Falcone, and Italians in general, either never mention or they downplay one of the most intriguing aspects of the Vitale story. Life within a criminal regime, or a shadow regime in this case, might drive anyone mad, but Vitale had his own reasons both for joining and for leaving the Mafia. The driving force throughout his life was an unrelenting crisis of masculinity. “Credevo di essere un pederasta e me lo sono portato sempre dietro questo pensiero.” [I thought I was a fag and I always carried that thought around inside me.] He became a mafioso “per protestare contro la mia natura, perché Dio me aveva creato quei complessi . . . Una protesta contro Dio, per il complesso di non essere uomo” [to protest against my nature, because God had given me this obsession . . . It was a protest against God for my obsession about not being a man]. Vitale’s return to faith, his confession, was probably as much an attempt to escape homosexuality as the Mafia. Tragically for him, whether as mafioso or pederasta, there was no way to escape a life of “crime.”9
Vitale’s sense of isolation must have been intense, both within the Mafia and in Sicilian society at large, exactly the solitude gang life is supposed to correct. Like the straight boy Juan Flythe in Baltimore, Vitale did finally try to live up to his own peculiar notion of goodness, though he had to do it alone. Some people are more comfortable going solo, and they may not be reaching for goodness at all but embracing a Nazi- or Mafia-like inversion of morality on their own. No gang needed. The last case in this volume is about someone like this.
There’s a chance this killer was at least vaguely aware of the whole concept of gay panic. He may have counted on it for safety when, for much more obscure reasons, he killed. He may have had an instinct that the public would despise his victim, exactly as it turned out many people did, and he may even have been canny about his status as a “juvenile” or about possessing what I earlier called “cuteness.” Whether such unnerving and dark confidence was real—I fear it was—this killer was still heartbreakingly young.
8
WEBER AND KATEHIS, 2009
I. Boy, Man
On March 22, 2009, a Sunday, the actual drama—murder, flight, capture—was almost over. But the news was coming out faster and faster, like the spokes of a wheel going blurry, then oddly static: there was too much information to process. Everyone involved, down to the accused murderer’s family cat Fluffy, had a presence on the Internet. MySpace, Craigslist, YouTube, twistedsiblings.com, georgeweber.net, ibeatyou.com, XTube, vampirefreaks.com.
Murders are mostly local news. Like all great international cities, New York also has a local side, a sort of urban private life that isn’t necessarily part of its public image. For instance, when outsiders hate or adore “New York,” the boroughs other than Manhattan often don’t figure in their thoughts. This was a local story, a Brooklyn and Queens story. Even the Manhattan part of it—the media-insidery sifting through all that titillating online “evidence”—was somehow local, an example of the cozy Manhattan compulsion to act more dreadful than you think you really are, to signal that you’re wise to the world.
A body was found in the parlor-floor apartment of a brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, right around the corner from the 76th Precinct house. This wasn’t the fanciest section of rapidly gentrifying Carroll Gardens; the buildings on this stretch of Henry Street weren’t all fussily restored. The area looked a lot like neighborly New York of a long time ago. Indeed, many old-timers still lived there, and newcomers had adopted their habit of weekend stoop sales. You got a few dollars and unloaded junk like LPs, that ironic Elvis plate, or a birdcage spray-painted gold. But the March Sunday when the body was found was too early in the season for the sales to start. It was cool. The street was empty. Stubborn brown leaves from the previous fall hung on the ends of twigs.
Coworkers worried about the victim when he missed a Saturday shift. They called the police. Cops walked around the corner from the 76th Precinct house to the Henry Street building for the first time just after midnight. Nothing seemed amiss. After more anxious calls, they came back at eight thirty Sunday morning. This time a neighbor mentioned hearing the water running in the parlor-floor apartment. The water had been running for days. Something was wrong.
For the rest of the day it was cop cars, news vans, the medical examiner’s truck, yellow tape, idling videographers. A man in a white jumpsuit appeared at the front door and ushered out two others in ME windbreakers, who maneuvered gingerly down the stoop carrying a body in a thick black vinyl bag lashed to a spine board.
Because it was the weekend, the story began the old-fashioned way: information was gathered by reporters who called up police press officers and wrote squibs for newspapers and wire services. The local TV stations made a chopped salad of old images of the victim, of the black bag coming down the stairs, of God-I-can’t-believe-it interviews with neighbors. As those images shuffled in the background of one broadcast, a plummy voice-over droned the usual platitudes: “A man who lived for the news, who, with his tragic death, is now making the news . . .” Because, ironically, the victim had been a reporter too. The Daily News and the New York Post love murders. They dove in. But even the New York Times put the story on page eighteen of its Sunday “Region” section. The local New York edition only, but still.
The victim, it turned out, was well-known locally. He had that hale-fellow-well-met retail fame that prompts the owners of your favorite bars and restaurants to ask if they can hang your picture on the wall. (Best Lasagna in New York!) He was an ABC Radio newsman, George Weber. He even had a jaunty trademark, George Weber, the news guy. So, fairly or not, the news was already a little newsworthier than your average murder.
Mainstream reporters got the hard information efficiently. Weber was forty-seven (forty-eight if he’d lived until Monday, his birthday). He’d worked for about twelve years on various shows at the big New York affiliate, WABC NewsTalkRadio 77. He’d done the first two hours of Curtis and Kuby in the Morning as all but an equal partner. But that popular program, run by Curtis Sliwa (founder of the Guardian Angels in another lifetime) and attorney Ron Kuby, ended when the affiliate picked up Don Imus’s Imus in the Morning.
Weber stayed on. He helped Michael Bloomberg on the mayor’s Friday show. But he’d finally, and just recently, lost his job to cost-cutting. He found a little work at the affiliate’s national network, WABC.
No longer a guy with a regular job, he was now a benefitless “freelance anchor.” His news show was still picked up by owner-operated stations like 1010 WINS in New York. It was a typical “great recession” job story. He wrote about it—no sour grapes, of course—on a blog his friend and ex-producer Frank Morano encouraged him to start, georgeweber.net. “Hey, it’s George Weber, the news guy . . .”
With so many media-savvy types surrounding Weber, it was simple work for reporters to get eulogistic quotes to plug into their stories. To a network vice president, Weber was “a consummate journalist.” Ron Kuby spoke easily and eloquently about his ex-colleague to Tim Fleischer of ABC TV. Even the mayor issued a statement: “George called news events as he saw them with little regard to party politics or ideology.”
On Monday, the police fanned out around the Henry Street brownstone. But the end came quickly. By Tuesday, with his own father’s agonized participation, a suspect was captured (in Middletown, New York, about halfway to the Catskills).
When the suspect was driven back to the 76th Precinct from Middletown, he was apparently talking pretty freely. A Brooklyn assistant DA, Marc Fliedner, showed up at the precinct house to discuss charges. He spoke to the father. He interviewed the suspect on video. The city’s police commissioner himself, Ray Kelly, gave a press conference describing in appropriately staid terms what sounded a lot like a gay hookup gone awry or even a hustler murdering his john. Apparently, the suspect had confessed.
Details started coming out that hinted at a salacious underside to Weber’s eulogies. It had already been reported that he was stabbed anywhere from ten to fif
ty times, including defensive wounds to his hands. A witness had seen a man on a cell phone pacing in front of the Henry Street brownstone on Friday night. A neighbor had later heard a thump.
Now reports came out that the victim’s legs, or both his hands and legs, had been bound with duct tape. An informant mentioned rough sex. There was no evidence of forced entry, so the victim knew his killer or at least opened the door for him. Word got out that drugs and alcohol were involved. Erotic snapshots were found in the apartment.
TV cameras were trained on the ’60s modernist 76th Precinct building when the Middletown captive was led out. A young, thuggishly handsome man, shaved head, olive skin, handcuffed, he wore a teenager’s, or criminal’s, default expression of scorn. He looked at the cameras with black-eyed indifference. His upper lip was swollen, injured during the capture in Middletown. His black sweatshirt and khakis were oversized, though not in the fashionably baggy way. In fact, the police had given him these clothes. They kept as evidence what he’d been wearing when caught.
The kid was John Katehis (the middle syllable is stressed and rhymes with “say”), and, though he looked older, he was only sixteen, a minor.10 SIXTEEN! ROUGH SEX! MURDER! FAMOUS NEWSMAN! Even the dourest observer must have felt a shiver of tabloid fascination.
The media and gossip website Gawker, an aggregator and commenter on the news, had already noted Weber’s murder over the weekend. The site, which is famous for half-put-on/half-real Manhattan dreadfulness, has a keen moralistic streak invisible to many of its readers and, especially, to the targets of its scorn. Hamilton Nolan wrote a rueful post imagining the Daily News’ description of the suspect as a male “companion” (his ironic quotes) and expected the Post to up the ante to “Sex Slay” in the title of a Tuesday article. “Not what . . . you would want your legacy to be immediately after your untimely death,” he noted.
Tawdry or not, Nolan pursued the story with the you-decide completism of modern Internet journalism. He found Katehis’s eerie MySpace page and countless photos of the accused killer posing with items from his very scary collection of knives. Nolan posted everything on Gawker, including links to Katehis’s childish YouTube videos of himself: the boy giggles helplessly while listening to the crank phone calls he made for his site JSKCranks. In another he boasts with tough-guy profanity about a seventy-five-dollar bottle of “fucking” Absinthe he just bought, kisses it, and concludes, “Now I’m gonna go try me some of this fucking shit.”
Nolan even put up a link to the diciest item Katehis had online. As “greekjohn92,” Katehis had posted on XTube a forty-six-second video of himself with the descriptive title, “Wanking my semi-soft uncut cock.” From a steep overhead angle, against a background of dun carpet, the faceless video shows an olive hand doing exactly what the title says to a darker olive penis. “Semi-soft” may betray a touch of cautious underselling from an otherwise cocky boy, but the video is just what you’d expect from a kid showing off his junk. A Gawker commenter pointed out that since everyone now knew greekjohn92 was sixteen instead of eighteen (as his XTube profile claimed), maybe it was best to leave the link alone for legal reasons.11Gawker removed it.
What kind of a sixteen-year-old was this? Would his MySpace self-portrait really be so eerie except in retrospect?
My name is John, I am sixteen years of age and live in Queens, New York. I enjoy long conversations, drinking, bike riding, hanging out, roof hopping, hanging off trains, any type of Parkour exercise, Extreme Violence (chaos, Anarchy, ect.) Video Games, Violent Movies and listening to my ipod. I am a very easy person to talk to. I like to do crazy and wild things.im like an adrenaline junkie, I’m always looking for a big thrill, I’m a big risk taker and like to live life on the edge.I am an Extremist, an Anarchist, and a Sadomasochist. As long as you show respect for me i will show respect for you, if you disrespect me, then i will fucking break your neck. To learn more about me just send me a message or catch me on aim, my screen name is johnkatehis92, my yahoo is greeksatan92[AT]yahoo.com, johnkatehis92[AT]yahoo.com and my msn is greekjohn92[AT]hotmail.com. You can ask me any kind of questions, I am always happy to chat with a new person. Oh and be sure to check out my crank call videos at youtube.com/JSKCranks, and see if u can beat any of my challenges or beat my scores at challenges, at ibeatyou.com my screen name is crazyjohn92. [sic throughout]
The “92” that keeps showing up refers to his birth date, June 26, 1992.
It’s simple to identify the quotes that caught journalists’ attention. Here was a kid who would break your neck if you dissed him. But maybe it wasn’t as scary as that. XTube has convenient switches to indicate your own sex and the sex of the person you’re interested in. Katehis was signed up as an eighteen-year-old male interested in women. His hobbies were buying swords, playing video games, fighting, and sex. His self-presentation, including flaunting his penis, makes him look like a precocious and arrogant fifteen-year-old trying to intrigue dream-babes. Since he hadn’t logged on for a year, the babes must not have been beating down his door.
Based on his confessions, the story came out that Katehis had responded to Weber’s “Adult Gigs” post on Craigslist. That could have been a one-time thing, an easy sixty bucks. What really seemed strange was Weber’s fetish. The title of his post was “Smotherme.” He liked to be smothered, and that’s what he’d hired this risk-taking kid to do.
Soon this material was all over news sites, and Internet commenters started to weigh in. Katehis had to be at least bi. He was gay and obviously couldn’t deal with it. No! Weber was the criminal! A forty-seven-year-old pedophile having sex with a kid. He deserved it. Katehis just went over on a lark and freaked out. But look at those pictures of him with his machetes! What about his parents? Anybody who would do that is obviously a demented fag. Good riddance to both of them. Some, who claimed to know Katehis or to be fellow students of his, said, “He was quiet,” “He’s not a tough guy,” “It’s so weird.”
The anonymous commentariat debated pedophilia vs. ephebophilia and whether smothering counted as sex, because real sex had to cost more than sixty dollars, and what was the ultimate responsibility of a sixteen-year-old, anyway—all this time joking with the Internet’s usual clever, postprivate savagery—and the aggregate judgment turned against Katehis. There were a few firebrands like “Damian Hospital” who railed against Weber the pedophile in a long series of posts, and shouted a rhetorical “FREE JOHN KATEHIS!” into the hush of the web. In his opinion, “that sick bastard” Weber’s reputation was being protected by bigwig media friends.
To most people, Katehis seemed troubled and troubling. He went to a special school in Westchester. Online he claimed to be a satanist. As “John Psychedelic,” he put up a page on twistedsiblings.com (a Goth-oriented social site linked to but not affiliated with MySpace) that included a self-description more or less identical to the MySpace one. But instead of breaking necks, he warns, “I don’t take shit from anybody, so if your [sic] looking for problems, fuck off!” And between “anarchist” and “sadomasochist” he adds that he’s a “LaVeyan satanist.”
John Psychedelic’s twistedsiblings page is a red and black symphony of pentagrams, a horned devil, and a large background photo of Anton LaVey. There’s an image of a lapel button with the slogan, I HATE christians.
Katehis’s satanism turns up everywhere. In scores of online pictures Katehis is almost always doing one of three things: brandishing a knife, giving the camera the finger, or, very frequently, making the devil’s horns sign with his index and fifth fingers. He has a large tattoo of a pentagram on his right shoulder with 6-6-6 between the star’s upper points and Diablo in gothic letters below. He often appears wearing a silver pentagram around his neck and another on the middle finger of his right hand. His T-shirts (always black) advertise ghoulish third-wave heavy metal bands like Cannibal Corpse, Lamb of God, the Black Dahlia Murder.
But how seriously can you take a sixteen-year-old’s infatuation with satanism? Even with the tattoo. Heavy metal
music and antisocial anger are part of the classic teenage bag of tricks. Furthermore, Katehis specifies LaVeyan satanism.
Though books on satanism were found at his family home (Katehis’s father later tells me they were his own), it’s unlikely Katehis could have read deeply about an occult practice that has hardly any depth to begin with. LaVeyan satanism isn’t what it sounds like. A 1960s Hollywood invention of Anton LaVey, it began as more of a Playboy Mansion party than a coven. It denies the existence of God and Satan both. Despite its original, spooky mise-en-scène, LaVeyan satanism’s tenets are actually rather humane. There’s a blanket, hedonistic replacement of indulgence for abstinence, but adherents are expected to behave pretty well. Still, vengeance is prescribed over turning the other cheek. And if someone in your home annoys you, you’re meant to treat them cruelly and without mercy. Maybe this is what Katehis was getting at when he talked about breaking necks.
The satanic details are beside the point. If Katehis had been going to Exeter, say, instead of a school for troubled kids in Westchester, he might well have fixated on Nietzsche. Katehis’s “LaVeyan satanism” is the masculine ideal of perfect self-reliance. Many boys are drawn to that fantasy. For them, the simplistic seems stronger than kryptonite. When they read, “Anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” they feel like they’ve been struck by intellectual lightning. How serious could this boy be?
At the same time, George Weber now appeared before the public completely exposed. You just couldn’t get more naked. He would have hated it. He would have raged or died of shame. First off, he didn’t think of himself as gay. Besides harboring a different set of desires, he had the waning white-picket-fence hopes that often afflict very cheerful, very public personalities. Friends, family, no one, knew about his secret fetish except the hustlers he hired. One of them remembers spotting George with a crowd of bar friends in Brooklyn. They exchanged a glance of fond but forlorn knowingness straight out of the 1950s. The hustler, ex- by that time, says he understood not to say hello.
American Honor Killings Page 18