16
Apologies and Memoirs
Finally, more than a quarter century after Martha Moxley’s murder, the trial began in May 2002. Dominick never missed an opportunity on TV or in his Vanity Fair column to take credit for bringing Michael Skakel, the Kennedy cousin, to justice in the murder of the fifteen-year-old girl from Greenwich, Connecticut.
At the trial, Dominick met a young reporter from Court TV, and he and Beth Karas became good friends, often sitting side by side to do live interviews for her cable network. It surprised Karas, after all his TV exposure, how nervous Dominick became before each live interview. “He would take out of his shirt pocket a little wallet photo of Dominique, and he kissed it and put it back in his pocket just before we went on,” said Karas. “It was a ritual.”
In the courtroom, Dominick sat near Dorthy Moxley. The lead defense attorney complained about the duo. “The jury isn’t looking at me—they’re looking at Dominick Dunne, they’re looking at Dorthy Moxley. It was like arguing against apple pie,” Mickey Sherman groused.
Dorthy Moxley, with her quick smile and homespun charm, embodied the prototypical all-American mom; and after the Simpson trial, Dominick emerged as the face of outraged, jaw-dropping injustice. Also, “Dominick became, after his daughter’s murder, a one-man crusade against people who got away with murder. Dominick was always a presence,” said Sherman.
Left out of Sherman’s all-American “apple-pie” dish was Mark Fuhrman, who covered the Skakel trial for Court TV. Moxley often invited him to sit behind her. She remained loyal to the detective for his help but realized it put her in an awkward position with the Greenwich police. She had no choice but to comply when Frank Garr invited her to the witness room but stopped Fuhrman from joining them there in the courthouse basement. “Mark, you can’t come down here,” said Garr. “This isn’t for you. Go back to the courtroom. You’re only a spectator.”
Dominick, as usual, proved more than adept at working both sides of the courtroom. He and Dorthy Moxley were friends again, although she always observed a polite distance. “I had a team of angels, and it was a culmination of all these things,” she said, careful to credit not only Dominick but also Frank Garr, Len Levitt, and Mark Fuhrman. “It was a joint effort. I’m adamant about that.”
Dominick also befriended Skakel’s lead attorney, Mickey Sherman. Aware of the flamboyant attorney’s fondness for the TV cameras, Dominick used his influence to get Sherman booked on Larry King Live and publicized his pull with the popular suspenders-wearing CNN host by arriving at the Norwalk, Connecticut, courthouse in the same white stretch limousine with the defense attorney.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized Sherman for being buddies with one of his family’s fiercest detractors, the attorney explained his relationship with Dominick to the aggrieved cousin. “We’re friends. What can I say? I’m a kiss-ass,” Mickey Sherman told Kennedy. Years later, he softened that description. “It was perceived by the Skakel family that I was trumpeting the enemy. But I had known Dominick before the trial. We were on many TV shows regarding criminal issues,” said Sherman.
Dominick’s relationship with Fuhrman proved equally controversial. It “shocked” the AP’s Linda Deutsch that her colleague had given the notorious detective the Sutton report. Also surprised was Ron Shipp, who, after his explosive testimony at the Simpson trial, stayed in touch with his reporter friend.
“Dominick phoned me specifically to talk about Mark. He was so pissed off,” said Shipp. Dominick told him, “Ron, I gave this stuff to Mark Fuhrman to do his book. Do you realize that son of a bitch never thanked me? I can’t believe it! You need to say something to him.” Especially galling to Dominick was how loyal he had been to the detective, even refusing to give the Sutton report to a rival reporter like Timothy Dumas.
Shipp was “never great friends” with Fuhrman when they worked in the LAPD together, and they had not talked in years. He did not make the call to the detective, despite Dominick being “livid.”
Two weeks later, Dominick phoned Shipp again. “Everything is good,” he said. “I talked to Mark. He apologized. Mark apologized.”
Dominick took personal interest in the trial, and not just as a reporter. He became distraught with the prosecution, especially the day attorney Chris Morano played the tape of Richard Hoffman’s interview with Michael Skakel, conducted for their book proposal. Dominick confronted Morano outside the courtroom afterward, asking, “Chris, why did you play that tape? It made me like Michael.” Morano did not explain but knew he made the right choice.
Dominick instead agreed with the press corps. The prosecution was losing the case. To make it worse, the defense team held a constant stream of press conferences, which usually ended with some reporter telling the TV cameras of the prosecutors’ incompetence.
“If we had tipped our hand earlier in the trial, any defense would come up with a way to explain it,” Morano explained. “A prosecutor’s job is to complete the dots in the final argument.”
Lead prosecutor Jonathan Benedict did just that in his final summation. Using Michael’s own words, he revealed that Skakel could not have known of Andrea Shakespeare’s whereabouts the night of the murder unless he was in the Skakel house—and not at the Terriens’. And it was Andrea who asked outside the Moxley house, “Michael, what are you doing?” It destroyed Michael’s alibi.
According to Morano, “The jury went ‘Oh my God!’ It was our final rebuttal.”
Skakel’s cousin Robert Kennedy Jr. made an hour-long visit to the court that day, his only appearance at the trial. He walked arm in arm with his aunt Ann Skakel McCooey, and when they passed Dominick, she whispered, “Jerk.”
Kennedy soon offered a somewhat lengthier critique of Dominick. He went on Larry King Live to call him “irresponsible,” and what he did as a journalist “almost criminal.” He told New York magazine, “The formula that Dominick Dunne has employed to fulfill his dreams has done damage to a lot of people. Dunne wants to write about two things, both of which are easy to sell: high-profile crimes and famous people. So he’s forced to try to make connections between his high-profile protagonists and the crimes.” Most significant, Kennedy wrote a fourteen-thousand-word defense of Michael Skakel titled “A Miscarriage of Justice” and got it published in the Atlantic Monthly. “I do not know that Ken Littleton killed Martha Moxley,” Kennedy opined in print. “I do know . . . that the state’s case against Littleton was much stronger than any case against Michael Skakel.” Kennedy went on to cite Dominick as being “the driving force” behind the prosecution, citing his creation of a “Lord of the Flies frenzy to lynch the fat kid.” He also called Dominick a “gossip.”
Dominick always said, “‘Gossip’ is an icky, bad word.” But he respected the practice. “It also means the complications that people have that they don’t let the public see. And I have the ability to get that information,” he boasted.
If Kennedy called him “a gossip,” Dominick called Kennedy “a little shit,” and he could not have been happier about the guilty verdict, which nonetheless left him stunned. He had been predicting for weeks that Michael Skakel would walk. (Dominick never could predict with any accuracy how a jury would decide.) A juror told him, “If Michael had kept his mouth shut all these years, this trial would never have happened.”
Dominick may have been surprised by the verdict but not caught off guard enough to refuse press interviews. Unlike his post–Simpson trial performance on CNN, he relished being the go-to man for most news outlets that day. While Timothy Dumas never succeeded in getting Dominick to give him the Sutton report, he nonetheless wrote Greentown: Murder and Mystery in Greenwich, America’s Wealthiest Community. In that book, he described the press scene outside the courthouse the day of the verdict, and how reporters mobbed the impeccably tailored writer from Vanity Fair. Dumas also observed that Len Levitt, the reporter who had been on the case the longest and done most of the heavy lifting, stood alone, virtually ignored by the press corp
s. Once again, Dominick emerged a star. “I’m more a worker bee,” Levitt admitted.
Dominick made efforts to mend fences. In an article for Vanity Fair, he wrote that Levitt found the “time to go to his son’s baseball games” during the hectic days of the trial. The mention touched the reporter. Dominick also gave Levitt a copy of his recently published memoir, The Way We Lived Then. “I want you to know about me,” he said.
Levitt thanked Dominick. He read the book. Amid the gossip, the beautiful party photographs, and its lexicon of Hollywood politics (Dominick subtitled the book Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper), Levitt found a curious subtext. Dominick wrote about a couple of very compromising incidents: one in which he did drugs with a stranger, who died unexpectedly from an overdose, and another in which Dominick was physically brutalized by a stranger during a drug binge. The Way We Lived Then also featured a photo of Dominick with the actor Frederick Combs; both men are shirtless on a beach and the caption reads “tripping on acid in Haiti.” After reading the book, Levitt asked its author, “I didn’t realize, but you’re making like you’re gay.”
Dominick smiled. “That’s true,” he said, then quickly changed the subject. Levitt recalled, “He pushed me to ask that question, that’s the feeling I got.”
With The Way We Lived Then, published in 1999, Dominick both sanitized and spiced up what he had written in his unpublished journals in the years from 1979 to 1983. In essence, he toned down the gay sex and amped up his drug use in the published memoir: The “psychopath” who bound his wrists, put a paper bag over his head, and threw lit matches at him was not invited into his Eastside sublet apartment to have sex, which is what Dominick first wrote in his private journal. In The Way We Lived Then, he wrote that his assailant was there only to share some cocaine, not have sex. Dominick also changed his prayer at that near-death moment. In The Way We Lived Then, Dominick implored, “God, help this man who is killing me.” In his journal, Dominick prayed to God to spare his children from having to read about another “sordid gay murder” in tomorrow’s newspaper.
Beyond the sex and drugs, there were other editorial changes. In his published memoir, “friends” disparaged his screenplay A Time to Smell the Roses in a way “that made me cringe with shame at my own lines.” In the private journal, they are not friends but rather close relatives. It was John Gregory Dunne who offered the scalding criticism, while Joan Didion listened in silence.
17
Safra and Paranoia
The cover of New York magazine called Dominick Dunne “America’s most famous journalist.” Television pushed him to the top. In 2002, signing with Court TV to host Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege, and Justice, he led a weekly investigative report on a famous crime, occasionally touching on ones he had already covered in Vanity Fair. He very much knew what he wanted the TV show to be. Joe Danisi, a Court TV producer, met with him at Patroon to discuss one of the first episodes, about Ann Woodward shooting her husband, Billy. Dominick knew every detail of the story, having written The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. The lunch went well until, much to Danisi’s surprise, Dominick pounded the table to shout across his charred haricots verts, “This show better be about my book, goddammit, or I’m not doing it!”
Shortly after the Skakel trial, Court TV chairman Henry Schleiff launched the network’s new show with a gala party. Dominick had been outraged when O.J. Simpson threw himself a welcome-home party after being acquitted. Dominick, a few years later, did not mind toasting the Skakel guilty verdict at his Court TV party for Power, Privilege, and Justice. He even pricked the controversy by inviting Mickey Sherman, who, despite losing the case, had no intention of staying away. “And they were celebrating the verdict, which was obscene,” the lawyer said.
Michael Skakel spent eleven years in prison, but after launching several appeals he was released on $1.2 million bail in 2013 to await a possible retrial. A judge ruled that Skakel had received an unfair trial due to his not being adequately represented.
Fortunately for Dominick, the Skakel trial ended in 2002 just as another major murder trial began. At least, Dominick considered it major. It is possible he might have been only mildly interested in the mysterious fire that took Edmond Safra’s life, if not for the fact that the Lebanese Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire had a most fascinating wife. Over the next two years, Dominick returned to the Safra saga repeatedly in the pages of Vanity Fair, and would have written about it up to his death in 2009 if Graydon Carter had not put a stop to the articles. Or had influential people told the editor to stop publishing Dominick’s articles on the Safras?
Carter denied any outside pressure or interference. Dominick refused to believe the editor’s denial for the simple reason that Lily Safra made the story absolutely irresistible, in his expert opinion.
The fire in the Safras’ penthouse apartment in Monaco was set on December 3, 1999. There was never any doubt who started it. Edmond Safra, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, employed no fewer than seven nurses, the most recently hired one being a former Green Beret named Ted Maher. When the Monaco police first arrested Maher, he claimed he had been attacked by two men, sustained serious knife wounds to his abdomen, and started the fire to set off the alarm system, which, for some reason, had been disconnected that evening despite his boss being a total security freak. Equally mysterious, no guards were on duty.
Dominick never met a victim he did not like, and just as he thought Marvin Pancoast had taken the rap for killing Alfred Bloomingdale’s mistress, he thought Maher innocent of deliberately killing his boss. So what if Maher signed a confession? It was “a confession in a language the American nurse didn’t speak, without an interpreter present,” he wrote in Vanity Fair. Also, Maher’s wife, Heidi, claimed to have been “kidnapped” by Monaco authorities, her passport taken and withheld. Maher signed the confession to free his wife so she could go home to America to care for their three children. And even more bizarre, Safra’s Republic Bank of New York had collaborated with “the FBI to expose the Russian Mafia’s international money-laundering operation.” Safra boasted far more powerful enemies than a former Green Beret soldier looking to play hero by starting a fire so he could “save” Safra’s life and maybe get a big bonus at the end of the year. That was the way Dominick saw it. Besides, Safra paid well. Maher received an annual salary of $170,000 for being one of seven nurses.
Dominick liked the international intrigue, as well as Ted Maher’s hard-luck story. But he absolutely loved Lily Safra’s good-luck story. Born Lily Watkins, she came to be worth over $1 billion through the course of four marriages. It fascinated Dominick how Lily’s second husband, Alfredo Monteverde, happened to die. He reportedly committed suicide in 1969 by shooting himself twice in the heart. As Dominick was quick to point out, when a person kills himself by gunshot there typically are not two bullet holes found in the heart of the corpse. Regarding husband number four, Edmond Safra rewrote his will only two weeks before his death, and Dominick had it on good authority that the deceased’s brothers were less than happy with the rewrite job.
“The damnation of Ted Maher, the low man on the nursing staff’s totem pole, had begun,” Dominick wrote in Vanity Fair. In his coverage, he begged Amnesty International to get involved. Unfortunately, Dominick alienated Maher’s Monegasque lawyer by writing about what he considered Donald Manasse’s weak defense of the accused.
Dominick made sure to get along better with Maher’s American lawyer, Michael Griffith, but failed to ingratiate himself with the citizens of Monaco when he quoted W. Somerset Maugham’s cryptic swipe at the principality, calling it “a sunny place for shady people.”
The trial at the Palais de Justice lasted only ten days, but in that time Dominick met and quickly befriended a wealthy American woman who was a self-described “sucker for a murder case.” As Mia Certic explained her interest, “The trial was a huge deal in Monaco. This place supposedly had no crime.”
Certic’s two teenage children were attending a Mo
naco school with ties to Edmond Safra, and she knew the principality like a second home. Her family divided the year between living in France and the United States, and she often read Dominick’s Vanity Fair articles, in particular, his pretrial coverage on Maher and Safra. “I was so shocked by the position taken before he came to Monaco. It was so out there, and on the wrong track,” she recalled. Certic recognized Dominick the moment he appeared in the courtroom and was not favorably inclined toward him. “Until I met him, and then I loved him,” said Certic, who fit the Dominick mold of stylish, vivacious, rich lady friends.
Donald Manasse experienced a similar quick change of heart. After objecting to Dominick’s negative portrait of him in Vanity Fair, the lawyer accepted his invitation to lunch in Monaco. Dominick gave tips on courtroom strategy. “I listened, not just because he was a famous writer who had experience in criminal cases,” said Manasse. “His natural instinct was to go to the side of the underdog.”
But Dominick was a cat swimming upstream in the Monaco court. “It’s a civil law system, the judges take a more active role in questioning people, it is very different,” said Manasse. “It was foreign to him. Who were the Johnnie Cochrans in the case? Who were the F. Lee Baileys?”
Even defendants can ask questions of a witness in the Monaco court, which led Dominick to become completely flummoxed when the chief rabbi of France arrived to testify. Manasse asked Rabbi Joseph Haim Sitruk if Edmond Safra would not have forgiven Ted Maher, who, according to his defense, never had any intention of inflicting harm on his employer.
Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 32