Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  Finally, of course, he just doesn’t add up. My own personal view of him may be unbalanced in the extreme but he never kept any of his personalities long enough for me to come properly to grips with one. He slipped in and out of them, as easily as a mannequin changing outfits at a fashion show. All have been equally improbable - the young boy from the happy loving family who blows out a peasant’s brains to keep the favour of a wicked uncle . . . the émigré in fear of his life who became the playboys’ friend but was eventually reduced to kidnapping attempts and cheap con tricks . . . the milk-drinking bouncer, rigid as a board, dealing with drunks in his conservative grey suit . . . the big-spending man-about-town with a gangster car to drive and a student teacher on his arm . . . the swinging Latin lover in the black sombrero reading Peanuts books on café terraces. . .

  And then, that most unlikely cri de coeur expressing his passionate desire to be normal, ordinary and dull; the need to shelter from his loneliness in the mundane. Inside the assassin’s cage, a Norman Normal trying to get out.

  Unconvincing? Probably, but the images clash and grate and never merge into something as definite as a single personality; the sum total of his personal traits do not add up to a real person. He is a complete and, in many ways, a highly intelligent animal who somehow does not understand that the world and people around him are real and only relates to them as a flowing series of abstract problems to be dealt with, one way or another.

  If I were a novelist, and this was fiction, I could make Evertsz abandon his more unlikely characteristics and contradictory roles. But it would be misleading of me to draw an outline around him and put my finger on his heart; Evertsz has a way of remaining perpetually out of focus, a disturbing blur on the edge of one’s understanding.

  Perhaps the best way to conceive of him is as a force rather than a personality. Whatever the guise, the energy remains the same. The power of his presence is unavoidable. I used to know if he was in a room before I saw him, and even when he was in the best of moods I never felt comfortable in his presence. In the worst of moods he was capable of silencing an entire room full of people if they did not regard him as the centre of interest.

  But all my theories on Evertsz have been exercises which I have indulged myself in only when he was not around. The tranquillity of my life without him continued with only an occasional postcard to disturb it.

  It was difficult to convince myself that he was real, difficult to imagine that he had ever existed at all. It was Miguel Perez, the bureaucrat, who brought him back to me when he told me he remembered the assassin well. He recalled an incident when the young Evertsz drove a lorry into the Department’s HQ in the dark of the night and his orders were to load up and dispose of a batch of freshly slaughtered corpses. The story conjured up the assassin well enough and sent a shiver through me. I imagined him going about his task, humping the bodies over the truck’s tailgate, his black eyes hidden in the dark. A chilling image. ‘Cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night.’

  Twenty

  Just before Christmas ‘74 Evertsz ceased to be of merely armchair interest. On 12th December I flew to Madrid to start work on a film assignment which meant I would be in Spain for three months. A short time after I arrived I discovered that the assassin was playing out a new role - that of model prisoner.

  My first reaction to the news that he was locked up in the city gaol was one of relief - at least he was out of circulation. But there we were again, both back in Madrid. It struck me that we had travelled the full circle of the wheel. A five-year cycle of Carlos Evertsz had ended and another was about to begin. Slowly I began to develop an obsession to see him again and ended up on the drive out to Carabanchel described at the beginning of the book.

  The letter from Evertsz, which must have arrived in London as I was in the taxi travelling out to see him - another ridiculous coincidence which would have to be scotched in fiction - gave me the background to his situation: Dear Criss, I have been in prison 13 months 24 to go. Well Criss, what are you up to, are you getting married or what, hear you have a child by a VIP bird and wraping about birds has enyone ask for me if so please send their address and I’ll contact them, BUT DON’T let enyone know where I am, so I could try and get some money out of them. I guess this is it for now, apart of asking you for as the many paperbacks book as you could spare and few dozens magazines, since it is very hard for me to get enything to read, this is a most dear friend, even better than bread and I have none of that as well. Look here send some Penthouse and Playboy. Well Partner looking forward to hear from you and hoping you are doing fine, and a very happy Navidades and all the best for ‘75. Sincerely, Carlos.

  Evertsz spent ‘75 in gaol with at least another year to go. It was not murder which put him behind bars but petty crime, just as overstaying his visa put him inside in England.

  And, of course, once in gaol Evertsz became top prisoner. At first he attempted to get on with the prisoners and tried to organize them into using their influence, but when they failed to respond he went over to the side of the prison authorities. He ended up with so many special privileges that he was virtually a warder. The cop instinct had worked for him again.

  In Spanish prisons trusties undertake many of the duties that warders perform in other countries. Evertsz carried a card, authorizing him as Jefe de periodo, which meant that he was in charge of all new prisoners during the initial three-day observation ‘period’ when they first arrived in gaol. Evertsz’s position gave him power and very definite advantages.

  It was Evertsz who marched down the corridors during the day taking the count, and it was Evertsz who shouted ‘Everybody in the cells’ last thing at night. Privileges included his own cell - the best kitted-out in the entire place with a bookshelf, table and chair, a comfortable mattress and sheets! He also controlled one of the gaol’s most profitable sidelines, the Nescafé racket. Evertsz had a catering size tin and sold coffee at 10 pesetas a cup. Ordinary prisoners are allowed two glasses of wine a day with their meals - Evertsz had four. And at night he was allowed down to the warders’ section to sit and talk with them.

  He was also responsible for meting out punishment in his gallery. The bad boys - men who, say, were found with a knife from the dining-room in their cell, or who had failed to turn out quickly enough for a count - are taken down to the lower cells and put into solitary confinement for a period up to 30 days. They carry their beds down and are interrogated and often slapped around. Evertsz excelled in both departments.

  A young Spaniard who knew Evertsz both in Madrid, before he was sent to prison, and then served time with him in Carabanchel, told me how the assassin had reacted to gaol. Evertsz greeted the Spaniard like an old friend when he turned up in periodo and they became close.

  ‘He was good company,’ the Spaniard told me. ‘He’s got a missing link somewhere, and it doesn’t all quite fit, but 90 per cent of it is perfect. Intelligent, faithful, considerate —he has all those things going for him and then he can turn around and do something which just isn’t logical that doesn’t fit at all.

  ‘I don’t remember well when I first met him but he was around long enough that I saw him from time to time. The vibration is so intense from Carlos that he’s unforgettable.’ The Spaniard spent much of his time in gaol writing spiritual tracts and used to talk them over with Evertsz.

  ‘He showed me a lot of letters he wrote to his girl in Paris. He would always write out a rough and then copy them out and they were long and detailed letters. They were sophisticated and very, very philosophical, but so intense and driving that reading them doesn’t make you feel philosophical at all - it makes you feel up against the wall. He can be very, very intense. It’s not a tone or a vocabulary, it’s just an energy thing.

  ‘One day the warders wouldn’t let me go up or down, or something, and Carlos thought it was unfair. He threw in his badge right there, his whole position. They gave it back to him and I was allowed down. They wanted him. He’s good.

>   ‘One guy climbed to the top of the bars inside the gallery - 60 feet high - and was going to jump and was threatening to freak out. Carlos was the one they chose out of a thousand people to bring him down. He part talked him down, part dragged him down, but he got him down all right.

  ‘Most of the other prisoners think he’s a maniac and some of them think he’s full of shit - I set them straight on that. I mean in a way he is, but they don’t realize he’s a heavy number. When he carried out the interrogations and slapped people around he was perfect, cool as a cucumber. He’d see the guy next day and say “Hi!”

  ‘When I was getting out - which is something you never know — I kissed the guy who told me. I ran upstairs and put my stuff together and Carlos burst into tears, out of gladness. He said, “I’m not ashamed to cry” and tears were running down his face. I said, “Man, anything I can do for you I’ll do.” And I meant it.

  ‘He used to show me this picture of his child and say that all he wanted to do was to get back and have a normal life and straighten things out with Conchita. That was the last thing he said to me.’

  Conchita, his wife, is a sad, smiling, gap-toothed girl, extraordinary only in the fact that she is married to an assassin. She is certainly no gangster’s moll, but behind her ordinariness she is tougher than she looks. She lives with her mother now, a woman made forever bitter by the fate that has befallen her daughter.

  Despite everything, Conchita remains loyal to Evertsz and still makes the long haul out to Carabanchel to visit him and take him food. Some days he receives her fondly; on others he shouts at her in a caged fury, jealous of the outside world she lives in, and tells her that he never wants to see her again.

  We met often in Madrid and would sit over coffee and talk about Evertsz. The conversation would usually slow down until I shook my head hopelessly, while she would smile in a way that suggested that she knew the impossibility of her situation but loved Evertsz still.

  When she told him that I was in Madrid and wanted to see him he began to send me regular notes through her: Dear Criss, Hope you are having a great time in Madrid, like to tell you how sorry I am for not been able to speak with you. I beg of you to understand my position I do need money and fast but whatever please understand that I remaind you truly and gratefully friend.

  I sent in enough cash to keep Evertsz’s Nescafé racket bankrolled and Conchita returned with an effusive note of thanks. Evertsz overflowed with sentiment: I am just truly in love with my wife and in need of a clean honest life with her, she has gone frue hell cause me, and I intent to make her the happier woman within my power, so you could let her know the way I feel about her. By for now and drop a line via my beloved woman. Carlos.

  ‘He says he loves you,’ I told Conchita, folding the letter. She smiled, shrugged and read a passage from a note he had written to her. In the brief interval between finishing the letter to me and penning the one to her he had swung from sentiments of love and loyalty to a feeling of enraged jealousy. ‘Who are you fucking now?’ the letter demanded. ‘You fucking round the town?’

  I tried to envisage the sort of sex freak so ruled by his cock that he would be crazy enough to pull Evertsz’s wife. An image repeated itself before my eyes like a film loop: I kept seeing the Dominican pilot, just after his penis had been sliced off.

  But now the game has been reversed on Evertsz and it is he who has been marked as a victim. At the beginning of this year a young Dominican, also named Carlos, was sent to Carabanchel on a minor charge. The moment Evertsz saw him he knew he was there for a reason.

  Evertsz took the young man down to the lower cells and worked on him. Interrogation, using God knows what techniques, disclosed that the man had been sent to kill the assassin. He had been offered $5,000 in advance and $5,000 on completion, by one of Evertsz’s many enemies, to go into the prison and arrange an accident. What the Dominican had not bargained on was that Evertsz would be in charge of all new prisoners. The Jefe de periodo extracted a long and detailed confession from him which he has put before the prison authorities.

  Twenty-one

  The last I heard of Carlos Evertsz was that he had temporarily lost his position as Jefe de periodo and had to serve 30 days in solitary as a result of a letter he smuggled out to the U.S. embassy in Madrid. In it he explained his situation, complained about the food and appealed for money. The letter ended up in the hands of the prison authorities.

  His decline is almost complete. He has degenerated from a government assassin to a small-time con man and today he is just another gaol-bird doing time. Worse, he is a prisoner without cigarettes, wine, Nescafé or company.

  He has alienated himself from almost every group he has ever had dealings with. The Dominicans don’t want him back, the CIA must wish they had never dealt with him at all and even the prison authorities of Carabanchel have dropped him. A string of countries are either closed to him entirely or dangerous to visit.

  The future seems as bleak as the prison cell he now inhabits. Maybe he will ‘quieten it all down’ and lead a ‘clean and honest life’, but I am as sceptical of his chances as I would be of a hardened alcoholic or a junkie on his fifth cure. He may try - he did run a grocery store in New York for a year - but a pattern has evolved and it seems inevitable that he will return to his old ways and that the whole insane process will continue.

  Evertsz holds no terror for me now. In fact after so long and so much I feel an affinity with him, almost a kind of affection, coupled with an animal respect that he has survived so long against such odds. But the moment he is loose again I will wait uneasily for the phone to ring. And, like everybody else, I’ve had enough.

  The fate of Miguel Perez would seem to have been decided. Certainly he was a witness to murder and spent years in the role of an apologist because of his tacit acceptance of the activities of the department that he worked for. But, finally, he did carry out one heroic act by alerting the 48 men on Dr Sosa’s death list to the danger they were in and I would like to think that his prayers to the Virgin of the Sorrows were answered, and that he had managed to smuggle his family to safety in Curaçao, but it is more realistic to assume that he has met the same end as other Dominican exiles living abroad. The world of political murder recognizes no boundaries and exiles have been found dead in mysterious circumstances here in Europe.

  One grisly example is the death of Maximilian Gomez, one of the revolutionary leaders exiled to Mexico after the Crowley affair. Gomez left Mexico for Europe and settled in Belgium where he was eventually found gassed in his bedroom. Lying beside him was Miriam Piñedo, the widow of another revolutionary leader murdered in the Republic by police. Piñedo was still alive when found and survived a critical illness caused by the gas. At the time the Belgian police regarded the incident as an accident.

  A grotesque discovery re-opened the case six months later when the dismembered parts of a woman’s body were found in suitcases scattered throughout Brussels. It took the Belgian police two months to identify the remains but when they did it was found that they were those of Miriam Piñedo.

  The responsibility for the murders has been the subject of heated exchanges between the various factions of the exiled Dominicans in Europe and has been discussed in the press.

  The Brussels newspaper Special claimed that the murders were the result of bitter rivalry between the Dominican pro-Castro party (MPD) and the pro-Chinese party (Movimiento 24 de Abril). In Britain the Daily Telegraph came up with the view that Piñedo had been murdered on Soviet orders to prevent Chinese infiltration among Latin American exiles in Western Europe. The paper reported that Piñedo was murdered as a result of her refusal to travel to Russia to restore her health after the gassing.

  The French periodical L’Express suggested that the business was much more complex and accused Hector Aristy - the exiled Dominican leader of the Movimiento 24 de Abril - of being the CIA mastermind behind both murders. The exiled Secretary General of the main Dominican opposition party (PRD), Jose
Francisco Peña Gomez, the man who backed Perez in his original exposé of intelligence methods, believes that both Gomez and Piñedo were murdered by the Dominican secret police.

  One thing is certain: the only beneficiaries of the murder of these two Dominicans, so far from their native land, are the present régime in the Republic and those parties interested in retaining it.

  Inside the country opponents of the régime continue to be dealt with ruthlessly. Even journalists have been murdered. Gregorio Garcia Castro of Ultima Hora was shot down near his home and last year Orlando Martinez, executive editor of the moderate left-wing weekly Ahora and a columnist of El National, was killed. Nobody has been punished for either murder. Police investigation has meant the harassment of opposition political parties rather than the discovery of the assassins.

  A suspiciously convenient landing by a handful of guerrillas in June 1975 gave the government an excuse for a timely round of arrests of opposition and trade union leaders. Later three Puerto Rican fishermen were accused of bringing guerrillas into the country on the orders of the Puerto Rican socialist party. They confessed, after 20 days of imprisonment, isolation and torture and were sentenced to 30 years hard labour.

  President Balaguer governs in the style of Trujillo without the provocative excesses of the dictator. The international press have been able to describe him as a small, meek-mannered, softly spoken man who is more like an ageing choirboy or timid grandfather than an autocratic ruler. But beneath that deceptive exterior is a man adept at keeping his enemies permanently off balance. He operates behind a paper democracy that boasts a cabinet, congress and judiciary. In fact none of them functions at all and Balaguer runs the country alone, trusting no one.