Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (113 page)

“Don’t worry—nothin’ I can’t fix,” said LaGuardia, on his knees at the edge of the pool, reaching for the steaks with a long-handled skimming net.

Jackie Monroeville saw the horror on Coco’s face, and she realized it was now or never. Coco was standing at
one end of the pool and Jackie at the other. In between was LaGuardia, kneeling and fully extended with the skimmer. The TV crews turned on their lights and zoomed tight on the candidate. Jackie sauntered along the edge of the pool toward Coco. As she passed LaGuardia, she gave him a discreet knee in the butt, and into the pool he went. The TV crews fought for position. When Jackie got to Coco, his face was in his hands.

“
Now
will you back my Gomer?”

THERE HAD TO
be a first political crucible for Marlon Conrad, and it came in the summer of 2001, when Governor Horace Birch asked him to handle the dismantling of affirmative action.

It was a delicate matter the party had been trying to slip through for years. Marlon stepped up to the plate and authored the Everything’s-Fine-and-Dandy-Florida plan, which was ghostwritten by his chief of staff, Gottfried Escrow, and concluded that everyone was now, for lack of a better term, white. Marlon unveiled it in time for the evening newscast.

The next morning, Marlon played video tail gunner while Escrow read aloud from his clipboard, delivering the routine roundup of the state’s overnight gunfire.

“…We had a double shooting in Fort Myers…a triple shooting in Bradenton…a quadruple shooting in Pompano…another quadruple in Miami, but the NRA is pressuring us to call it a pair of doubles…”

The phone rang. Escrow answered.

“I see…I see…thank you.” He hung up.

“What was that?” asked Marlon, clicking off fifty-caliber bursts with the joystick.

“Sir, we have a little public relations problem. Customs has Babs in custody at the airport. She failed to declare five thousand dollars in rare Belgian puppets.”

“Unbelievable!” said Marlon, spinning around in his
chair. “What’s with the fucking puppets? I’m starting to think there’s something seriously wrong with that woman!”

Meanwhile, a large contingent of African-American lawmakers, activists and students had begun assembling in the lieutenant governor’s anteroom for a sit-in. Shortly before noon, an unsuspecting Marlon got up from his desk to head out for lunch. Unfortunately, network cameras were rolling when Marlon opened his office door, bugged out his eyes and yelled, “Ahh! Black people!” Then took a quick backstep and slammed the door.

He ran over to Escrow. “What’ll we do?”

Escrow said he wanted a look. He ever so carefully cracked the door and peeked out, and he saw a lobby full of people staring back at him. He slowly closed the door.

“If we stay real quiet, maybe they’ll go away.”

It went on like that most of the afternoon, every hour or so the lieutenant governor’s door opening a tiny slit and Marlon and Escrow peeking out, one head on top of the other, then the door closing silently. The protesters exchanged puzzled glances.

Near the end of the afternoon, Press Secretary Jack Pimento came bopping carefree through the lobby, whistling “Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard.” He waded through the middle of the sit-in—“What’s up, guys?”—and resumed whistling as he walked in Marlon’s office.

Marlon and Escrow stared at Pimento in shock.

“How’d you get in here?”

Pimento looked confused and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The door.”

“But…aren’t the protesters still out there?”

“Yeah, why?” said Pimento.

“They didn’t attack?” said Escrow. “They just let you through?”

“What’s going on?” said Pimento. “You guys are acting weird.”

They sat Pimento down and told him what was going on, and Pimento started cracking up.

“Just call ’em in here and talk,” he said.

“We can’t do that!” said Marlon.

“Why not?”

“We’re scared,” said Escrow.

Pimento walked over to the door and opened it.

“What are you doing?” shouted Marlon.

Pimento called out to two lawmakers he recognized. “Could you come in here a second?”

The legislators entered to find Marlon and Escrow standing rigid and alert against the back wall. They looked at Pimento as they warily took seats. “Everything okay in here?”

Pimento nodded. He turned to Marlon. “Tell ’em your side.”

“Well, it’s like this,” Marlon began in a stiff cadence. “I don’t think affirmative action is fair. All those state contracts arbitrarily set aside. Doesn’t seem right.”

“What would you like to do with the contracts instead?” asked a lawmaker.

“Give ’em out based on merit, to people who have actually done something to deserve it.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like helping me and my family,” said Marlon, sitting down and loosening up. “Some of these people have given us so much. Pointed us to good investments, offered us low-interest loans and campaign contributions…”

The lawmakers stared.

“You see what I’m saying?” asked Marlon. “You can’t just go around your whole life asking for handouts…”

“…Something for nothing,” said Escrow.

“…The free lunch,” said Marlon. “You’ve got to do something first to
earn
it. These people who know my family—they’ve already put up. What am I supposed to do? Tell them, ‘Sorry, I have to give your contracts to someone we’ve never even met’? It’s just not fair. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to me. Now, is that what you want me to do? Be unfair?”

The lawmakers were dumbstruck.

Marlon smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

He came around the desk and shook their hands, and Escrow ushered them out of the office and closed the door.

“They sure are pushy,” said Marlon.

“No kidding,” replied Escrow.

Pimento stared at them with the same look as the lawmakers. “How exactly did you get to be like this?”

“Hard work,” said Escrow.

“Strong values,” said Marlon.

CHIEF
of Staff Gottfried Escrow and Press Secretary Jack Pimento hated each other’s guts.

It was philosophical, it was professional, it was personal. Always trying to one-up each other and become Marlon’s favorite, constantly contradicting and interrupting. Marlon once caught them in the break room slap-fighting like four-year-olds.

“Knock it off!”

Marlon asked his father for advice on which one to fire.

“No, no, no!” said Dempsey Conrad. “In palace politics
you always want to cultivate a little constructive factionalism. Prevents coups, keeps your power base solidified.”

GOTTFRIED
Escrow loved politics.

He had been chairman of the College Republicans at Florida State. During the presidential race in ’84, he and his buddies showed up before a Democratic rally wearing Mondale buttons and volunteering for the decorating committee. The campaign was delighted. Escrow’s gang gathered up all the posters and banners and even the tape and staplers and ran off and threw them in a ditch, then snickered. He thought it was a perfect micro-illustration of why the Democrats were no good for America.

Escrow was a trim five-ten. He had the baby face, short-sleeve dress shirt and disturbingly beady eyes of a door-to-door missionary, and he still viewed the world exactly as he did when he was fourteen, sitting at the dinner table listening to his father. “Watch out for the unions and the commies!”

Escrow began each morning by selecting one of a dozen starched white shirts evenly spaced in his closet on wooden hangers. He had his dark hair neatly trimmed for thirty dollars every Friday.

His chief of staff’s office next to the lieutenant governor’s suite was immaculate and well appointed. He buffed his oak desk every morning until it was a mirror. Machiavelli sat on the bookshelf. In stately frames along the north wall was his gallery of role models. Lee Atwater, Jesse Helms, Rush Limbaugh and Ken Starr. Behind his desk hung a poster titled
Loyalty
, with G. Gordon Liddy’s hand over a candle. In an age that teemed with
paranoid conspiracy buffs, Escrow was privately disappointed that he had never been asked to
join
a conspiracy.

PIMENTO’S
office was a cyclone wake, a tiny windowless room with papers everywhere and
Rolling Stone
magazines concealing lost halves of sandwiches.

Escrow stood in Pimento’s doorway, unamused. “Clean this shit up. It’s a disgrace!”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“Actually, I am,” said the chief of staff.

Pimento went about straightening his office. He had an old stereo, and he put on his cleaning music, “All Along the Watchtower,” both Bob’s and Jimi’s versions. Pimento was six feet and thin, with a military haircut and flecks of gray on the sides. His rapidly blinking eyes were ice blue. Pimento was the dreamer—the Lennon to Escrow’s spit-polished McCartney. He was a Rockefeller Republican who believed the interests of the lower class were tied to a properly regulated pro-business climate. That and more wrestling on cable.

Marlon always thought there was an invisible devil and angel sitting on his shoulders. He didn’t realize it was Escrow and Pimento who were fighting for his soul.

The pair gave Marlon their own briefings every afternoon, and they always fought over who would go first.

After lunch on a Thursday, the two headed for Marlon’s office from opposite sides of the rotunda. When they saw each other, they walked faster until they were trotting, then sprinting. They wedged shoulder to shoulder in the office doorway, struggled briefly, and broke free.

“I’m first!”

“I’m first!”

Marlon slapped his desk. “Don’t make me come over there!”

“He went first yesterday!”

“It’s Pimento’s turn,” said Marlon.

“But—”

“It’s settled!”

Escrow grumbled as he trudged across the carpet and dropped into the sofa.

“What do you have?” asked Marlon.

“Electric chair. Press conference in an hour,” said Pimento. “There’s been a lot of bad publicity with all the mishaps. I thought I’d prepare a full report so you’d be ready for the questions…. And you know what? It’s fascinating! I went way back into the science and law, the whole history in Florida—”

“Right, right,” said Marlon, spinning a hand impatiently,
get on with it
.

“Okay,” said Pimento. “Along the way, I found an interesting case. The guy’s set for execution in a few months. You might want to ask the governor to take a closer look—”

“If they arrested him, he must be guilty,” said Marlon.

“Do we have to listen to this?” said Escrow.

“Shhhh!” Marlon snapped at Gottfried, then turned back to Pimento. “Pick up the pace.”

“Right,” said Pimento, rubbing his palms together, looking at the ceiling, going over everything he wanted to say. “Okay, this is gonna be good! You ready?”

Both of them: “Yes!”

“Okay…”

ELECTRICITY HAD QUITE
a year in 1887.

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse waged a fierce battle over who would dominate the revolutionary new utility. Edison had DC—direct current—and Westinghouse had AC—alternating current—and they were playing hardball.

On a cool morning in February, Edison traveled to the town of West Orange, New Jersey. A crowd gathered in the square as Edison and his assistants placed a large iron plate on the ground and wired it to a thousand-volt AC generator. Onlookers pushed and shoved for better views. Edison’s team placed twenty-nine dogs and cats on the metal plate. They turned on the juice.

Most in the crowd were sickened by what happened next, but a few liked it.

Edison’s message: “See? AC current is dangerous!”

Across the Hudson River, lawmakers in New York State took a different view of the demonstration: “Hey, we have some
people
we’d like to do that to.”

William Kemmler fried August 6, 1890, in Auburn, New York.

The electric chair was born.

AT
the end of the nineteenth century, electrocution was in demand because the technology was so advanced. At the beginning of the twenty-first, it was in even higher de
mand because it was so primitive. For many, lethal injection just wasn’t quite as—how would you put it?—
satisfying
…. Then there was the sentimentality. Over the years, the chairs in various states had acquired their own quaint nicknames: Old Sparky, Yellow Mama, the Indiana Shit-Boiler.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court voted five to four in the case of
Furman v. Georgia
to halt executions because they were cruel and unusual. When the court changed its mind in 1976, it was as if Prohibition had been repealed. Gary Gilmore was the first to go, shot by a Utah firing squad. But he had requested to be killed—no fun in that. The country wanted someone dragging his heels a bit.

Enter punk and general screwup John Spenkelink, who stuck up a bunch of gas stations in California, escaped from prison, and stumbled haplessly across the country to Florida, right into the path of an oncoming political freight train.

Spenkelink was a skinny twenty-three-year-old in 1973 when he hooked up with a much bigger and more hardened forty-five-year-old career criminal named Joe Szymankiewicz. On February 3, Joe was shot dead in a Tallahassee motel room. He’d also been hit in the head with a hatchet. At trial, Spenkelink testified that Joe had beaten and sexually assaulted him at gunpoint.

John was poor and didn’t get a good defense. Guilty: first-degree murder. Sentence: death.

Legal experts raised their eyebrows. It might well have been first-degree murder. On the other hand, given Szymankiewicz’s violent record and the criminal lifestyles of people like John and Joe, the exact circumstances were not ascertainable. Not to the degree of certainty that
you kill someone. A death sentence just didn’t pass the smell test. With better counsel it was probably second-degree murder or manslaughter, maybe even innocent by self-defense.

John appealed. Timing was everything.

When Spenkelink’s case came up, he was in line to be the first person in the United States involuntarily put to death since the Supreme Court decision. His picture appeared on the cover of
The New York Times Magazine
, with the headline
THE NEXT MAN TO BE EXECUTED
? The political cost to spare Spenkelink was rising. The train had left the station.

During appeals, his attorneys argued capital punishment was cruel and unusual. John couldn’t believe his ears. They were using his case to attack the Supreme Court ruling.
The whole country wants the death penalty—you’re gonna get me killed! Don’t attack the Supreme Court—attack Szymankiewicz! He was raping and beating me!

On the night of May 25, 1979, a Friday, they shaved John down. He couldn’t stop shaking. The warden took pity and slipped him some whiskey.

John’s last words: “Capital punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment.”

During the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1994, one candidate bragged in a TV ad that as attorney general he had helped kill Spenkelink. Even fifteen years later, it was still good for a few votes.

FLORIDA’S
electric chair was getting some serious wear and tear. Built in 1923, the furniture portion—the sturdy three-legged oak seat—was replaced in 1998. The electric apparatus was not.

The chair is located at Starke, in the speed-trap no-man’s-land between Gainesville and Jacksonville. It costs $55.14 a day to house a condemned inmate; their cells are six feet by nine. An anonymous executioner is paid a hundred and fifty bucks.

When the legislature reinstated the chair prior to the 2002 election, the Department of Corrections immediately experienced a rash of what the official spokesman termed “minor incidents.”

Gerald Samuel “The Grim Reaper” Morgenstern, serial killer of prostitutes. Last meal: Delmonico steak, baked potato with sour cream and chives, French bread, Caesar salad, half gallon of mint chocolate ice cream, two liters of Dr Pepper. For his last statement Morgenstern read a rambling seven-page condemnation of the U.S. judicial system until even his spiritual adviser began glancing at his watch. He concluded: “I’d rather be fishing.” Then he seized up and the hood over his head caught fire.

Thomas “Crazy Tom” “Squirrelly Tom” Vogel, while on PCP, broke into a private residence and disemboweled a woman in her third trimester. Barbecue beef ribs, corn on the cob, baked beans, chilled peanut butter M&Ms, lemonade. Looking around at the people strapping him in, Tom said, “I think I’ve seriously fucked up.” He bolted straight in the chair and blood spurted out his chest.

Meredith “The Black Widow” Fricatolla poisoned four men with swimming pool chemicals. Fried shrimp, fried catfish, french fries, two fried eggs, onion rings and a diet Mr. Pibb. “I got nothing to say…Wait! I just rememb—” She went into spasms before what prison personnel described as “a midair static-electric discharge from the base of the seat to the foundation.” The morning radio
shock-jocks were more concise: “Lightning shot out her ass!”

The next case was the most interesting yet, even though the prisoner didn’t die.

Electrocution opponents have long contested the state’s position that death is quick and painless. They counter that because the human brain operates on tiny electrical impulses, the current from an electric chair throws normal perceptions of reality out the window. An execution that takes a second, they contend, could seem like days inside a short-circuited brain. But there was no way to prove or disprove the theory. Until Billy Joe Fahrenheit came along.

A moment after the switch was thrown and a thousand volts began dancing in the folds of Billy Joe’s cerebrum, he found himself flying through the air at incredible speed, circling the earth. The sky strobed orange, green and pink each second, and his body became elastic and nine hundred miles long, stretching all the way across Portugal and part of Spain. It was actually quite pleasant. He dove into the Atlantic Ocean, his body disintegrating upon impact with the water, and he became billions of microscopic twinkling mites that swam in a school toward the bottom of the sea. Suddenly the mites re-formed and broke the surface of the water and he was flying again, this time his body made up entirely from a single element, beryllium, and Billy Joe was thinking, Can ya beat this crazy shit?

It went on that way for the longest time until Billy Joe didn’t feel so good anymore. Then he started feeling extremely
bad
. Everything went dark and he began to hurt like hell all over. He heard someone yell: “He’s still alive!” and the hood was pulled off his head.

Billy Joe gave extensive media interviews until he was put back in the chair the following month and dispatched on an equally interesting journey, but with a different ending.

PIMENTO
suspended his presentation on capital punishment when he saw Marlon and Escrow starting to doze.

“Hey! You awake?”

“Absolutely!”

“Good. You don’t want to miss this next part.”

Pimento told Marlon he had checked the legal dockets. The next two prisoners up for execution were clearly guilty, but Marlon might want to take a closer look at lucky contestant number three, who was convicted in a case out of the Florida Keys.

THE
Miami Dolphins had just kicked off to the New England Patriots in a blizzard in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The phone rang in the kitchen of football fan Anita Braintree of Boston. It was December 1989.

Anita’s eyes stayed on the TV as she picked up the receiver. On the other end, she heard another TV tuned to the Patriots, giving her the game in stereo. She also heard rowdy drunks and a faint jet engine. She was expecting a call from her husband, but instead it was her husband’s annoying business partner, Frank Lloyd Sirocco, and he sounded a little trashed.

He said he was in a sports bar across the highway from the airport. She heard a loud bang over the phone.

“What was that?”

“Toy musket,” said Sirocco. Intoxicated people marched around him dressed like Ben Franklin, Thomas
Paine and Nathan Hale. The Patriots intercepted, and Mrs. Braintree heard cheering over the phone.

“My flight’s snowed in,” said Sirocco. “They’re closing the runways at Logan—”

“Is that a flute?”

“Fife and bugle,” said Sirocco. “I can’t get through to George in the Keys. When he calls, can you tell him it looks like our scuba trip is off?”

“Ooooooooo,” said Anita.

“Ooooooooo,” said Sirocco. The Patriots had fumbled.

George had taken a flight out of Logan the night before, ahead of the front. A blizzard now raged in Massachusetts, and Mrs. Braintree threw another log on the fire. She settled in for the second quarter, planning to phone George at halftime and pass on his partner’s message.

When Anita called down to the A1A Dive Center on Cudjoe Key, the caretaker was watching the Patriots and Dolphins on a portable TV on the screened porch, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under a plantation fan. He grabbed the registration book.

“Let’s see, George Braintree. He’s in cabin number…hold on a sec…”—they stopped to watch the Dolphins kick a field goal—“…cabin number five.” He rang the cottage and waited. “I’m not getting an answer.”

Two hours later—and precisely ten seconds after the Dolphins beat the Patriots seventeen to fourteen—Anita dialed the 305 area code again. This time she asked the caretaker to personally check on George.

When the caretaker opened cabin five, the TV was on the postgame show. George Braintree’s suitcase was opened neatly on a chair, his scuba gear stacked against the wall, his red rental Taurus parked by the pool. Even a
recently popped beer on the nightstand. The caretaker called Anita back and said everything looked normal. He must be at the convenience store or the pub.

He didn’t tell her about the wallet he had found on top of the TV, or the twenty he took.

Anita turned off the TV. It wasn’t like George not to call. On the other hand, he had been known to drown his sorrows after more than one Patriots loss. When Anita couldn’t reach George on Monday, she called the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.

The deputies got the vibe the moment they stepped in cabin number five. Absolutely nothing out of order—no sign of struggle or robbery. It was all wrong. The wallet and the blaring TV. The can of beer on the dresser, warm and full.

A week later, nothing. A month, still nothing.

Anita demanded answers from the sheriff’s office. She just couldn’t accept it. She had driven George to the airport herself and kissed him good-bye, and he had gone to Florida wearing a loud shirt and disappeared into hot air.

MRS
. Braintree was the primary suspect, mainly because she was half her husband’s age—the trophy wife. They had no children, and she stood to get everything. But the detectives’ audit of the Braintrees’ finances revealed George was worth more to Anita alive. He was underinsured and top-heavy with debt. She would have to sell the house.

The police swung their glare to George’s partner, Frank Lloyd Sirocco, who was now the sole proprietor of their business. Frank said that on the day George disappeared, he was watching a Patriots game in a Boston bar, fifteen hundred miles away. Dozens of people saw him.

Who were they?

He wasn’t sure; they were dressed like Minutemen.

What set off bells with the detectives was the seven life insurance policies on George. A small one had named Anita as beneficiary, but six named Frank.

What did Sirocco have to say for himself?

“Standard business practice,” said Frank. He showed them the books. The policies totaled half the company’s value on paper. Partners regularly did that so if one of them died, the survivor wouldn’t have to dissolve the company to pay off heirs. He showed them the buy-sell contract.

But why six different policies?

“George had a bad ticker,” said Frank. “He had to purchase a bunch of small policies that didn’t require physicals.”

The cops let Frank go, but kept an eye on him.

Frank immediately started dating George’s widow. She moved in a month later, and they married the following June.

If there’s one thing cops hate, it’s someone getting away with murder and yukking it up in the process. Frank and Anita weren’t even trying to hide it. New cars, trips, parties, even rumors Anita was coming down with a nasty drug habit.

The police kept checking, turning up threads of information that meant little individually but together began to weave a compelling circumstantial case. Shortly before George’s disappearance, Frank Lloyd Sirocco had reported his gun stolen. He made large cash withdrawals. On the weekend in question, there were three calls to Florida from the pay phone around the corner from Frank’s home. They checked the log of money orders at
the nearest convenience store—several large ones coincided with Frank’s withdrawals. But there were no names on the log and the security tapes had been erased.

The police knew they had their man. They decided to bluff. Frank was confronted. He didn’t ask for a lawyer, but he also refused a lie detector. “I saw something on
60 Minutes
about how they’re unreliable.”