Conviction Read online

  A year later, he telephoned me. He said he loved his new job and Greenwich, where he and his wife had purchased a house. But something was nagging at him. Wherever he went, he said, people still talked about the unsolved Moxley murder and the Skakels.

  “Why don’t you spend a few months up here and look into this for me?” he said.

  I think back to that conversation that was to alter the next twenty years of my life and ask myself how the murder of Martha Moxley became my obsession. Dominick, I would learn, had been drawn to it because of a tragedy in his own life. Fuhrman sought redemption from it because of his perjury charge. Frank was assigned to it as his job.

  But my motives changed over time. I began the case because it looked like someone from a rich and influential family had gotten away with murdering a fifteen-year-old girl and the police had covered it up.

  Then, it got personal.

  The lives of the rich and famous held no allure for me. On the contrary, I seemed to have spent much of my life escaping from what I perceived as my privileged past. I had grown up in the Five Towns in Nassau County on Long Island, where Jewish families moved from New York City after coming into money. Ours came from my maternal grandfather, a turn-of-the-century immigrant who as a teenager fled the yeshiva in Poland to sell pots and pans on the Lower East Side.

  He started his own business and was successful enough that he brought over his brothers. He bought a house in the Bronx and sent his son to medical school and his daughter to Hunter College, where she became a high school English teacher. That was my mother.

  My father’s family fled Russia and the Communists after my grandfather, for whom I am named, was released from a Bolshevik prison. They crossed the border at night, traveled west through Europe—at one point reduced to sleeping in the barn of my grandmother’s sister in Romania because she refused to allow them to sleep inside her house—before ending up, penniless, in Winnipeg, Canada. The uprooting broke my grandfather. He could find work only as the principal of a poor Hebrew school and suffered from depression the rest of his short life.

  My own childhood was prototypically American. I played baseball, football, and basketball until I dropped. I read everything I could about sports. My heroes were not just the ballplayers but the bylines: Arthur Daily of the Times; Jimmy Cannon of the Post; Roger Kahn, Ed Fitzgerald, and Shirley Povich of Sport magazine; and years later, as my interests widened, Dick Schaap and Jimmy Breslin in the International Herald Tribune.

  My reading habits so disturbed my mother that she asked our pediatrician if there was something wrong with me. The doctor assured her I was no different from most American males.

  I was also transfixed by The Big Story, a television program about crusading newspaper reporters. Each was a solitary figure who, like the Western sheriffs of frontier towns, walked the streets alone, poking into the dark crevices of a city that more sensible people feared.

  I suppose it was in part this Lone Ranger–like image that made journalism my calling. How better to right wrongs and help the less fortunate, those unable to help themselves?

  Yet it was a quality of my mother’s that sustained me through three decades of journalism. She possessed a blind and reckless optimism, a belief that in the end things turn out as they are supposed to. An unpublished writer, she penned novels and short stories into her nineties while taking creative writing courses and arguing with teachers one third her age.

  In the Five Towns, she was an oddity—the rare college graduate, unconcerned with Cadillacs, beach clubs, bar mitzvahs at the Plaza, and the Pierre and Del Monaco hotels in New York City, to which we as thirteen-year-olds were driven in chauffeured limousines. I, however, was very concerned. Even at thirteen, I knew something was all wrong with these displays of ostentation. One star-filled night I poured out my lament to my teenage girlfriend, proclaiming as we wandered our school’s grounds, “This is not how I want to live my life.” Only in retrospect did I understand that I was harsher than I had a right to be about people who’d overcome hardships I never knew.

  My escape from the Five Towns came when I was accepted at Dartmouth College, which I imagined as a rural Eden in the green mountains of New Hampshire. It was that. But Dartmouth in the 1960s was also anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-female, anti-intellectual, and anti-just-about-everything else. Its founding mission had been to educate the American Indian. In 200 years, Dartmouth had graduated seventeen Indians.

  Still, there were plenty of people like me who cared nothing for the luxuries that money could buy. Like a number of them, after graduating I joined the Peace Corps, which President John F. Kennedy had started a few years before. In fact, I felt I owed the Kennedys a debt, for it was the Peace Corps that led me—hell, catapulted me—into journalism.

  I taught at what was called an upper primary school in Tanzania, East Africa. The school was in a mountain village where daily rains left wisps of white clouds atop the blue hills, a setting as pristine as my idealism. While there, I wrote a book. It was a sunny book about my students, the school’s African teachers, and its headmaster, who taught me far more than I did him. My book was accepted by the first publisher I approached. “The first book which truly conveys the flavor of Peace Corps work, the realities of it, the challenges, the frustrations….an extraordinarily fine book,” Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps’s director and brother-in-law of JFK, wrote on the jacket cover.

  The book received a full-page review in the New York Times. It was excerpted in Harper’s magazine and published in England. It led me to a big-time literary agent with the awesome name Sterling Lord. Miraculously, he represented not only my boyhood sports-writing idols but also Schaap and Breslin.

  “You’re in the big leagues now,” he said. I was twenty-four. I was so scared I called him Mr. Lord. It took me about five years to work up the courage to call him Sterling.

  He arranged my admittance into the Columbia School of Journalism, which—published author or not—had placed me on the waiting list. Mr. Lord knew the dean. When everyone went home for the summer, I went to the top of the list.

  And who was teaching there but Dick Schaap, now a city-side columnist. During our week of in-service training, he allowed me to accompany him. One evening, he made a speech in Long Island and wrote his column in longhand on the train back to New York. He allowed me to proofread it and even to alter a word. Then he typed it up at the New York Times, of all places, where a friend of his directed us to a desk in the barren city room. Observing such insouciance and derring-do, how could I not want to be like him?

  Mr. Lord also arranged my first job at the Detroit News, a newspaper that, like the city itself, never recovered from the 1967 race riots. Like all rookie reporters, I was assigned to police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien Street. I was instructed to telephone the outlying counties and ask their police chiefs what crimes had been committed. The chiefs never told you what happened in their counties but blabbed about all the others. That’s how I learned police reporting.

  Fortunately for me, Detroit’s police commissioner, Ray Girardin, had been a newspaperman. He appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies, slim, stooped, and pockmarked. He took a look at me, saw that I knew nothing about the police, and arranged for me to ride in a patrol car on the four-to-midnight tours. It was my first appreciation of the dangers cops face and of their courage. I saw stabbing and shooting victims, furious husbands and cowering wives, scores of drunks, and plenty of racial hate—all directed at the police.

  It was also my first appreciation of why the quality a cop prizes most is loyalty. A partner’s loyalty can save a cop’s life.

  While in Detroit, I covered all sorts of crime—white merchants shot and stabbed by black teenagers during robberies; domestic stabbings and shootings that knew no distinction of color; even a serial killer in Ann Arbor, a darkly handsome young man who offered girls rides on his motorbike, then strangled and buried them in a relative’s basement.

  After two years, I comple
ted a novel, which the Times also reviewed, albeit in two paragraphs south of page thirty-five. Meanwhile, I’d returned to New York as a correspondent for Time magazine. I was like a reporter in a television movie: every week, a new story; every story, a new adventure.

  And I played the part. The first time I visited the old police headquarters on Center Street, a young cop at the information desk scanned my identification, looked up at me, and said, “Yeah, I really believe everything the newspapers say.”

  “Yeah,” I answered, “and I really believe everything the police say.”

  Time magazine was starting a New York bureau and I was the first reporter hired. But there was a problem. Actually, two problems. The first was that I was in over my head. I’d left newspapering too soon. The second was that after I was hired, Time began trimming costs and firing people. I survived only because of my boss, Frank McCulloch. Either he felt I had potential or took pity on me.

  An ex-marine, McCulloch joined Time as a stringer out West after World War II and caught the attention of its founder, Henry Luce. He left briefly to become a managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, then, to Luce’s delight, returned to Time as Saigon bureau chief during the Vietnam War.

  He had been the last reporter to interview Howard Hughes and told a hilarious story of being directed to drive to an abandoned airstrip in the Nevada desert, where a plane mysteriously appeared and flew him to a secret rendezvous with the reclusive billionaire. When he was returned to the airstrip, he found a note from Hughes that one of his minions had somehow placed on the dashboard of McCulloch’s locked car.

  Then in his fifties, he was an imposing figure with a shaved head, thirty years ahead of fashion. His door across the hallway from my cubicle was always open and I watched a procession of Time correspondents and other journalistic luminaries from Vietnam pass through it.

  They told amazing stories of war. One spoke of covering a massacre where he saw hundreds of bodies floating down a river. Although some were alive, a British journalist, an older man, announced that a reporter’s job was merely to describe what had happened, not to offer help. I wasn’t sure where I stood on that. Reporters still belong to the human race.

  For the first few months, until other correspondents settled into the bureau, it was just McCulloch and me. I became the sole beneficiary of his instruction.

  “What are the qualities a journalist should possess?” I asked.

  “Honesty, accuracy, and integrity,” he answered, “the same qualities one should practice in daily life.” Obvious as this might seem, when articulated by him, it sounded like a revelation.

  “Never lie when reporting a story,” he added. “You don’t have to tell people you interview the full truth. But a reporter must never lie. In the end, you are left with only two things—your byline and your credibility.”

  Two decades later, I would read in the New York Times that Phan Xuan An, Time’s office manager in Saigon during the war, admitted he had been a North Vietnamese spy and a colonel in the North Vietnamese army. Though unrepentant, he stated in an interview with CBS’s Morley Safer that he wanted to send his regards to McCulloch.

  In words I might have uttered, Phan Xuan An said of him, “He taught me everything about honest journalism. He taught me about ‘getting it right.’ Tell him whatever I did, I did not let him down on that.”

  I remained at Time for three years. Heady as the experience was, there was something unreal about it. I felt I was only playing at being a reporter. The reason was that Time’s editors in New York rewrote every story correspondents filed. Richard Reeves, then a political reporter, with the New York Times, said that one Times reporter equaled three Time correspondents because Times reporters wrote their own stories.

  While in Detroit I had heard of a group of Jewish gangsters, known as the Purple Gang. From the 1920s to the 1940s, they controlled the rackets and terrorized the city. Sterling (by then I’d worked up the courage to call him that) arranged a book contract and I left Time to write their story.

  For the next year, I traveled to Detroit in search of them. Many had been killed or had served long prison terms. Those who were still alive were in their sixties and seventies. Their families were embarrassed and ashamed. I couldn’t get near any of them. Too late, I realized I was in over my head again. This time, there was no McCulloch to bail me out. The book blew itself out somewhere around page twenty-seven.

  I prayed for a second chance to return to journalism. By then, McCulloch had left Time. He had never succeeded to its highest editorial positions, either as managing editor or chief of correspondents. While his abilities were recognized throughout Time-Life, its executives understood that his first loyalty was not to the company but to the craft of journalism. That was another life lesson for me: The best people don’t always rise to the top.

  But a recession was in the wind and nobody was hiring. Ironically, the only place to make an exception for me was Newsday on Long Island. I may have traveled half the world to escape the Five Towns, but I didn’t seem to have come very far.

  I landed there through Don Forst. He had edited Schaap at the Trib and was one of Newsday’s three managing editors. At my interview, I listed my bona fides, including having grown up in the Five Towns.

  “To the manor born,” Forst replied.

  With him was a second managing editor, Tony Insolia. He opposed hiring me, distrusting reporters from New York City, no matter where they’d grown up. He was a man of old-fashioned values and virtue, and I became as close to him as I did to Don.

  We agreed to a weeklong tryout, which stretched into a month. My second chance had begun.

  In some ways, Newsday was a step down from Time. Whereas Time straddled the world, my universe at Newsday was bounded by eastern Queens and the western Suffolk County line. But my experience there proved richer and fuller. Bill Moyers had left as publisher a few years before, but the place still rocked. The editor-in-chief, Dave Laventhol, also from the Trib, had been a Moyers guy. Erudite and shy, he rarely emerged from his office. Ken Brief was the national editor. Forst ran the newsroom. He said he wanted stories not merely about events but about people—not just what they did but what they thought and felt.

  “Just remember,” he said, “reporting isn’t about you. It’s about them.”

  One of my first interviews was with Meir Kahane, the rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League. He was holding a news conference and was seated on a podium next to a bearded man with a British accent who insisted on making a speech while Kahane sat glumly beside him. In the midst of it, Kahane cut him off, then stormed off the podium toward me.

  “Rich people,” he muttered, “I despise them.”

  He then asked me where I was from.

  “The Five Towns,” I answered.

  “Oh, a rich boy,” he said.

  “Yes, rabbi,” I answered, “but I have overcome it.”

  Perhaps because Newsday was a liberal paper and no one else seemed comfortable doing it, or perhaps because I had done it before, I fell into covering crime and the police. I started small: Kids in a gang fight at a junior high. A gambling ring in a school cafeteria. A middle-aged secretary embezzling from her company. A fifteen-year-old girl named Dawn who beat her alcoholic mother to death. A Vietnam vet, shot and killed by cops after a robbery, who as he fled discarded the women’s clothing he was wearing.

  And they or their friends or families all talked to me. Dawn’s stepfather told me Dawn killed her mother because she’d prevented Dawn from seeing her boyfriend. The Vietnam vet’s aunt told me he was a transvestite and was discarding his clothes because he feared being discovered dressed as a woman. “His last act,” said the aunt, “was to die as a man.”

  At the embezzling secretary’s office, her coworkers told me she was incapable of stealing and that the police had mistakenly arrested her. We pulled up chairs and I sat them in a circle and led them in a discussion about her. Details emerged that her co-workers had never realized.
r />   I seemed to have found my rhythm as a reporter, although I still had plenty to learn. I wrote a story about Frank Steiner, a shady private eye. Two decades before as a Nassau County detective, he’d supposedly solved the murder of millionaire horseman and socialite William Woodward, who was shot by his wife. She claimed to have mistaken him for a burglar.

  As a private eye, Steiner had two partners. One was Walter Cox, a brilliant and bitter ex-con. To prompt Cox to open up to me, I spoke disparagingly of Steiner, unaware Cox was taping our conversation. Cox then excised his voice and presented Steiner with the tape, saying my derogatory remarks had been prompted by their third partner.

  From that experience, I learned two lessons. Lesson number one: Never underestimate anyone you interview.

  Lesson number two: I wasn’t as smart as thought I was.

  A surgeon, Charles Friedgood, murdered his wife by injecting her with Demerol. One of his four daughters hid the needle. Another daughter alerted the police after he’d looted their mother’s safe deposit box and bought an airline ticket to join his girlfriend in Denmark. Police pulled him off a plane on the runway of Kennedy airport.

  Before his arrest, I visited him at his home. His daughter, blonde and in her twenties, answered the door. I wasn’t carrying a pad and she asked if I were “a real reporter.” I realized she was flirting.

  Then I visited the daughter who’d alerted the cops. She told me that the daughter I’d met at the door had hidden the needle used to kill their mother.

  I wrote a four-part series that became the book that Viking published. It became a book club selection and was optioned for a movie. I was a natural, a pro, or so I imagined. I didn’t realize that as a journalist I was only half-formed. The Moxley story would form my second half.