by Bill Mason
Which may have been true, but after beating Ray around the head and shoulders and threatening him with everything he could think of, the judge had no choice but to start the trial in six weeks, as per the county’s definition of “speedy.”
“But what if you’d pissed him off so bad that he revoked my bail?” I asked, and the two of them fell all over themselves to be the first to explain how that would have been the best thing that could have happened.
“Clear-cut case of judicial bias,” Fred said. “There would have been no reason in the world for him to do that—”
“Especially,” Ray added, “when we were arguing to speed the trial up, not slow it down. We would have had a judicial misconduct charge leveled against him before the lunch break, accusing him of violating your rights because he thought we stole a court record.”
Fred suddenly grew quiet. “Hey, Ray, you know what?”
“Yeah,” Ray finished for him, “I bet he was thinking that was exactly what I was trying to do. And no way was he going to rise to the bait.” Ray grinned and turned to me. “May have just done you a helluva favor, son. Made it impossible for him to revoke your bail without looking petty and vindictive.” Ray must have had a scheming gene somewhere that could pull stuff like that without his even knowing it. He also hadn’t bothered to inform the judge that it was Fred who would be handling the actual trial.
The court schedule really was full, and the judge in charge of the master calendar practically begged us to push things back a week, to which we graciously agreed. Because of scheduling conflicts, we had the trial in front of a new judge, a woman named Margaret Simmons. I was wearing a jacket and tie, and Fred wore what looked like a cowboy suit, including boots, a string tie and so much gold jewelry, it glinted off the walls every time the sun was at the right angle. During a break on the very first day following jury selection, one of the jurors approached the judge and asked her why the defendant was doing all the questioning of witnesses while the lawyer was sitting down. From the way we were dressed, the juror had simply assumed that I was the lawyer and Fred was the one on trial.
The prosecutor hadn’t called the cop who’d actually arrested me to the stand, so Fred did and asked him to explain why he thought I was prowling. “How do you know he hadn’t just stopped to take a pee?”
The cop said, “I didn’t smell any urine.”
“Are you an expert on urine?”
“No, but—”
“Did you get down on the ground and try to find the urine?”
“What urine?” the flustered cop asked. “There wasn’t any—”
“How do you know there wasn’t if you didn’t try to find it! I’ll tell you why: Because you didn’t want to find it, that’s why!”
The prosecutor jumped to his feet. “Objection, your honor! He’s badgering my witness!”
“Your witness?” Fred hollered back. “He’s my witness! I called him!”
It went on like that for two days. Despite Fred’s transparent and theatrical antics, it became clear that the police had no case and no reason to have arrested me. After both sides rested, Fred got up and requested a directed verdict of acquittal without letting it go to the jury. “Your honor,” he said, “if this absurd arrest stands, if the court really feels that sufficient evidence has been presented here upon which to ask this jury to seriously consider whether my client was prowling, then you might as well arrest every eighty-year-old in Fort Lauderdale who stops to catch her breath within a hundred feet of a police officer.” He didn’t even bother with the charge involving the knife, because if the prowling didn’t hold up, it was inconceivable that the weapon charge would, and he didn’t want to taint his argument by mentioning that I’d been carrying a knife.
The prosecutor, as his job required him to do, stood and argued against the directed verdict, but he knew his case was lame and his heart wasn’t in it. After he finished, the judge took no time in deciding to acquit me without letting the jury have the case. She seemed a pretty good person with a sense of humor, so I asked her if I could have my knife back. She laughed and said, “Don’t push it, Mr. Mason!” Then the smile vanished from her face as she looked toward the back of the courtroom. I turned around and saw three of Fort Lauderdale’s finest standing shoulder to shoulder, looking back at the judge. Old clichés like “murder in their eyes” and “staring daggers” popped into my head; I’d never seen such raw fury on people’s faces before. That they stood quietly only made those expressions more disturbing, as though they were perfectly willing to rein it in right now and release it in a more productive fashion sometime later.
Another celebration was in order for our team, but Fred split off from us and ran out of the courtroom, the cops following him with their smoldering eyes. He headed straight toward a bank of pay phones in the lobby. I told Barb to stay in the courtroom and ran after him. When I asked where he was going, he shouted back, “To call some of those goddamned reporters!”
I followed him to a phone and caught some scattered words as he spoke to one reporter who’d been particularly scathing in his remarks about the three of us. Toward the end of the conversation Fred jumped up angrily and opened the glass door. “That’s why I never cooperate with you, you mangy fucking scumbag!” he was yelling into the phone. “You put the guy’s arrest on the front page and now you’re going to bury his acquittal next to the want ads? Yeah . . . yeah . . . well, fuck you!” He slammed the handset back onto its cradle so hard it shook phones three booths away.
Very little about me would appear in the papers for six months. Until October 23, to be exact. On that date I’d make page one again.
Back in the courtroom Barbara’s reaction to my acquittal was muted. Sure, she was happy, but she was also thinking straighter than I was. “All it really means,” she said, “is that you’re right back to square one.” What she meant was that the pending VOP hearing and the Ramada matter were still hanging over my head. Nothing had changed, really, except for one thing.
“Now the police hate you worse than ever,” she said.
What really scared me was that the open harassment by the police came to a dead halt. No more slow cruises down my street, no more dirty looks and whispered remarks in bars around town. I even got the feeling I wasn’t being tailed anymore, but there was no way to know that for sure. I fretted over what they might be planning. Would Joe Gerwens and his men plant drugs in my car to set me up for a forty-five-year mandatory, or shoot me for resisting arrest? Had I finally pushed things that far? And if so, what had been the final straw . . . the missing court record everyone was still convinced I’d stolen?
But did we stop? Hell, no. We kept on hitting the bars and taunting the authorities simply by virtue of my very presence in any place other than prison. I became more circumspect about getting in their faces, but Ray and Fred, if anything, stepped it up. About a week after the acquittal Ray and I were trailering his boat from my house back to the water. We stopped for a cup of coffee and parked the whole rig in a restricted zone. When we got back, a squad car was pulling up, and two policemen got out.
“This thing yours?” one of them said in a nasty tone. I wasn’t able to tell if he recognized Ray or if he was simply in a bad mood.
“What about it?” Ray said, just as gruffly.
“It’s in a no-parking zone. Why don’t you move it?”
Without a moment’s hesitation Ray shot back, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself!”
I cringed and tried to shrink into invisibility. The cop started for Ray, who stood his ground and didn’t look away. I was certain the cop was going to shoot us both right on the spot, he was so mad, but his partner grabbed his arm and shook his head, which scared me more than anything. Here was a guy who’d hurled a belligerent epithet at a uniformed officer, and instead of confronting him or even writing a parking ticket, the cop just backed off. As far as I was concerned, the one who shook his head to tell his partner to stop might as well have said out loud, “No, not here. Later, like we plan
ned. When nobody’s looking.”
Ray was oblivious to the nuance and smiled in triumph as the cops got back into their car and drove off.
Things got even worse at home, if that was possible. Since I’d been released on bond, Ray and Fred had started coming around the house again, which made Barbara tense and anxious. She was too polite to say anything to them directly and put up a pretty good front while they were there, but I heard about it afterward. Since I was usually drunk at those times, I didn’t react well, and the downward spiral of our marriage continued. I still had everything in place to leave—the van, money, weapons—and kept trying to talk to Barbara about it, thinking maybe she’d get used to the idea if I kept bringing it up all the time, but she was too worn out to keep pretending it was a real possibility and I soon gave up.
The next few months passed in a haze. All the motions, the hearings, the drinking, the fights at home, the restrategizing after each new turn in the case . . . all of it ate away at me to the point where I sometimes felt like nothing but a bag of shot nerves and bad temper. I don’t remember many of the specific legal details, only the thought beginning to take hold that all of it was just delaying the inevitable, that the system was determined to get me and wouldn’t rest until it did, legally or otherwise. Once this hopelessness took a foothold in my brain, I could no longer avoid the reality that my life as I’d known it was over, and that in some way the cops were going to win after all. Part of this may have been a defense mechanism, something inside telling me that I had to get used to a few painful truths if I was to have any chance of saving myself. Still, I fought those truths to the last minute, avoiding them even when Fred, pain etched across his face, told me that we’d run out of legal options and the violation-of-parole hearing was going to take place before the matter of a retrial on the Ramada charges was considered. I kept on avoiding the truth right up until just before the hearing itself in October.
It was scheduled for nine in the morning, the first case to be heard when court opened that day. I’d been out until midnight the night before with Fred, Ray and Carl Coppola. Nobody had said much, and then we went home.
Those unavoidable truths swam up before me again as the sun rose the next morning. I was hungover, exhausted and fighting down the kind of anxiety to be expected when coming to a decision to chew off your own arm to escape a trap. At about six o’clock, I finally threw in the towel for good.
Barb stirred out of sleep as I nudged her and spoke her name, quietly, so as not to wake the kids. When I had her attention, I said, “I need to take off.”
She glanced at the clock. “It’s only six. We don’t have to be there until—”
“No, I mean I’m taking off. I’m not going to the hearing.”
There was simply no way I could face another judge, another venomous cop, another day in a jail cell, another hour of the particularly cruel brand of uncertainty that comes packaged with fighting your way through a horrendously complex and unpredictable legal system. I didn’t need to explain all of this to Barbara, nor did she try to talk me out of it; she’d lived through the whole experience with me, and even though I’d caused her an incalculable amount of pain and worry, somehow she still loved me, and understood.
It was a very frightening moment, and I sought refuge in the minutiae of logistics. “You still have to go to the hearing,” I told her as she began to cry. She shook her head, but I explained that she had to. “If you don’t show up, they’ll accuse you of aiding and abetting a fugitive. You have to go to court and look confused and upset when I don’t show up. Tell them I left early to meet with Ray and Fred and you came to court by yourself.”
Worrying about protecting herself while I was about to launch myself into such dangerous waters didn’t sit well with Barbara, until I reminded her that her first obligation was to the kids. If she got into trouble, or if the court decided she was a bad mother and called in social services . . .
“Would they do that?”
I pointed out to her that we still had a lawsuit pending against the police, and that it was in her name. Once I hit the road, she’d probably have to drop it, but that didn’t change the fact that there might be some enmity against her floating around.
As we lay there quietly, I spent about five minutes feeling sorry for myself and wishing with all my heart I could undo everything I’d done to put myself in this position, then called Barb’s brother Augie and had him come pick me up and drive me over to Hollywood. I sent him on his way, then opened the door to Barb’s aunt’s garage and got into the van. A few minutes later I was northbound on I-95, trying to occupy my mind with detailed planning in order to avoid dealing with the enormity of what I was doing. I was going to need a new identity, and all that that implied: opening new bank accounts, getting a social security card and driver’s license, retitling the van, finding a place to live . . . a thousand difficult and complex chores, each fraught with risk. I concentrated on them as I drove, because if I gave vent to how badly I already missed my family, if I conjured up for the hundredth time that morning Barb’s confused, panic-stricken but still-loving face, I’d disintegrate.
By eight-thirty I was over fifty miles away, and it didn’t take much of a calculation to know I’d already passed the point of no return: Within an hour after I failed to show up for the nine o’clock hearing, neither my lawyers nor my wife able to explain my absence, the judge would issue a bench warrant for my arrest. If caught, I’d have no defense whatsoever, because what could be more self-evident of violating parole than failing to appear for a VOP hearing?
I pressed the accelerator to the floor, a totally stupid thing to do when my entire existence at the moment should have been completely dedicated to not getting caught. As I began to pass other cars, though, I was surprised to discover that, despite my anger, bitterness and loneliness, I just plain didn’t seem to give a shit about anything at all.
Two days later it was reported in South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel that Shirley Thompson, who had been the court reporter at the time of my original sentencing and was now living in Chicago, had found her shorthand notes of the sentencing hearing tucked inside a book. She’d never transcribed her handwritten copy into an official record and had inadvertently taken it with her when she’d moved.
Part
III
15
On the Run
I’D INTENDED to drive the 650 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta in one day and then put up for the night, stopping only for bathroom breaks and to grab some food that could be eaten while steering. But when I hit Atlanta, the thought of lying alone in bed in a motel was too much for me and I kept going, even though I felt like I was driving off a cliff and was so preoccupied and upset it’s a wonder I didn’t crack up the van somewhere along the way.
But at least driving was something to do, although I can’t say I was being fully attentive to the road. Alone in a room it would be different. Hell, even in jail, people I loved and who loved me back were able to visit me. Despite the uncertainties of being imprisoned—and this will sound strange, I know—there really hadn’t been a lot of things to worry about, except the big one: how and when I would get out. And people who cared about me and who were experts had helped me worry about it. Aside from that, there were few details to be attended to on a daily basis.
Now I would have nothing but details to worry about, hundreds of them, and it started to hit me what it would mean to be a fugitive. It wasn’t about blithely outrunning the police and having a jolly old time outsmarting them. It was about never being able to relax and having the most innocent of daily activities—going out for a walk, getting a haircut, ordering a pizza—suddenly take on a dangerous edge. There was no way to know when you were just about to be spotted or had already been made, no way to know if “they” were closing in or even watching. I’d have nothing to go on but assumptions and would have no way of knowing if the precautions I’d be taking were overkill or dangerously insufficient. The best I could do was think
about it rationally, come up with a plan and stick to it.
I hoped I’d be able to do that soon, because at the moment I was as far from rational thought as I’d ever been when sober. I had about two hundred dollars’ worth of quarters for pay phones and was stopping every hour to call Barb, and occasionally Fred or Ray. I was concerned that I’d made my lawyers look bad when I hadn’t shown up, but Ray just laughed it off. “My job isn’t to make judges like me,” he said. I wasn’t worried about my home phone being tapped, because I wasn’t important enough to warrant that kind of effort, but I made sure anyway not to let slip to anybody where I was or where I was heading. I was also careful in our conversations not to give the impression that Barb or my lawyers had known in advance that I’d be skipping.
I missed Barbara and the kids terribly, and every time I heard their voices and realized how much farther away from me they were getting with every call, it just got worse. Those were thoughts I didn’t want to be alone in a room with, so I just kept driving until I finally hit Cleveland before dawn the next day. My aunt, who lived on the sixth floor of one of the buildings I managed, was out of town, so I let myself in, being careful not to let anyone see me. I was exhausted and slept for a few hours, but when I awoke I kept my eyes shut for a minute, unwilling to open them to greet the first light of an unwanted life.
My first order of business was to get some money. I stayed in the apartment all day and after the sun went down headed for my work locker where I’d stashed the jewels from the Blair House score. I spent time looking them over, deciding which could be sold as is and which had to be broken down to mask their origin. After I’d carefully taken apart the latter, which took the better part of two days to do right, I started a list of what I thought the individual items might be worth and how much I’d be willing to settle for from a fence.