Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  The information Andrew gave on the pawnshop form led the authorities to the Normandy Plaza, where early Wednesday evening thirty cops showed up to swarm the hotel and search for him. “Within a couple of minutes they had five guys on the roof across the street,” says Normandy Plaza owner Roger Falin. “They had blocked off the street. Within minutes after that they had fifty or sixty people here.” Ronnie claims to have been harassed by the authorities because Andrew had listed his room number on the pawnshop form. “I had to hire a lawyer. The SWAT team did break the door. I threatened to sue,” he says, flopping on his bed to demonstrate how he was held. “I had the SWAT team in here spread-eagled over me.” Ronnie, however, claimed not to recognize Andrew’s picture. In fact, when the police first searched the Normandy Plaza, nobody at the Normandy Plaza claimed to recognize Andrew. Paul Philip says, “Unfortunately for us, when we were there, they hadn’t yet had that ‘moment of clarity.’”

  “First we search the rooms and come up empty,” says Rose Marie Antonacci-Pollock. But that soon changed, she continues. “Overnight, Miriam is able to describe him down to his well-manicured toes and well-developed calf muscles.” Miriam Hernandez defends her momentary lapse of memory: “I thought to myself, I know this face—I can’t place it. Maybe I was afraid. They made me so nervous when they said he was a killer—that he had already killed five people. I could not place him—he changed three different rooms … They said, ‘Andrew Cunanan.’ I said, ‘That name? No.’” All day Thursday she thought about it. “My head pounded all night; I couldn’t sleep. I came that morning, and you know when that light flashes in your brain? I went right to where I had his registry—I pulled it and called my brother and said, ‘This is the guy.’” Miriam claims that she called the FBI but that the agent was not at his desk. She later called the FDLE, which relayed a message to the Miami Beach police about 4 P.M. to check out room 322. The room had not been previously searched because the search warrants applied only to occupied rooms, and 322 was empty. But before the police got there Friday, Miriam recalls, “then comes everybody from every newspaper. That jerk was first.”

  She is referring to Chuck Goudie, a veteran crime reporter who was covering Cunanan for WLS-TV, the ABC-owned and -operated station in Chicago. Back in May, Goudie had done the first interview in San Diego with Erik Greenman, Andrew’s roommate, and had also covered Lee Miglin’s murder. According to Rad Berky, a longtime respected correspondent for WPLG, the ABC affiliate in Miami, Goudie was “in town doing a story on leads followed up on. He knew [police] had gone to the Normandy Plaza. He went there just to do a stand-up. While he’s out front, somebody from the hotel says, ‘I now remember him [Cunanan]. He’s been here. Come on in—his room is still here.’” Goudie knew immediately that police had not searched the room. “At the head of the tape the manager explains the police had not been in the room,” says Tom Doerr, then news director of WPLG. That minor detail, however, did not deter Goudie. Sensing a scoop of major proportions, Goudie not only entered the room—but also picked up and displayed for the camera all sorts of items that Andrew had left behind, from a hair-clippers box to porn magazines, thereby tainting it all as evidence.

  When the police showed up a short time later, they had no idea that Goudie had been allowed inside, and they proceeded to dust the room for prints. When Goudie’s piece appeared on the six o’clock news that night, the authorities were enraged. “If we would have been prosecuting the case, everything in that room would have been challenged and thrown out,” says Carlos Noriega. “God forbid we found the gun in there.” Rad Berky says of his ABC colleague, “It is one of the most egregious acts I’ve ever seen a reporter commit. He’s supposed to be one of the better reporters in this business. It’s symptomatic of this type of story. There’s this incredible urge to be first—I got what nobody else had.”

  “We always have to remind ourselves that no story is larger than the public safety and no story is worth a human life,” Tom Doerr stated on a piece that WPLG felt compelled to air in the wake of what Goudie had done. “We used the video from his report; we didn’t know he’d gone in before the cops,” says Doerr. “It’s kind of strange, but everyone is so hungry to get the exclusive, you don’t think.”

  Rather than apologize, Goudie made no comment. His news director, Phyllis Schwartz, issued a statement and suggested to Miami colleagues that it made no difference that he had entered before the police, because hotel personnel had told him that they had already cleaned the room. Doerr says, “Goudie insists he called police to tip them after he’d done the piece. But they blew him off.” Phyllis Schwartz said in her statement, “WLS-TV maintains that its news gathering and reporting activities are legal, ethical and appropriate in this ongoing investigation.” Just in case, WLS hired a prominent Miami law firm to represent Goudie, who later received an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association for “his continuing coverage of the Cunanan manhunt.”

  Lieutenant Noriega was so angry with Goudie that he ordered Al Boza to issue a scathing warning to the media not to tamper with the case. “We were very upset,” Noriega says. “I called Boza and said, ‘You do a press release saying we expect [the press] to exhibit proper conduct. This is a homicide, and it’s ethically wrong.’” The release was never sent. “To make a long story short,” Boza explains, “that news release received about four or five revisions before a very, very mild copy went out.” The release that did go out did not mention Goudie or tampering with evidence, but focused on the use of anonymous sources. It was nevertheless deeply resented by some news organizations, which interpreted it as an incursion on First Amendment rights.

  Although police remain profoundly skeptical, the personnel at the Normandy Plaza are adamant that they took no money for showing room 322 to Goudie. However, a hotel resident told police that he had seen one hotel employee accept at least twenty dollars from a local NBC news producer trying to gain entry. The police were then told that approximately nine camera crews had been in the room.

  For Miami media, the Cunanan manhunt was equivalent to covering a war. Ramon Escobar, an assistant news director at NBC’s WTVJ who is openly gay, was elevated to field marshal for the station. As the resident expert, he knew where to deploy his troops to look for Cunanan. He was also able to answer embarrassing questions such as, What is a bubble butt? Escobar received anonymous calls from a fellow escort of Andrew’s in New Jersey named Steve, who claimed (incorrectly) that Andrew had been to Clinton’s first inaugural. He also said that he had received e-mail from Andrew, though no one remembered Andrew ever using a computer. Acting on a tip from Steve that Andrew might be using the computer at the local library, Escobar, who lived near the Normandy Plaza, visited the nearest branch of the Miami Beach library and found that the FBI had been there before him. Andrew had indeed been using the facilities, but it could not be established that he had used the computer.

  The locals watched the big networks roll in with astounding resources. Satellite trucks maintained with a twenty-four-hour crew—at a cost of $10,000 a day—became a common sight. Sometimes the media veered dangerously close to being out of control. On Thursday, for example, the naked, bloody corpse of a Cuban doctor was found hogtied in his bed S&M-style in nearby Miami Springs. The suspect was a young man he had taken home, who robbed him. The doctor, who had a wife and children in Cuba, was not known to be gay, but because the description of the suspect resembled Cunanan, his murder got tangled up in the manhunt frenzy and he was outed live on TV.

  One of the great made-for-the-media, performance-art pieces surrounding Versace’s murder was the first of his two memorial services. On Friday at 11 A.M., the Mass of Resurrection for Gianni Versace was celebrated at Miami’s St. Patrick’s Catholic Church by a number of priests, including two bishops. It was officially organized by the Archdiocese of Miami, which sent out a press release announcing it. The Casa Casuarina sent over floral arrangements. “Even people paying their respects barely knew who G
ianni Versace was,” says Jim DeFede, a reporter with the New Times. “Every bozo and loser in South Beach was there,” adds Tom Austin. “The entire city commission, all the mayors and city managers. They didn’t let cameras inside.” But outside, the drenched-in-black congregation preened for the cameras in their shades and their $200 Versace T-shirts while police and the FBI infiltrated the crowd, lest Andrew attempt to return for a final blaze of glory in the spotlight. “The service was very strange,” says Israel Sands. “The priest was bending over backward to be up to the level of trendiness. He quoted Madonna and sang in the pulpit from Evita—‘Where Do We Go from Here?’” Tara Solomon says, “We stopped whimpering and had our jaws politely drop.” Sands adds, “The priest did a very nice sermon, and he alluded to Joseph’s coat of many colors—a Versace coat. This priest left no stone unturned in the family of Christ. He got away with it. Well done.”

  NOT EVERYONE APPRECIATED basking in the media glow. “In this case the media got in our way,” says Miami Beach Police Sergeant Richard Pelosi. “We couldn’t use our radios.” Detective Paul Marcus adds, “We had to talk on land lines because of the media. The Herald and the TV stations could monitor the radio. We had to be very careful—we couldn’t even use cell phones.” Pelosi recalls, “One day, all of a sudden, a camera and boom mike are outside our window of the third-floor detective bureau. The boom mike was from a local channel. We made them move it.” Navarro would play Noriega messages on his answering machine from female reporters begging for the slightest crumb of information. “It sounded like they were offering their bodies—‘anything you want, anything you need.’ I couldn’t answer my phone for the first month,” Navarro says. One reporter even broadcast a story about not getting anything but the answering machine!

  Scrimshaw grew more and more disgusted. “The state attorney’s office wanted to completely close communication with the press, because they were thinking O.J. And what the press wanted to know was innocuous. The whole factor in this is the case took over from us.”

  Scrimshaw continues, “We were forced into the position of running down leads instead of conducting the kind of investigation we needed to conduct.” The FBI wasn’t sharing information either. “We depended on the FBI for certain things, and if they did them, they didn’t tell us. We were told that the FBI was not going to give us written reports.” As a result, the practical outcome of all Deputy Director Esposito’s directives to the Bureau nationwide was reduced—at least for the lead investigator for the Miami Beach police—to word-of-mouth reports passed on by rookie agent Keith Evans.

  One of the most frustrating parts of the investigation for Scrimshaw was that he could not get any feedback from Europe about Versace or his business. “At first the Italian [liaison] told me he’d give me whatever help he could,” Scrimshaw relates. “When I called back the second time, he said, ‘I have to get clearance from my supervisor.’ I thought I heard a hesitation when I asked about organized crime. I said, ‘I need to know if there is an investigation.’ That’s when the communication stopped. He never returned my calls, and he disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Meanwhile, useless leads poured in from all over the world. A Swiss psychic swinging a pendulum said Andrew would be leaving Ottawa for Montreal. Others claimed to have spotted him in Brazil and Mexico. The only lead of any consequence came from a sailboat owner, Guillermo Volpe, who returned Wednesday, the sixteenth, after four days away, to find that someone had broken into the twenty-four-foot sailboat he anchored in a slip off Collins Avenue on Indian Creek, about fifteen blocks south of the Normandy Plaza. He found old pita bread and newspapers opened to stories of the Versace killing, including Versace’s hometown paper, Milan’s Corriere Della Sera. He also saw a man resembling Cunanan sitting on a bench nearby reading a navigational book that he later realized had been taken from his boat. Police were never able to find any forensic evidence on the boat, but they did find a red polo shirt, which could have been the red shirt on the person seen by a police officer on the roof of the Thirteenth Street parking garage right after the Versace murder, where the dog picked up on Andrew’s scent.

  Since the FBI had not begun the process of profiling Andrew, the Miami Beach police decided to profile him on their own. They were aided by Steve Nauck of San Diego, who was in training in Miami for PanAm World Airways and who told the police he was like a “baby brother” to Andrew. Nauck filled them in with a long list of Andrew’s likes and dislikes—that Chicago and Minneapolis were among his favorite U.S. cities, and that Milan was among his favorite European cities, for example. Nauck told police a favorite fantasy of Andrew’s “involves bondage and ‘fucking someone to death.’” Nauck believed that Andrew would disguise himself either as a surfer or as a transvestite. And thus another stereotype, that of the drag queen, which gays so objected to when citing law-enforcement and media reports about Andrew, came from one of his gay friends.

  By Sunday, the fifth day after Versace’s murder, there was still no sign of Andrew, and the investigation started to stall. The FBI had already pulled out of the Miami Beach Police Department and gone back to their own headquarters building in Miami. Some saw this as a sign that the FBI was dismayed by the pawnshop blunder and other police mishaps and had decided to withdraw. Paul Mallett insists that the FBI withdrew strictly in order to not to impede “a homicide investigation.”

  On Sunday a sighting of Andrew came in from the Miami Airport Hilton Hotel. Rose Marie Antonacci-Pollack, who accompanied the police there, says, “Enough weapons were assembled to run a small war.” A squad of FBI commando types donned Velcro flack vests that rolled down to reveal the letters “FBI.” Agents found two trembling maids who thought they had seen Cunanan. As a result, the register was scanned for “hot rooms”—those inhabited by walk-ins with no reservation, individuals who paid in cash, and single men. The FBI agents were allowed to search only after knocking on the door and announcing who they were. In one room in which they heard no response, says Antonacci-Pollock, “they broke in on a family who was sound asleep and never woke up.”

  All in vain. Andrew was not found at the Hilton either.

  36

  Show Me the Money

  Gay Killer and Tom Cruise

  Exposed!

  Shocking

  Truth Behind

  Murder Spree

  Gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan is madly in love with Tom Cruise! The sick monster talked openly of killing the superstar’s beautiful wife, Nicole Kidman, so he could have Tom all to himself—to tie up, torture and humiliate for pleasure.

  —National Enquirer, August 5, 1997

  Inside Gay Serial Killer’s Sick Mind

  I’ll Be More Famous than Liberace or Rock Hudson

  I am leaving to take care of business … I’m going to make these people suffer for what they did to me. I will be the nightmare from which they will never wake up.

  —Globe, August 5, 1997

  Kiss of Death

  Behind the Killer’s Smiling Mask: The Shocking Untold Story.

  Secret Wife and Child

  Stream of Rich Lovers

  His Cruel Killing—At Age 8

  Lover Who Escaped

  —Star, August 5, 1997

  THE STAR’S “LOVER who escaped,” Tim Schwager, the assistant manager of a San Francisco Denny’s who spent one night with Andrew and woke up with three hickeys, was transformed for the tabloids after Versace’s death. After first “writing” his story for a special box in Newsweek, he next appeared in Star as a “restaurant manager.” In the even more downmarket British tabloid News of the World, Schwager became a “Hollywood restaurateur” who “woke up with strange, Vampire like markings all over his body.”

  The tabloids landed on Andrew Cunanan as the next O. J. Simpson or JonBenet Ramsey. While the manhunt went on, the story of “Who Is Andrew Cunanan?” centered on Hillcrest, where only a handful of close friends abstained from giving interviews. A number of former friends of Andrew attempted
to cash in. The coverage went from the false and lurid in the Enquirer to the trivial and trumped-up in Star, which, for an interview and an old backpack of Andrew’s filled with condoms and Nair hair-removal lotion that Shane O’Brien had lying around, reportedly paid O’Brien five figures. The tab breathlessly reported, “We handed the backpack to the FBI, who were thrilled with the latest piece of the Cunanan jigsaw puzzle. ‘This is an important piece of evidence,’ says a high ranking agent. ‘Our thanks go out to Star for going out of its way to help.’” According to an unnamed neighbor whom nobody at the tabloid could remember interviewing, Andrew “strangled a cat at age eight,” and Gamma Mu was “a sordid homosexual society whose millionaire members spared no expense indulging their kinky passion for sleazy, jet-setting sex.”

  Even more outrageous, for those Enquire-ing minds who wanted to know, Andrew “described bizarre sexual fantasies about dressing Tom in full leather bondage outfits and dominating and humiliating him.” Despite the fact that Erik Greenman, Andrew’s last roommate had barely mentioned Tom Cruise in previous interviews—then only in passing as a favorite movie star—Greenman’s story changed radically after he got paid $85,000 by the tabloid.

  The frenzy over the Cunanan story surprised even a tested tabloid veteran like Hard Copy’s Santina Leuci. “You’re writing checks for more than your paycheck in a year.” Erik Greenman, for example, was hotly pursued because the people who knew Andrew best avoided the press. Robbins Thompson went underground to Mexico after being outed, and Norman Blachford didn’t need the money or the publicity. Nevertheless, Diane Sawyer sent Blachford a personal letter hoping for an interview for Prime Time Live. Cunanan’s brother and sisters were favored with bouquets from “concerned” network producers who could not pay outright for interviews but who could offer all-expenses-paid trips to New York, including limo service. Some network magazine shows were reportedly willing to pay for still photos in hopes of getting an interview that way.