Island Practice (3 page)

Lepore immediately sized things up: “A left tibia and fibula. No cut marks or bullet holes. It hadn’t been gnawed on. The boot had barnacles on it. The bones had been cleaned of flesh. It had been in the water awhile.”

More than a year later, verifying suspicions of many Nantucketers, state authorities determined the leg belonged to Jonathan Hemingway, a Nantucket landscaper who had disappeared one night in March 2010, when he was sailing his powerboat from Hyannis to Nantucket with his family and apparently fell overboard while his wife and children slept below.

The severed leg closed the book on one island mystery. But there is always another.

In July 2011, Lepore found a plastic bag on his desk with another human tibia inside. Someone had found it on the beach near Coatue and brought it—where else?—to Lepore. “Semifresh,” he said. “Still smelled.” It came from an adult over thirty, he deduced, noting that the bone’s growth plates had fused, making it too developed to belong to a child. He sent it to Boston. No idea to whom it belonged, but on this island, “there’s always folks missing.”

What’s never missing on the Nantucket that Lepore encounters every day is a spirit of individuality some people take to stubborn extremes. Gene Ratner gained national attention for his drive to save the four-bedroom home he built more than thirty-five years ago perching just above the great sweep of water off Madaket Beach. As wind, water, and time eroded shards of Nantucket’s fragile coast, Ratner’s house was increasingly in the crosshairs as the steps he took to protect it clashed with island environmental rules. Finally, in September 2010, after a hurricane left the house crumpled but standing, officials condemned it, and Ratner, by then eighty-five, was forced to take it down.

A few months later, in another Nantucket-versus-nature moment, came a showdown with Joe Dooley, a scalloper living with a passel of dogs on a thirty-year-old fishing boat he had bought for $10 and moored in Nantucket harbor in 2007. The boat, the
Miss China
, had a broken engine and was unable to move under its own power.

Nantucket officials once had to rescue six Dooley dogs that jumped overboard, and the Coast Guard once had to pump thousands of gallons
of fuel out of the boat so it wouldn’t sink. Then, in December 2010, a pounding winter storm swept the
Miss China
off its mooring and beached it in the sand near Nantucket’s Brant Point lighthouse. Officials tried to get Dooley and his dogs off the boat, afraid it would break loose and sink or crack up, creating a navigational disaster for other ships.

Dooley refused. “They want to get me off the boat so they can claim it for salvage,” he told the
Inquirer and Mirror
. “I’ll freeze to death or starve to death before I give them that satisfaction.” It was nearly a week before he finally gave in.

The miles of ocean between Nantucket and America make some people feel invisible, undetected, and emboldened. Perhaps that’s why, on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend in 2010, Pamela Morgan committed Nantucket’s first bank robbery in more than two hundred years.

There’s a reason why “bank robbery hasn’t caught on,” notes Lepore. “They got no place to go.”

This realization occurred a little too late to Morgan. But then, she had a lot on her plate. She had a ball of tinfoil full of fake identification cards with different aliases. She had a string of larceny convictions in Ohio, Oregon, and California. And in 2009, she had been arrested by the Secret Service after trying to jump the White House fence.

So who knows what she thought would happen when she walked into a Nantucket branch of the Bank of America, began chatting to the teller about letters she had written to Fidel Castro, and presented five crumpled $1 bills that were so obviously counterfeit some had George Washington on both sides. “She was telling me there were people after her, that her life was in danger, and if I knew her situation, I would know why she was doing this,” the teller testified. Told her money was no good, Morgan pulled a note from her backpack that read: “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Give me the money.”

Morgan walked out with $3,000 but didn’t get far. She crossed the street to Sheep to Shore, a knitting shop, then slipped into a post office, where a police officer confronted her. She explained, the officer recounted later, that she’d tried unsuccessfully to use the counterfeit bills
at several stores, and that she’d foil-wrapped her ID cards because “the government was tracking her through microchips in her identification” and “the tinfoil didn’t allow them to track her like that.” Later in jail, she accused the Nantucket police and the FBI of tampering with her milk and bed sheets. Her case is pending, and she is being held in a psychiatric facility.

As an out-of-stater who’d been on the island less than twenty-four hours, Morgan was a washashore of the briefest variety. But people with deeper island roots have tried to get away with things too, often right under their neighbors’ noses.

Not long after the Great Nantucket Bank Heist, one of Lepore’s nurses was enjoying the evening air when a posse of local cops, state police, and federal agents tromped across her porch, barreling toward the house of her Belarusian next-door neighbor, Mikalai Mardakhayeu. Turns out he was running an international fraud conspiracy, a phishing scheme in which he and his cohorts pretended to prepare tax returns for people across the country while actually using their personal information to siphon off $200,000 in federal and state tax refunds.

That was nothing, though, compared to the scrimshaw-smuggling conspiracies. Two old-timers in two separate cases went too far in the name of art, specifically the practice, begun in the nineteenth century, of carving bones and teeth of whales, walruses, and other sea mammals. One, Charles Manghis, long a bearded and bespectacled presence at his shop on the Old South Wharf, was a scrimshander, an artisan who etched lighthouses and ships into ivory and whale teeth and had even carved presidential seals for both presidents Bush. The other, David Place, owned Manor House Antique Cooperative.

Both men were convicted of conspiring with a Ukrainian smuggler and a middleman in California to illegally import the teeth of endangered sperm whales. Manghis, who was tied to some 375 whale teeth, admitted his nautical transgression. Place, accused of smuggling $400,000 in teeth and tusks, did not, saying the Ukrainian hornswoggled him. And
a handful of independence-conscious Nantucketers rose to his defense, signing a petition arguing for his sentence to be reduced.

“We have a proud history,” wrote the organizer of the as yet unsuccessful effort, “of taking care of our own.”

But as Lepore has learned from experience, sometimes Nantucket is unable to take care of its own. Trudie Hall was twenty-three and pregnant when she disappeared in July 2010, last seen when she left the island for what was believed to be a short trip to Cape Cod. Hall, a Jamaican immigrant, American citizen, and Nantucketer for ten years, turned out to have a secret even her mother claimed not to know. She had married two different men within six months of each other and not divorced either, possibly in an immigration scheme in which she reportedly received money to help the men get legal status.

To thicken the plot further, the father of Hall’s unborn child was a third man, a former Nantucketer, now on Cape Cod, who was married and had previously been convicted of stealing $8,000 from Nantucket bus fare boxes.

After Hall disappeared, her rental car was found in a commuter parking lot, with blood and bullet casings inside. The investigation continues, although police and her mother assume she’s dead.

Lepore was as fascinated as the rest of the island by Hall’s uncertain fate. But he was not surprised that Nantucket formed the nexus of Hall’s hidden world. He knows the island too well.

As far as most Nantucketers were concerned, Thomas Johnson, aka Underground Tom, was another mysterious disappearance, someone who fled the island more than a decade ago. Lepore, however, knew better.

Johnson grew up in Binghamton, New York, one of seven children of a city judge. As a teenager, he built his first log cabin in the Pennsylvania
woods, where he often retreated. He briefly attended community college, reportedly writing on every test and assignment, “When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.”

When he was twenty, his father died in his arms of colon and liver cancer. Soon Johnson, who stayed home to care for his mother, developed a drug habit and hired himself out as an international drug courier. In 1983, he was arrested in Italy for trying to smuggle in more than $2 million of Thai heroin, stitched into the lining of a suitcase he was supposed to deposit in a train station locker in Rome.

After two and a half years in an Italian prison, he was released on house arrest, but escaped, began kiting checks, and eventually came to Nantucket, where he said he scoped out the site for his underground home by spending “a month of Sundays” sitting in a nearby tree on Boy Scouts land near Lovers Lane. In just five weeks, he dug a hole with a shovel, paid less than $150 for materials, stole or “liberated” other supplies, and built what he described as his “self-help tank,” saying, “I’ve gone into the earth, almost like a seed, to germinate.”

Johnson germinated largely in solitude, weathering hurricanes and snowstorms underground, his house insulated with rubber and covered with topsoil and sand. Its portal, camouflaged by limbs and dead leaves, was a hatch inlaid with a small glass window.

Inside, a ladder descended eight feet into the earth, which opened into a three-room chamber outfitted with a striking array of comforts: cedar paneling, a Belgian stone floor, a stained glass skylight obscured by a patch of blueberry bushes, a homemade chemical toilet, a battery-powered television, and a shower made from a plastic tube hooked to a water jug. A cubby cut into one wall served as a pantry, keeping bottles of milk and cups of Jell-O pudding cool even in summer.

At first Lepore didn’t know where Johnson lived. He’d see him riding around on his bike or picking up scrap wood. Johnson supported himself as one of Nantucket’s legion of part-time carpenters and painters who build and maintain summer people’s homes. He drank at bars in town and occasionally got in fights.

Johnson went to tremendous lengths to conceal his house, using what might be called sleight of foot. He created shoes that made impressions that looked like deer hooves, placed his feet down as he walked in the linear pattern that resembles deer tracks, and varied the path he took to his door by taking one of fifteen different trails. He dismantled deer stands that hunters erected in the scrub pine forest to discourage them from hanging around, lest they spy his six-foot-four-inch frame lumbering toward his lair.

But Underground Tom had medical issues, including joint and back pain, and he sought out Lepore. No doubt he considered the doctor something of a kindred spirit. Lepore’s office is as intricately decorated and anti-establishment as Johnson’s belowground bunker.

There are skulls, arrowheads, snake skin, turtle shells, fish jaws, and antlers. Books include
Latrinae et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World
and Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America
. And some of Lepore’s many signs would appeal to his iconoclastic patient: “It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others” and “
Carthago delenda est
” (Carthage must be destroyed), the famous phrase by the Roman leader Cato, which often signifies a single-minded intensity for total victory against one’s enemies. In his waiting room, Lepore has posted a reference to America’s favorite fantasy tale: “Nobody gets to see the wizard. Not nobody. Not no how.”

Lepore never billed Underground Tom for his visits. Fascinated by weapons ancient and contemporary, Lepore allowed Johnson to pay his medical “fee” by providing informal advice about fashioning arrowheads. He tried to get Johnson to protect himself from the island’s disease-carrying ticks, but Johnson refused to be tested for Lyme disease. Nor would he let Lepore repair his hernia. He allowed hardly anyone to visit him underground, although he told Lepore that at one point he had a girlfriend who would join him in the pull-down queen-sized bed he had notched into one subterranean wall.

Then, in November 1998, a hunter, Jack Hallett Sr., was searching for a deer stand, crawling under a low branch, when he happened upon
the stove pipe and the trapdoor. Hallett deliberately left a footprint so the occupant of the underground house would know he had been discovered. The next day, over breakfast, Hallett told Paul Johnson, an X-ray technician and reserve police officer, what he had seen.

“You’re going nowhere until you prove to me that this is true,” Paul Johnson asserted. Hallett led him to the spot, and they knocked on the hatch. “I was expecting you ten years ago,” Underground Tom intoned. He was cordial, but his hand trembled so much coffee sloshed out of his cup. The hermit gave his name as Tom Underwood, one of his smart-alecky aliases; Dick Human and Forest Green are others.