Thank God for Ken Ruffo, GraBois often thought. FBI special agent Ken Ruffo was every neatly barbered, trim-mustachioed, deliberately nondescript Fed Hollywood has ever concocted. He had no hidden agendas, and on the job he rarely cracked a smile. But beneath his laconic manner lurked wry humor and genuine warmth.
GraBois welcomed Ruffo’s impressive memory, which was like having access to a walking computer hard drive. To supplement his internal filing cabinet, Ruffo’s secret weapon was an elaborate three-by-five index card system. Every fact in the case was logged and cross-cataloged. You could fire a name at Ken Ruffo, and he’d rummage around, then fire back with bullet points.
“Who was Monte Birnberg?” GraBois would call and ask. “And how does he relate to the case?”
“Just a minute.” Ruffo would put down the phone, then read from the card he’d just pulled: “Monte Birnberg was one of the last people to see Etan on the morning of May 25. On May 26, 1979, Birnberg was interviewed and he told us the following…”
Like the rare beer can collection Ken Ruffo kept in alphabetical order in his Long Island home, the Patz files came in several neatly organized banker’s boxes. But like GraBois, Ken Ruffo could only work with the material he’d been given, material that over the years and the changing guards had degenerated into the missing and misnumbered. The fragmentation seemed to be unintentional, with the sheer volume of interviews and separate investigations overwhelming an orderly system. GraBois was finding big gaps in the Patz paperwork, creeps who should have been checked out or may have in fact been checked out, although there was no record of it.
With the help of Ruffo and NYPD detectives Bob Shaw and O. J. Byrne, GraBois was beginning to learn the cast of characters and chart his own way. There were, of course, the Patzes themselves. Just like every investigator before him, Stuart GraBois needed to cross the Patz family off his own suspect list. But there were a lot of others.
Over the next weeks, he read through page after page of potential suspects, names culled from years of anonymous tips, interviews with friends, neighbors, and other law enforcement agencies, as well as known pedophiles and cons looking for a break in their own cases. In recent months, investigators had been following one informant’s lead that had taken agents as far as Massachusetts, Florida, and even Amsterdam, but to GraBois it all seemed to go nowhere. He was, however, struck by an odd blip in Israel, where years earlier Etan’s picture had mysteriously appeared in a magazine next to the name “Etan Ben-Haim.” He also wanted to know more about the Patz “babysitter” and how she seemed connected to various shadowy figures he was also looking at.
GraBois was convinced Sandy Harmon could offer important clues, although he needed to hear them from her directly. Looking at a two-paragraph summary of a seven-hour police interrogation didn’t tell him nearly enough. He was intrigued by her link to the man arrested in the Bronx drainpipe, especially when he learned that her son had been molested by Jose Ramos, and that no one knew where he was now. GraBois also noted that Sandy had been judged “deceptive” after she took a polygraph, and while he never counted on polygraphs, the evidence was mounting against her credibility. Ken Ruffo had also told GraBois about the interviews he’d subsequently conducted with the two girls Sandy had walked home from school with Etan.
Both Chelsea Altman and Kyra Simmons had recalled that, contrary to Sandy’s claims that she’d always walked alone, on several occasions the woman had met a man en route who would then accompany them partway home. The girls described him as tall, white, and in his mid- to late twenties, with light reddish brown hair and green eyes. He had severe acne and crooked teeth, talked slowly or with an unknown accent or speech defect, and walked with a limp. The girls used to quietly make fun of him, calling him Sandy’s “boyfriend,” after they saw the two adults holding hands.
GraBois also learned that after Sandy had lawyered up in 1983, detectives had tracked down Keith Browning, another man she’d been dating in the spring of 1979. Browning appeared to have nothing to do with the Patz case. But he corroborated that Sandy had indeed been involved with Jose Ramos, which Browning had discovered when he surprised Ramos and Sandy at her apartment one day in May 1979 and immediately broke up with her. Browning also told police Sandy had been afraid young Bennett’s natural father might come to New York and try to hurt her or her son. Sandy’s mother had once suggested that perhaps Bennett’s father had taken Etan, mistaking him for the son he hadn’t seen since infancy.
Ken Ruffo recounted to GraBois how in the summer of 1983, he and a Missing Persons detective had eventually found and interviewed Bennett’s father in Arizona. A witness there had reported seeing him with a blond boy, which had immediately set off alarm bells. But after interviewing the man, they’d determined he was not involved in Etan’s disappearance.
Just before the Arizona trip, Ruffo told GraBois, Missing Persons had also finally located Jose Ramos in New York City. Ramos had told the NYPD detectives he’d just returned from Coconut Grove, Florida, where his parents lived. But after extensive questioning and a polygraph, he’d been released.
Ruffo told GraBois he’d only learned all this after the fact. Ruffo wasn’t happy about being left out of the loop, and had noted in his files that the police said they hadn’t called the FBI agent earlier because they didn’t think he’d be interested. When NYPD detective Bob Shaw was assigned to the case a year later, he reviewed the police files but never found a DD5 report for this session, if there was one. It seemed to have disappeared as mysteriously as Ramos then did.
There were a number of other neighborhood pedophiles on the list. GraBois studied hard and quickly learned them by heart: the “bubble man,” who belonged to NAMBLA and attracted kids in Washington Square Park with his giant soap bubbles; the phony priest, who claimed to have supplied a false birth certificate for a child who might have been Etan Patz; and one man, who had joked about Etan being buried in a building around the corner from the Patz loft where he worked; and on and on.
A few months into the case, GraBois and Ruffo were standing outside Rudy Giuliani’s office waiting to give him a status report. The biggest order of business that day was the Israel mystery. In 1981 a New Yorker visiting Jerusalem was taken aback to see a photo of Etan Patz in a Romanian-language magazine called Revista Mea that she happened to pick up while having her hair done at Dolly’s Hair Salon in Jerusalem. Even more remarkable, the photo, found in a regular “family photo album” feature, bore the name “Etan Ben-Haim,” which in Hebrew means “son of life.” The picture purported to be from Kiryat Bialik, a small working-class city near Haifa. The tourist took the magazine to the American consulate, and when she got home from her trip she also sent the photo to the NYPD. The photo turned out to be one of Stan’s, a series from which he’d distributed hundreds of copies, although this particular shot hadn’t been circulated widely. How did it get into an Israeli magazine, and with that very significant name in the caption?
Questions had surfaced about Israel even before the magazine featured Etan’s photo, when Stan Patz’s brother, Rabbi Norman Patz, led a group of American children on a trip there just a few months after Etan’s disappearance. There were those murky old rumors that religious differences among members of the Patz family might have led to Etan’s being spirited away to the Holy Land.
Over the years, the NYPD had made attempts to follow the Revista Mea lead and had even solicited the help of the Israeli National Police. There’s nothing there, the Israelis had said. When Ruffo got the case, he’d wanted to know more, and had gone after Revista Mea with his customary due diligence. But running leads in a foreign country without actually going there was a bureaucratic quagmire. Ruffo had to request—by telex—that an intermediary LEGAT, or FBI legal attaché, in Rome make inquiries to the Israelis, who in turn had to be relied on to investigate. The results—if any effort was actually made—also had to work their way back through the same channels to Ruffo. After two years of this complex game of “whisper down th
e lane,” with much of the whispering in Hebrew, Ruffo had never felt satisfied enough to cross the Revista Mea angle off his list. Nor had GraBois.
That’s the problem with a case like this one, GraBois thought as he summarized his progress to Giuliani. If this were your typical crime of tax fraud, or even a bank robbery, the investigative path would have been clearer, more obvious. But in this situation, getting one round of answers would invariably lead to follow-ups, so GraBois felt the need to ask all the questions himself.
“It bothers me,” he said to his boss, his trademark phrase whenever something just didn’t add up.
“So go,” Giuliani said. “Why don’t you two just go yourselves? Otherwise you’ll never know for sure.”
When GraBois came back to say the FBI wouldn’t authorize Ruffo’s trip to Israel, Giuliani wasn’t fazed. “I’ll take care of it,” he said and dialed the phone.
“Hello, Judge Webster, how are you today?” Giuliani had a two-minute conversation with FBI director William Webster, and Ken Ruffo packed his bags.
“This is just stupid,” Stan Patz said to Ruffo when the agent visited a few days before the trip. “You’re wasting taxpayers’ money to chase a copyright infringement case.” Stan didn’t hide his sarcasm. “My copyright of my photo, one I took when Etan was still safely at home in this very room. If the picture had been taken by somebody else, of an Etan lookalike, then I could understand it. But it clearly came from a series I took myself.”
“This doesn’t appear to be one of the shots you sent out, though,” Ruffo countered, “and we need to understand this better than we do.”
“Look at this proof sheet.” Exasperated, Stan pointed to dozens of similar shots on one page. “Who really knows what I printed and didn’t print? Anyone who got their hands on it could have sent it to the Romanian magazine as a joke.” But as he had fumed, Stan realized that Ken Ruffo would only be incited by his protestations.
“Go ahead, go.” Stan finally gave up trying to make his point. “Have a great time. Say hi to Ben-Gurion for me.”
Ruffo dutifully reported Stan’s protests to GraBois, and as predicted, told the prosecutor he didn’t understand why Stan had his back up about Israel. GraBois didn’t either, and Stan’s attitude fueled them both further.
GraBois and Ruffo traveled to Tel Aviv in late October 1985, accompanied by General Joshua Caspi, the Israeli National Police liaison to the United States and Canada, who happened to speak not only English and Hebrew, but the Romanian of his native country. It was GraBois’s first trip to Israel.
The three men left on a Saturday night, landed on Sunday morning, and went straight to the Israeli Police Headquarters, without a moment to catch their breath. In the Bible, God labored six days to create the Earth and rested only on the Sabbath, so Sunday in Israel was like any other day of the workweek. The ten days that followed were a nonstop blur of meetings, travel, and culture shock. GraBois and Ruffo were struck to see soldiers patrolling the streets with Uzis and the absence of public trash cans and mailboxes, any receptacle that could hold explosives. Every time the Americans returned to their parked car, their Israeli police chaperones ran a mirror attached to a stick the length of its underside, checking for bombs. And when Ken Ruffo saw an unusual beer can to add to his collection, the Israelis cautioned him to leave it alone. You never know, they said. How can people live this way? GraBois wondered.
The siege mentality occasionally made his job easier, though. Israelis didn’t tend to question authorities knocking on their doors no matter the circumstances or time of day.
“But it’s late,” GraBois protested to one such intrusive visit, long after hours. Once they’d met with Revista Mea magazine staff, the team had pored through government census records to compile a list of Ben-Haims in Israel. Now they were crisscrossing the country to identify, firsthand, any matching Etans. They worked all hours of the day and night, and couldn’t always time their visits conveniently.
“It’s not a problem,” their escorts assured GraBois, and sure enough, they were ushered into this Ben-Haim residence with no resistance. GraBois felt uncomfortable about their invasion, and not just because of the late hour. If strangers had showed up on his doorstep demanding documented proof that he was the parent of his own two children, he would tell them what to go do. But it didn’t seem to bother the Ben-Haim families, who cheerfully produced their sons’ birth certificates, and the sons themselves for inspection. The ultra-religious residents of Jerusalem’s Old City were less receptive to GraBois and Ruffo when the two Americans visited as tourists during their one afternoon off. They threw stones at the two Americans for driving on the Sabbath.
Before GraBois and Ruffo left the country, they’d urged Israeli police to continue searching among other Ben-Haim families and asked Revista Mea to republish Etan’s photo, in the hope that this would nudge loose its original source. In New York, an eagle-eyed reader spotted the familiar face and called the tabloids. When asked, the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed a federal trip to Israel and then went one step further, asking major Israeli newspapers to publish an age-progressed photo of Etan.
The ensuing media blitz both in Israel and the United States launched a slew of New York reporters to Israel. John Miller, by now a crime reporter for Channel 4, NBC’s New York station, followed in GraBois’s footsteps and came back with an explosive interview. A woman in Kiryat Bialik, who had told investigators Etan’s photo looked familiar, had given Miller a much stronger statement. Although her on-camera comments were later disavowed by Israeli authorities, they immediately made headlines.
MY SON PLAYED WITH ETAN, CLAIMS ISRAELI MOM. Stan Patz stared at the newspaper in his hand with disgust. He could not begin to fathom this trajectory of the case. Nothing will come of Israel, he assured Julie, and any minute we’ll be under those swinging bare bulbs again.
GraBois had called Stan and Julie Patz into his office after the Israel trip, to give them a heads-up before the story broke in the American newspapers. This was their first meeting, and Stan had been in a combative mood, defending himself with that gruff, armored shield the early Missing Persons detectives had slowly seen through.
“Why the Hebrew names for all three children?” GraBois had asked him, making small talk, although he really was curious. “Etan is so unusual.”
“My wife is part Native American,” Stan had responded. “What should we have called him, Running Deer?” GraBois had laughed at that, but the glib response had left him unamused. He also had no interest in Stan’s views on the Israel trip, which Stan was determined to share.
For Stuart GraBois this was a fresh start, and he was full of unbridled zeal. For Stan and Julie Patz this was the umpteenth fresh start, and their patience was wearing thin. They’d already had six and a half years contending with the homicide cops and the Missing Persons detectives and the FBI, not to mention hundreds of psychics and reporters. This time, the combination of what GraBois saw as the parents’ insouciance and they saw as his overly aggressive demeanor didn’t combine well at all, classic oil and water.
GraBois made no apologies for his aggression. He thought that after so many years it was exactly what this case needed. Ken Ruffo had spent his tenure reworking the case from the ground up, including new polygraphs of the Patzes in 1984—a year before GraBois got the case—and Stan’s answers had once again raised suspicion. Two weeks later Stan had passed a second polygraph, after a crash course in calming meditation techniques. After that second round “on the box,” being asked about his possible sexual perversions—“Have you ever masturbated in front of a minor?”—he told authorities he would no longer submit to these tests. I’m done with this, he thought.
But when GraBois got involved, he felt compelled to put Stan back in the spotlight. The many teams who’d preceded GraBois may have concluded that the Patzes weren’t involved in Etan’s disappearance, but those investigators also hadn’t solved the case. It would be wildly irresponsible for GraBois to give the pa
rents a free ride. By early 1986, he was dredging up all the old sore spots—rumors of marital strife, religious differences, financial burdens. He had to reassure himself that neither Stan nor Julie was a suspect. GraBois never came out and directly accused them, but the line of questioning was clear.
How did you get the money to buy your apartment in this up-and-coming neighborhood? Why were you taking photos of Etan nude from the waist up? “Because I’m a professional photographer,” Stan had replied, bristling the most at that one. “Because my son was in his own home,” was what he thought. “He wandered around in his own home in his shorts—my God, what a perverted thing to do.”
But GraBois was not ready to dismiss those by now well-known photos. They had attracted everyone’s attention and were beautifully shot, but he didn’t care if Patz was an artiste. On the street, the shots of Etan posing shirtless would sell as “semi-nudes,” and the sleazeballs who sold them got locked up if they were caught. GraBois had put some of those guys away himself.
“It bothers me,” GraBois told the investigators, so he had them push hard on that angle, even though he knew how much it upset Etan’s parents.
Imagine how ticked off Stan Patz would be, thought GraBois, if he knew the questions the Feds were asking other people about him and his possible predilections. The prosecutor had also contacted the manager of a number of bars, including one in Stan’s neighborhood where all the older gay guys went to cruise really young flesh. GraBois wanted to know if anyone had ever brought Etan into one of them. “I got nothing to say to you,” the manager told GraBois’s investigators. Reportedly feared by his associates, this man was considered armed and dangerous, and protected by powerful mob interests. It was believed that the bar he managed was owned by an alleged gangster, who was himself a long-standing target of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. GraBois had thought about it, then approached the alleged mobster’s attorney. Would Matty “the Horse” Ianniello be willing to contribute his resources to finding this poor boy? Less than an hour later, the bar manager’s attorney had called: He was now anxious to meet.
After Etan Page 17
