After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  In fact, when Stuart GraBois took on the Patz investigation, it was the only open missing child case in the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York. Federal authorities had gotten involved back in late 1982, with the NAMBLA bust in Wareham, Massachusetts, which raised the specter of interstate activity. If someone had taken Etan across state lines, they could be charged with the federal crime of kidnapping. As a federal prosecutor GraBois would develop such a case for prosecution, aided by investigators who had already worked the case for some time. By this point his team comprised FBI agent Ken Ruffo, along with two NYPD Missing Persons detectives, Robert Shaw and Owen J. Byrne.

  Ruffo came to see GraBois the Friday after Memorial Day. The agent handed the prosecutor a folder of background reports, to introduce GraBois to the major points of the case. “You’ll get the rest of it next week, but this should start you off,” the agent said.

  “Okay, I’ll read through it, get familiar with the other material when it comes and then I’ll give you a call.” GraBois took the papers home to read over the weekend. Typically, when he started a case, he’d read the briefing folder meticulously, making detailed notes, to be fully up to speed before adding his own paperwork to it.

  The next week, a half-dozen brown cardboard storage cartons arrived in GraBois’s office. Every one of them was full of folders thicker than the one he had already read. He stacked them up against a wall and pulled the first box over to his desk. He leafed through the chronological files to locate the first day, May 25, 1979.

  On that day in 1979, Stuart GraBois was not yet an AUSA, but he was already with the Justice Department, as a senior trial attorney in the New York office of their Anti-Trust Division. May 25 happened to be his father’s birthday, and the extended GraBois family would have gathered that weekend to mark it.

  There had been another cause to celebrate: the recent birth of Stuart and Bonnie GraBois’s son, Andrew. Arriving ten years after his sister, Melissa, he was a long-hoped-for baby. For the first time three generations of GraBois men would be at the birthday party, all three native New Yorkers.

  Stuart GraBois grew up with his younger sister, Marsha, the children of first-generation Jewish-American parents, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Theirs was an insular, close-knit neighborhood, where alliances formed not by religion or ethnicity but by block, even by building. The kids moved easily from apartment to apartment in a large complex that seemed more a small village, and they always felt protected. Everyone watched out for everyone else.

  From an early age, GraBois internalized his family’s deep reverence for those who upheld justice and contempt for those who did not, starting with the experience of his paternal grandparents, who had lived in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Before leaving Paris for New York in 1906, GraBois’s grandfather had seen firsthand the damage of France’s infamous “Affaire Dreyfus,” and would often relate to his grandson with deep anger and sadness the decade-long travesty. The elder GraBois vividly recalled the injustice done to Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely convicted of treason and imprisoned for four years on the notorious Devil’s Island off the coast of South America before his name was finally cleared. Dreyfus’s superiors initially had believed he was guilty of passing state secrets to enemy Germany, but later lied and schemed when they discovered their error.

  “That’s why we came to America,” Benjamin GraBois would tell his grandson. “Because justice is possible. Here you have a chance to go to school to make sure people get treated fairly.”

  The idea of justice by law captivated GraBois. In his middle and high school yearbooks he always wrote the same life goal: to be a lawyer. In his first month at American University’s Washington College of Law he met his wife-to-be, Bonnie, an undergraduate studying political science, and by the time he got his law degree they’d already been married a year.

  In 1967, fresh out of law school, GraBois worked as a Legal Aid investigator before taking the bar, using his new legal training to interview witnesses, gather evidence, and hone his persistent style. After admission to the bar, he stayed at Legal Aid and proved himself a feisty litigator with a bulldog reputation, no matter who his opponent might be.

  Like most criminal defense attorneys, GraBois’s cases usually ended in plea bargains, moving through the courts with conveyer-belt efficiency. Once, a client of GraBois’s in a double narcotics charge bucked the system, refused the plea, and demanded a trial. The judge involved was renowned for his laziness. He had no interest in suffering through an actual trial, and became contentious when told the defendant wouldn’t plead and planned instead to offer his mother as an alibi.

  “That’s ridiculous,” the judge snapped in the court proceeding. “Mother, get up here.”

  GraBois watched the elderly black woman stand up and move timidly toward the front of the court.

  “Her name is Mrs. Johnson, Your Honor,” GraBois politely asserted.

  “Don’t tell me what to say.” The air was getting charged. GraBois was already smarting at the idea that his client might be deprived of his right to trial. He thought the judge’s words were demeaning to this woman, who clearly thought any authority figure was intimidating, let alone a black-robed white man on a raised bench who would probably send her son to prison.

  “One more word out of you, Mr. GraBois, and I’ll hold you in contempt of court.”

  “Come on, Your Honor, my client…”

  “That’s it!” The judge was livid. “Two hundred dollars or five days in jail.”

  “Judge, I work for Legal Aid.” GraBois couldn’t believe the man was serious, so he joked back. “I don’t have two hundred dollars.”

  “Put him in!” roared the judge, who was nearly apoplectic. As the bailiff moved to lead GraBois away, the judge made him an offer. “If you apologize, I’ll have you released.”

  “What am I supposed to apologize for?” GraBois asked.

  After several hours behind bars, even the admiration of his fellow inmates wasn’t making his stay any less miserable, but GraBois refused to accede to a man he himself held in contempt. GraBois’s boss at Legal Aid, whom GraBois respected enormously, came to see him and made his own plea.

  “Listen, don’t apologize. The man is such an idiot; just say something that sounds good, and he’ll buy it.”

  “Your Honor,” GraBois announced in open court after being released from the cell, “I had no intent to be contemptuous of the court’s robes.” The judge seemed to chew on this, so GraBois repeated it.

  “I’ll take that as an apology,” the judge finally said. GraBois’s client went to trial and was found guilty, which he clearly was. “That’s not the point,” GraBois liked to say whenever he told that story. “He had a right to a fair trial, and if he wanted to exercise it, you shouldn’t railroad him into a plea, just because you think it’s a waste of time.”

  GraBois knew his days as a public defender were coming to an end when he found himself itching to prosecute some of his clients. The final straw came when he was interviewing a client in his cell and the man coldly detailed his physical and sexual abuse of a child. GraBois realized then that he still wanted to be a defender, it was just that he wanted to defend the victims.

  When GraBois arrived at the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York in 1982, he knew it was where he’d always wanted to be. By this time, he was older than many of his fellow AUSAs, who often come to the U.S. Attorney’s Office just a few years out of law school, and typically stay long enough to make their bones as litigators before moving on to high-billing private firms. GraBois came into the job not only having had several years’ experience in the trenches as a Legal Aid investigator and defense attorney, but he was the kind of born and bred New Yorker who knew his way around town.

  On the seventh floor of One St. Andrew’s Plaza, GraBois’s new office faced the church of the same name. Police bagpipers would practice in the church basement, somet
imes preparing for the next funeral of a fallen officer, and the notes would waft up through the window. The poignant strains provided a fitting soundtrack as GraBois prepared cases against drug dealers, counterfeiters, and bank robbers.

  But the prosecutor had a special affinity for pursuing criminals who took advantage of the most vulnerable victims—the elderly, women, and children. Maybe there was something of the white knight in his instincts, but all his life GraBois had believed in evening the odds, and, if he did his job right, even reversing them. A fraud scam that bilked senior citizens out of their Social Security checks was not a high crime, but he would picture someone his grandmother’s age who couldn’t buy groceries, and he would push hard for the toughest sentence. His unswerving, never-give-up, even-if-it-ends-in-a-head-on-collision mentality followed him from the Public Defender’s Office, whether it meant facing down the criminals or a power-hungry judge.

  At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Stuart GraBois felt that he was among his own. There was an ethos, a real spirit, that permeated the office. Many years before he’d arrived at the Southern District of New York, then U.S. attorney Whitney North Seymour had issued certificates—standards of performance—to each assistant, and the tradition continued beyond Seymour’s tenure.

  “To be an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York is a badge of honor that must be earned,” the dictum began, and then demanded a mix of virtues, both professional and personal: integrity, candor, and fairness; precision, thoughtfulness, decency; personal courage and conviction, among others. GraBois knew that some outside the office might think it corny, but he also believed every AUSA lived by those words.

  He framed the certificate and hung it on his wall. The powerful words, especially the last sentence, served as a reminder of his grandfather’s passionate defense of Alfred Dreyfus. Never proceed with a case, it cautioned, “unless convinced of the correctness of one’s position, or the guilt of the accused.”

  In one of his early cases, agents working with him had wired an informant who then got his target on tape apparently making admissions to a series of armed robberies. The suspect had an extensive record and a history of pleading guilty. Despite the strong evidence, something bothered GraBois—why this one time did the suspect not want to take the plea? Because I didn’t do this one, the man was adamant.

  Both the informant and the suspect were Hispanic and spoke Spanish on the tape, which made it harder to ID the voices. GraBois learned that with sophisticated technology, investigators in Washington were able to analyze Spanish-speaking voices, so he decided to go one step further and sent them the tape. The results revealed that the informant had deceived authorities—he’d been talking to someone else on the tape. The news came in late on a Friday night, as GraBois was headed out the door. He figured the judge was gone for the day, and by keeping the perp in for the weekend, he would probably prevent a few more crimes. But that would be wrong. He was surprised and relieved to reach the judge in his chambers, who immediately arranged for the man’s release. It was the kind of thing GraBois knew anyone in his office would have done.

  Before GraBois was assigned to the Patz case in 1985, it had been overseen by the AUSA in the next office over. GraBois would watch as agents and detectives filed in to see her from time to time, men he knew from some of his own cases, and he would chat with them after they left. Sometimes they’d stop by beforehand to run a line of investigation by him. “Do you think this has any legs?” they would ask, a dress rehearsal before they’d go onstage next door. When his neighbor left in 1985 for a judgeship, GraBois was eager for the challenge.

  The Patz case had always been an enigma, with its crazy patchwork of leads and long list of amorphous suspects. Even with the unlikely prospect of a miraculous breakthrough, the issue of jurisdiction had always lurked beneath the surface. If after months, even years, of exhaustive labor, the investigation finally broke to reveal that Etan had never been taken out of New York, this wouldn’t be the Feds’ case to try. A subsequent prosecution would be turned over to the local district attorney. That would mean all of the work, and then a handoff.

  But GraBois didn’t care about any of that. He wanted the Patz case. Maybe it appealed to him as a father. How could a parent survive that? Or maybe there was something about the challenge of a case that had eluded so many before him, that had as much of an impact on him as it did on so many New Yorkers who’d felt violated themselves by this heinous crime. He’d followed the case in the press since he’d first scanned the chilling headlines over Sunday morning coffee in May 1979. He’d often thought of six-year-old Etan, walking alone on his own street for the first time, and how he’d seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth.

  But before he could move forward on his new case, GraBois had to sort through its overwhelming history. It wasn’t so much that there were no leads; there were too many leads and all of them frustratingly sketchy. They ran off in twenty different directions, dense paths he had to hack his way through, if only to post a “Dead End” sign. He got a morale boost in the first days when he ran into one of his bosses, the head of the Criminal Division, on the stairwell. The men stopped to chat, the usual talk about baseball and family, before turning to casual office talk.

  “What are you working on these days?” Howard Wilson asked him.

  “I’m taking over the Patz case,” GraBois replied. “I’m really getting into it. There’s so much there.”

  “You’re kidding! C’mon, let’s go upstairs,” Wilson said, “and we’ll tell Rudy.”

  U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani’s office was one flight above GraBois’s. His assistants numbered in the hundreds, so they were spread out all over the nine-story building. Giuliani’s presence was keenly felt, though, from the early morning Pavarotti arias coming out of his large corner office with the expansive views of the Brooklyn Bridge, and his agile fielding on first base for the office softball team, to his hard-charging, high-profile attacks on the mob and Wall Street greed. Despite some criticism of his aggressive prosecutions, inside his office he was seen as a crusader with an intense loyalty for those who stood with him on his mission.

  When GraBois and Howard Wilson stuck their heads into Giuliani’s office to relay the news, the U.S. attorney brightened.

  “That’s terrific,” Giuliani said. “You should know that this office is behind you 100 percent. Do whatever you have to do. I’ll give you anything you need.”

  GraBois went back downstairs with the sense he’d just come away with a blessing from on high. He was passionate and eager to dig into this new case, but, looking at all the boxes spread out in front of him, it helped to know the big guns felt that way too.

  CHAPTER 10

  No Stone Unturned

  Long-Lost Boy Hunted Anew;

  New Yorker Gone 6 Years May Be Alive in Israel

  …“There is no hard evidence, but there is a reasonable assumption that Etan Patz might have been in Israel,” said Giuliani, who reopened the case six months ago….

  … The Israeli investigation became public this week when a Romanian-born woman in Queens noticed Patz’s photograph in the current issue of a Romanian-language magazine from Israel…. Federal officials said the photograph was published… at the request of Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois and FBI agent Kenneth Ruffo, who traveled to Israel last month to follow up several leads.

  —Washington Post, November 23, 1985

  Subject: interview of the mother Julia Patz….

  … Mrs. Patz further stated that when the child did not return home on schedule between 1530 hrs. and 1540 she called Karen Altman, a neighbor who usually walks the boy home from the returning bus which stops on the northeast corner of West Bway and Prince St. When advised by Mrs. Altman that she was informed by her daughter Chelsea that the boy…

  —NYPD Police Report 5/26/79 (DD5) Bill Butler re: Lost Child #687

  She was informed by her daughter Chelsea that the boy…” Stuart GraBois was reading Bill Bu
tler’s first DD5, and when he got to the end of page one, he flipped it over to continue reading. But the page that followed… didn’t. It was dated March 1983, four years later. “That the boy… did what?” he thought with familiar frustration.

  GraBois was trying vainly once again to read through Butler’s earliest NYPD reports. In 1979, Butler could never have known when he wrote them that so many iterations of law enforcement, one after the other, would be piecing this case together with such fragmented artifacts, like archaeologists at an ancient dig moving around miniscule random remnants of pottery, hoping some of the jagged edges would click into place.

  Ingesting all this material was making GraBois painfully aware how much this case differed from his others, and not just because it involved a young, vulnerable little boy and had attracted the nation’s interest. Typically, by the time the federal prosecutor took on a new case, there was a clear-cut suspect, and whatever investigation had yet to be done related to building the prosecution. Although federal prosecutors were certainly part of that investigation, the FBI agents did the fieldwork. The Etan Patz mystery, GraBois had come to understand, was the sort of case that demanded more. It was a real whodunit. Not to mention where, how, why, and when.

  Crouched in front of the open box of files, GraBois scanned the stacks of police reports, FBI summaries, and court documents, searching for the rest of that second DD5. Looking past the carton he was perusing, he eyed the five behind it. Sometimes it felt that no matter how much of the case he absorbed, no matter how many stacks of files he reviewed, more would take their place, as if from a magician’s bottomless prop box. But he had given himself a mandate to tie up every loose thread, no matter how much of a stretch. If he didn’t, he’d always be asking himself the worst of all the lingering questions: If I had only pulled at that one strand, would the whole case have unraveled?