Love, Lies, and Murder (13 page)

Perry March first realized, at least with a degree of certainty, that Larry and Carolyn Levine were serious about using the grandparent visitation order issued to them by an Illinois court when they suddenly showed up unannounced at the door of his palatial home in Ajijic one sunny day in May 2000. There had been changes to the Tennessee State Legal Code that gave grandparents who were residents of that state the right to pursue custody of grandchildren whose custodial parent(s) had been adjudged responsible in a wrongful-death lawsuit. There were people on both sides of the fence who believed that the Levines may have had some influence into the language of the new legislation. However, a big question on everyone’s mind was how a Tennessee law could be applied in Illinois toward a person now residing in Mexico. Perry refused to allow his in-laws to see Sammy and Tzipi and, in the words of Perry’s father, he “sent them on their way.”

Perry later said that he had only heard of the visitation order when he was informed by a clerk in Cook County, Illinois, who confirmed that a copy of the court order was being sent to the U.S. State Department. He said that after he had verified the docket number, he went to federal court in Guadalajara, where he obtained an
amparo,
a legal device that is used for constitutional protection. In Perry’s case the
amparo
was used to prevent the judge who had initially been approached by the Levines from implementing the visitation order.

The Levines, however, weren’t about to give up that easily. Although Perry had turned them away, they would be back. And Perry would soon learn that when the Levines refiled the same Illinois-issued visitation order with a different judge and a new docket number was issued, the
amparo
that Perry had obtained was no longer valid.

A month later, on Wednesday, June 21, 2000, Perry March was going about his day-to-day business at his office in Ajijic when six Mexican immigration officials showed up at 9:00
A.M.
and told him that there were problems with his immigration status. Although the men were unarmed, Perry recalled, only one of them had a badge and was wearing a uniform. In no uncertain terms, they informed him that he would have to accompany them to Guadalajara to straighten out his paperwork.

“They grabbed me under the arms and put me in a headlock,” Perry later recalled. “They lifted me by my ears, lifted me off my feet, and shoved me through my conference room doors.”

After getting him outside, he said, they threw him into the back of an unmarked white van and sped away. The scene resembled something out of a thriller, with Perry bouncing around the back of a speeding van with several not-too-friendly-looking Mexicans at his side.

As Perry, dumbfounded and bewildered, was being whisked off toward Guadalajara, Larry and Carolyn Levine, unbeknownst to Perry, were in Ajijic. They were accompanied by a local attorney, a Mexican judge, and several Mexican police officers, and they were heading for the school that Sammy and Tzipi attended. Perry would later learn that the Levines had somehow gained the assistance of the Mexican authorities to execute their legally questionable court-ordered grandparent visitation demand.

The judge, lawyer, cops, and the Levines were at the school for nearly an hour, arguing with school administrators about turning Sammy and Tzipi over to them for their court-sanctioned “visit.” Finally, the Mexican officials were able to convince the school administrators to hand the children over to the Levines.

Meanwhile, Arthur March had heard what was going down with regard to the children and with Perry—Ajijic was, after all, a very small town and word often traveled very fast. Arthur acted quickly, jumped into his SUV, and arrived at the school only moments behind the Levines. In hot pursuit he chased them as they raced toward an airport, and at one point everyone stopped and had a face-to-face confrontation. Arthur allegedly pulled a gun on them, and told them that they would not get out of Mexico alive.

“I wasn’t thinking rationally,” Arthur later told a reporter. “But those are my grandkids!”

Following the heated exchange, the pursuit continued as the Levines continued toward the airport. They finally managed to elude Arthur, were able to get on a plane, and flew with the children to Nashville.

Perry, in the meantime, realized that the immigration officials were taking him toward the airport, but he wasn’t sure why. Was he being deported? Thinking quickly, he finally mentioned the name of an immigration official that he suspected was behind his abduction. Upon hearing the official’s name, the driver of the van pulled to the side of the road, stopped, got out, and began talking on his cellular telephone.

“Three minutes of conversation,” Perry recalled, “he gets back into the van, turns around to me, and says, ‘It’s a terrible mistake. I’m sorry. Your paperwork is in order.’ ”

As soon as Perry was released by the immigration off i-cials, he sped off toward the school. By the time he arrived there, his in-laws, along with his children, were already gone and flying toward Nashville.

“They are kidnappers,” Perry said of the Levines. “It was all a big orchestration.”

According to Perry, along with a CBS News report that ran later, the Levines purportedly had been forewarned by the FBI that Mexican immigration officials had planned to bring Perry March in for questioning and possible deportation that same morning.

The FBI, it was learned, apparently had Perry under surveillance in Mexico since his arrival. He was under a sealed indictment at the time for fraud at his father-in-law’s law firm, and he was a murder suspect. The FBI can apparently watch anybody, since they have agents attached to embassies and consulates in countries all over the world, and they were monitoring Perry in case he had plans to leave Mexico and go to another country. The FBI agents that were watching Perry March were based at the American Consulate in Guadalajara, and the information that they were obviously reporting was somehow getting to someone in the Levines’ camp. Ironically, Perry and his father knew about the sealed indictment from their own Mexican attorneys.

That particular day, June 21, the Levines were told, would be a good opportunity for them to attempt to execute their visitation court order. An operation like the one that occurred would have taken some planning—it wasn’t as if the Levines could have received a spur-of-the-moment telephone call to urge them to hop on a plane and fly to Mexico. For such a plan to have been implemented in the manner that it was, careful planning, observation, and reporting had to have occurred.

Shortly after their arrival back in Nashville, the Levines had to act fast because their court order, if allowed to stand, only called for a thirty-nine-day visit. They quickly began making plans to obtain permanent custody of Sammy and Tzipi.

“This was a court order in which we were doing what the court said we had a right to do,” Larry Levine said later.

In many respects, whether their actions turned out to be legal or illegal, who could blame the Levines? After all, Sammy and Tzipi were the children of their only daughter, now presumed dead—allegedly at the hands of her husband. Would any grandparent want to leave their grandchildren in the custody of the person who was suspected of killing their mother?

Perry told the local media and anyone else who would listen that the Levines had broken not only Mexican laws but international treaties as well when they came and took Sammy and Tzipi out of school and brought them back to the United States with them. The Levines, Perry said, had utilized high-level relationships in their efforts to win the cooperation of the U.S. State Department and other U.S. diplomatic connections in Mexico, which ultimately created a conspiracy that involved getting him deported, while at the same time removing his children from his custody.

According to Perry, the visitation order from Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois was in actuality a letter rogatory, or a letter of request, a mechanism that one court or jurisdiction sometimes uses in which to request assistance from another, often a foreign court, in its effort to obtain desired information. According to Perry, such a letter can be used only for two purposes under the auspices of the Inter-American Convention, and that is “to serve notice, summonses, and subpoenas,” or to otherwise collect evidence or information. A letter rogatory, Perry said, cannot be used for the purpose of coercion against people.

“This is an Illinois order,” Perry said. “It’s like Moscow issuing an order to grab John Doe in Ethiopia.”

John Brennan Jr., an attorney in Guadalajara, who was consulted about the Mexican Federal Procedures Code, said that a hearing should have been required to determine the legitimacy of the order and whether it complied with Mexican law or not. The hearing, Brennan said, would also be used to allow the parties involved a chance to have their say about the matter. The procedure that is required to be followed, said Brennan, is called homologation, which means to approve, ratify, or otherwise officially confirm the issues stated in the letter. He said that a court official is required to convey the first notice.

“They can’t do it,” Perry said. “No court can allow another country to arrest or take property. . . . The concept of grandparent visitation does not exist in Mexico.”

Perry indicated that he would file official complaints, known in Mexico as
denuncias,
against everyone who was involved in the action that allowed his children to be taken out of Mexico without his consent.

“I’ll get my children back no matter what it takes,” Perry said. “They will pay the price for kidnapping my kids.”

Although Perry had initially believed that the Mexican immigration authorities had been involved in getting his children removed from Mexico, further investigation had convinced Perry that they had not, in fact, been involved.

“Following conversations my lawyers have had with people in immigration,” Perry said, “we have concluded that there was no collusion regarding the removal of my children from Mexico by the immigration department here. Once the immigration department realized my kids were being taken out of school, they rushed my ass back to Ajijic at ninety-five miles an hour.”

It was possible that the immigration authorities had been duped by part of a much larger “conspiracy” that had been born to have him removed from Mexico, Perry believed.

“The Levines had influence with Al Gore,” Perry charged. “The State Department and the embassy asked (the Mexican government) to get me deported. Regular people would not get this kind of treatment.”

Perry had been summoned by the immigration officials, in fact, to respond to a formal complaint alleging that he had been working in areas in which his immigration status did not allow him to work. After discussions the immigration officials had concluded that the complaint had not been proven and that the grounds to deport March did not exist at that time.

Additional background information about the visitation order showed that an Illinois judge had originally granted the Levines visitation rights with Sammy and Tzipi in December 1996. However, Perry had appealed the ruling; but the Levines’ right to have visitation with their grandchildren was reinstated by a second ruling that had been issued in the early part of 1999.

Meanwhile, Perry, who didn’t dare risk returning to the States for fear of being arrested on the allegations of embezzlement from his former employer, had managed to obtain privileges to contact his children by telephone.

“I’ve talked to them on the phone twice so far,” he told a reporter for the
Guadalajara Reporter.
“My son was crying. He said he wants to go home, where I live. ‘I want to come home, Daddy,’” he quoted his son as saying. “My daughter said, ‘I wanna go home, Daddy.’ They already both speak Spanish. This is home for them.”

With the thought foremost on his mind that he might lose his children for good, Perry contacted Nashville lawyer John Herbison to help him in his quest to get his children returned to him. Herbison, who practices in criminal, constitutional, and civil rights law, agreed to help him. Born in Nashville in 1955, and admitted to the bar in 1987, Herbison was very familiar with the Levines and all of the controversy surrounding Perry March.

Herbison, the son of a former preacher, has been hailed in Nashville circles as a defender of free speech. By his own admission, the University of Tennessee Law School graduate likes “tangling with the government,” and taking on difficult or challenging cases. With a reputation as a very good lawyer, Herbison has built much of his legal practice around defending adult businesses in Nashville and has represented clients who were involved in prostitution. Although Herbison once told a reporter that he doesn’t utilize adult businesses himself because he is “not interested in it,” he staunchly believes that people should be allowed to choose their own reading material. He has been known to refer to the city’s vice unit as the “erection suppression” unit.

“There’s a segment of the population, when it comes to matters of sex and sexuality, that is wound too tight,” Herbison once said. “But there’s a group of otherwise honorable politicians who pander to that crowd.”

When all was said and done, Herbison seemed like the right match to take on Perry March’s problems.

 

 

A onetime lawyer schooled at Vanderbilt, Perry March had managed to outsmart dozens of police authorities and judges throughout the states of Tennessee, Illinois, and, now, Mexico. Reduced to a somewhat transitory life, Perry had become an exile, with his children, Sammy and Tzipi, in tow. Perry March had found a place of safety in a small community, in Mexico, where he believed that he could still live like an American behind the barred windows of his lavish home, which he shared with his new wife and their “Brady Bunch” family.

However, as would be seen, that self-imposed “prison” was not good enough for some, namely Lawrence and Carolyn Levine.