Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  Finally he wedged himself into a telephone box at the back of a small restaurant off the main street of Santo Domingo and systematically phoned every man remaining on Sosa’s list. He remembers that as he stood ringing the numbers he was rigid with fear, prepared at any moment for a burst of machine gun fire to cut him down as he dialled.

  The avenues of escape were thoroughly blocked. An enraged Dr Sosa had organized a hawk-like watch on the airport and docks of Santo Domingo while every agent of both Presidential and Military Intelligence had orders to shoot Perez down on sight. It seemed as if his decision to save the lives of the 48 men on the death list meant that he had sacrificed his own. His only hope was political asylum and with that in mind he climbed into his canary yellow car and raced to the Venezuelan embassy.

  Eighteen

  ‘The Ambassador behaved like a father to me and it is thanks to him that I am alive today,’ Perez recalls. The Venezuelans granted asylum to himself, his two youngest children and his wife. They were driven to the airport accompanied by the ambassador himself, Rafael Ignacio Sanchez Tirado, and a military attaché, where they boarded a Venezuelan aircraft and flew to Caracas (Travel document).

  A week later the story hit the headlines of the Dominican press which ran detailed accounts of Perez’s claims, mentioned the stolen documents and printed the names of the men on Dr Sosa’s death list. The Secretary General of the opposition party, Peña Gomez, who was on the list, later gave a press conference to confirm the story and also disclosed the names of the Cuban agents.

  It was the first time that Dr Sosa had ever been exposed in this way. He told both the president and the press that he was completely ignorant of any assassination plot. Perez was an employee with political ambitions of his own and as for the so-called secret documents - well, where were they?

  President Balaguer himself finally called a press conference to say that after a thorough investigation he could happily announce that he still had every faith in his intelligence chief. The whole story of a wholesale assassination was a concoction of the opposition designed to create panic among the population.

  And so it became necessary for Dr Sosa to ensure that his traitorous assistant maintained a total silence. Venezuela was to become an extension of the nightmare he had lived through back in the Republic. He was a penniless exile on the threshold of another era of terror in a strange land where he knew no one.

  I have recorded the events of Perez’s exile up to my arrival in Caracas, when he was under surveillance by both Venezuelan and Dominican agents, and his subsequent trip to New York. He arrived back in Caracas happy that he had gained his objective of ‘revealing the deeds of the assassins to the world’. He intended eventually to visit the Dutch island of Curaçao to make arrangements with the captain of a molasses boat to smuggle his family out of the Republic.

  ‘Everybody living outside of their country has an uncertain future,’ he had told me in New York, shrugging miserably. The events of the past years were part of his destiny, he said, but added that he was uncertain what that destiny was. In his conversation, as in his diary, it was clear that he was a committed Catholic, profoundly superstitious and a convinced believer in miracles. He spoke of the Virgin of the Sorrows, his aptly named but unreliable protectress, and gave instances of miracles she had wrought which had saved his life. He was hopeful that she would come to his aid once again.

  The day after his arrival back in Caracas he was visited by Mauricio Coro, a fellow Dominican exile, who told him that he had spent three months in political asylum in the Venezuelan embassy in Santo Domingo and desperately needed somewhere to stay.

  ‘In fact the man was a terrorist and a torturer who had infiltrated the police, but when he was found out he had to go into exile,’ Perez says. Despite the man’s previous background Perez seems to have felt some responsibility for a fellow exile. He apologized to Coro for being unable to put him up, as his own place was much too small, but he did find him somewhere to stay.

  “The next morning I got up but when I went downstairs I found three men at die door who asked me to identify myself. They then took me to DISIP’ (a special branch of the Venezuelan police). ‘I had no idea why, and when I asked I got no reply. The men wouldn’t talk. When we got to DISIP a man called Sr Rhodes said to me, “Ah, you’re the kidnapper!” My mind spun and I didn’t know what to think.’

  The police were pulling in Dominican exiles because it had been reported that the Dominican consul had been kidnapped. After Perez’s initial interrogation three men took a statement from him and made it quite clear that they believed him to be involved in the kidnapping. They told him that they knew he had worked for Intelligence in the Republic and that if anything happened to the consul he would be held responsible. ‘I was in such a bad state of nerves that I couldn’t even answer. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.’

  That evening they brought his wife and son to DISIP to confirm his statement. It was nine o’clock before they were finally allowed to leave but Perez was ordered to return the following day. ‘That night I couldn’t sleep,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I wanted to run away and disappear. But I knew that they would come after me and put the blame on me for something I knew nothing about.’

  The following day when he returned to DISIP he found several other Dominicans whom the police had brought in. One of them was Mauricio Coro. The police had read a great deal into Perez’s meeting with Coro, who was known as a political activist. They thought the two men made strange bedfellows and suspected a plot. ‘They wanted to know why Mauricio Coro had come to my house at eleven at night. I explained why but they obviously didn’t believe me and kept on with questions and more questions.’

  He was allowed to go home that night but was again ordered to return the following day. This time Perez felt a change of atmosphere and he had the impression that the situation had somehow developed. Once again interest was focused on to Perez’s secret documents. ‘We know that you have documents belonging to the Dominican Intelligence Department,’ his interrogators shot at him, ‘and we want you to tell us where they are. If you don’t we have the power to send you back to Santo Domingo.’

  He was told that the police believed the kidnapping to be associated with the documents. This made no sense to Perez but he wrote philosophically, ‘Anything was possible where the experts of the intelligence department were concerned.’

  He told the police that the material he possessed was not the property of the Dominican government but private information from the personal files of his ex-chief, which concerned crimes the department had been involved in. In order to keep the documents safe he had handed them over to a representative of the church in Caracas, he said, with a note saying they were to be published if anything happened to him. It was a good answer, which put his interrogators into stalemate, and he was allowed to leave.

  Subsequent events made the whole incident seem like a deliberate plot on the part of the Dominicans to force Perez into handing over the documents. The day after he was released it was discovered that the kidnapping had been a hoax. The Dominicans had merely been putting the pressure on the Venezuelan government to arrest Perez as a criminal. The consul suddenly appeared with the lame explanation that he had just taken a few days’ holiday and that his staff had been over-zealous in their concern for his safety.

  Perez had braved another storm. ‘I began to live again,’ he wrote. ‘Everything was once more back to normal after several days of despair.’

  Not that being ‘back to normal’ meant quiet days and tranquil evenings. Perez was subject to the same pressures as before; it was just that he was not held by the police in an interrogation cell. But he had made the mistake of falling out with the interpreter we had used who reacted by going to the newspapers. A Caracas daily, El Mundo, published an article on ‘communist’ intrigues in Caracas and mentioned Perez’s meetings in the town with Colonel Tejeda and later myself to discuss certain secret documents in his possession. A
lthough the reference to Perez was vague and inconclusive it sowed new fears in his mind and jeopardized his already shaky status in the country.

  The news that Perez had been talking to a journalist alerted the Americans. ‘The first secretary of the U.S. Embassy (George Raymond Phelan, Jr) sent his chauffeur to my house with his card and asked me to phone the embassy. I didn’t want to phone, but the next day the chauffeur returned, so in the evening I did phone and made an appointment to meet him at 9 a.m. the next day at a house in the eastern part of Caracas.

  ‘When I got there a man told me that he knew I had something which did not please them - and that I was going to publish it. They didn’t mind my publishing the rest provided I left out the documents which dealt with the U.S.A.. I answered that I could not do as he asked.’

  Meanwhile back in Bloomsbury I was sifting through the material and bombarding Perez with letters asking him to clarify various points and occasionally talking to him on the telephone. I received a telegram: ‘Situation delicate. Do not ring.’

  After two weeks without any news at all I became worried and did telephone. The call was avoided and the next thing I knew Perez had flown to New York to tell my agent that I was not to ring him as his phone was tapped. Paranoia was most expensive, I thought, safe in London.

  There were a couple more letters and then . . . nothing. I asked a fellow journalist visiting Caracas to go and see him and he reported back that the family had moved from the address. I wrote letters to poste restante addresses and received no replies. Perez had disappeared.

  I have never heard of him since.

  Nineteen

  During the period that I was back in London attempting to coax letters out of Perez I searched hopefully through the mail each morning for word. But as our correspondence became less and less frequent I felt his world slip away from me and grow remote. Then one day a postcard arrived out of the blue from an earlier acquaintance. The message, inscribed on the back of a circular card of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses posted from Rome, sent the blood rushing to my head: I’m not looking for an excuse because there is no-one. Just to let you know that I have no forgotten what big favor yo did to me in Berlin. Please trust me that I will make it up. Love, Carlos.

  The assassin was announcing his return to my life and was apparently remorseful for not paying me for the air tickets I had bought him. But, love Carlos? Talk about the swings! I had been removed from the top of the death list and given the status of best buddy. I was rather touched.

  Later another card arrived from Lisbon: Hi Criss, Don think that I have forgotten about you, please always remember that the Carlos Evertsz of this world never forget friends. Love, Carlos.

  This sudden lurch into love was worrying. Evertsz was changing, laying all this love-between-men stuff on me, and the extent of the change was spread before me when two young Australian girls turned up on my doorstep as a sort of present from Evertsz. They were a pleasant enough, dumpy pair and very much the sort Evertsz worked on.

  He had a power over certain women and it was not one that he exerted through fear. His women, far from being frightened of him, remarked on his charm. One thing about Carlos Evertsz, they said, he is certainly a gentleman. They were mostly unspectacular in themselves and included nurses and student teachers, the sort of girl who lived bedsitting-room existences, bought romance magazines and desperately believed in the short stories and heroes in them. Evertsz was larger than life, a big spender, good looking and above all he was a man who had killed. He had glamour. He did not bother to conceal his past, which seemed to add to his sex appeal.

  The Australian girls talked about him endlessly with wide eyes as if he were a god. They accepted his murderous past as part of his mysterious ways, but were unable to understand why he had left them one day to cash $500 of their travellers’ cheques at an especially favourable rate and had never returned.

  Evertsz really had changed his image for Lisbon. Instead of the straight grey suits and highly polished shoes, which had worked so well in London he took to sporting black silk shirts, tight black trousers and an extravagant black sombrero. And in place of the rigid, policeman-like figure with the glass of milk in the London disco, there was this funky, supersexy-snake who danced through the night. He became a well-known boulevard character, a conspicuous figure at the pavement cafés where he sat in his sombrero reading Peanuts books translated into Spanish.

  The Australian girls would have pared his toenails with their teeth, but as it was he was content to have them rub baby oil into his body after he showered. While the girls busied themselves with the oil Evertsz would look down admiringly at his torso and exclaim, ‘God, I’m in good shape.’

  He liked to talk to them about his own brand of philosophy and used to show them letters which he wrote to his French girl. One of the girls was so moved that she stole one, written by Evertsz while he was staying in a two-star hotel on the Rodrigues Sampaio in Lisbon. It makes extraordinary reading:

  Introspection, observation and the records of human behaviour in the past and at the present time make it very clear that an urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread, and, at times, quite as forceful as the urge to self-assertion. You must be aware, that Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as themselves but we also desire - and desire very often, with irresistible violence - the consciousness of being someone else.

  In other words: I have a longing to get out of myself, to pass beyond the limits of this tiny island we call universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.

  Any man or woman, the most happy, no less the most wretched, may come suddenly or gradually to the naked knowing and feeling of their own being, this immediate awareness of selfhood begets an agonizing desire to go beyond the insulated ego.

  When I was near you my happiness at that time seemed to have passed the limits of the possible and was a kind of enduring paroxysm, an exquisite frenzy which I could renew at will.

  When one needs - as I need you - one needs a complete existence and just need it w. one’s whole being, w. the soul and every fibre of the body.

  I have never admited have need enyone, in fact I never had need enyone - untill I cross my way into your life.

  You must be aware of the fact, and it is that I need you in order to make my life a life.

  Also I would like to be very honest w. you. As I stand now on life, I have nothing at all, but my will to work for a decen an normal life. Please let me no if you feel that you could share w. me strugle for life.

  Thru time and space

  Always w. you.

  It rings true, although I feel that only the last three paragraphs were written by Evertsz and that for the rest he has used the words of another writer to express his ideas - essentially that he would like to be somebody else, preferably the normal ordinary being of his dreams. The early syntax is beyond Evertsz’s grasp of English, and it is unlikely that he would use a word like ‘beget’, but the final paragraphs are certainly his own, from the spelling of ‘enyone’ with an ‘e’ to the passionate desire to have a ‘decen and normal life.’

  In Colin Wilson’s book Order of Assassins he used Evertsz as a case history - alongside Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper - to explore the psychology of the assassin. Much of what he writes is extraordinarily relevant to Evertsz, altogether forming a brilliant insight into the man. After summarizing his life in the Dominican Republic Wilson concludes: ‘. . . there is no sadism in Krafft-Ebing’s sense of the word. All the atrocities described by Evertsz seem to have been committed with a certain indifference, as if it were sheep who were being butchered. Dictators who run a régime of this type are not motivated by sadism; but they are motivated by a fierce will to power. Such pleasure as is involved - for example, in burning Cuban prisoners - seems to spring out of the satisfaction of anger rather than some “erotic nerve”.’

  Wilson makes a distinction between the murderer and the assassin, arguing th
at most murderers would prefer not to kill, while assassins commit murder for its own sake. ‘The assassin is a man for whom murder is not only an ultimate purpose, but a means of self-fulfilment, a creative act . . . The ordinary murderer commits his crime looking over his shoulder. He hopes not to be caught; if he is caught, he will hang his head and acknowledge his sense of guilt by saying, “It’s a fair cop.” The assassin peers down his rifle with the sense of justification felt by a headmaster as he canes an insolent pupil or a hangman as he releases the trap . . . He feels he is in the right.’

  Wilson takes a pre-Freudian stand to understand the mind of the assassin in general and comes up with Evertsz’s favourite author, Nietzsche, whose philosophy recognized the will to power as the fundamental drive of all living creatures and saw it as an expression of man’s struggle to become a god. Wilson quotes a passage from Nietzsche which would make Evertsz’s dead eyes burn with excitement.

  Nietzsche writes in Antichrist: ‘What is Good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.

  ‘What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.

  ‘The weak and the failures shall perish; first principle of our love of man. And they shall be given every possible assistance.’

  ‘The vital key to the psychology of the assassin, Wilson says, is that the true role of his violence is to prevent the disintegration of his self-image.

  Interesting stuff, I thought, as I flicked through the pages of Wilson’s book. My life had become so tranquil without Evertsz that I was even able to take a detached, intellectual interest in his existence. The bastard was no longer breaking into my flat, wandering through my life at will and invading my sleep until it seemed that every dream I had during the latter months with Evertsz was a nightmare crammed with symbols of death. Wilson might well have discovered the key to the assassin’s psychology, but in Evertsz’s case it would only open the door into a maze in which there were many more doors, some opening on to dead ends and others not opening at all.