by R. G. Belsky
The details were pretty much the way I remembered them the first time:
Nineteen-year-old Victor Reyes had left his home in the Bronx that night. Shortly afterward, his mother, Camille Reyes, heard gunshots and ran outside. Mrs. Reyes found her son shot and bleeding on the sidewalk in front of the residence. She ran back inside, phoned 911 for help, and then rushed back to her son’s side.
Police Officer Gary Nowak was the first to respond. He secured the crime scene, waited until an ambulance arrived to transport Reyes to Lincoln Hospital, and then interviewed people in the area in a search for possible witnesses. Detectives Brad Lawton and James Garcetti arrived after that to continue the investigation.
The victim had been shot once in the back. Because the bullet lodged in his spine and could not be recovered, the exact make of the weapon was not determined at the time. But based on forensic evidence obtained, it was believed to have been fired from a .38 revolver. That was confirmed when the bullet was recovered from Reyes’s body and entered as evidence by Santiago before his death. The weapon was never found. But that bullet was presumably still in an evidence room somewhere. If I could somehow match the bullet to the gun that fired it, that could lead me to whoever shot Reyes. All I had to do was find the damn gun after fifteen years.
Reyes himself said that he did not know who had shot him. He was disoriented and in shock after the shooting. And even later, when he had recovered enough to leave the hospital as a paraplegic, he seemed to have trouble remembering much about the incident. Doctors pointed out that this was not uncommon in patients who suffered traumatic injuries like this. From the position of the wound, it appeared he was headed back toward the house, not going away from it, when he was shot. At first, police believed he had turned and was running away from his attacker. But then, when he made clear he had never seen the attacker or been aware of any danger until the gunshot, that idea didn’t hold up. But for some reason he had turned back toward his house and was headed in that direction when he was shot in the back.
The bullet, as I already knew, did devastating damage to him. Shattering several ribs, smashing into his spleen, and then lodging itself in his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed for the rest of his life.
There followed a fairly detailed account from Nowak of his attempts to interview witnesses, neighbors, or anyone else on the street who might have seen what happened. From the report, it appeared that Nowak had done a more than diligent job of trying to obtain this information. But he came up empty. No witnesses were ever found, according to Nowak’s summary in the report.
But then, at some point later in the evening, an all points bulletin went out for Bobby Ortiz, who was described as a member of the Latin Kings street gang, driving a light green car and wanted for questioning about the Reyes shooting.
When I read that, I went back to the previous section to see if I had missed something, but I hadn’t. At first there were no witnesses and the victim didn’t know who shot him. Then suddenly there was a search for a suspect.
Still, everything seemed so simple at that point. Ortiz and Reyes were in rival gangs, they got into some sort of gang dispute, Ortiz shot Reyes from the car and then fled. The next step should have been the apprehension of Ortiz, probably with the weapon that he’d used in the shooting. All by the book, all very straightforward.
Except it didn’t happen that way.
The file showed the trail of police mistakes and seeming indifference that led to Ortiz slipping through the cracks of justice. Including his subsequent arrest and release by Poughkeepsie police who didn’t know he was wanted for a shooting. No, it didn’t seem like anyone had looked too hard for Ortiz or was concerned about putting him behind bars for what he had allegedly done to Reyes.
I read through the report several times. One thing that jumped out at me was the name Gary Nowak. I’d wanted to talk to him the first time I looked into the Reyes story, but he’d left the force not long after the shooting and I was never able to locate him. I wrote his name down now. I needed to try to find him. I’d tracked down the two detectives who handled the case, but not Nowak. He was the first person there that night. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to add anything to the account of what happened that night; probably he wouldn’t. In all likelihood, he’d say it was just another shooting. But I’d learned a long time ago to leave no stone unturned on a story. I always talked to everyone. And Nowak was a missing element.
I also went through all of my own notes from the people I’d questioned before bailing on the story for the Kennedy stuff.
Particularly poignant was the interview with Reyes’s mother, which made me feel guilty all over again about the phone conversation where I’d been forced to admit to her that I really hadn’t done anything more about looking for answers to her son’s shooting.
“His life was over at nineteen,” Camille Reyes had said to me that first day in her Bronx apartment. “He couldn’t work; he couldn’t have a relationship with a woman; he couldn’t have a normal life anymore. That heart attack he had wasn’t what killed him. It was that bullet fifteen years ago. It just took him a long time to die.”
Then there was the part about how her son had been trying to turn his life around at the time he was shot.
“He was taking night courses to get a high school diploma,” Mrs. Reyes said. “He got a job. He promised me he was going to quit the gang life. The job was especially important to him. It was the first real job he ever had. He was working as a busboy at Fernando’s. He seemed so happy. And I was so proud of him.”
Fernando’s. I remembered interviewing Miguel Pascal, who used to work at Fernando’s with Reyes and now owned his own restaurant in the Bronx. I found my notes for that interview and read through them again. Pascal had said that Reyes also told him that he quit the gang life. But Pascal had added one other detail—that Reyes wanted to join the police force. “He had a friend or a brother or somebody who had gone to the Police Academy and changed his life around,” Pascal told me. “Victor wanted to do the same thing.” I’d assumed the friend on the police force was Santiago. But now the police force angle took on more significance.
Pascal was a busy guy, but he seemed willing—even eager—to talk more about Reyes when I called him at the restaurant. Maybe because he really liked Reyes when they worked together. Maybe because it helped him deal with the news of Reyes’s death. Or maybe because he realized that could have been him in that wheelchair, if things had worked out in a different way.
“You know, I thought a lot about Victor after the shooting,” Pascal said to me on the phone. “I thought about going to see him in the hospital and afterward when he got out. But things got busy at the restaurant and my life in general and . . . well, I guess I just never could find time. I pretty much forgot about Victor until you came by and told me about him dying that day. I’m sorry about that. It must have been a terrible ordeal he went through after the shooting and for all those years. I wish I could go back in time now and be there for him a little more. But we get busy, we have our own lives, and we never get around to doing that kind of thing until it’s too late.”
I thought about me and Santiago and said that I understood exactly what he was saying.
I told Pascal I was interested in finding out more about what kind of plans Reyes might have had back then for joining the NYPD.
“Do you know if he was ever actually accepted as a police recruit?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” Pascal said.
“How about filling out any kind of application or other paperwork?”
“Not sure.”
I made a note to check later to see if I could turn up any kind of record of Reyes actually applying to the NYPD in the period before the shooting.
“But I did see him talking to a cop one day,” Pascal said. “Right around that time he told me about wanting to join the force. I wondered what they were talking about. M
aybe that was it. Maybe the cop was helping him.”
“Where did their conversation take place?”
“In the alley behind the kitchen of the restaurant where we worked. I went out there to dump some stuff. He and the cop were out of sight behind a Dumpster. They didn’t see me. I don’t think they wanted anyone to see them. But I did. Saw him and the cop talking. Seemed pretty animated.”
I described Santiago to him.
“Does that sound like the cop he was with?”
“Nah, not him.”
“I don’t suppose you’d have any idea who the police officer was after all this time?”
“Sure, I do.”
“You do?”
“Kind of hard not to know about him these days. He’s in all the papers. The guy they say is probably going to be the next police commissioner.”
“Brad Lawton?”
“That was him,” Pascal said.
“You’re sure it was Brad Lawton you saw in the alley with Reyes that day?”
“Absolutely.”
“What do you think they were talking about?”
“You’ll have to ask Brad Lawton that,” Pascal said.
Chapter 42
I WASN’T READY TO ask Brad Lawton anything. Not yet. At the moment, Lawton was still unaware I’d put any of this—whatever the hell it was that he was doing—together and made any connection between the Kennedy and Reyes stories. I wanted to keep it that way for the time being. I would confront him for some answers when I was ready. But first I needed to gather more facts about Lawton himself.
The Internet was filled with stuff about Lawton. Not just his rise from patrolman to deputy commissioner either. There was quite a bit about his personal life. Nikki Reynolds hadn’t been the first notable person he dated. There’d been actresses, models, and even a princess or something from someplace I’d never heard of. He was a regular on radio call-in shows, made numerous guest TV appearances, and supposedly was also in demand as a speaker to law enforcement groups. I thought about Jimmy Garcetti, his old partner, drinking in a dingy Bronx bar and counting the time left until his retirement. Garcetti had sure been right when he said that he and Lawton had gone in different directions after their time together in the Bronx.
He’d first made a name for himself in the Bronx when he and Garcetti were there. The Bronx precinct was not a plum assignment for a cop who wanted to advance; it was considered a dead-end career location. But Lawton turned it into a career maker. He began making arrest after arrest, many of them drug busts. One of the articles pointed out that he’d somehow managed to zero in on the gangs that dominated the drug distribution in the area. “It was almost like he knew what the gangs were going to do—who they were going to sell to and where—before the gang members made their deals,” said one ADA who racked up prosecution after prosecution thanks to Lawton’s street busts. “I’ve never seen anyone with better cop instincts.” The ADA wasn’t the only one thinking like that. He’d caught the eye of people in the department with his spectacular record of arrests. They eventually transferred him to a much bigger and higher-profile detective post in Manhattan. There was no stopping him after that. He would be promoted to lieutenant, captain, borough commander, and eventually deputy commissioner in the years after he left the Bronx.
There was speculation that he could wind up as police commissioner, even before the current commissioner Piersall’s troubles. Or possibly even something higher. Political leaders had put out feelers to him about running for public office at some point. Councilman. State senator. Maybe even mayor one day. Lawton continued to insist that he was happy to be in law enforcement, but a lot of people saw him as a very attractive future political candidate.
It wasn’t just his record. Everything I read described him as a charming and impressive personality who could win over whatever room he was in. Just like I remembered him from that day in his office. He was colorful too, always coming up with good sound bites or quotes for the news media. In a world of wooden, cliché-ridden political leaders, Lawton was a welcome breath of fresh air.
Then there was his personal life. He had been married once, when he was just starting out on the force. But his wife, Debra, had died, the victim of a street mugging. In a book he had written about crime fighting, Clean Up the Streets: Crime Fighting in the Twenty-first Century, Lawton talked at length about the pain of losing someone so close to him to crime and how that had made him even more determined to get criminals like the one who killed his wife off the streets. “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about Debra,” he said with moving passion. “Especially whenever I take someone bad off the streets. Wherever Debra is when that happens, I think she’s smiling.”
That didn’t stop him from being a big man around town on the social front. There were countless pictures of him showing up at police banquets and other high-profile events with beautiful women—some of them famous, or at least semifamous—on his arm. Nikki Reynolds was just the latest in a long line of women Lawton had dated. I also found numerous pictures of him with other celebrities. One shaking hands with Bruce Springsteen at a concert. Another with Bono. And one with Michael Jordan at some sports dinner. No question about it, Brad Lawton moved in some pretty star-studded company.
He had an apartment in the city and a house in Sag Harbor. He was known for throwing parties at both places, with many of the boldfaced names in New York City. One of the topics of conversation at all of these parties was always the awards and plaques and trophies he had accumulated. At the house on Long Island, there was a full trophy case that contained many of these honors, and also such memorabilia as the first patrolman’s hat he wore on the street, his original detective’s badge, and even a collection of all the weapons he’d carried during his years on the force.
I sat back from my computer and rubbed my eyes. I’d been reading about Brad Lawton for a couple of hours. But it all pretty much came back to the same message wherever I looked: He was a great cop. A great leader. A great guy.
But I knew there was more. There had to be more. Except I wasn’t going to find it reading Lawton’s glowing press clips. Everyone there loved him. I needed to find someone who didn’t love him, someone who might be able to tell me the truth about him.
There’d been three cops at the Reyes shooting that first day: Lawton, Garcetti, and the rookie cop named Gary Nowak. Garcetti and Lawton split up as partners not long after that. And Nowak left the NYPD after less than a year on the force.
Maybe Nowak could give me some answers.
Chapter 43
ACCORDING TO POLICE department records, Gary Nowak had graduated at the top of his class in the Police Academy several months before the Reyes shooting. His assignment to a Bronx street beat was his first as an actual NYPD officer. He had scored in the upper 5 percent of all recruits on his exams and won awards for physical prowess, hand-to-hand combat skills, and marksmanship. As a member of the force, he had already received a citation for bravery after subduing an armed robber during a bodega holdup and another departmental honor for helping to get a family out of a burning house before firefighters were able to arrive on the scene. Gary Nowak seemed like a guy with a bright future in the NYPD. But then he abruptly resigned, about six months after the Reyes shooting. After that, he pretty much disappeared off the official radar.
I had put in a request with the NYPD Public Information Office to try to track down a current address or contact information for him when I first started working on the story after Santiago’s death. They’d gotten back to me with some details a while later. But by that time I was deep into the JFK story and never bothered to follow up. I dug out the information I’d gotten from Public Information and read through it.
Gary Allen Nowak currently lived in Sarasota, Florida. He was a schoolteacher there. Taught history and civics at a junior high school. There was a home address for him too. A telephone number.
And an email address.
I could have just called him or emailed him, of course. But I wasn’t sure if he’d respond or talk to me. Why should he? Besides, I always preferred talking to someone face-to-face rather than over the phone or via email. Of course, it could all be a waste of time. Nowak might know very little. He might have been an insignificant part of the events that happened the night Reyes was shot.
But I had a feeling he was more than that. Why did he quit the police force so soon after that? Why did he turn his back on a career in law enforcement to move a thousand miles away and become a schoolteacher instead? And why did all these big changes in his life happen six months after he responded to the Reyes shooting? I was going to have to talk to Gary Nowak in person to find out the answers.
I took an early morning flight out of New York and landed at the Sarasota airport shortly after nine. The sun was already blazing hot by the time I got in my rental car. Even with the air conditioner on full blast, it took me a long time to stop sweating. I turned on the radio. The temperature was 88°, headed for a high of 96°. I made a mental note that if I ever got another job I could someday retire from, Florida would not be my retirement destination of choice. The summer heat in New York was bad and Dallas was worse, but Florida was off-the-charts brutal.
The school where Nowak taught was about a twenty-minute drive from the airport. I’d checked beforehand to make sure he’d be there since it was still summer. They told me that the teaching staff was already getting ready for the fall school term. I pulled out a MapQuest printout of the directions, laid it on the seat beside me, and followed the directions as I drove. I went past strip malls, discount stores, and signs advertising retirement communities until I pulled up in front of the school where Nowak was now living a new life as a teacher.
