by Charles Fox
After that I really didn’t care. I tried to irritate them, turn up the radio when they were talking, that sort of thing. I didn’t care anymore.
On the outside there was a collective gasp when the mutilated, half-burned corpse was found on the beach in Naples. Such finds can’t be that unusual in a city so large and notoriously violent as Naples. But so involved in the day-to-day drama of the Getty kidnapping was Italy—and the world, for that matter—that it was immediately assumed that the body was Paul’s, the “Golden Hippie,” the “Oil Prince.” Chace stepped in at once and, to Gail’s relief, took over.
Chace (notes):
Well-roasted corpse found on the beach in Naples. Thought to be Paul’s. Called police in Naples, requested measurements, determined instantly not Paul. Burned bodies shrivel, but corpse still too short. Paul is a very tall lad. This was a short man.
A short man. The Chipmunk was a short man. Perhaps that’s something of a reach, but whatever the case Chace made a considerable concession at this point and as summer’s heat loosened its grip on Rome and the mountains, the nights were cold.
Chace (notes):
Rome September 2nd, I’ve dropped the idea of trying to break them up and told them, “Okay. We’ll pay the money: it must be a simultaneous exchange.” We have moved away from the idea of no ransom at all. We have failed on the thrust of only paying expenses, trying to get the boy out, but now we will not pay the money unless it is a simultaneous exchange. I am working on devising plans and presenting them over the phone, looking at it from their point of view, how they could exchange the boy for money with complete protection against any ambush. One of them was obvious, they have lookouts along the road and then show me the boy at 100 yards. Someone along the road certifies I have the money then there is a car exchange. Variations of that.
From the start Gail tried desperately to persuade Chace this was a terrible idea. Whatever had happened in the mountains was reverberating in Rome. The kidnappers were getting worn down by Chace, and it would be Paul who paid the price.
Gail:
Chace talked of simultaneous exchange. I pleaded with him to do it the Italian way. Do it their way. They have him. They have what we want. He said, “We have what they want.” I tried to make him understand that what the kidnappers had was much more important than what we had.
Chace kept making battle plans, crossing bridges, passing behind cars: “You shoot him on a rock over this mountain and we’ll shoot the money in the air.” Have a meeting on a bridge, the boy brought out onto the middle of the bridge and bring the money on the other side of the bridge, then do the exchange and then shoot the kidnappers. Maybe it would have worked in some other world, some other country, or some other time.
When the body was found on the beach in Naples, the press were back at my door. They wanted to know, “Do you think that’s your son, the young man who’s just been killed in Naples?”
After I came back from London I talked to the kidnappers almost every day; they didn’t trust Chace. Fifty said he preferred to talk to me, but we didn’t seem to get anywhere.
I tried to explain to Fifty and the kidnappers that Big Paul had a lot of problems, health problems, emotional problems. His wife had died. But that, with all the goodwill in the world, he had changed his mind about paying. I tried to tell them not to believe things he had printed in the newspapers, because he was at the end of his rope too. Fifty said to me, “Why haven’t you told me things about the family before?” I said, “Possibly because I think families are pretty private things. If we didn’t have to go into any of our particular relationships, wouldn’t it be better?” He said, “It would have been better if we’d understood.” But who has the time to explain all that kind of thing?
I used to wonder if Paul had tried to explain it to them. I said, “Hasn’t Paul told you anything?” And Fifty said, “Some things, but we should hear these things from you.”
I continued to talk with Fifty even after Iacovoni was given as the contact. He would call Iacovoni sometimes, and sometimes he would call me. He and I had long conversations. “We want to talk to you. We don’t want Fletcher Chace. We don’t trust him. We trust you. You’re the boy’s mother, you have his interest at heart.”
I would have liked to meet Fifty. Sometimes he felt so sorry for us, so at a loss. Sometimes he was terribly human, he called and said they had a meeting and they had a vote—most everybody wanted to kill Paul and there were a few who said no, but if things don’t improve, even the ones who were saving him were going to go. He was really upset, really sad. Sometimes we used to yell and scream at each other. But no one could have anticipated the amount of time it was taking, the amount of suffering. I’m sure Fifty suffered personally—their lives were all messed-up.
At this point, our kidnappers—Fifty and the group—were coinciding with this other group in Germany. We had letters, and we couldn’t decide if the letters were from the Munich group or not. At this point, we thought Paul was being held by them. They were very consistent. They had come in right at the beginning and they kept calling and writing. They wanted me to bring the money to Munich in two red suitcases. We were very tempted.
Fifty was beside himself, he figured the money was going to go to Munich. He yelled, “No. It’s us. We’re the real kidnappers. You’ve got to believe me.”
A few days after the kidnappers first called and after it was in all the papers, an operator called and asked me if I would like to arrange a conference call between, what’s her name? Joey Heatherton, a well-known Hollywood actress who was married to the Texan football player Lance Rentzel, who had exposed himself to a ten-year-old girl, and a third party. I said, “I’ve heard of this actress, but I don’t know her or the girl. Why do they want to talk to me?” The operator said, “Will you accept a conference call?” I didn’t know what a conference call was. The operator tried to explain it to me but it all fell apart.
Then I had a collect call from the girl, the girl in Texas, half saccharine, half threatening. She said she knew where Paul was. She wanted me to fly her sister in from Texas, hinting it would be very nice if I was clever enough to give this lovely young girl a home for about a year, because if I did, she might tell me some very interesting things. It was weird. I don’t think the phone was tapped at that time, so I had to try to remember everything she said. I said, “I’ve got enough problems right now without some girls in Texas trying to use me for money and plane tickets. If you have something to say, tell me. If I think there’s something in it, I’ll bring you here, but I’m not going to bring you here on some nonsense—I don’t have that kind of money.” She said, “It is very interesting information, we think possibly we could help let you know where Paul is, or at least who has him. We know it’s a serious kidnapping. Do you know that?” I said, “Yes, I know that. Do you know that?”
I put it over to the FBI. Then the girl called me again. I didn’t know whether or not to accept the call, but her message was intriguing. She was afraid. All she could say was she had been present at a meeting where they discussed plans to kidnap Paul. She was afraid she knew too much and of what was going to happen. That was the last time I heard from her. The FBI looked into it and decided it was just a pair of nuts. I don’t know. I had a lot of phone calls, and it really sounded like they knew where he was. They may somehow have been involved in an early discussion with some gangster who had the idea. They didn’t arrest anybody. Joey Heatherton’s name never came into it again. I don’t know what that was.
Then came a letter from Paraguay all in Spanish. They said, “We have your son,” and how much money they wanted, how to take care of the delivery. Then came a fine nut from Canada, who had apparently been released from an institution a few weeks before. There were lots of phone calls from him.
Then a boy who had suffered an amnesia attack was found in an American church in Paris. The people who ran the church had seen photographs; this boy didn’t know who he was. Maybe it was Paul. That was a huge
hope, although really I knew perfectly well Paul was somewhere in Italy.
A few days later Margarita, Iacovoni’s secretary, took a telephone call from a man who wanted to set up a meeting with Mario, the Getty chauffeur, at Ladispoli, Old Paul’s villa:
Man: Tell Mario he is to meet me at the end of the Alessandro Farnese in his car.
Margarita: What car?
Man: In his car. I know his car and I’ll know him. He’s to meet me there on the corner between Corrienzo and Alessandro Farnese. If something happens and we don’t make contact, he should go back to the office and I’ll contact him by phone.
The supposed kidnapper told Margarita that they were going to show Paul to Mario and everything was supposed to go through Mario. Margarita told the caller she had been instructed that the family wanted prior assurance that these people were real and gave the caller the list of detailed questions that Iacovoni had previously asked Fifty, questions that only the boy could answer. They warned Margarita that it would take time and said they would call back.
Immediately afterward, Fifty called:
Fifty: I would like to speak to Avvocato Iacovoni.
M: Avvocato Iacovoni is not here. Is it about those particular questions?
Fifty: Yes.
M: Well, you’d better call Mario.
Fifty: What Mario. Who is Mario?
M: You know, Mario. We gave you the number.
Fifty: No, no, I don’t know anything about him. I want to talk to Avvocato Iacovoni. Where is he?
M: Just a minute. The door’s ringing. Maybe he’s coming up the stairs.
Margarita ran and got Iacovoni’s cousin, who was next door, and brought him to the phone. The cousin had no idea it was the real kidnappers and was extremely rude to Fifty, who was getting madder by the minute.
Cousin: Avvocato Iacovoni is not here! You’ve already spoken. You already have the number.
Fifty: What number? I don’t have any number.
C: Yes, you do—Mario’s number.
Fifty: I don’t have Mario’s number. I don’t know who Mario is. I want to speak to Avvocato Iacovoni.
C: If it’s about a personal matter, you’re just going to have to wait.
Fifty: It is a personal matter. I would like to speak to him.
C: You’re just going to have to wait two or three days or call that number we gave you.
Fifty: But I don’t have any other number.
They went back and forth at each other and finally the cousin said, “You’ll have to wait two or three days,” and hung up.
Two weeks later, on September 17, the kidnappers had finally changed their tune and agreed to meet with Chace.
Chace:
One of the Calabresi wanted me to meet with him on his turf, under his control, and I was ready to go. He wanted me to bring a priest. I went to see the archbishop from Chicago, who was visiting Rome, a friend of Ed Daley’s. He refused. He sent me to another priest; this one wanted to be a hero and go with me. A lot of people wanted to be heroes in those days, volunteering themselves as hostages, intermediaries, to be a warm body. We even had a girl begging to take Paul’s place. I went to call on this priest myself. He lived in a very nice house, but when I said, “We’re all set to go,” he got cold feet and changed his mind. He didn’t want to be a hero. I offered to go alone, but the Calabresi refused.
In the mountains the nights were becoming intolerably cold and the kidnappers were growing tired of having their supply lines so stretched. It wasn’t clear what had happened by the stream, but a new and different cadre appeared, and Paul’s treatment grew worse as the kidnappers, or at least their soldiers, built up more and more resentment.
Paul:
After the thing with the Chipmunk, that was the end, and they started getting cold and they said we would have to go farther down. We left the stream in the morning.
We climbed out of the gorge and we walked down, and then up the ridge the whole day to this cave. We arrived in the night. It must be a six-kilometer-long ridge with all these little caves. There’s a path this size, and then down, I happened to see the drop once—it must have been three hundred or four hundred feet. They found a cave. It was so small that I couldn’t lie on my back except on one side, because the other guy had to sleep next to me. We had to sleep side by side on our sides.
During the day they were outside. I think they were out having fun and I could have just walked out of there. They told me they would shoot me if I did, but I think they trusted me so much that they’d just leave, because they’d leave the cave early in the morning. They had very straight hours, leave in the morning, back in the evening. I’d listen to American radio, and do my own food; not cook, but I had things I could mix together—tuna fish and tomato. Every other day they would bring me hot food, like spaghetti, which was a real treat, you know it’s really incredible the way nothing excites you anymore, but I got into this whole trip, a ritual of just eating pasta. You really appreciate the little things in life. I would spend hours and hours on spaghetti, save some for later.
All the caves were man-made. I must have stayed in ten different ones, mostly a clay sort of thing. There’s a flap down there, mountains on the other side where I came across from. Down is the swamp and the river at the bottom, and it goes up here. The first cave was terrifying. I’m not joking: it was only this high, and as long as me. That was the smallest one. They said, “This is going to be your final resting place. Isn’t this great? All we have to do if you do something is bury you right here.” You can’t believe what it is to be in a thing this high, the paranoia that it put me in. I couldn’t turn around. You’re facing inwards, so they can just shoot you. They covered the hole with leaves and things. They said that this was at the top of the cliff and there was a guy on top and a guy at the bottom who would shoot me if I tried to get out.
There was friction between all the guys. They had come to really hate and despise me. They took my radio away. Piccolo said to me, “Please try to escape. We can use that as an excuse to kill you, you fucking little rich smut.”
The next afternoon I heard ladies singing on the road right down the hill from the cave. Piccolo tore in and said, “You bastard.” He dragged me out and stayed like this against me until the women passed because one can tell the songs and the accent exactly; each little town has their accent. She passed. He was furious with me because I had pretended not to hear, I was crying and I said, “Please, change the place.” That was when they started stuffing wax in my ears, but really with such hate, pushing it in with a pencil. I guess I did convince them to move me because the day after they took me to a cave right nearby.
This cave was a large one, very long, different passages with the 1945 Army jeep inside it. They told me it was where they had kept artillery and cannons during the war. That’s how I worked out the idea with Marcello about where this was. We figured out it must be a defense place, a strategic point, and it’s quite obvious it must have been a place resisting the allied invasion. I don’t want you to write this down, but I think it was the town of Madonna Dell Etna or something like that.
I was quite free in this cave, I had my own room and bed at the back of it and they were down on the other side. One night they had a very big dinner. Things seemed to be okay then; they ate little birds, turkey, the best Chianti, ’66 wine, pasta, candles, tablecloth—the whole thing. They were all there that night—all the guards, like, seven of them, drinking and dancing till the early hours. They had a tape player. I went off to sleep and they told me we were going to move the next day, but we didn’t. We must have stayed there quite a while.
Piccolo left to see his family. I don’t know why, but one day soon after they said, “We’re scared you’re going to run away, so a mean guy is going to come.” This mean guy must have stayed five nights with no break the whole time. He was trying to scare me psychologically. He walked up and down. It echoed. The echo in this cave was strange. He spent the day loading and reloading his pistol, clean
ing it, making noises to scare me. He only fed me every other day, hard bread. He only gave me a little water. He hit me and pushed me around. He must have hated me. He didn’t speak a word for days. Then he said, “I’m going to get your mother. Do you want to see your mother?” He talked like a drug freak. The only other time I heard his voice was when the guys would come down to ask what supplies he needed. That’s the only thing I heard him say, “Porta un po di vino.” Except he said “bino,” like a South American—he talka like dis, you know? That’s why I call him VB1. He made all the telephone calls. In the end, I got that guy who was mean in trouble. I said, “Hey, people, it’s ridiculous this guy trying to scare me so much psychologically.” They said, “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” And he never came again.
Then the other South American–sounding guy who I made the connection with came, VB2. I’m sure I had met one of these VB guys at Marcello’s. South Americans run the whole coke scene in Rome. He showed off by pulling all this money out of his pocket. He tried to freak me out. I went to my room, but he was making so much noise I couldn’t sleep, so I went back in and told him, “Get out.” We had a fight. I don’t know if they ever caught him, I don’t think so. It shows how fucked-up the police are. They had his voice from the phone calls, but they never recorded and printed them. I have so much proof, like that VB2 snores. They could go outside his cell at night and see if he snores, but they don’t want to.
I didn’t know anything at that time, no information. I still didn’t have my radio, so what I’d do is say, “I had a dream,” and I would say what I thought was happening. He told me his dreams. We did this every day, just VB2 and me comparing dreams. I would make up wild fantasy dreams and he’d make up sexual dreams. I liked him until the day he said, “I had a dream I fucked a woman and my cock was as big as a manganello.” A manganello is a policeman’s nightstick; it was an expression the Fascists used. If you think about a cock as weapon it relates to violence and ignorance. So I said, “I don’t want to hear.” We never spoke again.