by Maureen Orth
The plea was carefully thought out. Liz Coté talked affectionately to Andrew in a code language filled with nick-names for her children. “Since he was a creature of style and great vanity,” says Merrill, “it would be more likely to work against his remaining at large if he were treated politely.”
Liz Coté, much blonder and fuller-faced than she appeared in the photo Andrew carried, was shot in close-up. She said, “The Andrew Cunanan I know is not a violent person. The Andrew Cunanan who is the godfather to my children is not a thief … Please stop doing what you’re doing. I know that the most important thing to you in the world is what others think of you. You still have a chance to show the entire world the side of you that I and your godchildren know. The time has come for this to end peacefully … D.D. loves you, Schmoo. I bring with me a special message from our papoose. Grimmy says she loves her Uncle Monkey and hopes that you’ll remember her always. Your birthday will soon be here, and someone else who loves you will be five years old.” Coté ended with a Latin phrase that Andrew would remember from his days as an altar boy: “Dominus vobiscum” (The Lord be with you).
TRYING TO USE the media to lure Andrew, however, might be playing right into his hands. Before Andrew killed Versace, Captain Tom Cronin, the Chicago policeman and Quantico graduate, had told me, “Down deep inside, the publicity is more sexual to him than anything else. Right after one or two of these homicides, he probably goes to a gay bar in the afternoon when the news comes on, and his face is on TV and he’s sitting there drinking a beer and loving it. You hide in plain view.”
Hagmaier says that as such murders “accelerate, the motivation changes from a personal crime to more of a power thing: ‘I can play God with anyone I want, and I want everybody to know that.’” Hagmaier explains that many serial killers leave something behind so they can become nicknamed and notorious: “The ‘Son of Sam,’ he wrote notes. Or he uses the same gun—‘the .44 caliber killer.’ ‘The Atlanta Strangler.’” Andrew, however, was obviously aware that law enforcement knew who he was. As a result, “when he’s traveling around the country, he’s got to leave something of his signature behind,” Hagmaier concludes. “And maybe that’s stealing the vehicles and leaving them where they can be found.”
These vehicles, Hagmaier feels, were left almost like business cards. “He wants it to be picked up in the national media, because this reinforces his strength, his power and control over other people, including not just his victims but law enforcement and the media. It becomes like a chess game. We in law enforcement have to react to [the killer’s] moves, but the chessboard is the media. And when they make a move and it’s reported, and then we respond to it, the way we react and what we say in the media sometimes dictates their next move.”
The profilers wanted to keep the pressure on Andrew so that he would stay in Miami. At the same time they needed to understand how he had killed. They went over and over the scenes of his crimes, trying to figure out what he might do next. As Hagmaier says, “He’d used a .40 caliber more than once. He kept the same gun. That’s significant, because the real sophisticated ones get rid of the guns right away. And a lot of serial killers don’t use guns.” Hagmaier adds, “It’s not uncommon for a serial killer to use his hands the first time, because the first crime is usually a representative victim, symbolic victim, or somebody they personally want to destroy, and they take more pleasure in doing it with their hands than a gun.”
Hagmaier calls Versace’s murder “a hit. It’s a high-risk crime; people are going to be there, he wants people to know who did it.” Whether or not Versace is “personally symbolic,” he’s “the wealthy, high-profile homosexual success story that Andrew Cunanan was never going to be,” Hagmaier says. “The only way he’s going to get famous is the same way John Hinckley got famous. So he gets a lot of ink out of Lee Miglin. Reese he gets some ink out of, but it’s really not good for his ego. He basically needs the truck, and that’s why he whacks this Reese guy, as far as I know.
“Then maybe he does somebody else, and we don’t know about it. Versace appears to me to be that he wants everybody to know he’s doing it. He’s deteriorating, but he’s got these ego needs, and it’s, like, Is this gonna be Little Bighorn or not? The question is, What’s he do after Versace if he doesn’t get caught? He’s going to kill for one or two reasons: He’s going to kill out of necessity again, because he needs another vehicle, or he takes a step above Versace.” For Andrew, a step above Versace would be someone like Elton John. “Maybe we’d never hear that song about the princess,” Hagmaier speculates. The other possibility the FBI had to consider was a gay political assassination—Harvey Milk revisited. Someone like that “brings you a lot of ink. He represents, if not wealth, then certainly power.” And who might that someone be? Barney Frank?
Scrimshaw considered the meeting at Quantico a valuable experience. “I don’t think I learned that much about Andrew until I went to Washington,” he says. “And that’s the day he was captured. We’re always the last to know. It happens a lot. This investigation drove us—we didn’t drive it.”
Because it was only possible to leave Miami Beach on land by crossing a causeway, and the airport was on full alert, law enforcement hoped that Andrew was still in Florida. It had been nine days since he killed Versace, and the last time anyone had seen him was in the alley a few minutes after the murder. News reports on Wednesday had a store owner in New Hampshire swearing that she had seen him going north in a Mercedes. One of Hagmaier’s old friends at the Bureau called him from Miami to say he thought Andrew was in Central America. Hagmaier hoped Andrew would stay put. “I said if he’s still in Miami, he plans on dying in Miami.”
39
The Last Night of Carnival
FERNANDO CARREIRA, A Portuguese immigrant, has lived in Florida for twenty years. Before that he lived in New York, where he owned a carnival and a cigar business and was proud to be the founder of a merchants’ association on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that worked with police to combat neighborhood crime. He earned a special New York City police badge. Carreira wears a lot of gold jewelry, including a gold identification bracelet with the name “Richard” studded in diamonds. He says he bought the bracelet in a pawnshop, and it would have cost too much to rearrange the diamonds to spell Fernando. At the time of the Cunanan manhunt, Carreira was seventy-one, his wife was forty-nine. They had a fifteen-year-old son. Carreira made his living looking after properties, and one of these was a baby-blue houseboat at 5250 Collins Avenue, berthed on Indian Creek, not far from the landmark Eden Roc and Fontainebleau hotels.
The houseboat, which was trimmed with white filigree and colored lights, had a three-tiered white plaster fountain in front and a small white awning over the front door. It was owned by Torsten Reineck, a flamboyant German with a salt-and-pepper ponytail who was living in Las Vegas, where he managed a gay bathhouse called the Apollo. Normandy Plaza residents such as Ronnie and his friend Lyle, the drug dealer, knew the houseboat well and later remarked how they had often seen ExCalibers, Rolls-Royces, and Bentleys parked out front. The houseboat had a colorful history. It had once served as part of the set of an old TV series, and, according to Jack Campbell, it had at times been a trysting place for rich gay men who did not wish to take the hustlers they had picked up in Flamingo Park home to their villas across Indian Creek.
On Saturday, July 19, Carreira says, Reineck called from Las Vegas to ask if he had checked on the houseboat. Carreira had, and told him all was well. On Wednesday, July 23, about 3:45 P.M., Carreira and his wife stopped by again. Right away Carreira noticed that the top lock on the front door was stuck or broken, but it had given him trouble before. When he fitted his key into the bottom lock, however, he was shocked to find that it was unlatched. He pushed the door open. “I told my wife, ‘Somebody was here. Maybe somebody here now.’” His suspicions mounted as he and his wife entered, because all the lights were on and the drapes, which were always open, were drawn. “So I walk all the way do
wn to the living room,” which faced the water, and there Carreira found more surprises: The cushions had been pulled off the sofa and made into a bed on the floor with a blanket, and a chair had been turned over as if to form a barricade. Fernando Carreira crossed to the sofa. “I looked to the left side, and there were two sandals. When I see the sandals I tell my wife, ‘Somebody sleeps here. Somebody is here right now.’”
Carreira keeps a handgun tucked in his waistband. As he pulled it out to conduct a search, a loud shot rang out in the second-floor master bedroom. “It was a very big noise, and I have to run out,” he recalls. Carreira thought someone had fired at him and missed. He and his terrified wife ran outside and hid in the bushes. Carreira was convinced that whoever was inside had seen him from the second floor.
He tried to dial 911 on his cell phone, but he was too nervous. He phoned his son instead and told him to call. Crouching in the bushes, he watched the front door and told his wife to watch the back—someone could dive from the rear deck into the creek and escape. The police were there within four minutes and told Carreira to move back. The first officer radioed the dispatcher at headquarters that he had reached the houseboat and was “hiding behind some concrete in front of it.”
“What color is it?”
“It’s the blue one.”
A few minutes later, the dispatcher radioed the marine patrol. “Check out the blue houseboat … If there’s a victim, he’s inside.”
The officer and the Carreiras walked to another houseboat anchored not far away. Carreira remembers, “The policeman says, ‘It’s better we go up there, because maybe someone can see you from the window. It may be someone dangerous.’ When police tell me ‘someone dangerous,’ I know what he mean. Only at that time I can’t figure out it maybe was Cunanan.”
The police were taking no chances. An order quickly crackled across the police radio: “Shut down traffic on Collins Avenue.”
THE FIRST CALL from the houseboat to the police came in as “occupied burglary—possible shots fired inside.” Al Boza, the Miami Beach Police public-information officer, recalls that he was relieved. “Thank God, I’m going to have a break. The press is going to run somewhere else. This is some idiot who broke into a place and expected to sit there on vacation at a nice location.” Since the call had nothing to do with Cunanan, and there had been no major sightings that day, Boza figured he could catch up with scores of phone calls. After all, he had seen this scenario unfold before. “We dress in black, and we march with shields and helmets, and we bang doors down, and they are long gone.” He sent his deputy, Officer Bobby Hernandez, to cover for him.
BY WEDNESDAY, SAYS NBC’s WTVJ station manager Don Browne, the Cunanan story, so hot the previous week, had “cooled off. There was a real sense he’d moved on, gotten out of here.” But minutes after Carreira called in, Detective Gus Sanchez, monitoring his police radio and remembering the Volpe sailboat sighting, alerted his superiors: “FYI, the subject we’re looking for was on a boat a few days prior, so keep that in mind.” Sanchez says, “We had information that Cunanan was possibly hiding on a boat near the area of the call. [So] I notified them, ‘Heads up. Begin treating it as the subject we’re looking for.’” The houseboat was quickly surrounded.
Someone on the radio warned, “Lieutenant Noriega, or George Navarro, reference this call up here. I don’t want to put too much out over the radio here, but you have a good idea for what it is, right?” Sanchez declares, “From the very onset, police believed it could be Cunanan on the houseboat.” And they acted accordingly.
“We’re going to try to get a chopper here—a little air support,” the police radio beamed, “and do an entry with either the county or Miami SWAT team.”
A few minutes later, another officer radioed, “I’m on the roof of that building across from the houseboat. The houseboat has no access to the roof—no access to its roof—and the front door is still open.”
Noriega assigned the interior of the houseboat to Navarro, and another officer was put in charge of the exterior perimeter. “I didn’t want this to turn into a circus,” Noriega says. But the media was already gathering for what would become, for that day at least, the greatest show on earth. However, the reporters and cameramen were once again frustrated. They were kept several blocks away from the houseboat to the north and to the south on Collins Avenue as heavy traffic was detoured.
“We’ve got the media here at 5101 Seacoast Towers,” an officer radioed from a few blocks away. “Would you advise on media? He’s trying to get through here.”
“He needs to stay outside the perimeter. He’s not to pass that point.”
“You want me to hold him here? He’s advised me he has a right to go through.”
Over the next two hours, the chaos increased. “Residents can’t drive home. People are parking on both sides of side streets. People got pissed,” says Officer Bobby Hernandez. “They start walking through the beach to get home. We had to deal with a very angry public.”
“I have three media here—they’re getting a little hostile,” an officer radioed. “But I’m keeping them back … They’re really getting hostile. They’re telling me I don’t know the law.”
Even people living in the area posed a risk. Residents of the luxury high-rises and hotels lining Collins Avenue hung out over their balconies, straining to see the action. Across Indian Creek, “police were going into backyards, trying to clear reporters out of the line of fire,” recalls Jim DeFede, of the New Times. “There were helicopters overhead and people hanging out of balconies—it was definitely an event,” says Detective Gus Sanchez.
At 4:30 P.M., the first inkling that the houseboat might not be a random location was introduced when the Miami Beach police lieutenant who was the liaison with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami informed Navarro of a “possible connection” between the houseboat owner, Torsten Reineck, and Gianni Versace. Wow. How interesting. But there was so much going on right then that no one followed up on the lead.
At police headquarters, Chief Richard Barreto was in his office being interviewed by John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted for another AMW show on Andrew Cunanan to be broadcast the following Saturday. “I’m in Barreto’s office all set up, and a phone call comes in they’ve surrounded a houseboat,” Walsh relates. “The timing was incredible.” Walsh had already earned the resentment of other reporters, who objected to the privileged access he was getting. “They’re going, ‘Why is John Walsh inside talking to Barreto, et cetera et cetera?’ Tough shit, that’s my response. Tough shit. OK?” He adds, “Every reporter wants to get wounded and be on the cover of Time magazine for getting shot and getting Cunanan’s story.”
Barreto told Walsh, “We had to call the Metro-Dade SWAT team to come across the causeway. They’re coming across. We’ve got boats there … Can we end the interview?”
The local Miami Beach Police SWAT had recently been disbanded in a dispute over whether they should be paid for their physical-training time. Now they reported to the houseboat as the reconstituted “Warrants Search Team.” Much to their chagrin, they were relieved by Metro-Dade’s Special Response Team (SRT). This meant that Barreto was briefly ceding jurisdiction for the houseboat interior to another law-enforcement entity. The Metro-Dade SRT was fully equipped, but confusion would ensue because no provisions were made for any direct communication to occur between them and the Miami Beach Police Department, which was controlling the area outside.
“All this took time to set up the team, and attempts to negotiate were made,” says Detective Paul Marcus, who was part of the Miami Beach police team. “There was an attempt to put a phone in. The phone inside was disconnected.” Finally, “we ended up throwing a hard-line phone into the houseboat.” Numerous efforts followed to get whoever was inside to answer. “We were verbalizing through the bullhorn, ‘Pick up the phone, pick up the phone.’”
By then the poles and dishes on satellite trucks, like so many giant lollipops, dotted the sky. The
local TV stations were broadcasting the houseboat scene live in English and Spanish, and police had turned the firehouse across the street from the houseboat into a command center. “This place looked like a movie,” Marcus recalls. “The FBI moved in with computers.” Meanwhile, TV helicopters were sending live shots from overhead, chronicling the movements of the Metro-Dade SRT team and interfering with their work.
“Inside the war room they’re saying, ‘Can we cut the power to the boat?’” recounts John Walsh, who was allowed to listen. They wanted to prevent anyone in the houseboat from watching TV—which was capturing every move of the siege from the news helicopters above. Officer Bobby Hernandez says, “As an officer, it’s a safety issue—there’s a huge amount of vulnerability. The media would not back off.”
“At the time we had our helicopters in the air—like flies we were there,” says Tom Doerr of WPLG Channel 10. “I’m sorry to say that all of us were guilty at that moment of overzealousness.” Al Boza started calling TV stations, saying, “Folks, you’re giving tactical information, because whoever that is inside is delighted to see we have got three people in the front, two people on the side.” The SRT team and many others were in potential danger. “What if he has automatic weapons and he’s firing across the street and he hits somebody who’s standing on the sidewalk in front of the Fontainebleau, some German tourist or something?” asks John Walsh. “He could have opened up a round with an AK-47 that would have gone right across Collins Avenue and hit fifteen people.”