“There’s a problem,” Bonavita said uncomfortably. “He’s changed his mind, and he doesn’t want to plead.”
“Let’s have a brief discussion,” GraBois said to Bonavita, trying to contain his fury, “just the two of us… and your client.” When the three men walked into the courthouse law library, GraBois startled Bonavita by moving immediately toward Ramos, who in turn edged backward, until he was literally up against the wall. GraBois was careful not to touch him physically, but he leaned in, prompting Ramos into a defensive posture.
“Well, wait a minute here…” Bonavita started. Even if both attorneys wanted to resolve this quickly, he thought, it was highly improper for the prosecutor to be talking to his client directly like this.
“Why don’t you just listen.” GraBois motioned to the public defender dismissively, not taking his eyes off of Ramos. GraBois was fifteen years senior and a head taller than Bonavita, who stopped talking.
Turning to Ramos, he continued. “You too, Jose, don’t talk, just listen. The time for waffling and bullshit is over. I’m sick of this crap. You either plead today, right now, or we go to trial on Monday. It’s that simple. Your choice.”
“I need more time to think about it,” Ramos said.
“You’ve had enough time, and you won’t get a better offer. Or we will pick our jury on Monday, and I promise you it won’t take long.”
The two men stared at each other—a battle of wills. As always, GraBois wasn’t bluffing. If he closed his eyes, he could almost see the incriminating words of Ramos’s tidily written confession to the judge: “I was in a terrible state of mind with my addiction. I couldn’t control myself.”
“Well?” GraBois prompted him. “Are you ready to plead?” Ramos just nodded reluctantly. He looked like he was about to cry.
But just a few minutes later when he walked into the courtroom, Ramos seemed to have recovered, or at least assumed a mantle of false bravado. Spotting some now familiar reporters, Ramos reveled in their attention.
“No comment,” he announced, without ever being asked for one, then tried to identify individual reporters. New York Daily News reporter Joanne Wasserman, newly pregnant and already fighting to keep her lunch, felt a fresh wave of bile rise up the back of her throat when Ramos greeted her by name before moving on.
“Associated Press? Warren Times News? Daily Bugle? No comment,” he said. “Size 38 uniform, shoes 10½, brown socks, trifocal glasses. I’d invite you all to shrimp dinner. That’s what we’re having tonight—shrimp.
“They want to know everything,” he said offhandedly to no one in particular. A few minutes later, when District Attorney Joe Massa entered and took a seat in the gallery, Ramos singled him out.
“Ah, Joe Massa,” Ramos proclaimed when he saw his former public defender. “Enter the dragon.”
But when the judge himself entered, Ramos and the whole room fell silent. Judge Robert Lea Wolfe, president judge of both Warren and Forrest counties, brooked no nonsense in the courtroom he had called his for the last twenty-one years. He was known for holding defendants in contempt for wearing inappropriate clothing, and attorneys in contempt for daring to perch comfortably on the edge of a defense table during closing arguments. Things were done by the book in Judge Wolfe’s courtroom.
A handsome man with dark wavy hair and mustache, he was stern, fiercely independent, and known for his prodigious work habits. When Wolfe walked out his back door in the morning he was standing in front of the courthouse parking lot. He took the last two weeks of July off every year for summer vacation, but otherwise he was in his court, and in his court, he was God.
Judge Wolfe began by reading Jose Ramos the charges against him and then discussed the plea agreement. The judge was a stickler at pleas, and he led Ramos through a lengthy recitation of his rights, before hearing his guilty plea.
“And can you tell the Court briefly, Mr. Ramos, what you did that brought this charge upon you? What did you do?”
“Well, Your Honor, I conducted myself in a very heinous manner, and it was because at the time I was really under a lot of mental strain.”
“All right, but what did you do?”
“Well, I conducted myself in a sexual manner with a child.”
So far the judge had yet to hear Ramos confess to anything specific, and in order to accept the plea, he needed to hear him admit to the exact elements of this particular crime. He tried again.
“… What does it mean to you to have oral sex? What’s that mean to you?”
“Well, I put my mouth on the child’s penis.”
This admission threatened to derail the hearing yet again, because Ramos had just pled guilty to the wrong crime, to the third charge that had never actually been filed. He corrected himself, and the hearing continued. Ramos had now admitted to giving oral sex as well as receiving it, an additional felony crime that carried another five to twenty years in prison. At that point, though, any thoughts of further prosecution were overcome by the relief of hearing him actually make his plea in court.
“It’s done.” GraBois’s voice held a note of triumph as he spoke on the phone afterwards to Cherie Taylor. “He stood up and admitted his guilt in court. All that’s left is the sentencing. But this is a felony crime he pled to, and he will serve serious time, no matter what.”
“Bless you,” Cherie said. “God sent you to protect our children.” She was overcome then, and she put Joe Sr. on.
“How long can we keep him in?” Joe asked, and GraBois went over the window of jail time. It was complicated, because it depended on the actual time Ramos would serve on both the Erie sentence he was currently in for and the new Warren conviction.
The minimum mandatory sentence for one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse was five to ten years. If the judge ruled the Warren sentence to run concurrent to the time Ramos was already serving for the Erie charges, five to ten could see his release anywhere from 1995 to 2000. But if the sentence was consecutive, and he had to serve first one then the other, he faced a possible fourteen years. It could go even higher if the judge slammed Ramos with the max—ten to twenty years—but GraBois cautioned the Taylors against that hope. He never allowed himself to think beyond the minimum mandatory.
“It’s not quite putting you in a room alone with the guy,” GraBois said to Joey’s father, “but it’s a real victory.” Then he asked to speak to Joey.
“We got him, kiddo,” GraBois said. “You should know what a great job you did. You got him. You put him away.”
“Wow,” Joey said. GraBois wished he could see Joey’s face, but the tone in that one word felt very rewarding.
“There will be one more hearing where the judge will sentence him, but you don’t have to be here. You don’t ever have to see him again. He’ll be in jail for many years, and if he ever gets out, they have to let me know first. You’re safe now.”
“Thank you, Stu, thank you,” Joey said.
Glimmer of Hope in Patz Case Dimmed by Child Molester’s Plea Bargain,” read the caption under a photo of Ramos in the brief New York Times mention of the guilty plea the next day. GraBois put the newspaper down with disgust. His moment of triumph had been reduced to this? A little boy and his family were vindicated. Jose Ramos was going to serve hard time for his crimes now, and the press painted this as failure. Of course he was disappointed Ramos hadn’t crumbled and fully confessed to the kidnapping of Etan Patz. But short of that, GraBois thought, he’d achieved an important objective—he’d locked this bum away behind bars for a long time.
Not only that, but his hopes for solving the Patz case were far from dimmed. GraBois knew this wasn’t his last shot at Ramos; to the contrary, the Warren case had already led to two new leads GraBois had barely begun to pursue, but both held promise. Ironically, even though he couldn’t share this new development with the press, he had the press to thank. Because of the coverage on the Pennsylvania case, two different men who knew Ramos had learned of GraBois’s investigation
into the Patz case, and both had now come forward separately to offer potentially valuable information. The Warren case also guaranteed the Patz case prime suspect a known address for at least five years, and hopefully more. Now that the hurdle of the guilty plea was past, GraBois focused his efforts on the sentencing.
The judge would consider both the defense and the prosecution’s recommendations. He would also review a pre-sentence investigation report, which included the defendant’s history and impact statements from the victims. GraBois put the Taylors in touch with the victim advocate in Warren, and he asked Barry Adams, as a longtime friend of the family who’d observed them over the years, to provide additional written testimony. GraBois himself had already started drafting the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum on the flight back from Warren to New York.
Ramos was busy with pen and paper too. The day after he pled guilty, he wrote another long letter to the judge—ten pages on a standard yellow legal pad—asking him to revoke the plea. “ ‘We should judge by the standard of truth, never on any account, by any other,’ ” he wrote, quoting Plato.
Here was the real truth, he said: Joey’s father knew “fully well that I told him… that I did not want him to let his children come near my Mobil [sic] Home, because I was mentally unstable… and I was afraid something might happen.” Ramos believed he himself should be absolved of any guilt: “The father is the real criminal,” he wrote. “I am now made to pay for a crime that he knew could have been avoided. What kind of Justice is that.”
In the six weeks leading up to sentencing he wrote a good half dozen of these letters, each more frantic than the last, and started filing his own motions to revoke the plea, refusing to deal further with his defense attorney. He requested a psychiatric evaluation to pursue a mental illness defense, and he was penning notes to the press, negotiating for big money to tell his exclusive story, trying to play different reporters off against each other in a bidding war. He responded to a request from the Daily News’s Wasserman by flaunting other offers from Inside Edition, Current Affair, and WCBS-TV in New York. “As I have stated [to them], unless your Editor is willing to give me $40,000 for an exclusive interview with a possible book option, that I will not conduct any interview with members of the Media, both Print and Visual.”
Ramos, who evidently figured the tony magazine Vanity Fair could afford a higher price, demanded $50,000 from Ed Klein, who was writing a long feature piece on the Patz case. “Then I would maybe consider doing an exclusive interview,” Ramos wrote Klein, “that would go down in History as the greatest work of journalism that anyone has ever written to date.” In Klein’s letter back he asked if the price included Ramos’s connection to the Patz case.
“Personally,” Ramos responded, with the same “blame the victim” mentality he evinced in Joey Taylor’s case, “I think the Parents should have been charge[d] with Criminal negligence, for allowing that child to be by himself on the streets.”
On November 29, 1990, Stuart GraBois and Marylou Barton parked their rental car on the street outside the Warren County Courthouse. The first time they’d been in this courthouse for the preliminary hearing, the tree-lined streets of downtown Warren had been shaded from the summer sun by a leafy green canopy. Now it was cold enough to see your breath, the otherwise bare trees and the small shops were dressed in Christmas lights, and huge red-and-green wreaths hung from the fourteen-foot carved courthouse doors. Yellow ribbons tied in giant bows festooned the two-story lampposts that flanked the courthouse entrance, in support of Warren County reservists who’d been called up to sit at the Kuwait border, awaiting President George H. W. Bush’s order to invade Iraq.
GraBois and Barton had arrived for the 9:30 a.m. sentencing forty-five minutes early, with enough time to sit in District Attorney Massa’s office—the staging area on their periodic visits—drink a cup of coffee, and go over last-minute details of the case. GraBois had been up late the night before in his Holiday Inn room, putting finishing touches on his remarks before the judge, and now he added a few more lines, changed a few words.
GraBois wasn’t nervous—he hadn’t felt nervous in a courtroom for over twenty years, not since his very first appearance three hours after being sworn in as a Legal Aid defense attorney, when his hands had shaken and his voice had cracked. But he had been reading drafts of his speech out loud for the past two weeks, to himself, then to his wife, incorporating her advice on editing and delivery. He was not expecting to get his wish of the maximum ten- to twenty-year sentence, but he was going to make his very best argument for it.
Outside, a cadre of Rainbows who had traveled to Warren to represent the Taylor family stood on the sidewalk, dressed in their establishment best. New Yorker Garrick Beck wore the classic version of a business suit, accessorized with a ponytail; and the other three men were in corduroy and leather. But under the cowboy hat, Barry Adams had brushed out his braids. Walking toward the courthouse, past the Civil War cannon guarding justice on the stately lawn, Adams surveyed the gray day and caught a glimmer of sun hiding behind the cloud covering.
“We’re going to see a rainbow today if we’re lucky,” he said to his friends. But first, as they lingered outside a side entrance, they saw Jose Ramos. He was being walked from his jailhouse cell to the courtroom with the press following along. It wasn’t hordes of paparazzi chasing after a celebrity scandal, but even the jostling of a handful of news crews combined with the tension of Ramos’s ankle chains to throw him off guard, and he stumbled once, trying to shield his face from the cameras.
Inside, the courtroom wasn’t packed, but it wasn’t empty. Besides the press and the Rainbows, a sizable group of curious townspeople had gathered. The mood, as always in Judge Wolfe’s chambers, was muted and respectful, but there was a curiosity to see how this would finally resolve. Even without the novelty of the Rainbows, the outside attorneys and the sensitive child molestation charges, sentencing day in Judge Wolfe’s court was often newsworthy. The stories were legion. Once, Judge Wolfe had sentenced a man who’d represented himself and brought his entire church congregation to fill the spectator benches in his support. When the man had pointed that out in a show of his good faith and respectability, the judge remained unmoved.
“Eleven and a half to twenty months,” he’d declared, giving him a harsher sentence than expected. To the deputies leading the defendant away, he’d added, “And make sure there’s a Bible in his cell.”
Today the judge quickly dispensed with Ramos’s most recent round of motions to dismiss. Defense attorney Tom Bonavita began by making his recommendation of the minimum mandatory sentence—five to ten—and he asked for it to run concurrent to Ramos’s Erie County term. He argued that more than a lengthy sentence, what would be most appropriate was the psychological treatment Ramos had never received. Then it was GraBois’s turn.
“Your Honor, may it please the Court?” GraBois began, stepping forward. It felt strange to him, standing shoulder to shoulder with Ramos at the front of the courtroom. In federal court, these remarks were made from the counsel table, with the defendant seated several feet away. GraBois spoke directly to the judge.
“Jose Antonio Ramos appears before you today for sentencing for having committed one of the most horrible acts known to our criminal law, the sexual violation of a young child. Instead of using weapons or fear, Ramos used kindness, friendship, and gift giving to lull his young victims into a false sense of security, and then he struck.”
These courtroom speeches were always a performance, the prosecutor’s big moment to impact the judge with his spoken words. But today, for Stuart GraBois, this was more than just a show. For a man who shunned the press, whose public comments were of necessity terse and perfunctory, it was the first time he’d ever been able to speak publicly about everything he’d learned and felt about Jose Ramos. There would never be a trial, and in his capacity as prosecutor he certainly would never have testified even if there had been, but now he was getting his chance to bear witnes
s to the misery caused by the man beside him.
“Your Honor, Joey Taylor is a victim for life, he will never be the same. He is treated as an outcast, he is the brunt of other childrens’ jokes, he no longer has any friends. His own brother, William, Your Honor, won’t be seen with him in public for fear he, too, will somehow be ridiculed”—GraBois gestured to the man by his side—“as a result of what this person did to him.”
There was something so powerful about putting voice to his feelings with Ramos standing at his right shoulder, so close he could hear the man breathing. GraBois reminded the court that even as Ramos had pled guilty to his crime and claimed he didn’t want to put the child through more pain and suffering, his actions spoke the real truth.
“What truly amazes me, and I’ve been prosecuting for a number of years, is on the day that he entered his guilty plea, he was sitting over there; he was bantering with the reporters and he still is corresponding with news people, negotiating fees to tell his story, and it’s all a big joke to him, Your Honor.” Everyone in the courtroom could hear the genuine outrage in GraBois’s voice.
“There is no conscience in this man, there is no remorse. Joey is still suffering, Your Honor, and this man shows no remorse…”
GraBois paused to let his last words sink in, and to give his next words their due.
“Your Honor, the Commonwealth respectfully requests that this monster standing here, who stands here so smugly, be put away in prison where he can never again harm a child, and therefore most respectfully recommends to Your Honor that he be sentenced to the maximum allowed by law of twenty years’ imprisonment consecutive to the sentence he is now serving.”
To GraBois’s right, Ramos then made his own case, speaking so softly at first, spectators strained to hear his voice. “I am very remorseful… I understand that this is a very, very traumatic situation for a child to go through. I myself have been abused all my life, too. Nobody helped me out, now you want to put me away for twenty years, well…” His voice broke, then rose sharply. “It ain’t right.”
After Etan Page 30
