‘Why don’t you dance with my chick, man?’ Evertsz asked. ‘Go on, man. Dance.’
The expected hysteria began. I tried to laugh it all off while Rosa cranked up the insanity until the whole table was wracked with brittle laughter.
‘Go on, dance with my chick,’ Evertsz insisted. It was all friendly enough but his eyes brooked no refusal. Groaning inwardly, I led my demented partner to the floor and was a party to her giggling jackbooting for several excruciating minutes.
Back at the table the chaperone belched a single syllable laugh. It was Rosa’s turn to yawn. Evertsz looked happy.
‘Aren’t you going to dance?’ I asked.
‘No - I don’t go in for that teenage stuff,’ he said.
That night I had my first assassin-induced nightmare. I dreamt I had left a window open and awoke to unbearable anxiety. Some days later I was shaving in the bathroom of the apartment with the sun streaming through the open window.
‘Bang!’ a voice said gently.
I looked out of the window and crouched on the roof about 25 yards away was Evertsz, a pretend rifle at his shoulder. He sprang up, laughing. ‘Watch yourself now. The boss likes his security tight. Close that window.’
He disappeared. I closed the window.
That night at dinner I tried to explain to a friend, a Spanish film producer called Pedro Vidal, how I had felt. ‘He just said, “Bang!” and laughed,’ I said shrugging. ‘I was petrified.’
Pedro’s eyes bulged and he took a swallow of wine and I knew that I had triggered off a memory. He told me of the first time he had spoken to the assassin.
‘He scared the shit out of me. The phone goes and a guy says, “I’m Carlos Evertsz”. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. “Do you know where Gregorio Webber is?”’
‘I had just been with Gregorio in Paris but the way the voice sounded I just said “no” automatically. It was the first time in my life that I’ve gone and locked the door after a phone conversation. I knew I was talking to a nut and I was so scared it was unbelievable. I looked for a weapon, a knife - anything - and stood here like a jerk. Waiting - for what?’
‘That was just on the phone. And I didn’t know the guy, but I bolted the door and closed all the windows!’
When Vidal did meet Evertsz some time later he knew well enough why he had bolted the doors and windows. Those eyes! Those unbelievable eyes! You look in those and you know that he’s a murderer.’
Madrid had suddenly lost its appeal for me. I decided that the summer was over and made plans to return to London, where the cops don’t wear guns and nobody really believes that people like Evertsz exist. A bizarre occurrence in the middle of the small hours sent me on my way.
When I awoke I realized dimly that the doorbell must have been ringing for some time. I wrapped a towel around me, peered through the spyhole and saw a woman in a nightdress in some sort of panic.
‘Agua! Agua!’ she screamed.
Stranded in the frightful no man’s land between total blitzed drunkenness and the rigours of a ferocious hangover, I sensed the urgency of it all but failed to understand exactly what she wanted. I wandered off into the kitchen to fetch her a glass of water. Halfway the carpets began to ooze under my feet and by the time I reached the kitchen I understood that the place was flooded.
Together we began a search for the mains water tap. Spanish plumbing being the mystery it is we had to go through the entire apartment.
And I began to find them.
Guns. Everywhere.
First of all it was embarrassing, then alarming. A rifle behind a screen, a revolver under a sofa; an automatic in the bathroom, a shotgun under the bed. Finally, behind a curtain at the back of the bar we found a hidden door and opened it. Water was gurgling from a mains tap in a dark corner, otherwise the hidden room was an armoury. Ammo belts, a sub machine gun. I picked up a small leather case which had been soaked in water and it fell open. A cascade of a thousand .22 bullets rattled to my feet. I turned off the tap and the woman slunk away.
I went back to bed and felt better for the automatic, freshly loaded with damp ammunition, under my pillow. For the first time I began to realize the extent of the paranoia that Evertsz spread in his wake. Webber had enough armour to take on the Guardia Civil, but I knew that all of it was there to protect himself from a single man. And what the hell was I doing with a gun under my pillow?
Two days later I flew back to the sombre banking city of London. Its dullness, solidity and atmosphere of ‘such-things-do-not-happen-here’ struck me as being as festive as a carnival.
And that was how things stayed for a while. Dull, sombre and solid. Winter arrived and dripped gloom and the drab tableau of sober citizens, without a single hit man among them, was immensely appealing.
Two
Evertsz arrived just after Christmas.
Life for him in Madrid had gathered such momentum that it had eventually careered out of control. He had simply overdone everything and pulled too many crooked strokes until the police began to take an active interest in him.
He was in a spot and went to Tom Webber for help. ‘He sat in the chair, and you won’t believe it, but he was wearing one of my suits and ties stolen from my apartment. He came on really heavy and my knees were knocking behind the desk. But I told him he had taken us as far as we would go. I refused to help.’
Instead he offered a compromise. There was an Iso Grifo he owned being driven to London to be sold and Webber told Evertsz that he could take a chance and risk the ride through customs. The officials at British immigration were duly impressed when Evertsz was driven into the country in an expensive Italian sports car and showed them his old police papers from the Dominican Republic.
Once in town he lost no time in looking me up. The voice on the phone was the portent of months of gloom. I was virtually the only contact he had in Britain so he moved into a cheap hotel around the corner from my apartment just to make sure he could take the maximum advantage of me.
I dreaded the beginning of each and every day. Evertsz usually arrived before I was out of bed and waited for me to open the door. My place became an annex to his hotel room and took on the atmosphere of a Nazi bunker. Any money I was careless enough to leave around would be picked up by Evertsz and pocketed in front of my eyes.
‘I need a little change,’ he explained.
On the days when he was in a bad mood he brought a gloom into the apartment that was deadening. On one occasion I returned to the flat to find him already there, sitting in the front room with his feet up on my desk. He had forced the catch of the window and broken in. Nothing had been stolen. It was one of his rare attempts at humour, a heavy-handed practical joke which underlined my vulnerability and his expertise.
He began to talk about his earlier life, how he had been used by the Americans and how he had blown it back in the Dominican Republic. Eventually I thought, Oh hell, if he is going to be here anyway I might as well get it down. I suggested the idea of a series of taped interviews to him and after initial reluctance he agreed.
There is nothing odd in the fact that Evertsz agreed to broadcast his crimes. He was vain and clearly believed that his past activities deserved kudos and recognition; he was also bitter about the way he had been used by ‘the Americans’ and wanted a chance to get back at them.
He turned up one wet afternoon immaculately dressed, obviously intending to be formal about the whole thing. It was so dark that day that I had to have the lights on in the front room. The first interview lasted a solid six hours. It was an extraordinary, gruelling experience that was quite unreal and hopelessly saddening. At the end of it I felt drained and so did he.
Evertsz told me that he was born Carlos Evertsz Fournier in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic on 14th May 1942. He described a suspiciously happy childhood with a strong father he respected, a loving mother, doting sisters and an obedient younger brother.
By the time he was old enough to begin High School he had an am
bition. ‘To be a decent cop, that was what I wanted. It wasn’t something I got from books or films or anything, it was just something that always appealed to me. That was my idea in the beginning - to be a decent cop. Later I found out there was no such thing as a decent cop any longer.’
I could hardly believe my ears. Was he serious? That was the sort of line even a ham of a script editor would put the blue pencil through. But Evertsz was serious, intensely so. It is ironical that he would not stand up as a fictional character for both his personality and his story are unreal.
He seems to have been born with the instincts of a mean cop. At the age of 15 he had already been marked out and his career as a secret agent began. A Lt. Rodriguez introduced him into G2 - Army Intelligence - and he was designated to find out the political colouring of his fellow students. He did his job thoroughly, spied on friends and sent four of his young companions to prison. ‘Two got a couple of years but the other two never came out. The Trujillo police were real tough.’ He discovered afterwards that the two who had lived had been tortured.
Meanwhile, out of school, Evertsz was spotted by Capt. Ramon Molina Urena, a wealthy landowner who lived in the same neighbourhood on the east side of Santo Domingo, the Ensanche Ozama. Molina was the uncle of the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, and an influential military man. ‘I was a straight boy and being a straight boy - not communist - he kind of liked me. He used to take me hunting on his farm and let me drive around in his cars.’
It was Molina who initiated him into murder. ‘He used to have this big farm and he wanted to spread the farm and take more land. There were campesinos around the area - poor people with a little bit of land - and he used to say, “This guy doesn’t want to move - I’ve got to make him move.” So he went with me on horseback - we were always packing guns - and we went to this guy’s house. He said, “Man, don’t mess around, you’ve got to move out. I need this land.” And the man begs: “No Captain, don’t throw me out, this is my only way of living.” He didn’t give a damn. He pulled a gun and shot the guy straight away. I watched it in cold blood. It got me sick - really. I thought perhaps he would go to prison or something, I didn’t expect that. Molina said, “Don’t worry Carlos, things have to happen. I’ll show you how to do it.”
‘Two weeks later he said that he had a little problem, another campesino didn’t want to hand over his land. At that stage I always used to go over to the farm after school to look things over. He called two of his peones and we got the man and buried him alive up to his neck. Molina said, “You shoot him now”. I shot him.
‘I felt shocked - completely sick. It made me think real hard that I was bad. I was scared for myself. Remember, I had a very strong moral background, with my father and the Catholic education. To me it was a very distasteful thing.’
Evertsz was leading a very full life after school and he was encouraged by Molina to take an interest in the country’s raw politics. He joined the Vanguardia Juventud Trujillista (The Trujillo Youth Vanguard). The movement was modelled on the Hitler youth - ‘But I wanted to make it a little stronger’ - and his job was to tighten up its security. Characteristically, he worked quietly behind the scenes as a special delegate, forever checking on members’ loyalties. He sent one of the leaders, Manuel Frometa, to prison for, ‘Getting a little bit on the left side.’
Evertsz finished school and his political involvement with the ruling party had been precocious enough for good passes and grades to be arranged for him. He joined the Batalla de las Carreras - the Air Force Military Academy - and was spotted by the chief of the school, Col. Rames Troncoso, and again told to spy on his fellow cadets for left-wing sympathizers. It was a job that he was already expert in. Before long seven cadets were imprisoned and twelve thrown out of the school.
He received the usual military training until 1959 when there was an invasion from Cuba and all the cadets were promoted to Second Lieutenants, put in charge of a platoon and sent straight into combat. ‘It’s funny, there was only a small group of people against us - about 180 - and we took a very heavy loss. None of us, from the top generals to the very last private, knew what combat was all about
‘We took prisoners to the San Isidro air base about nineteen kilometres outside of Santo Domingo. Some of them we chained together and we threw gasoline over them and lit them up. Then we put the flames out immediately and then we’d do it again - two or three times. Some guys died right away from the shock, others didn’t.
‘We took some prisoners and tied them out on the airstrip and left them out in the sun to die. Then we tied some up, put them in a DC3 and pushed them out of the door.’
It was a small war and when it was over Molina used his influence to get Evertsz in Air Force Intelligence, known as A2 or Km9, due to its position on the highway Carretera Mella. A2 was the Intelligence service’s crack force and was led by Trujillo’s son-in-law, Col. Jose Luis Leon Estévez.
It was as a member of A2 that Evertsz saw for the first time how political prisoners were treated. ‘I hadn’t done a person - you know, torture - by that time. I saw how they got the fingernails out. Then we had an electric chair. Anybody who said they didn’t like what was going on in the country would be got hold of and put in prison for six months where they beat the living shit out of them.’
Evertsz favoured the skin torture. The prisoner would have his chest neatly lined by a razor and then the skin would be slowly peeled from the flesh. More elaborate methods included attaching electric wires to a man’s genitals.
Tools of the trade included electric chairs for slow electrocution and a sophisticated shock applicator with many arms, which were attached to a prisoner’s skull with tiny screws. The torture department came up with new appliances with demoniac inspiration and one of their masterworks was a rubber collar that could be tightened to sever a man’s head. Routine tools included nail extractors, scissors for castration, leather-thonged whips and small rubber hammers. The torture chambers themselves leaned more to the futuristic than the medieval: public address systems in the cells carried every blood-curdling scream to other prisoners awaiting their turn.
Three
Most of Evertsz’s work was concerned with keeping the pressure on the communists (although an opposition leader remarked at this time: ‘In my country there are not enough communists to administer a good hotel.’) Anti-communist feeling was stirred up by a simple method. Bombs were placed in churches, priests were shot and an outraged population naturally accredited the incidents to the communists. (At this point in the interview Evertsz started to tell a story of how he had murdered two priests and taken their bodies to the waterfront in Santo Domingo and disposed of them. Suddenly he grew agitated, refused to go on and demanded that the tape with the offending passage be wiped clean. It was the one time in the interview that he showed any diffidence at all in going into details of a killing. He mumbled something about the church ‘getting back’ at him and refused to be drawn.)
Apart from official business Evertsz performed a special personal mission for Estévez whose wife had been unfaithful to him in an affair with a handsome Air Force pilot called Caanan. ‘We arrested him and took him to Kilometre 9. Estévez was already there waiting for us. He ordered one of the men to cut off the man’s penis. The guy kicked and kicked. Then Estévez shot him and took the penis and gave it to his wife. His wife said nothing - she was a bloody bitch.’
But again there were more sophisticated approaches and Evertsz was becoming a master of his craft. It is as if he looked upon murder as an art and when he describes some of the techniques it is with the pride of a man who knows that his work is good. One of his favourite methods was with a needle which he used for the first time on an engineering student suspected of being involved in a plot to assassinate Ramfis, Trujillo’s eldest son. Evertsz kidnapped the student at the university, knocked him out with chloroform and drove him out of town. He then pushed a four-inch needle into his brain from underneath the right ear lobe, pulled the
needle out and brushed away the pinpoint of blood with alcohol. Evertsz drove him back into town and dumped him on a park bench in the Park Colon for the police to find.
‘The needle method leaves no trace - there’s more than a 99 per cent chance that not even a good doctor will be able to know what happened. In the autopsy it seems as if the victim had a cerebral haemorrhage. The pinprick just looks like a pore and it is behind the lobe anyway.
‘Another well-used method was throwing people out of a car on a bad bend. There’s a highway going out of the city to the north and there’s a place with some very bad bends. We used it often, very very often.’
In 1960 Trujillo sent a special team to assassinate Romulo Betancourt, then president of Venezuela. It didn’t come off and Trujillo brought down on his head economic boycotts from several countries and the wrath of the U.S.A. ‘The CIA decided to have Trujillo assassinated and they were going to use people who were close to him. I heard about it from my uncle, Freddie Evertsz - currently working for the CIA in Santo Domingo, by the way. He told me that the weapons for the assassination were brought over in Mazola oil cans which were delivered to certain supermarkets.’
Trujillo was assassinated in a manner that Hollywood would thoroughly approve of. In May 1961 two cars pulled in front of the dictator’s as he was driving to a ranch to keep a midnight rendezvous with one of his many mistresses. Seven men piled out of the cars firing machine guns. Trujillo kept three machine guns in his car at all times but did not have a chance to get at them. Instead he leapt out, blood spurting from his back, and fired his revolver. There was a final burst of gunfire and he fell. The illustrious leader was later found dumped in the boot of his own car with 27 bullets in his body.
‘They got him. It was a shame. We got five of them but General Imbert Barreras and General Luis Amiana Tio survived. They were hidden in the U.S. Embassy. It was the one place at the time we didn’t look in.’
Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman Page 2