The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

  In Deadline – U.S.A., Peter Ventura’s favorite newspaper movie, there was a wonderful scene at the end where the paper’s managing editor, played by Humphrey Bogart, was about to run an exposé about a mob boss that would send the guy to jail. The mobster calls Bogart and makes all sorts of threats while Bogart was in the press room getting ready for the presses to roll with the story. But Bogart just orders the presses to start rolling.

  I thought about that movie now as I called Dominic Bennato to tell him about the story we were running and ask for any comment from him about it.

  It took a while for me to get through to him on the phone, but I finally did.

  Maybe because he’d met with me before that day in his office.

  Maybe because he found me so charming.

  Or maybe because he knew something was about to happen, and he needed to find out what it was.

  I went through everything that we would be running in the Tribune. I said we were still gathering more information about it. He had twenty-four hours to get back to me with a response. Otherwise, we would run it without any comment at all from him. I said that seemed more than fair. Bennato obviously didn’t agree.

  “You can’t print that story,” he screamed at me when I was finished.

  “That’s not up to you, Bennato.”

  “You kill that story or you’re in big trouble,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”

  “Big trouble,” Bennato said again, then he slammed down the phone.

  Danny was right.

  I did need to be careful.

  Sixty-Three

  I saw another police car the next morning. But not soon enough. And this time it was the real thing, not my paranoia. A blue and while NYPD squad car pulled in front of the Tribune building just as I approached. Shockley and Janko got out.

  I tried my best to stay calm. I was on a busy Manhattan street in broad daylight with lots of people around, I told myself. Nothing bad could happen to me here, I told myself. I told myself wrong.

  “We’ve been thinking again about that marijuana we found in your car,” Shockley said. “We decided we let you off too easy then. So we’re gonna take you to that jail cell, after all.”

  He looked over at his partner Janko and smiled. Janko smiled too. They were enjoying this. Shockley and Janko were the type of cops who enjoyed their work, even if what they were doing was not really police work.

  “I don’t have to listen to this anymore,” I said, and I started moving toward the Tribune front door.

  “Yeah, you do,” Shockley said, and he grabbed me.

  “Let me go!”

  “Cuff her, Vic.”

  Janko pulled out a pair of handcuffs and put them on me. Then both of them began dragging me toward the squad car. All I could think of to do was scream for help. Which was what I did. I yelled at people passing by on the street that I was being kidnapped.

  But these were cops. They just told everyone I was a psychotic mental patient they were picking up for my own safety. A few people stared, but most kept walking and ignored us. Like most New Yorkers do when they see something unpleasant happening on the street. I probably would have done that too.

  They shoved me into the car and began driving away.

  Headed away from the 22nd Precinct on the Upper East Side, where they worked.

  Instead, we drove downtown and then across the East River into Brooklyn.

  “What precinct are you taking me to?” I asked, even though I was afraid I didn’t want to know the answer.

  “You ain’t going to any precinct, honey,” Janko said.

  “You ain’t going to be going nowhere!” Shockley laughed.

  I didn’t say anything after that. There was nothing to say. We drove through Brooklyn to a deserted area along the waterfront. There was nothing there except a big old warehouse building. They took me out of the car and into the building.

  There were a half dozen men inside. A couple of them wore police uniforms like Shockley and Janko. The others I assumed were mob guys who worked for Dominic Bennato.

  But there was one person in the room that I gave the most attention to: Dominic Bennato himself.

  All four hundred pounds or so of mob boss.

  Sitting there in this warehouse building and glaring at me.

  This was not the Dominic Bennato I met in his fancy, businesslike office with the secretary, the plush rugs and the Muzak playing in the background. This wasn’t the Dominic Bennato either who ran the Italian restaurant Marcello’s with the wonderful pasta primavera and had takeout food delivered upstairs to Michelle when she lived there. And it wasn’t the Dominic Bennato who told me in his office how much he admired “my balls” for standing up to him.

  This was the real Dominic Bennato.

  A vicious thug.

  A killer.

  “I’ve decided it’s time to put an end to all this trouble you’re causing for me,” Bennato said. “You’ve refused to stop investigating everything about Walsh and Walsh’s daughter and all the rest. That means I have to take matters into my own hands. Walsh is too important to me to allow you to mess up this deal. I have Walsh in my pocket, and he’s going to stay in my pocket. So I’m going to have to shut you down, Jessie Tucker. You won’t be telling this story to anyone.”

  Even in my current situation, I was curious. Still a reporter to the end, I guess.

  “What damaging evidence do you have on Walsh?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Is it about the death of his son?”

  Bennato almost smiled now. “You are a pretty good reporter.”

  “You got the real story about his son’s death from Greg Stovall, the deputy. You financed Stovall in his landscaping business in return for the information. And that’s given you something to control Walsh – the man everyone always thought was the Prince of the City because he was supposedly so honest and incorruptible – ever since. Am I close?”

  “Let’s just say Walsh had his secrets that he didn’t want to come out. And that’s proved very profitable for me.”

  He nodded toward Shockley and Janko.

  Something was about to happen.

  The time for talk was almost over.

  “I’m going to give you two options, Ms. Tucker,” Bennato said. “Neither of them are very pleasant. But one is exceedingly less pleasant than the other. The first option is that you will write out and sign a note saying that you were wrong about this story; that you made all the facts up which were never true; and you did it because you wanted to stay in the media spotlight like you were with all the Central Park events. You will also say that the trauma over everything that happened to you all over again recently in Central Park has been too much to bear, and you just can’t go on anymore. Yes, it will be a suicide note. Just like the one Billy Renfro left. That should be enough for the Tribune to not run your story. And, even if they did, no one would believe anything you said because of your clearly disturbed mental state from the suicide note. Then, once you have written this note for us – and signed it, officers Shockley and Janko will shoot you in the head and dump your body into the East River.”

  This can’t be happening, I thought to myself as I tried to control the fear and the panic inside me. I can’t have my life end like this. Not after I survived everything I went through in Central Park. Did I go through all of that just to die in some crappy warehouse at the hands of a thug like Dominic Bennato?

  “What’s the more pleasant option?” I asked Bennato.

  It seemed to be the only logical response.

  “That is the more pleasant option. The other option – if you refuse to write and sign the suicide note I just spoke about – is that Shockley and Janko will still kill you and dump you in the East River. But they will make it a very long and painful process for you. They’re experts at prolonging pain like that, and they enjoy torturing a victim long and hard before the final kill. So make it easy on yourself. Jus
t like Renfro did. Write and sign the note, and I promise you it will all be over very quickly.”

  I looked at Shockley and Janko. They were smiling even more now. Janko had that crazy look in his eyes again. Excitement maybe. Anticipation. Or both. Like Bennato had said, these two enjoyed their work.

  I turned back toward Bennato.

  “And those are my only two options?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Actually, I do have a third option.”

  “Really? What is that?”

  Shockley and Janko weren’t holding on to me, so I was able to move my handcuffed arms in front of me. I moved them up to my chest. Then I reached up to the top buttons on the blouse I was wearing.

  “Here’s my third option,” I said, and began to open up my blouse.

  Bennato just shook his head. He didn’t understand what I was doing. Not yet.

  “Sex? You’re offering us sex for your life? I really don’t see how that could make a difference. If we wanted to have sex with you, we could. And then go ahead and kill you anyway. So let’s stop wasting time and—”

  “Not quite,” I said.

  I unbuttoned my blouse all the way down now and pulled it apart so they could see what was underneath.

  A recording device.

  “I’m wired, Bennato. And you’re screwed. Everything you just said and did was being recorded by the police. The real police, not these disgraces to the NYPD you have working for you. They’re outside the building now listening. They should be arriving here very soon.”

  At first, I think they thought I was bluffing.

  But I wasn’t.

  Suddenly, there was a smashing sound at the door of the warehouse.

  Bennato turned around in a panic, lumbered to his feet and started to try to run, along with Shockley and Janko and the others.

  But there was nowhere to run to.

  A huge number of cops, including SWAT team members with automatic weapons, were inside the warehouse now and taking everyone into custody.

  Sam Rawlings was there, which didn’t surprise me. He was the one who came up with the idea to have me wired – and then followed – in case Bennato tried something like this.

  Thomas Aguirre was there too, which also made sense.

  But one of the other people there – one of the cops – was a surprise.

  It was Walsh.

  “What are you doing here?” Bennato yelled at him.

  “My job.”

  “If I go down, I’m taking you with me!”

  “I know.”

  “Then why—”

  “This was something I should have done a long time ago,” Walsh said.

  Sixty-Four

  I was a media star all over again. Just like I’d been with Central Park. Everyone wanted to talk to me. I was on Good Morning America, the NBC Nightly News and the cable news channels. Newspapers, magazines and websites chased after me for an interview. And #jessietucker was trending like hell on Twitter and the rest of social media.

  This all came after I broke the story first on the front page of the Tribune.

  MOB BOSS BENNATO BUSTED—AND THE TRIBUNE WAS THERE!

  Top NYPD Officer Walsh Implicated in Crimes Too

  By Jessie Tucker

  Tribune Crime Reporter

  Dominic (Fat Nic) Bennato, the legendary New York underworld leader, was arrested during a dramatic raid in a Brooklyn warehouse for murder and a host of corruption charges growing out of the death of policewoman Maura Walsh.

  This reporter was there and actually participated in the stunning takedown of the notorious mob boss who has successfully avoided prosecution from law enforcement over the years.

  Also taken into custody were NYPD Deputy Commissioner Mike Walsh, the father of the recently slain policewoman, and a group of allegedly corrupt officers from the 22nd Precinct in Manhattan who had been taking bribes from Bennato.

  The Tribune learned that Maura Walsh was working undercover at the time of her death to expose those corrupt police officers – including her own father – who had been cooperating with Bennato on various illegal schemes and activities.

  It is not clear yet if Maura Walsh’s murder on a lower Manhattan street was connected to the undercover investigation. But Bennato and several of the officers from the 22nd Precinct have been tied to at least two other murders – Billy Renfro, Maura Walsh’s NYPD partner, and Frank Walosin, a Manhattan private investigator.

  It took a while to sort everything out. And, when that happened, it turned out to be even more incredible than I or anyone else could have ever imagined.

  Some of it I already knew or had figured out.

  Yes, Walsh admitted to Internal Affairs investigators, he had used his NYPD influence and connections to cover up the details of what really happened in the death of his son years earlier in Saginaw Lake.

  He said he’d lost his temper and beaten the boy for bad behavior that day. He said he had beaten the boy for doing things wrong in the past too, once even breaking a bone in Patrick’s arm. But the physical abuse hadn’t really gotten out of hand, he insisted, until that last day. That’s when he realized he had beaten his own son to death with a series of powerful blows to his head. He hadn’t meant to hurt the boy that badly, he said, it was an accident. Just a horrible and tragic accident, he kept saying over and over.

  It was what happened next that was truly unfathomable.

  In order to hide the fact that the boy had died of injuries inflicted to his head, Mike Walsh took out his spare service revolver that he kept in a closet at the house and then – Walsh began to cry as he relived this movement – he shot his own son in the head. That way it appeared as if the boy died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, not a beating.

  Walsh – who had always seemed so impassive and unfeeling in the past – completely broke down in tears as he related this part. I remembered the EMT Timothy Fenton talking about how emotional Walsh was that day at the house too. And with good reason. He had just shot his own son. To cover up the fact that he’d already accidentally killed the boy with his fists in a fit of anger.

  He then offered the police chief, Walter Palumbo, the dream job he’d always wanted with the NYPD and paid off his deputy, Greg Stovall, too. They made sure no autopsy was done; nobody asked too many questions; and they even switched the medical records in the report on the case.

  Neither of them were aware he’d actually killed his own son, Walsh believed, but they knew he wanted details about what happened that day kept secret – or even altered, in the case of the medical report.

  He said they thought he was trying to protect his teenaged daughter Maura by doing all this.

  “When they found out Maura had been drinking while she was supposed to be watching Patrick, they assumed Maura had done something irresponsible that caused his death. That we had lied about her not being in the house when Patrick died to protect her. And they believed that was the secret I didn’t want anyone to find out about. I did not disabuse them of that belief. I let them keep thinking that’s what had happened – my daughter was responsible – rather than let them discover the truth.”

  But it seemed the money wasn’t enough to buy Stovall’s silence for good. Because it turned out he had a cousin who was involved with the mob, and he told the cousin about it all at some point afterward. The cousin got the word to Bennato, who saw an opportunity to get a top police official like Walsh, a man known for his integrity and refusal to accept any payoffs or gifts, under his control.

  Bennato gave Stovall a lot of money for his landscaping business – much more money than Walsh had been able to afford. In return, Stovall told Bennato everything he knew about the death of little Patrick. When Bennato confronted Walsh with this information, Walsh realized he was in too deep now to back out of the lies he’d told. And so he reluctantly agreed he had no choice but to cooperate with the mob boss.

  There was a dramatic video made during Walsh’s interrogation by police investigato
rs where he talked about his daughter, Maura. It eventually wound up on YouTube and trended all over Twitter and the rest of social media. But I got it first from one of my sources and we played it prominently on the Tribune website before anyone else did.

  It was a terrific exclusive for me.

  But it still pained me – and made me feel sad about Maura – to watch Walsh as he talked about his daughter. The man’s cold, aloof exterior was gone now. Instead, all of his guilt and his remorse and his anguish over what he had lost because of his own actions were what we saw in the video as he talked:

  “My daughter was consumed by guilt because she had gotten drunk when she was supposed to be watching Patrick,” he said. “When I spoke to her afterward, she didn’t remember anything – including the fact she had left the house while Patrick was still alive. She had gone into a total blackout.

  “She was convinced it was she who had been at fault for her brother’s death. That she had allowed Patrick to play with the gun. Or, perhaps even worse, she had taken the gun out of the closet and – in her inebriated state – accidentally killed her own brother. She really believed she was responsible for her brother’s death – and that we had lied about where she was to protect her.

  “I let her believe that. I let my daughter continue to believe she was the one at fault for Patrick’s death. And that everything I had done to keep the facts a secret was to protect her, not to protect myself. Just like Palumbo and Stovall believed I was doing too. Even after they spoke to Maura’s friend she’d gotten drunk with and left with that day, they assumed it was all part of the cover-up. Letting people like Palumbo and Stovall think Maura had acted irresponsibly to cause her brother’s death just seemed the most effective way of making sure the real story never came out.”

  My God, I thought to myself, as I read the incriminating statement.

  But there was even more.

  “As Maura grew up, I used this information – information that wasn’t true, of course – against her to get her to do what I wanted. Which was to join the police force. I had lost my son. The son that I desperately wanted one day to carry on the Walsh tradition of NYPD service.