by R. G. Belsky
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Prologue
The most important thing a journalist has is his integrity.
An old newspaperman taught me that. He said it was the one constant, inviolate truth to remember about this business. More important than all the scoops, the bylines, or the number of press awards you won. “If you ever compromise your integrity, Malloy,” he told me, “you are lost.” I believed that then, and I believe it now.
There’s something else that I have learned. Integrity is an absolute value. You can’t lose a little bit of your integrity any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. You’re either all in or all out on the integrity issue. And once you’ve crossed over that irrevocable moral line, you can never go back. No matter how hard you try.
I think about all of this a lot these days. Mostly late at night when I lie awake, replaying all of the events that got me to where I am.
And trying to make some sort of sense out of the incongruity of it all.
The most important thing a journalist has is his integrity.
I lost my integrity somewhere along the way.
And yet I am still a journalist.
So what does that say about me?
PART ONE
The
Magic
Bullet
We’ve come to know it as the “magic bullet” theory.
The magic bullet enters the President’s back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees.
It then moves upwards in order to leave Kennedy’s body from the front of his neck—wound number two—where it waits 1.6 seconds, presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left, right, then left and continues into Connally’s body at the rear of his right armpit—wound number three.
The bullet then heads downward at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering Connally’s fifth rib and exiting from the right side of his chest—wound number four.
The bullet then turns right and re-enters Connally’s body at his right wrist—wound number five.
Shattering the radius bone, the bullet then exits Connally’s wrist—wound number six—makes a dramatic U-turn and buries itself into Connally’s left thigh—wound number seven—from which it later falls out and is found in almost pristine condition on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital.
That’s some bullet.
—From the movie JFK
Death is the great equalizer.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Chapter 1
I MET NIKKI REYNOLDS for lunch on a summer afternoon in New York City.
We were sitting at an outdoor table of a restaurant called Gotham City, on Park Avenue South in the East 20s. The pasta she ordered cost $33. My hamburger was $26.50. The prices weren’t on the menu, though. It was the kind of place where if you had to ask the price, you didn’t belong there. Me, I didn’t care how much the lunch cost. Nikki Reynolds was paying.
Reynolds was a New York literary agent. In another lifetime, when I’d needed a literary agent, she’d been mine. But I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. So I was surprised when she called me up out of the blue and invited me to lunch.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted to talk to you today,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
I always like to ask the tough questions first.
“I have an author with a new book—a nonfiction blockbuster about the John F. Kennedy assassination—that’s going to make big news,” she told me. “It’s very timely too, coming right after all the attention everyone paid to the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK killing.”
“Timely,” I said.
“The basic concept of the book is that more than a half century later, we still haven’t solved the greatest crime in our history. It’s called The Kennedy Connection. Catchy title, huh?”
“Catchy,” I agreed.
“The book will reveal shocking new information about what really happened that day in Dallas and afterward.”
“Wait a minute, let me guess,” I said. “Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t really do it, JFK really isn’t dead, and both of them are living secretly somewhere right now with Jim Morrison and Elvis.”
Reynolds sighed. “You know, everyone told me, ‘Don’t take this to Gil Malloy. He’s a smart-ass, he’s an arrogant, sarcastic son of a bitch—hell, he’s pretty much of an all-around pain in the ass.’ I keep trying to defend you, Gil. But that’s getting harder and harder to do.”
“Some days I guess I just wake up kind of cranky,” I shrugged.
Nikki Reynolds was somewhere in her fifties, but plastic surgery and Botox had taken about ten years of that off of her face. Blond, pixie hair and a tight, trim body from lots of workouts at the health club. She was wearing a navy blue pin-striped pantsuit, a pink silk blouse open at the collar, and oversized sunglasses that probably cost more than the meal we were eating. The Manhattan power broker look. She looked like she belonged at Gotham City.
I had on blue jeans, a white T-shirt that I’d washed specially for the occasion, and a New York Mets baseball cap. No one else in the restaurant was wearing blue jeans. Or a T-shirt or a baseball cap. When I’d walked in, someone at one of the tables had mistaken me for a busboy. I had a feeling—call it a crazy hunch—that I might be a tad underdressed for this place.
“Who’s the author?” I asked.
“Lee Harvey Oswald.”
I smiled. “Right.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Lee Harvey Oswald is alive and a client of yours?”
“Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.”
“He had a son?”
“Yes.”
I thought about that for a second.
“I don’t remember anything about Lee Harvey Oswald having a son. Didn’t he have a baby daughter or something with that Russian woman he married?”
“Oswald had two daughters with Marina, whom he married while he was living in the Soviet Union. One of them there before he returned to the U.S. Another baby girl that Marina gave birth to just a few weeks before the assassination. There’s never been any mention of a son. Until now.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“Lee Harvey Oswald had an affair. In New Orleans where he lived in the months before he went to Dallas.”
“So you’re saying ol’ Lee Harvey was as much of a horndog as JFK, huh?” I laughed.
“The mother was a twenty-one-year-old girl who died less than a year after the assassination. The baby boy wound up being adopted. For much of his life he’s been haunted by uncertainty over what his infamous father did or didn’t do on that day in Dallas where Kennedy was killed. He finally decided to try to find out the truth. That’s why he’s written this book.”
I took a bite of my hamburger. It was okay but nothing special. At these prices? Actually, I’ve had better at McDonald’s.
“I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Reynolds said.
“Just one, really.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why me?”
“You’re a newspaper reporter. I want to get some advance publicity, build up some word of mouth before the book comes out. I figured if you wrote a story now—”
“Nikki, there’s lots of newspaper reporters
in this town. You could have picked any of them to talk to about all of this. Why me?”
Nikki Reynolds put her fork down and pushed her still almost full plate of pasta away. She didn’t seem to like it any more than I did my hamburger. Maybe we could both stop at a McDonald’s later for a snack.
“I think I know the answer,” I said. “I’m the only reporter in town gullible enough to fall for something like this. Maybe you wanted to go to some other reporter. Someone with a better track record than me. But, in the end, you figured Gil Malloy—whom you haven’t talked to, haven’t taken phone calls from, and couldn’t even be bothered to return messages from in a very long time—was your best choice. Because he’s easy. He doesn’t ask a lot of questions or dig very deep or spend too much time making sure a story is true. Hell, you can buy him off with a lunch.”
“C’mon, Gil . . .”
“The only problem with your plan is that the same reason you figured I might go for it . . . well, that’s why I couldn’t be of any help to you, even if I wanted to. No one is going to believe me if I start talking about someone claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret son and solving the Kennedy assassination. People—people at my own newspaper—would say, ‘What’s next? He’s going to claim he saw Elvis at a shopping mall? Or reveal those flying saucers and little green men that the government is really hiding at Area 51?’ Hey, I’m damaged goods, Nikki. You should know that better than anyone.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence between us. I sat there waiting, watching people go by on the street and listening to the sounds of the city. Horns honking. Car doors slamming. A radio turned up somewhere to a rap station. It was the middle of summer, and a lot of New Yorkers had already fled to the Hamptons, the mountains, or the Jersey Shore. In another few weeks, the city would be empty, which was fine with me. I remembered sitting at a restaurant just like this one a long time ago with Nikki Reynolds. Listening to her tell me how she was going to make me rich and famous. I’d believed her. That was before I found out that fame and fortune aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, as Bob Dylan once said.
“I’m sorry I never returned your phone calls after . . . well, you know,” she said finally.
“Don’t worry about it. Lots of people didn’t return my phone calls. Everyone wanted to keep their distance from me.”
“But I’m here now.”
“And bought me this lunch,” I pointed out.
“This could be a big story for you.”
“I’m already working on a story.”
“We’re talking about John F. Kennedy’s murder here.”
“Mine’s a murder story too.”
“Bigger than JFK?”
“Big enough.”
“What’s the story?”
“The murder of Victor Reyes.”
“Who’s that?”
“A kid who belonged to a gang in the South Bronx.”
“Who killed him?”
“Probably someone from another gang.”
“Are you telling me that chasing after some cheap gangbang murder in the Bronx is more important to you than maybe finding out the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? The biggest unsolved crime of our lifetime. Maybe of all time. How can you even compare a murder of that magnitude to the killing of this Vincent Reyes?”
“Victor.”
“Excuse me.”
“His name was Victor Reyes, not Vincent.”
“Who the hell cares?”
“Everyone matters,” I said, quoting something I’d read in a book once. Not because I really believed it, but because I couldn’t think of any way to explain my decision to someone like Nikki Reynolds.
She wrote down Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.’s address and phone number on a piece of paper and handed it across the table to me. I looked down at the paper, shrugged, and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans.
“I really need your help on this,” Reynolds said.
“Have you checked out this guy’s story about being Lee Harvey Oswald’s illegitimate son?” I asked.
“Of course, I have.”
“And?”
“Well, it’s not easy to find out about records from fifty years ago, but I’m pursuing it vigorously.”
I shook my head.
“Who’s the publisher that bought this book?”
“We don’t have a publisher yet.”
“Has he written the damn book?”
“He’s working on it . . .”
“So you have a guy who may or may not be Lee Harvey Oswald Jr., who may or may not have a book, and—even if he finishes this supposed book—you don’t have a publisher at the moment. And now you’re asking me to put whatever few shreds are left of my professional reputation on the line to promote this for you. Does that pretty much sum up the situation here, or have I left anything out?”
She reached over and put her hand on top of mine. She looked me straight in the eye.
Earnest. Sincere. Pleading, almost desperate.
“Do it as a favor for me,” Nikki Reynolds said. “Do it as a favor to me for old times’ sake.”
It was a helluva performance. She was always very good at getting people to do what she wanted. Except I’d seen it all before.
“I gotta tell you, Nikki,” I said, “the old times weren’t that great.”
Chapter 2
THE New York Daily News, the newspaper where I work, is located at the lower end of Manhattan, close to where the Staten Island Ferry docks. That’s about as far south as you can go in Manhattan without falling into the water. It’s only four miles away from Times Square, but it feels like four million.
When I was growing up, I used to dream about working at the Daily News one day. It all seemed so romantic and so glamorous and so right back then. The News office in those days was on 42nd Street in the heart of Manhattan. The building was the same one they used for the Daily Planet in the Superman movies. In fact, a lot of people used to think that the Daily Planet and Metropolis from the old TV show and the comic books were based on the Daily News in New York. I would watch Clark Kent on the screen and imagine it was me fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. I didn’t have superpowers like he did, but I was a helluva reporter. And a helluva reporter could accomplish anything. Overcome any obstacle. Right any wrong. I really believed that once.
By the time I got to the Daily News, the legendary 42nd Street office was already gone, a victim of the realities of the Manhattan real estate market during the mid-’90s. But the dream was still alive and kicking for me. In my senior year at NYU, I wangled an internship to work at the News. I was supposed to be there only ten hours a week, while at the same time attending regular classes. I worked sixty–seventy hours a week. Needless to say, I didn’t spend much time in class that last year.
After NYU, I got a full-time job as a reporter at the News. I started out at the bottom, of course. Running around to press conferences and meetings and crime scenes, then calling the details in to a rewrite man in the News office. Eventually, I was transferred to the Bronx borough office. I was given the education beat there. The borough staffs covered local community news, which was the least desirable place to work. And of all the boroughs the Daily News covered, the Bronx was considered the worst office to be assigned. Plus, the education beat in a borough was by far the least desirable assignment any reporter could have. I didn’t care. I still thought I was Superman. I thought I could do anything. And that was pretty much what I did. I broke a big education story about corruption in a Bronx school board fund that got several people indicted and later sent to jail. I did a series on best and worst teachers in the borough that won me and the paper all sorts of awards. I exposed overcrowding in the classroom, shortages of textbooks and other equipment, and unhealthy conditions in school cafeterias on my beat. I also wrote about the exceptional students who
were able to rise above all this and somehow achieve an education in a school system out of control.
Many of my stories were making the front of the paper. Sometimes even the front page. I was a rising star. It was only a matter of time until I’d get promoted out of the Bronx into the main newsroom in Manhattan. Six months, a year tops, I figured.
And then 9/11 changed everything. I was headed for a press conference in the Bronx about reading scores when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on that unimaginable morning of September 11, 2001. I turned around and raced to get to the scene. By the time both towers went down, I had filed reams of copy to the city desk, trying to capture the horror and the devastation and the enormity of the losses that terrible day. I was so close that I was literally covered in ashes and debris from the towers. I stayed there all day, then the next day, and the weeks after covering the grim search for bodies and for answers. I hardly changed clothes, I didn’t shave most days, I even slept at Ground Zero a lot of the time. It was the biggest story of my life, and I didn’t want to let go—not even for a few hours. I would win awards for my coverage. I would get promoted at the News. I would get more money from the paper. But I wasn’t thinking about any of these things when I spent all those days and nights in lower Manhattan. I was just thinking about covering the story.
More big stories followed in the years after that. I got an exclusive interview with the mistress of a disgraced politician. I broke the news of a terrorist plot against the New York City subway system that was foiled by the NYPD and Homeland Security officials. I did a series of articles revealing how millions of taxpayer dollars were being wasted on personal use and pet projects by the City Council.
Eventually, the Daily News gave me my own column. It would run up front in the paper three days a week. My own column. Just like Jimmy Breslin once had in the News. Or Pete Hamill. Now it was Gil Malloy. I was really on my way to the top now. Hell, I was probably already there.
