A blue-collar social philosopher before bouncing around the country for his radio career, Weber had grown up outside of Philadelphia. His parents still lived there, as did a sister with a perfect, straight-arrow husband. Weber might as well have been South Boston Irish, though. The blarney, the relentless good cheer, the ethics veering between maudlin and vengeful, the pretty serious alcoholism. He had a hard drinker’s gut and a hard drinker’s bloated face, pillowy along the jawline. He had wispy hair and bad skin, pasty and prone to flush. He looked older than he was.
Apart from the bar friends and the media friends and the neighbors, Weber’s social world revolved around his beloved dachshund Noodles and, for more articulate intimacy (and sex), hustlers. They talked to him. And he talked to them. It was friendly. He explained to one that the smothering thing started when he was a kid. An older boy had wrestled him to the ground and put his hands over his mouth. Somehow Weber remembered liking it—the scare, the contact eroticism. For an irrepressible talker like him, a story was a much better explanation than anything as dryly descriptive as “autoerotic asphyxiation.”
In any case, smothering worked for him. One guy who answered his “Smotherme” ad on Craigslist explained that Weber never even took his clothes off. He would lie supine on the bed, maybe gripping the thin steel bars of the headboard. The hustler said all he had to do was straddle him, clamp down on Weber’s mouth and nose, and Weber, staring at his own reflection in a cheval glass tipped over the bed, would eventually come. Meanwhile, the hustler gazed at a black-and-white art photograph of a movie-house marquee hanging on the wall over the bed. If he got bored, he confessed, he might press down a little to make George come faster. But that was it. It was hardly sex at all.
Fetishes are by definition unusual, but this one was particularly eerie. After all, it was flirting with death. People shied from imagining it. At one point, the no-nonsense trial judge Neil Firetog couldn’t keep himself from calling it “this smothering garbage.” The hustler remembers the movie marquee photo so well because he was avoiding looking down at George’s face. The broken capillaries disappeared in an all-over redness, purpleness, and somehow the eyelids gaped slightly as if air or blood were straining at ducts around the eyeballs. One time, smothering George from behind for a change, he says George lost consciousness, becoming dead weight as a few tablespoons of vomit slipped from his mouth. Thinking he’d killed him, knowing he could have, the hustler refused to see George ever again.
George went on, though. He got into light bondage. Sometimes he was short of cash. Perhaps, every time he had sex, he felt a self-disgust as elaborate, as ceremonial, as his sexual practices had become. But outwardly he was a sweetheart, loved by neighbors, coworkers.
His secret hustler family liked him too. In fact, the hustlers worried about his getting into trouble. All was innocent enough while George sat watching wrestling on TV until he was aroused, but then he’d lead any stranger into the bedroom where everything was set up. One of his regulars, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to John Katehis, said he talked with friends about the danger George ran of meeting the wrong guy.
Mostly George was alone. He’d drink rum-and-cokes from the moment he came home, or wander down to Angry Wade’s, a faux-old sawdusty red stucco tavern on Smith Street with a roaring animal head on a shield over the door and football on the wide-screen TVs.
Even after Noodles suddenly died, George planned his second annual Noodlepalooza party. He cadged refrigerator space for beer from a neighbor, throwing out jovially, “Oh, and you can come too!” The marquee guests at the first Noodlepalooza had been Joe Franklin and Bernie Goetz (a weird New York personality locally famous since his 1984 vigilante subway shooting spree). This time George had a crowd of sixty and an a cappella doo-wop group. He wrote about it on georgeweber.net.
On Friday, March 20, the day before he was killed, George uploaded a photograph of his thick ankle and lower leg to his blog. The hairless white skin was covered with red spots. In the accompanying post he wrote: “Many of you know I have had two bouts with bedbugs in my over ten years at this location in Carroll Gardens, so my radar is always on when it comes to the blood sucking bastards that made my life hell.” He explains that he’s gotten rid of them thanks to a good exterminator and comments on a political aspect of New York City’s bedbug hysteria, then in full swing. “I predict, thousands of additional residents will be infested with bedbugs by the time this ‘advisory board’ reports back to the mayor with it’s [sic] recommendations. Then, what? How much longer will it then take to actually carry out the panel’s advice? 2010? 2011? Too long!” After posting that cri de coeur, maybe he glanced at his e-mail from the day before. “From: Satan Katehis [[email protected]] To: smother boy [[email protected]] Hey dude its me John. I changed my number. my new number is 347 634 0105.”
II. John’s Version
After he was tackled in Middletown, John told police his name was Nick Smith. The playacting didn’t last long. While his father Spiro, who’d come along as part of a ruse, was hustled back to Brooklyn in another car, John was rear-handcuffed and put in a police department Chevy Impala. A Detective Yarrow drove. A second detective sat in the front passenger seat. In back, next to John, sat a third detective, James Normile, a trim gray-haired man with a slight jowliness and the wide-open eyes and flat-footedness of a TV second banana.
As Normile tells it, he explained to his prisoner that it was going to be a long drive and that John could ask for a bathroom stop if necessary. John began to relax. He said he was sixteen. This was apparently his first truth. Maybe he believed it would make a difference in the long run. When asked what he wanted to be called, he told Normile his real name was John. And he said he’d killed Weber by accident, because the man had pulled a knife, and . . . At this point, Normile says, he told John they could get into the story back at the 76th Precinct (Miranda and all that). So the exchange turned to small talk.
John may have been a little disconcerted to find the detectives so unvengeful. Asked if Middletown was quiet, he told the older men about the area’s demographics. A lot of Mexicans lived there. When a marked law-enforcement vehicle appeared on the highway next to them, he noted their own car was going over the speed limit and wondered jokingly if the Impala could make a getaway if this turned into “hot pursuit.” By the end of the trip he was laughing now and then. He was still handcuffed.
Since the capture had occurred at about ten forty-five p.m., they didn’t make it to the Brooklyn precinct house until one. Normile interviewed John with a colleague, and by two forty-five they had a written statement. Normile wrote it out himself in block print. A stitched-up injury had completely immobilized John’s right forefinger, so he had trouble writing. Even so, before the interview, Normile was careful to get John to sign a simple form stating that he understood his Miranda rights. “Do you understand?” the form asked six times after spelling out each right. “Yes” was circled six times and John managed his initials “JSK” next to every one. After he finished writing the statement, Normile asked John to read and sign it as well. Did the kid want any changes made first? John asked only that “accidentally” be inserted before “. . . stabbing him in the neck.”
Meanwhile, an assistant DA had shown up at the 76th Precinct. Marc Fliedner is a small man with an easy political glibness and the taste in blue suits and red ties to go with it. On this occasion he dressed down. He interviewed John on video at four twenty-three in the morning with Normile in the room.
III. The DVD
The DVD opens with a shot of what looks like an old movie clapper. A hand appears and writes in black marker, “0423,” the time. The hand then moves to the space for the name of the interviewee, “Jonathan Katehis,” and crosses out “Jonathan,” replacing it with “John.” The camera pans to show who’s in the room. After that, it’s one long, unflinching shot of John.
The kid has the slightly ashen look the olive-skinned get when overtired or stressed. His
buzz-cut hair and eyes have their usual obsidian gleam. But he’s animated. He frequently swivels back and forth or shifts the entire chair on its wheels. His forearms only rarely come to rest on a yellow tabletop. Behind him are what look like closed metal shutters, a grated radiator, and over one shoulder, the clapper-like card is stuck to a wall now. On the table are the black mic and a half-eaten donut on a blue-rimmed plate.
John is wearing a black bomber jacket over a T-shirt. He speaks with a trace of the tough guy’s d’ese-and-d’ose outer-borough accent. Sometimes his voice rises in a staccato ha-ha-ha of nervous laughter. A man-among-men baritone returns abruptly. Throughout the interview he has a blustery confiding tone, as if he believes that, through sheer energy, he can make his listeners understand what it was like to be in his shoes.
While his right hand, the injured one with an immobile, slightly curving forefinger, is surprisingly kinetic, his left hand is even busier. Whenever he isn’t making explanatory gestures or stroking the side of his nose, which he does a couple of times (a tic reputed to betray liars), John uses his left hand constantly to dust donut crumbs from himself. He does this with an unexpected, aristocratic finickiness. He doesn’t often pick up a piece of the broken donut. He takes a bite two or three times at most. But his elegant fingers twiddle endlessly over the plate as if his hand were an infinite source of crumbs or stickiness.
In response to Fliedner’s questioning (on the DVD the ADA comes across as abundantly patient and relaxed yet serious), John tells the story, some details of which were soon to leak.
* * *
John says he sold a Sidekick and another smartphone on Craigslist and he was checking around the site and found a “smother thing” in the “Adult Gigs” section. He figured it would be an easy sixty dollars. He and George exchanged pictures. George’s weren’t explicit, just hands over his mouth and nose, and John thought he could do that. They had a back-and-forth about setting up a time, and John finally took the subway to Carroll Gardens on a Friday afternoon. He picked up a pack of M&Ms and a Stewart’s root beer (probably at the Rite-Aid next to the subway entrance on Smith Street). He says he followed George’s directions to 561 Henry Street, which was a straight shot past Carroll Park, down President Street.
In front of the Henry Street brownstone, John continues on the DVD, he phoned George. George came to the front door and let him in. John was still carrying his root beer, but he must have been about finished, because George offered him a Bud Light as soon as they got in the apartment. In an odd detail that must refer to Noodlepalooza 2, John says the older man joked that he had a lot of beer left over from a party. His friends had run through all the hard stuff. George was drinking something himself, but John doesn’t know what. It was in a red plastic glass later found in the bedroom—maybe rum-and-Coke. After a minute of beer talk, George said, “Let me show you what’s going on in the other room.”
On the bed in the bedroom (here, John speaks to the ADA and detective with a buddylike expression of shared distaste) were mirrors, black duct tape, and rope and scissors. George explained how he like to be smothered, and John tried it, gingerly putting his hand over George’s mouth and nose without pressing down.
After that delicate introduction to his fetish, George led John back into the living room. George had a chest he used as a coffee table. According to John, the inside of the chest was strewn with loose cocaine. On the DVD John tries to be helpful: “I assume it was cocaine. You guys have got to test it.” George took some out and cut three lines for John but had none himself. “I was hyperjumpy after that. I don’t take drugs. I’m—I got super paranoid.” He says George explained that he wanted “the stuff you use to clean VCR tapes” sprayed on a sock and held to his mouth. (In the written statement he’d called this stuff “poppers.”) “VCR tapes?” the ADA wonders. John lets out a high-pitched laugh, “VCR, yeah, I thought it was extinct.”
George and John returned to the bedroom. They were both clothed. George got on the bed. John says he wrapped the duct tape around the man’s ankles three or four times. Helpfully again, he explains that if police found any tape on his hand it must have been from when George was trying to get it off his ankles later, after the struggle. But George was on his stomach at this point. John says the older man turned over and pulled a knife from his pocket, probably just to show it off or something, but “I’m jumpy as shit from what I just told you.” On the DVD he examines his dirty nails for a moment.
Fliedner asks, “Are you on the bed?” John shakes his head and spits out a fleck of something before saying no. Then, in order to demonstrate how George must have pulled the knife from his right pocket after turning over, John briefly makes as if he’s George lying on the bed. He says he (John) freaked out and grabbed for the knife.
Like someone patting a ball of dough into shape, he mimes their wrestling for the knife with his hands. Pressed, he says, “I’m leaning over the bed.” He leans. “He’s lying on his back.” He leans back. He raises his voice a bit: “Both of our hands were on the knife. We were fussing over this knife.” He was cut himself in the struggle. He holds up the injured finger.
More questions: “What were you talking about? Was there any conflict?”
In a striking flash of anger, John raises his voice: “NO! It was like I just told you. We were fussing over the knife and it slips and goes into his neck and he starts cursing and shit.”
John is at once calm again. He returns to the scene. “I’m bleeping paranoid. Here I don’t remember the sequence.”
Fliedner asks whether John was carrying any knives himself. He mentions that John’s own father said he usually carried two. But John had already explained in the written statement that he had no knife on him because he was coming straight from school where you weren’t allowed to carry a knife. On tape, he repeats, “I just said I came from school.” The preposterous idea of carrying knives to school causes him to erupt, “Ha-ha-ha!” with the same strained, high-pitched laughter as before.
Now, on the DVD, the wheels of John’s chair squeak suddenly. He leans forward and grabs his right thigh. He’s felt a shooting pain. Fliedner asks if he wants to stand up or stop. But John says the pain is “from the antibiotics or something.”
* * *
Meanwhile, in court, while the DVD is being played, John’s cheeks have turned distinctly red under his terra cotta complexion. No one enjoys seeing themselves “played back.” John’s father Spiro has scuttled from one side of the courtroom to the other to get a better view of the video. He can’t stop sniffling, sobbing almost, as he watches.
* * *
The video interview continues. “It’s all out of sequence,” John says. “This dude’s fucking stabbed and I’m bleeding the hell out of my hand . . .” He says he “ran around searching for shit.” He took a bottle of whiskey and “chugged” some, but stopped because he wasn’t sure if it might thin his blood and make the bleeding worse.
“I don’t know how I did it so fast,” he explains when asked why he went through George’s collection of children’s lunch boxes—twenty of them lined up atop the kitchen cabinets. He found “like just sippy cups” inside, “Ha-ha-ha!” Up on the countertop he started to feel dizzy. He ran water from the kitchen faucet over his deeply cut finger.
He went into the bathroom and tried to rinse the finger again but the water was too hot, so he took the lid off the toilet tank to soak his hand in cold water. He found some gauze bandages and tape in “the—like—the—” he makes an oddly elegant movement with his left hand and Fliedner supplies the word “mirror.” “Yeah.”
His clothes were bloody, so he took them off. He didn’t want to get blood on his sneakers or on his Harley jacket. Mentioning this, his hands gesture toward his lapels. “That jacket?” Fliedner asks in a how-bout-that tone of voice. Yes. John was trying to keep blood off the very jacket he’s wearing during the interview. He explains he sprayed himself with some Axe body spray he found in the bathroom and dressed in some of George
’s clothes. He wore one of George’s leather jackets and carried the Harley jacket in his left hand.
“I’m tripping, I’m paranoid,” he emphasizes repeatedly. He says he went back into the bedroom where George was still mumbling. He reached into George’s pocket and took sixty dollars, “what he was going to pay me for this smothering garbage.” (It’s a different-sounding dismissive from when the judge picks the phrase up later.) As John reached into George’s pocket his hand dragged the older man’s pants down, and the body, or still-softly-vocalizing man, fell onto the floor.
“He still has his boxers on,” John answers Fliedner’s question with a little frown of propriety. He says he picked up the knife and took it with him, a flip-knife with a tiny knob on the three-inch blade so it could be opened with one hand. In the written statement he’d judged it a pretty good knife but added that he had a nicer one in his own collection. (“Yeah, I like my swords and knives,” he admits defensively to Fliedner on the DVD.)
“I close the door behind me. That’s something I do everywhere.” At the foot of the brownstone’s steps, he says, he turned right, then right again on President Street. “I dispose” of the knife by throwing it by a tree. “I was walking calmly. I was walking quickly.”
Whatever John had used to bandage his finger wasn’t holding. He’d severed a small artery, so blood pulsed out with every systole. He’d need stitches or a tourniquet to stop it. In the subway, he says, a “Hindu” couple swiped a MetroCard for him at the turnstile. He took the G train north, back toward Queens. He moved from car to car; his bleeding was attracting too much attention. Wherever he sat, his throbbing forefinger filled the shallow depression of the plastic subway seat next to him with blood. A stranger fished a fresh sock from his gym bag and handed it to him to stanch the flow.
American Honor Killings Page 19