Even the Wicked (4 page)

“Or, to put it another way, each of us embodied for a moment in time the collective will of the people of New York. It is the ability of the public to work its will that is, when all is said and done, the genuine essence of democracy. It is not the right to vote, or the several freedoms provided by the Bill of Rights, so much as it is that we are governed—or govern ourselves—according to our collective will. So don’t hold yourself accountable for the timely execution of Richard Vollmer. Blame Vollmer himself, if you wish. Or blame or credit me—but when you do, you are only blaming or crediting

One of the cops had left his card, and McGraw dug it out and reached for the phone. He had the number half dialed when he broke the connection and started over.

First he called the City Desk. Then he called the cops.

“RICHIE’S KILLER GOES PUBLIC” the next day’s headline screamed. The lead story, under McGraw’s byline, reproduced Will’s letter in full, along with excerpts from the first letter and a report on the progress of the police investigation. Sidebar stories included interviews with psychologists and criminologists. McGraw’s column ran on page four, with the title “An Open Letter to Will.” The gist of it was that Will may have been justified in what he’d done, but all the same he had to turn himself in.

But that didn’t happen. Instead Will was silent, while the police investigation proceeded and got nowhere. Then, about a week later, McGraw’s mail included another letter from Will.

He’d been expecting more from Will, and had been keeping an eye out for a long envelope with a typed address and no return address, but this time the envelope was small and the address handprinted in ballpoint, and there was a return address as well. So he went ahead and opened it. He unfolded the single sheet of paper, saw the typeface and the signature in script type, and dropped the letter like a hot rock.

“An Open Letter to Patrizzio Salerno,” it began, and McGraw went on to read a virtual parody of his own open letter to Richie Vollmer. Patsy Salerno was a local mafioso, the head of one of the five families, and the elusive target of a RICO investigation who had survived innumerable attempts to put him behind bars. Will detailed Patsy’s various offenses against society. “Your own cohorts have tried repeatedly to rid us of you,” he wrote, referring to the several attempts on Patsy’s life over the years. He went on to suggest that Patsy perform the first public-spirited act of his life by killing himself; failing that, the letter’s author would be forced to act.

“In a sense,” he concluded, “I have no choice in the matter. I am, after all, only

The story sold a lot of papers. Nobody managed to get an interview with Salerno, but his attorney made good copy, describing his client as an innocent businessman who’d been persecuted by the government for years. He saw this latest outrage as further persecution; either Will had been launched on his crackpot crusade by the lies the government had spread about Patrizzio Salerno, or in fact there was no Will, and this was an elaborate federal effort to uncover or fabricate new evidence against Patsy. He advanced the latter possibility while declining on his client’s behalf an NYPD offer of police protection.

“Imagine the cops protecting Patsy,” the Post quoted an anonymous wise guy as saying. “Make more sense to have Patsy protecting the cops.”

The story got a lot of play locally, in the papers and on TV, but after a few days it began to die down because there was nothing to keep it going. Then on a Sunday Patsy had dinner at a restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. I don’t remember what he ate, although the tabloids reported the meal course by course. Eventually he went to the men’s room, and eventually someone went in after him to find out what was taking him so long.

Patsy was sprawled out on the floor with a couple of feet of piano wire around his neck. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth, double its usual size, and his eyes were bulging.

Of course the media went crazy. The national talk shows had their experts on, discussing the ethics of vigilantism and the particular psychology of Will. Someone recalled the number from
The Mikado
, “I’ve Got a Little List,” and it turned out that everybody had his own list of “society offenders who might well be under ground,” as the Gilbert and Sullivan song had it. David Letterman was on hand with a Top Ten list for Will’s consideration, most of the entries overexposed show biz personalities. (Rumor had it that there was a good deal of backstage debate about the propriety of putting Jay Leno at the top of the list; in any event, Letterman’s late-night rival went unmentioned.)

There were more than a few people who claimed to be Will, and tried to take credit for his acts. The police set up a special phone number for calls relating to the case, and they got the predictable glut of false claimants and confessors. Open letters to various citizens, purportedly by Will, flowed to the News offices in a great stream. McGraw got a couple of death threats: “An Open Letter to Marty McGraw…You started this, you son of a bitch, and now it’s your turn…” A lot of people, in public and private, were moved to guess who Will’s next target might be, and offered their recommended candidates.

Everyone was sure of one thing. There would be a third. Nobody stopped at two. One maybe, three maybe. But nobody stopped at two.

Will didn’t disappoint, although his next pick may have surprised a lot of people. “An Open Letter to Roswell Berry” was his heading, and he went on to identify the city’s leading anti-abortion activist as an unindicted murderer. “Your rhetoric has provoked violent action on the part of your followers time and time again,” Will asserted, “and on at least two occasions death has been the direct result. The bombing at the 137th Street clinic, the assassinations of the nurse and physician on Ralph Avenue, were wanton acts of murder. Both times you have talked out of both sides of your mouth, disassociating yourself from the act but all but applauding it as a means to an end, and a far lesser evil than abortion…You champion the unborn, but your interest in a fetus ends at birth. You oppose birth control, oppose sex education, oppose any social program that might lessen the demand for abortion. You are a despicable human being, and seemingly unpunishable. But no one can hold out for long against

Berry was out of town when the letter landed on Marty McGraw’s desk. He was in Omaha, leading a massive protest against an abortion clinic. “I am doing God’s work,” he told the TV cameras. “It’s His will that I continue, and I’ll stack that up against the so-called will of the people any day.” He told another interviewer that whatever business Will had with him would have to wait until he returned to New York, and he expected to be in Omaha for some time to come.

God’s will. In AA, we’re advised to pray only for knowledge of His will, and the power to carry it out. My sponsor, Jim Faber, has said that it’s the easiest thing in the world to know God’s will. You just wait and see what happens, and that’s it.

It may indeed have been God’s work that Roswell Berry was doing, but it evidently wasn’t God’s will that he continue. He stayed in Omaha, just as he said he would, but when he returned to New York it was in a box.

The maid found him in his room at the Omaha Hilton. His killer, not without a sense of humor, had left him with a coat hanger wrapped around his neck.

It was the Omaha Police Department’s case, of course, but they welcomed the two NYPD detectives who flew out to consult with them and exchange information. There was no evidence to link Berry’s murder with the killings of Vollmer and Salerno, none aside from Will’s having singled him out in his open letter, and this left room for speculation that some native Omahan, spurred perhaps by Will’s suggestion, had handled the matter on a local level.

Will’s next communication—sent, like all the others, to Marty McGraw—addressed that notion. “Did I go off to Omaha to settle accounts with Mr. Berry? Or did some citizen of Omaha, outraged at having to put up with Roswell Berry’s disruption of that fair city’s urban equilibrium, take matters into his own hands?

“My friend, what on earth does it matter? What difference can it possibly make? I myself am nothing, as someone is purported to have said in a slightly different context. It is the will of the people that acts through me. If indeed another pair of hands than mine stuck the knife in Roswell Berry’s pitiless heart before girdling his neck with a coat hanger, it is as moot to ponder my own responsibility in the matter as it is to wonder how much your own writing gave rise to my actions. Each of us, alone or in concert, helps to express

It was cleverly done. Will wouldn’t say whether he’d gone to Omaha, arguing that it didn’t matter one way or another. At the same time, he pretty much settled the matter by alluding to the fact that Berry had been stabbed. The Omaha authorities had suppressed this. (They would have liked to suppress the coat hanger as well, but it leaked, and the symbolism was just too good to expect the press to keep it under wraps. It was easier to hold back the knife work, because it hadn’t shown up until they had Roswell Berry on the autopsy table. He’d been killed with a single stab wound to the heart, inflicted with one stroke of a narrow-bladed knife or dagger. Death was virtually instantaneous and there was no bleeding to speak of, which is why the stabbing wasn’t noticed at first, and why it managed to stay out of the papers.)

Roswell Berry had looked like a difficult target. He’d been more than halfway across the country, staying in a hotel with a good security setup, and escorted at all times by a cadre of loyal bodyguards, broad-shouldered young men in chinos and short-sleeved white shirts, with buzz haircuts and unsmiling faces. (“Thugs for Jesus,” one commentator had styled them.) There was plenty of speculation as to how Will had managed to slip through their ranks and get in and out of their leader’s hotel room.

“WILL-O’-THE-WISP?” the Post wondered on its front page.

But if Berry was a hard man to kill, Will’s next pick was clearly impossible.

“An Open Letter to Julian Rashid” was the heading on his next letter to McGraw, mailed some ten days after his ambiguous response to Berry’s death. In it, he charged the black supremacist with fomenting racial hatred for purposes of self-aggrandizement. “You have created a fiefdom of a people’s discontent,” he wrote. “Your power feeds upon the hatred and bitterness you create. You have called out for violence, and the society you vilify is at last prepared to turn that violence upon you.”

Rashid first landed in the spotlight as a tenured professor of economics at Queens College. His name back then was Wilbur Julian, but he dropped the Wilbur and tacked on the Rashid around the time he began formulating his theories. The name change was not part of a conversion to Islam, but merely represented his admiration for the legendary Haroun-al-Rashid.

His theories, which he expounded in the classroom in spite of the fact that they had little demonstrable connection to economics, contended that the black race was the original human race, that blacks had founded the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, that it was this race of black men who were the elders revered in the prehistory of societies throughout the world. They were the builders of Stonehenge, of the heads on Easter Island.

Then white men had arisen as some sort of genetic sport, a mutation of the pure black race. Just as their skins lacked melanin, so were their spirits lacking in true humanity. Their bodies were similarly stunted; they could not run as fast or as far, could not jump as high, and lacked that primal connection to the very pulse of the earth, which is to say that they didn’t have rhythm. Perversely, however, they were able to prevail because of their inhuman nature, which led them to overwhelm and betray and subvert the black man whenever the two races met. In particular, it was a late offshoot of the white subrace whose special role it was to serve as architects of the white subjugation of the black race. These mongrel dogs at the heart of it all were, surprisingly enough, the Jews.

“If it turns out there’s life on Saturn,” Elaine said, “and we go there, we’ll find out that they’ve got three sets of eyes, and five sexes, and something against the Jews.”

Whenever he was given the opportunity, according to Rashid, the black man showed his natural superiority—in track and field, in baseball and football and basketball, and even in what he labeled “Jewish” sports—golf and tennis and bowling. (There were few great black equestrians, he explained, because that too involved subjugation and domination, of the horse by the rider.) Chess, for which he apparently had a passion, provided further proof of black superiority; a game of the intellect, it was studied out of books by the Jews and their followers, while black children took to it naturally and played it well without having to study it.

It was now the black man’s burden—his phrase—to separate himself entirely from white society, and to establish his innate supremacy in every area of human endeavor, exerting dominion over and, yes, enslaving whites if need be, in order to usher in the new millennium with the black-run human civilization that was essential if the planet itself was to survive.

Predictably enough, there was a strong move to oust him from his sinecure at Queens College. (Ray Gruliow represented him in his successful battle to hang on to his academic tenure, and insisted that he liked Rashid personally. “I don’t know how much of that horseshit he believes,” he once told me. “It hasn’t kept him from hiring a Jewish lawyer.”) He won in court, then resigned dramatically and announced he was starting his own academic institution. His supporters had managed to get title to a full square block in the St. Albans section of Queens, and there they constructed a walled compound to house the new black university and the greater portion of its students and faculty.

Julian Rashid lived there, with his two wives and several children. (Although the inevitable rumors had circulated of a passion for white women, both wives were dark-skinned, with African features. They looked enough alike, in fact, to give rise to another rumor to the effect that they were sisters, or even twins.) A guard was posted around the clock outside of Rashid’s living quarters, and a phalanx of armed men in khaki uniforms accompanied him whenever he left the compound, which in turn was fortified and guarded twenty-four hours a day.