Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  ‘So I had to leave. The Dominican Police were only allowed to have one man in the embassy grounds but the whole of the front was covered. I got out through the backyard into the back streets.’

  Tejeda had ordered Evertsz’s death before leaving and sent men to his home. Evertsz was warned by his brother and spent an uneasy night hiding at his sister’s house. The following day he petitioned the president for a guarantee of safe conduct to the airport. ‘I was suffering from complete nervous shock, my whole system was broken down. You don’t know what it’s like to be in that situation. I didn’t want to kill anybody else.’

  The president was not wholly unaware of CIA skullduggery on the island, and believed enough of Evertsz’s story to allow him to board an Iberia flight to Spain. ‘In Madrid I lived in a pension for a while, trying hard not to be seen because I knew that the guys might try to get me. I was trying to find out what was going on in town before I made any move whatsoever.’

  Slowly he drifted into the world of the émigré in Madrid and life was not too difficult. He attended parties given by Ramfis, and was used as a bodyguard and given money by him - later Ramfis was killed in an aristocratic auto accident when he was in a head-on collision with the Duchess of Albuquerque in the town’s Gran Via. Also in Madrid was Col. Estévez, who had murdered his wife’s lover, and Evertsz was fond of telling stories of how he tricked him out of money. So for a time he fared well on the guilty charity of fellow Dominican émigrés.

  He started to work as Webber’s security man . . . got married again to a 16-year-old Spanish girl called Conchita . . . bounced cheques . . . and once again created an impossible situation for himself. Which takes us back to London.

  Five

  The interviews with Evertsz were strange affairs and fell into a pattern. He would arrive in good spirits and begin to reminisce in a boastful manner. Slowly, as the story grew, his attitude changed and he started to gripe about the way ‘the Americans’ had treated him. Again and again he returned to the theme of being a decent cop, an honest Air Force officer with a position and respect, and how all his chances had been ruined by dabbling with the CIA. Then finally the braggart’s veneer disappeared and the extent of his loneliness showed through. Exposed to the bleakness of his own existence he became self-pitying and mawkish.

  There were moments of long silence. Evertsz would finish telling of some terrible murder and grow quiet. Faced with the ridiculous task of putting this bloodshed into some kind of date order I found myself asking, again and again - ‘And who did you kill then?’ or ‘Did you kill this one before or after X?’

  And then there would be silence. Even for Evertsz it was proving too much. The story of his young life spewed out in long, rambling episodes was a more painful proposition than he had bargained on. He had started out eager as an actor to be interviewed but had finally come to the point where he openly admitted that he sometimes questioned his sanity. At one point he became so self-indulgent in his misery that I thought he was going to weep.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing my mind.’

  On another day when I returned to this remark I tackled him too openly and he denied flatly that he ever questioned his sanity. There was no doubt of it, he said, and quoted IQ and personality tests which he had passed without difficulty. He was embarrassed at having shown so much emotion and looked upon it as a weakness that might prove fatal if allowed to blossom. Men like Evertsz dare not allow themselves the luxury of cracking up.

  There was a moment on one afternoon when I felt compassion for him despite the monstrous acts he confessed to. I think it was the totality of his loneliness that made me feel sorry for him. I had opened a tiny window on to something so vast, cold and empty that I wondered how he could survive in such a stark mental landscape. For a moment I had the illusion of understanding him.

  Later my compassion was to dissolve but during that long afternoon, as it grew dark outside, we became close. I had not drawn the blinds so that only the light from the sodium street lamps and the gas fire shone in the room. I was half drunk from drinking too much brandy too quickly on an empty stomach and sat quietly while Evertsz struggled with the impossible task of telling another human being what it felt like to be him.

  ‘Sometimes when I talk about this, bring all these things back like this, I think really hard. It seems to me a crazy life. I don’t have a target, I don’t have ambition - except like any other man I would like to have a future, a secure future. I have lived like a millionaire because I’ve been living with people who had the bread and I’ve been working together with them. I have tasted the good things of life but for me it doesn’t fulfil everything.

  ‘It is not that it has given me a mental problem, for to become a secret agent of any government you have to pass psychological tests. But it has made me lonely.

  ‘Life is boring now. I feel that I have done everything any man could have done for my years. There’s nothing new for me - absolutely nothing new. Not sex even - I’ve been into all kinds of sex, varied sex, orgy parties. No materialistic things, speed, any kind of kicks, chicks — I don’t think there’s anything for me.

  ‘I guess about the only good thing I have in life is great family background. My relationship with my family has always been great. It’s not that I write to them or anything. And there’s no such thing as Christmas for me. I go to the movies or go out on a motorcycle if I have one.

  ‘I’m crazy about cars and motorcycles. I race them. I’ve been trained to drive fast. I take out a scrambling bike into the mountains or something and do the danger stuff - I really love to do that alone. I love my skin but I like to risk my neck. I like to prove myself - I’m proud of myself. I know I’m good.

  ‘I guess now I have to fulfil my place in society. It would be nice for a change to have a normal life. I don’t know if I would like it because I’ve never had it. I think it would be nice. I see a lot of you people having normal, boring lives so I might as well have a little taste of it.

  ‘Sometimes I wish I was a bricklayer or a carpenter, or a truck driver or an accountant - just a normal guy. I just want to be a normal fellow - work in an office. Anything normal! It’s not that it would make me happy because I don’t think I’ve ever been happy or know what people call happiness. What do you people call happiness? I don’t know. I think it’s just a vision you create.’

  It makes sense that Evertsz’s favourite author is Nietzsche. ‘I like the way he put the words together and he makes you think a lot. The philosophy I read is getting to me every day more and more. I have enough command of my mental system not to get deeply involved with it. If you take that stuff hard, and you think about things and you take things apart you’ll drive yourself mad. If you took Nietzsche and followed him all the way to the end you’d go nowhere. You can’t do that, I know it won’t lead to anything positive.

  ‘But I only read philosophy and psychology, I never went for the cowboy stuff or police stories. I don’t believe in fiction at all.’ His own existence does not strike him as unreal.

  ‘I’ve lived my life so I cannot say it’s fiction. But sometimes it’s been too fast. It’s shocked me sometimes. I get scared sometimes. I have my whole life before me, after all - if I keep on the move. A guy who is leading this kind of life is bound to have enemies who for personal vengeance want to kill you - some for political reasons, some for . . . I don’t know - I’ve done, a lot of damage I guess. So I reckon I’ve got something coming to me. I’ve been sent several warnings.

  ‘The funny thing is nobody has threatened my family. That’s the funny thing. They love my family. My mother still loves me - as mothers do. She thinks what I’ve done is wrong but then I’m her eldest son. My brother thinks that everything I do is right and my sisters love me. But the rest of my family, apart from my grandmother, don’t want anything to do with me.’

  Evertsz regards his past activities as mundane, day-by-day events. He has merely followed his profession along the route it has led him.
He becomes irritated if the abnormality of his position is brought up.

  ‘I don’t think my life has been so extraordinary. It’s just been my life, it’s been routine to me. I’ve never had any other kind of life. I just think that I’ve been well trained to do what I had to do. A secret service man has been trained to kill - to kill your own brother if you have to. I had my brother put in jail once. He was going a little bit to the left side and I had to make him go the right side. It made him go to the right side straight away.

  ‘Yet I love him. Perhaps I shouldn’t use that word - I don’t know what it is. Let’s say I dig this guy. I don’t know what others mean by love. I don’t have friends, except perhaps my brother. Not even my mother. When my father died in 1962 I got the news over the phone in New York. Later that night I was dancing. But I really dug my father as well. But his death was just nothing - no personal feeling or anything.

  ‘All this business has made me a very, very sad man. If you see me laughing sometimes I’m really sad beneath it. Refreshing all these things and thinking about them again makes me think hard. Not just about these things but all my life. I could have been something else, I could have been to school and been all that my father wanted me to be - a real honest man.

  ‘I don’t regret my life - but I won’t do it again. As a matter of fact I don’t regret what I do. I know what I’m doing. A man should know what he’s doing, and what he is going to do. What I would have liked to have been is a decent cop or a good intelligence officer. I wish that I had never worked for the CIA. I would have liked just to have been with Dominican Intelligence and worked through the proper channels and never have played with a double card.

  ‘Now I’ve given up any idea of being an agent or a military man. It destroys you as a human being. In many ways I would like to have stayed with my last wife and see if she could share in my psychological situation.

  ‘I’m morally destroyed, humanly destroyed. I get very, very depressed without any reason at all.’

  I asked him if he felt that way because of the people he had killed.

  ‘I don’t give a damn about the people. People have never meant anything to me.’

  — How many people have you killed?

  ‘You mean personally? About thirty. Thirty or forty.’

  — That’s a lot of people.

  ‘No. You could do much better if you wanted.’

  — But it’s still a lot of people.

  Evertsz shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

  It was a concession.

  ‘Sometimes I feel very anti and very alone. I’m a very lonely person. I always feel lonely, real sad. Even with my wife now, who I love - well, not love . . . you know. I feel different from everybody else. Sometimes I really think hard. Then I feel anti, real and honest to God.

  ‘Before my father died he wanted me to get out of the wrong crowd. At that time I wasn’t really involved, and he didn’t even know how involved I was. Otherwise I guess he would have killed me. He was a straightforward man. Actually he never touched me. We used to have man-to-man talks. He was real good to me - about the only person I can say that about.

  ‘When I was at school I used to go to church every day. I still have faith in God in my own way. Sometimes when I’m in a tight spot I say, “Hey, fellow, would you lend me a hand?” I don’t really know if it’s faith or fear. Sometimes you’re so frightened that you can’t do anything to get out of it, even if you have created the psychological situation.’

  —What about your children? Do you miss any of them at all?

  ‘Not at all. Not at all. I don’t miss anything. I don’t miss any of my children at all. No, I don’t.’

  —How do you feel about the people you meet casually around and about?

  ‘People get along with me very well. I fool people, because I’m a very sociable fellow.’

  —And deep relationships?

  ‘What do you mean? No, I don’t get deeply involved.

  ‘I’m careful not to get involved. I don’t give it the break. It doesn’t work. There’s no such thing. You are always after something, one way or another.’

  —Why don’t you give it the break?

  ‘I don’t have an answer - really.’

  —Aren’t you worried what might happen to you after this is published?

  ‘Aren’t you? In the Dominican Republic reporters who step out of line get their fingers smashed.’ He laughed. ‘Look, I don’t give a damn about me. Maybe I’ll be here - maybe I’ll have gone. Nobody will know. If anything does happen you know who to blame. If I were you I wouldn’t go to the Dominican Republic for a long while. If anything does happen you’ll know who to blame.’

  ‘But there are other journalists to follow up your story - there’s nobody to follow up mine.’

  He laughed again. ‘Don’t look so worried. If they smash up your hands you can learn to type with your feet.

  ‘Actually I haven’t given you all the names and details of the things of my life because that would fill a couple of books. Names like General Ilcantara, who was a famous general in Trujillo’s time. He was a sadist. He would go to the prison, line up guys and shoot them. And General Paulino - he did the same, killed people for fun. I consider those people animals - they were killing people just for the fun of it. They were not killing people for the purpose of accomplishing a mission. Those cats and the young men like myself who are in this line - there’s a difference. Fine, we go out and kill a man - but because we have been told to and it has to be done.

  ‘I’m an operator, a liquidator just doing a job. Part of the machine. I don’t enjoy this any more. To me it’s like typing is to you. Those other people do it because they enjoy it I don’t see anything to be enjoyed out of it.

  ‘If we tortured a person it was because they would respond psychologically. I used to try interrogation first but sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to put some physical pressure on. Every man in life has his price and every man has his weakness. So if a guy doesn’t talk after a nice way - you have to get tough. I don’t enjoy doing it but I think it’s necessary.

  ‘Every police force in the world does it. No bullshit about it, everybody does it. I mean aside from politics - for thieves as well. Forget about the political side - let’s talk about police work, the real McCoy. To me there is no emotion at all involved. It doesn’t necessarily have to be government stuff—it could be someone who paid me to do it. You can come and say, look I’ve $20,000 and this guy is interfering with my business.

  ‘You have to understand - it’s a job, just a job. To me it’s just a way of making a living. Some people learn a trade, well this is my trade.’

  Six

  Slowly, I began to accept the idea that Evertsz had become a part of my life. The Observer wanted to run my interview with him in a truncated form but were worried about its authenticity and had somebody checking the story in Santo Domingo. Meanwhile, in an attempt to ease the financial burden of Evertsz from my shoulders, I had helped him get a job as a bouncer in a nightclub.

  He used to patrol the club like a vigilant schoolmaster, or stand at the bar nursing a glass of milk - and God help anybody who thought it was funny. One night I was standing with the non-smoking, milk-drinking non-dancing assassin when the barman slipped out on to the dance floor with a Chinese waitress.

  ‘Look at that teenager,’ Evertsz said, not unkindly.

  He put down his milk, walked across the dance floor and slipped an arm around the barman’s neck. I saw panic flash across the man’s face and understood that it was not because the assassin had him in a necklock but simple uncontrollable claustrophobia. And then my heart stopped. The barman swung a wild backward punch which caught Evertsz awkwardly on the side of the head.

  Evertsz released his grip and stood back. There was a brief exchange of words. The barman rubbed his neck; Evertsz walked back to the bar and picked up his milk. I looked on, unable to believe that the barman was still in one piece.

  ‘My fault, man
,’ Evertsz said magnanimously. ‘I shouldn’t have made him look small in front of that chick.’

  The curious logic of Latin machismo had saved the dancing barman’s skin.

  Evertsz fitted easily into the club scene and as an ex-government assassin he had pedigree. Every night two or three tables would be set aside at the back of the club for the local villains to drink champagne and talk business. A few younger men always sat on the fringe where they eagerly played up to the bosses. Evertsz took his place among them.

  He was given a Ford Escort - a stolen one - which he referred to affectionately as ‘one of the gangster cars’. He displayed a driving skill and nerve that would credit a stuntman and threw the car down the streets of London at full speed, drove up on pavements, roared the wrong way down one-way streets and forced cursing cabbies off the road. He was incapable of driving a hundred yards without putting on an exhibition.

  But inevitably he fell out with his employers and was reduced to devising desperate confidence tricks. One plan involved gaining access to an office in the embassy of the Dominican Republic which he used as a base to meet rich punters in elaborate attempts to borrow money on bogus business deals.

  How Evertsz managed to use an office in the embassy remains a mystery. The Dominicans deny that he was ever given access to the embassy but they did hand on mail to him. One letter, marked ‘Official Business’, arrived from Fort Bragg addressed to Carlos Evertsz, Latin Dominican Air Forces and Allied Forces, Dominican Embassy, London.

  ‘Dear Mr Evertsz,’ the letter ran. ‘Many thanks for the card you sent of the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede. It was a pleasure to hear from you and learn of your support of the U.S. Army Special Forces. Those of us who wear the Green Beret feel we are playing an important role in the U.S. Army, and it is very gratifying to hear from someone like you and know that our efforts are appreciated.

  ‘Thank you for taking the time to write, and I wish you the very best of success in the future. Sincerely, Henry E. Emerson, Brigadier General, U.S.A.’