The Best American Crime Writing (2 page)

H
e steers the van over the rolling folds of country Route 579, a two-lane road flanked by fields once neatly tilled and sown, now increasingly given over to development. But the landscape still carries the flavor of open country in the deep dead of night. His headlights find the sign for Woolf Road, and he turns down a curving, narrow lane; here the trees lean in close on both sides. A half mile later, he takes another left and creeps down a blind driveway, curling right, until his beams alight on an incongruous sight in the wooded blackness: two ornate white gates. Sculpted lions perch atop the columns that anchor them. The letter J is patterned into the gate on the left, a W into the other. Between the gates stands a brick wall. Set into the brick is a plaque. From a distance, it looks like a Hall of Fame plaque, Cooperstown bronze, but this plaque is slightly different. It depicts a man’s head and shrugging shoulders, his hands held out, palms up, as if to say, Who knew? And these are the very words printed below:
WHO KNEW? ESTATES
.

The gate on the right swings open, and Gus Christofi steers the van past the expressionless gaze of the lions, down another driveway, and slows at the house, 31,000 square feet of star shrine, the centerpiece of a sprawling fiefdom that shoves the Jersey woods aside. It is a building quite unlike anything Gus has ever seen.

Who knew, indeed? That he’d ever arrive at such a place? That a man who’d busted into other people’s homes in search of things to fence would ever see such a door as this, unlocked, welcoming him
in? That a man who had shuttled for so many years from jail cell to jail cell would one day come face-to-face with such an ornate and pearly gate?

Then again, who knew how false the facade would turn out to be? How slick an Oz-land stage set could look? As Gus strolls toward Jayson Williams’s front door, he doesn’t see it, not for what it really is: a gateway back into a world he’s spent seven years desperately trying to escape.

The funny thing, the surprising thing, is how much they have in common, at least at first glance. Jayson hails from the Lower East Side of Manhattan—a cocky kid who hung with “a bunch of Italian tough guys,” who did jail time as a teen for hitting a cop, who muddied his life with alcohol. Gus was raised across the Hudson River on the dark streets of Paterson, New Jersey. He dropped out of school after sixth grade, ran with a bad crowd, spiraled into addiction by the age of 16.

Both had reclaimed their lives. Both had realized their promise. And now both had moved on to a most unfamiliar landscape—the woods and horse fields of northwestern New Jersey—Gus, at 55, seeking a clean and sober place, Jayson, at 33, in search of a clean escape.

When you think of all the ways their paths could have crossed, it’s remarkable that they were as yet unacquainted. They easily could have met on the back roads of Hunterdon County—Gus driving his limo, Jayson piloting his new motorcycle, the one with the absurdly large engine. They might have met in a sports bar when their drinking days had overlapped. Or on the set of the United Way commercial that featured Gus telling the tale of his recovery, filmed on the leafy grounds of his rehab center.

And yet, given how much Gus loved his work and given how much Jayson loved a good time, it only stood to reason that they’d
meet this way. On this night. When Gus was on the job. And Jayson was throwing a party.

It’s Jayson’s brother who makes the call to the dispatcher at Seventy Eight Limousine on the evening of February 13: He hires a car to pick up several people just over the Pennsylvania state line in Bethlehem, where the Harlem Globetrotters are playing a charity game at Lehigh University. Jayson will be at the game with some friends. He has invited the Globetrotters to join him for dinner. They’ll need a limo ride to the restaurant.

A few minutes later, Gus returns to the office. His workday has officially ended, but he leaps at the Williams job when the dispatcher offers it. Gus is a serious sports fan, and Gus is a workaholic, and Gus deserves to catch a break. He’ll reel in a considerable tip on top of $65 per hour. He’ll get to meet the local All-Star.

Sam Nenna, the owner of Seventy Eight Limousine, clears Gus’s schedule for the next day. Nenna figures this will be a long night. Jayson has used the services of Seventy Eight Limousine before, for trips to the casinos in Atlantic City. No telling when Gus’s evening will end. It doesn’t begin until 10:30, when he steers the company’s silver van to the Comfort Suites in Bethlehem to collect four Globetrotters: two former Nets, Benoit Benjamin and Chris Morris, and two men Jayson has never met, Curley Johnson and Paul Gaffney.

Jayson will drive his own car. In all, there will be thirteen for dinner, and on this night they’ll be treated to first class. The best food. The best company. Jayson’s old friends Benjamin and Morris will meet his new ones, Kent Culuko, 29, a former Jersey prep star, and John Gordnick, 44, a middle school basketball coach. The star of the evening, of course, will be Jayson. Center stage is a place in which he has long been comfortable. In his prime, he was a force on the court; off it he took to the limelight with ease, feeding a public ever hungry for over-the-top behavior. His best-selling memoir,
Loose Balls
, paints a portrait of a man who has spent his entire life
gleefully Bigfooting all convention, demanding respect at every turn, dispensing frontier justice to anyone foolish enough to defy him, desperate to prove his manhood by whatever display necessary.

Two years ago, a series of playing injuries pulled him off the hardwood stage. Since then he’s had little trouble finding other outlets for his act: MTV. The game-day studio at NBC. The taverns in and around his new neighborhood. Even the sprawling grounds of Jayson’s estate are not vast enough to rein him in.

A man spends more than half his life imprisoned by addiction, supporting his own demands in the company of no one but himself—well, when he’s freed from those bonds it stands to reason he would want to make amends. And so Gus Christofi has decided to dedicate his life—as sappy as it sounds—to helping others. He makes up for the years in solitude by embracing everyone around him. The photographs are legion: Gus, the stout figure with the fold-lined face of a bulldog who has long given up the fight, his arm draped around this guy, that guy, a buddy’s kid; he’s like Zelig—someone takes a picture, Gus is in it. He is driven, it seems, to weave himself into the fabric of society. Determined to make things easier for the retired pharmaceutical executive who insists on Gus as his driver and for the homeless guy on the streets of Manhattan, hitting up good-hearted Gus with a goofy scam. Gus can’t pass a stranded motorist, even on a busy interstate, without tapping the brakes, whether it’s a day laborer in a broken-down beater or a state senator on his knees, struggling to fix a flat.

Gus’s fares will testify to the depths of his new soul. Along with the recovering addicts he counsels at Freedom House, they provide the simple joys in a life now measured in small blessings. He smothers them with attention: bags of their favorite candy stowed in the trunk, jokes, card tricks he learned in jail. If he drives someone
to the medical center to visit a sick relative, a card arrives in the fare’s mail a few days later. From Gus. Hoping everything turned out for the best.

He doesn’t do it for profit. He does it because he likes people. And people invariably like him. By the time he has chauffeured the Globetrotters to the Mountain View Chalet in Asbury, they are so charmed that one invites him in.

The Mountain View rings high-class for a restaurant hard by the asphalt of I-78. Behind the Mountain View’s doors, diners enjoy an evening of rural upscale: $20 entrees. Haute cuisine sauces. Etched-glass partitions.

During the next few hours, according to one source, the Williams party will run up a tab of $ 1,800. Gus sits to one side, drinking coffee. According to one account of the evening, though, he is not entirely excluded from the revelry, for at one point Jayson says something to Gus, something sealed away in court files, an offhand remark with a nasty overtone.

Gus lets it wash over him. He does not have a violent streak. Even as a kid, he shied away from fights. Maybe in the young and troubled Jayson he sees something of his former self as well.

The barb does not surprise anyone who knows Jayson, knows of his hair-trigger temper, the trip wire tied to the volatile influence of alcohol. The catalog of Jayson’s early-career explosions is substantial: a 4:00
A.M.
street fight after a play-off game; two men maced, another one beaten outside the bar Jayson had bought in Manhattan; a busted head in Chicago; a tag-team melee with Charles Barkley. “Part-time player, full-time party animal” is how Rick Barry put it once to an acquaintance, who passed his words on to Jayson, who promptly took it out on Barry’s son. Roughed the kid up for four full quarters. Knocked him down. Cross-wired justice, the Jayson Williams way.

These days in Hunterdon County, just about anyone you meet will furnish a tale about Jayson’s antics, though none are as outlandish
as the anecdotes in
Loose Balls
. The story about the kid Jayson knocked out, then tried to shove from a fourth-story window in high school. The one about his father planting a bullet in the posterior of a boy who had given his son trouble—the father whose license-plate holder carried the legend .45
MAGNUM
, reflecting the caliber of the weapon he routinely carried. Those of us searching for clues to Jayson’s behavior need only look at the picture his memoir sketches of his childhood years in New York and South Carolina: The day one brother shot another. The day his mother shot at his father after she’d been told he was cheating on her. The day his half sister was brutally attacked. The day she learned the hospital blood transfusion had given her HIV. The day she passed it on to another sister through a shared needle. Both sisters died. Jayson was only a rookie when he adopted a son and a daughter left behind by his sisters. As Jayson tells it, after the man who’d beaten his sister was released from prison, Jayson hunted him down. Wanted to kill him. But let him go.

Some of the stories in the book reek of hyperbole. On this night, though, there’s a very real court appearance awaiting Jayson, the result of an incident three months ago at a suburban tavern favored by softball teams, local professionals, bikers, and laborers. A clean, well-lit venue offering a glut of TVs and every Irish beer on the market. Cryan’s is a lousy place for an angry soul to find himself late on a Wednesday night. A man who saw Jayson at the bar recalls, “He was pretty tuned up. He’d had a few.” Some kids started taunting the washed-up All-Star, says the witness, and Jayson took the bait. He lunged. Got himself into a scuffle. Ended up in cuffs. The Branchburg Police Department charged him with obstructing its investigation by twice shoving a policeman.

The incident did not appear to trouble Jayson’s employer, NBC, which, in the fashion of so many of his employers through the years, felt no need to put undue emphasis on his transgressions. If this is the history of a man constantly flirting with disaster, crying
out for help, it is also the story of a man favored by constant forgiveness.

One of the reasons he built his own well-appointed theme park, said an allegedly older and wiser Jayson in his memoir, was his desire to protect the outside world when he felt the need to go a little crazy. And so on this evening, when dinner at the Mountain View ends, close to 2:00
A.M.
, Jayson decides to move the party to his place. The Globetrotters beg off. But Jayson insists. He will drive them himself. Gus will transport the others in his van. For what good is a trophy house when there’s no one there to see it?

The hallways run for half a football field. The walls harbor a basketball court, a theater, a billiards room, and an indoor pool. A columned balcony overlooks the outdoor pool, two par-3 golf holes, and a sweeping vista of landscaped real estate. Tucked away on the 130-acre grounds are a duck pond, riding stables, an ATV track, and a pasture with a gated entrance, also decorated with the initials JW, for his prize cattle, which graze in its shade.

When Gus’s van reaches the end of the driveway, it’s Jayson’s friend Kent Culuko who invites Gus into the house. Gus grabs his camera. For a man whose home is a small apartment shared with a fellow recovering addict, the sheer size of the place is incomprehensible. It almost feels cold. But the grand scale is also revealing, a physical manifestation of the owner’s need to appear larger than life.

The truth is, Gus’s apartment is a whole lot more comfy. It’s on the ground floor of an anonymous two-unit home eighteen miles north, in a dull western New Jersey town bruised by the passage of time. The furnishings in Gus’s place pale compared to the expensive appointments in Jayson’s place, but they reflect the soul of the man. The mirror, for instance, that Gus salvaged from a Dumpster. It took him months to restore. He placed his picture on it, then
wrote a poem, “The Man in the Mirror,” because he too had been reclaimed, through the efforts of an army of folk: the counselors at Freedom House, his probation officer, his best friend, Joe Arm-strong—all had helped salvage and polish the person you see today.

Joe lives on the second floor. He volunteers as a counselor at Freedom House, too. Together he and Gus received the rehab center’s achievement award in 1999. Joe used to give Gus grief about the mirror. Spare me the sentimental stuff, he would tell Gus. Gus would call Joe a cynic. Joe would call Gus a sap. So when Gus wanted to play for Joe the audiotape he’d made on Christmas morning 1999, Joe said no. No sentimental shit. But Gus made him listen to it anyway. Something had come over him, a moment of clarity, and Gus had to get it on the record. He spoke from the heart while sitting at the kitchen table, with a gospel version of “Silent Night” in the background as a syrupy sound track.

“Almost five years ago, around this time, I was released from Middlesex County Jail,” Gus says. There’s some gravel to his disembodied voice. Some world-weariness, too, but it’s not confessional. It is a matter-of-fact recitation.