but he’d never got over his fear of death. We had many conversations about it.”

  * * *

  On Tuesday, May 16, 2006, Porter Stansberry is out of town. As soon as he gets the news that Rey is missing, he returns to Baltimore and joins the search, offering a (rather chintzy) $1,000 reward for information leading to his friend’s whereabouts. When, by Friday, there are still no leads or clues, he raises the reward to $5,000, noting the increase at the bottom of the “Missing” posters. Stansberry, it appears, is as desperate as anyone else to find Rey.

  “He’s a happy guy,” Porter tells Nicole Fuller, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “He and his wife had just booked a trip to go to New Mexico in a few weeks. This is not a man that wanted to leave. I’ve got to find my friend. I can’t imagine my life without him. He’s my best friend.” But at some point on Wednesday, May 24, when Rivera’s body was discovered, Stansberry’s demeanor changed. He was at work when he got the news, and according to the FBI report on the case, he sent his employees home, hired a number of attorneys and, because of security concerns, a private detective, and refused to speak to the police.

  In a podcast interview with Bill Bonner, Stansberry describes Bonner as “an incredible friend.” He continues, “You know you really have a great friend when you’re at the low point in your life, and you get a phone call—I think Bill’s called me once in my entire life out of the blue—and it was during a very tough period in my life when I’d just recently lost a very good friend.” A few years later, in an entry from Bill Bonner’s Diary about the proliferation of “fake news” in the Trump era, Bonner mentions the newspaper accounts of Rey Rivera’s death as an example of the trend. “In one s
ad instance,” he writes, “an ex-employee committed suicide, distraught over a personal problem.” The article continues:

  It happened at a time when one of our groups was being investigated by the SEC. (The case ended up as a legal fascination … complicated, but inconsequential … and later largely repudiated by the courts.…) The ex-employee was in no way associated with the alleged wrongdoing. And the infraction had nothing to do with the SEC’s usual beat—front-running or market manipulation. But the reporter couldn’t resist: “Suicide at Troubled Baltimore Publisher,” read the headline. The reader was left to conclude that the poor fellow offed himself because he was implicated in a trading scam that had never happened or even been alleged.

  My curiosity is excited when I read that Bill Bonner knows for a fact that Rey “committed suicide, distraught over a personal problem.” Since the Rivera case is, officially, still open as a homicide, I wonder whether Bonner has reported his information to the police. What could the “personal problem” have been? Why did Bonner, Porter Stansberry’s boss, know about it, when Rey’s wife and friends did not?

  On Wednesday, August 2, 2006, Porter Stansberry and his wife purchase a house in the country suburb of Cockeysville, about fifteen miles north of Baltimore. According to property records, they pay $1.5 million for the 4,587-square-foot house, which sits on a lot of 2.77 acres. Like Stansberry’s other visible assets—his clothes, his car, his cigars—this property is a sign of the man’s success.

  * * *

  It is a snowy night. I am talking to one of my graduate students over drinks in the Owl Bar downstairs in the Belvedere when the electricity starts to go out gradually as the generators fail, one after the other. First the kitchen goes dark. Then the small lobby area where we are sitting; then the main bar; finally the whole place goes dead.

  Porter Stansberry

  We finish our drinks by candlelight; then my student leaves and the evening concierge, Freddie, leads me to the stairs with a hurricane lamp. He shows me up to the second floor and guides me to a door that I’ve never seen before or since. The door leads to a broad landing at the bottom of the fire stairs. I stumble blindly up to the fifth floor, where I emerge into the dark hallway.

  The entire Belvedere is pitch-black and almost completely silent. I light candles in the apartment. It is beginning to get very cold. When I go to brush my teeth by candlelight, I hear strange noises inside the bathroom walls: irregular dripping sounds, fragments of whispered conversations coming through the water pipes, the echoing footfalls of people climbing the fire stairs and back passageways: the building’s inner organs and alimentary canal. After brushing my teeth, I take the dog downstairs for his evening walk, meeting residents I do not recognize in the dark hallways, nervously clutching their flashlights or cell phones.

  The power usually goes out twice a year, whenever the circuits get overloaded: once in the winter and once in the summer. When it happens in the summer, there is a different feeling. Things are friendlier. People congregate outside, where it is still light and there is a chance of catching a breeze. The Owl Bar, which has its own mini-generator, will sometimes stay open when everywhere else is in complete darkness, though only to those who can find their way through the darkness of the lobby and around the back hallway. These special nights remind me of the tales told of the days of Prohibition, when the Owl Bar was a notorious speakeasy—there are apparently still bullet holes in the walls—and the eyes of the bar’s two owl figurines would flash on and off when a liquor delivery had safely arrived.

  That February night, when I get outside, I discover it is not only the Belvedere that has lost power, but the whole block. Something electrical has “blown” underground, according to the concierge, and “a part has to come from Philadelphia.” As I climb through the thick, silent snow, I see that the traffic lights on Charles Street have been wired up to a makeshift generator. A soft white veil covers everything, blurring boundaries between sidewalk and street. Icicles hang from the canopy over the front steps of the Belvedere. I hear a sound normally smothered by the noise of traffic: the moan of foghorns out in the bay.

  * * *

  Rey’s body is so decomposed that if Allison wants to bury him, she can do so only in Baltimore. Understandably, she does not want to lay her husband to rest in a city of so many bad memories, so after consultation with Rey’s family, she has his body cremated and takes his ashes back to LA with her when she returns. For a long time, she is unsure where to bury the urn. She visits Madrid, planning to bury Rey’s ashes in the city of his birth, but somehow it does not feel right.

  After a great deal of thought and searching, she finds the perfect place. Rey’s ashes are in a vaulted cave by the edge of the sea in Puerto Rico, so close that when the tide comes in, the waves wash over his urn.

  * * *

  One day, out of the blue, I receive an anonymous email.

  “Mikita: with respect, I have a family and prefer to stay out of this. Rey did not kill himself. Be careful.”

  X

  ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2009, three years and seven months after Rey Rivera’s death, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit concludes that Porter Stansberry did not obtain his “Super Insider Tip” from a private source, as he maintains. Deciding that, although Stansberry may have spoken to such a source, his claim to have received a tip from that person is a fabrication, the court finds Pirate Investor guilty of securities fraud.

  To protest the decision, Stansberry and his attorneys draw up an appeal from a final judgment, requesting a reversal of the court’s decision, arguing that Stansberry obtained what he believed in good faith to be a real financial tip, which he subsequently sold to the subscribers of his email newsletter. Stansberry himself was not a company insider, they argue; nor did he buy any of the stock he endorsed. Like other journalists dealing in speculation, his attorneys argue, Porter Stansberry has a right to get things wrong. In fact, they claim, this is a right protected by the First Amendment.

  The Court of Appeals disagrees. It upholds its decision, reasoning that Stansberry clearly knew that what he was doing was wrong at the time: “Stansberry’s conduct undoubtedly involved deliberate fraud, making statements that he knew to be false.” At last, Stansberry is out of options. Pirate Investor is ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution and civil penalties.

  The Court of Appeals is seriously mistaken in its judgment, believes Stansberry. He will not accept defeat. In one final and powerful push, he persuades a number of publishers to sign various amicus briefs in his defense in an attempt to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision. These petitions, signed by representatives of some of the nation’s most reputable publishers (including the New York Times Company, the Hearst Corporation, and Forbes LLC) argue that a guilty verdict in the case will be “a significant threat to the free dissemination of news about the financial markets and specific investment opportunities,” and could lead to a situation that “would be contrary to the spirit of our system of a free and independent press.” A New York Times editorial published on July 3, 2010 (“The Right to Be Wrong”) observes that “the implications of the SEC’s action are potentially profound: newspapers or Web sites promising their paying readers stock information that later turns out to be untrue suddenly leave themselves open to fraud charges. Any financial commentator who passes on bad information in good faith could be sued.”

  But the Fourth Circuit Court does not believe that Stansberry passed on “bad information in good faith”; rather, the court holds, he made statements that he knew at the time to be false. And “punishing fraud does not violate the First Amendment.”

  * * *

  The case of Rey Rivera, like most unsolved mysteries, is in the news for a day, two days, a week at the most, before fading out of sight. For the first couple of years, on the anniversary of the day Rey’s body was found, Jayne Miller presents a brief news feature for WBAL-TV, reminding us that the case is still unsolved. After this, there is no follow-
up investigation. When Rivera’s death is brought up in online conspiracy-theory forums related to Agora (and to these there is no limit), it is either dismissed as “obviously” a suicide, or regarded as equally “clearly” a murder—committed by whom remains unclear, but the question generates an intricate web of speculation and paranoia, which, since it cannot be penetrated or even approached, is essentially another kind of dismissal.

  By the time five years have passed since Rivera’s death, I decide it is no longer inappropriate for me to try and reach out to his family. After searching online, I find what I believe to be the email address for Allison and the phone number of Rey’s brother, Angel. My email to Allison does not bounce, but I get no response. I call Angel and tell him I am interested in writing a book about the death of his brother. He tells me he is in a meeting and will return my call in an hour or so. He never does. Clearly, he does not want to talk.

  I am persistent but, despite days spent writing letters, sending out emails, and making phone calls, I get nowhere. In one direction is a roadblock; in the other is a brick wall. I call the Baltimore police archives to see how I can get a copy of George Rayburn’s 911 call reporting the hole in the roof, but I am told that it is too late—the police destroy all 911 tapes after six hundred days. I arrange for a disgruntled Agora ex-employee to talk to me off the record; though I wait up by the phone, he never calls. The form I fill out requesting a copy of the police report asks for an “incident number,” which I do not have and cannot find. The phone number for the Baltimore City Police Central Records Office is either out of date or out of service: I call and call, but nobody picks up. One day I call to find the line is dead, although the number listed on the website remains unchanged.