by Rita Cosby
"Just get back," Moe told him.
According to Moe, rather than calling 911 directly, the next thing he did was call the hotel liaison because, as Moe told Fox News, "My phone is registered in Dade, my cell phone is registered in Dade [County]. I knew if I dialed 911 then possibly Dade rescue would pick up, and I didn't know the address to the Hard Rock, so I had our liaison that helped us out in the Hard Rock call 911. Then, I rushed back."
The only problem with that is . . . it isn't true.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, more than thirty percent of all 911 calls come from cell phones and the call is answered typically by a central operator in the city you are calling from, who can then immediately redirect the call if necessary to any area's emergency response team. Surprising naivety for Moe, a certified paramedic and a celebrity bodyguard. Also, Moe said he didn't know the address to the hotel, yet hotel employees say he had been there at least six times before. But what makes Moe's story especially disconcerting is that the call for help from room 607 didn't come until 1:38 p.m., many minutes later, around the time he had gotten back to the hotel. And he wasn't the one who made the call.
• • •
Meanwhile, Brigitte and Tas were trying anything and everything to revive Anna. "Anna!" Brigitte screamed as she began vigorously rubbing and tweaking Anna's feet while Tas climbed onto the bed and began attempting CPR on Anna's naked, unconscious body. Tas, a trained nurse, began vainly pushing against the springs of the mattress beneath Anna's body, not against an unmovable surface like a hard floor, as is necessary for CPR. "Anna! What's going to happen to your daughter?" Brigitte cried out. "You can't . . ." Brigitte was in shock and can't remember if the word "die" escaped her lips, but she knew the situation was critical.
Anna's body was still warm, but Tas told Brigitte there was no pulse. She peeled back the comatose beauty's eyelids. She said she thought there might have been a reaction in Anna's hazel eyes. "Anna, Anna!" Brigitte pleaded. "Wake up, Mommy is here!" Then, she prayed out loud: "Thy will be done."
As they struggled to save her, there was no struggle from Anna, no throwing up, nothing like that. Anna was just lying there. "We are so powerless when something happens to you," Brigitte told me later. "We think we can do something, but in reality, we can't really. You can do A, B, and C, but you can only do what you can do. I knew there was nothing that I really could do, but I do Reiki [a spiritual Japanese technique in which the healer does a "laying on of hands" to promote healing]. I began doing Reiki over Anna's body, and I sort of had this feeling that it was over, but I cannot say that because it's not for me to say. I got the feeling she was saying goodbye."
As the two women tired themselves in their efforts to revive Anna Nicole Smith, they realized that there was nothing they could do for her. She needed medical help urgently. Where was the ambulance? Brigitte thought. It seems like it's taking forever.
It wasn't taking forever. The ambulance had yet to be called.
• • •
Moe rushed back to the hotel. In early interviews, he said he was about fifteen minutes away and frantically ran every light to get there.
According to the handyman who was seated on the boat right across from Howard when he got the fateful call from Moe, the conversation lasted maybe one to two minutes at the most. And he said that Howard said only a few words to Moe, something to the effect of "Oh, okay, I'm on my way." Howard's first visible reaction when he got the news that all was not well with Anna could be described as surprising by some. "It didn't seem like an upsetting call to him at all," the handyman told me. "Which is odd to me, especially after I learned that the call was giving the bad news about her health." After Howard ended his call, he said in a monotone, unemotional voice, "I have an emergency and have to leave."
"He did not come across like it was a crisis at all," the handyman told me. "He didn't seem distressed. He was very matter of fact, like it was a minor business issue versus a personal crisis. It certainly didn't come across like it was a major emergency in any way. He acted very nonchalant."
In fact, after Howard got the call, the handyman says Howard answered several questions for him, including a conversation about whether Howard could pay him the few hundred dollars he owed him for the minor repairs he did. Howard said he forgot to bring the money. Howard then said goodbye and walked back to the car. "He definitely wasn't running or rushing to his car," the handyman said. "Just going through the paces, it seemed." It's approximately a three to four minute walk to where his car was parked from where the boat was docked. About ten minutes after the phone call, the handyman says the Town Car pulled out of the parking lot. In retrospect now knowing what Howard was told on the phone, the handyman described Howard's behavior as "extremely odd."
• • •
According to police records and hotel surveillance footage:
At 1:38 p.m., Tas was exhausted from her efforts and frustrated that help hadn't arrived. She called the hotel operator and said Anna Nicole was unconscious and needed emergency assistance immediately.
Within minutes, hotel security personnel were in the room. The Hard Rock Hotel is in the city of Hollywood, but it's actually located on tribal land, owned by the Seminole Indians, who have jurisdiction over all activities on their property. They are considered a sovereign nation on sovereign land, and only federal agents who work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs have authority on that land. Although Hollywood authorities assisted in the case, Seminole officials controlled the investigation and determined what information came in or out.
At 1:40 p.m., Hard Rock security called the Seminole Police Dispatch, and the Seminole Police called Seminole Rescue teams and Hollywood Fire and Rescue: "Hi, this is the Seminole Police," a female said on the recording of the 911 call. "If you could please respond to the Hard Rock, room 607. It is going to be in reference to a white female who is—what is she not responsive? —She is not breathing and she is not responsive. She is actually Anna Nicole Smith. . . ."
• • •
Though Moe told police he was in the room and instructed his wife to call 911, eyewitnesses say that Moe arrived at the hotel and broke into a sprint across the hotel lobby, yelling toward the front desk to "Call 911!" According to surveillance tapes, he arrived in the room at 1:40, after the call for help had already finally been initiated.
When he arrived in the room, his wife was on top of Anna, continuing her unfruitful attempts to revive her. He moved her out of the way and felt for a pulse. He later said he might have felt a faint pulse. His first reaction was to pick Anna up and put her on the floor so he could properly do CPR on her. "When I had my lips around her lips, blowing," Moe said in an interview with Larry King, "blowing, breathing life, breathing air in her, and it blew back, I just . . . deep down . . . I just figured that she was going to, you know, see her son Daniel."
1:44 p.m. Seminole Police were on the scene.
1:47 p.m. Both Seminole Rescue and Hollywood Fire and Rescue arrived in the hotel room. They took over administering CPR and began ACLS protocol (Advance Cardiac Life Support), which included medications such as atropine (to try to jumpstart her heart), Narcan (a reversing agent in case she overdosed on narcotics), and they intubated her by inserting a breathing tube into her lungs and blowing oxygen directly into her lungs, but the air immediately blew right back out.
Later that day, Captain Dan Fitzgerald with the Hollywood Fire and Rescue Department would say, "There was just no way of knowing how long she'd been down before she was discovered, which could make all the difference in the world. If you witness somebody pass out, you can initiate care immediately. But if somebody passes out and it's not witnessed, they can be there for twenty minutes or so before they're found, it makes it a much more difficult scenario to work our protocols and be successful."
At 1:51 p.m., Howard K. Stern burst into the room, but was stopped by security personnel. According to King Eric, he had been stoic and quiet on the approximately fifteen-minu
te car ride back from the boat basin. "He didn't say anything," King Eric said. "He wasn't calm. He was fidgety. He didn't know what to do. At that point, we thought she just collapsed. I thought maybe she didn't eat or something." But when Howard got back to the hotel in front of a crowd of eyewitnesses, his response was much more heightened. He was seen running through the hotel and was very upset, quite different from his initial response when he received the call at the boat basin.
Room 607 had become a very hectic scene. Moe has said Howard was emotional and everyone was trying to calm him down. He asked, "Moe, is Anna all right?"
"She's in good hands," Moe said, referring to the slew of emergency personnel in the room.
Hotel surveillance tapes show Howard in the hallway, throwing his arms up and down and pacing feverishly in a circle. An emergency official at the scene told me Howard said, "I can't believe it." At first, he was not crying, but mumbling to himself, hitting his leg in disbelief. One eyewitness told me, "It wasn't like he was in mourning or sad. He wasn't grieving, it was more panicking."
"Don't go!" Howard shouted into the room at Anna's body. "Stay!" Brigitte hugged him and she remembers him screaming out, "Ah, Anna! Without you I'm nothing!"
Approximately 2:15 p.m., it was Moe, rather than Howard, who ran beside the gurney carrying the tabloid icon to the waiting ambulance below. Eyewitnesses say Howard ran down the hallway following the gurney up to the elevator. Once Anna had been rolled inside and the elevator door closed, Howard turned around, fell to his knees, put his hands on his face and began crying. But it was Moe, rather than Howard, who took the ride in the ambulance with Anna to the hospital. And it was Moe, about a half an hour later in the emergency room of Memorial Regional Hospital, who gave doctors the nod to stop their resuscitation efforts.
At 2:49 p.m. Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead. Since the hospital chaplain wasn't available, Moe leaned down and whispered a prayer over the body of the former Playboy Playmate he had been in charge of guarding. He gave Anna her last rites and told her to go be with her son.
Howard eventually went to the hospital, but not at his request. An eyewitness says after thirty minutes to an hour of him being in the room and talking to detectives, the hospital called and asked for Howard's presence. Another person on scene told me, "He was in no rush to go."
• • •
Howard K. Stern had been quite busy. He began talking to his media contacts right away, which surprised several people around him. The timing of this detail has never been made public before. Entertainment Tonight, which had previously made exclusive "deals" with the couple, was already en route to Hollywood, Florida, and was confirmed for a block of rooms at the Hard Rock that Howard personally called to reserve before 4 p.m. Given that Anna had just been pronounced dead at 2:49 p.m., it was shocking to many of those present that Howard could even think of any media at that moment, much less make an exclusive deal so soon after her death pronouncement. But he did. "Right away," said an eyewitness, "Howard was ready to make his next deal. It showed us that to Howard it was all about money."
27
chapter 2
Next of Kin
"I just want her to be with Daniel," Howard K. Stern cried to Entertainment Tonight cameras on his flight from Florida to the Bahamas on Entertainment Tonight's private plane. Even though Howard testified under oath during the Florida court hearing over Anna's burial that he only received the free flight, he was reportedly paid one million dollars to allow the entertainment news magazine to exclusively tape him and tag along as he went back to the Bahamas to secure Anna's five-monthold baby, Dannielynn—the baby he was claiming to be the father of.
Anna would, as Howard hoped, soon be with her beloved son Daniel, side by side in burial plots purchased in the Bahamas in the fall. Stern himself testified that he signed the check for the cemetery property, four family plots, one for each of them for the future, precipitated by her twenty-year-old son's death five months prior to Anna's. Daniel died under similar sudden and mysterious circumstances while visiting Howard, his mother, and newborn sister in a Bahamian hospital.
Drug infused death seems to run in the family.
• • •
The summer before his death, Daniel Wayne Smith was taking classes at Los Angeles Valley College—getting an "A" in his philosophy class. He had gotten his driver's license, and was living with Ray Martino, one of Anna's long-time friends and the director of To the Limit and Anna Nicole Smith: Exposed, a video collection of Anna's "most delicious fantasies . . . complete with exotic French maids, lusty limo drivers, and bubble baths." Anna didn't worry about Daniel finding out about or being exposed to her naughty side. She'd raised Daniel to be around adults, unabashedly exposing him to her life. He knew everything about her: from her stripper past to her Howard present.
And, according to private investigator Jack Harding, it was the overbearing presence of Howard that inspired the young man to call the seasoned investigator for a meeting. Daniel had met the seventy-four-year-old Jack Harding through Ray Martino in the summer of 2006, shortly before Daniel died. He was having a hard time with his mother's recent decision to move to the Bahamas, thousands of miles away from him. In fact, he ended up in the hospital on two occasions during that summer—shortly before Anna moved and on July 17, the day before she arrived in the Bahamas to establish permanent residency. He complained of stomach cramps and back pain. Doctors thought he was depressed and incredibly stressed.
Ray Martino treated Daniel like a son and, trying to help him look toward the future, introduced him to Jack Harding because Daniel said he was interested in the military. Harding, a friend of Ray's, had served in the military years ago and the two of them struck up a conversation about what that was like.
Daniel kept the private investigator's business card and called him in August, about a month after the two had initially met. He told the private investigator that he "wanted to meet about business this time." They met early the next night at Paty's Restaurant on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake.
Daniel, tall and slender, was wearing a shirt over his t-shirt, as well as jeans and a baseball cap. They didn't eat, but during their hour and a half chat over coffee and tea, Daniel kept looking out the window, around the restaurant, and admitted he was very worried someone was following him. He told Harding that he didn't want anyone to know that he was meeting with him, not even Ray with whom he was staying.
He told Harding about a dream he had had the night before in which he saw his mom in a coffin. "She was looking grey," Daniel said, his eyes welling with tears. "He was clearly upset," Harding told me. "He was so emotional and disturbed by this dream. I could not dismiss it."
He told Harding he wanted him to investigate what Howard K. Stern was doing to his mom and people around her. Daniel said, "Every time I call the Bahamas' house, Howard hangs up on me." He also felt Howard had ordered others on Anna's staff to do the same, preventing Daniel from talking to her. "Howard also keeps feeding my mom drugs," he continued, "mind-bending drugs. He has total control over her like a, like a . . ."
"Svengali?" Harding asked.
"Yeah," Daniel said. "That's it! He's a Svengali. Howard does not want me around because I want to get my mom off the drugs and away from him . . . to save her." He explained that ever since Howard had come into their lives, he had purposely kept his mother "out of it all the time." Harding said Ray Martino had told him before that Anna had cleaned up for a while, but had gone "off the deep end with drugs" when she hooked up with Howard.
Daniel also told the private investigator that Howard was having people "lay his mom"—pimping her for sex. Daniel didn't elaborate further to Harding. However, Jackie Hatten, Daniel's godmother, told me Daniel confided in her that "he'd seen Howard give his mom uppers and downers and then guys would come to the house, talk to Howard and go in his mom's bedroom and close the door." According to Jackie, Daniel called it the "Millionaire's Club," a reference to an episode on Anna's E! Entertainment Tele
vision reality show, in which she had gone out on arranged dates with super wealthy men. Unlike the show, however, Daniel told Jackie that the men he saw, at least fifty of them in a year, would go into his mom's bedroom for hours. Then, from his vantage point hiding behind the door in his bedroom, he'd see the guys coming out adjusting their clothes and discretely palming Howard money on the way out the door. Daniel said he'd then see his mom being "all drugged out and groggy" in her bedroom.
"Daniel definitely didn't want to say anything bad about his mom," Harding said. "He was very protective and loved his mom." And, according to Jackie and other friends of Anna's, though her sexual proclivities were wild and well known, she was adamantly against prostitution. Jackie said she and Daniel firmly believed Anna had no idea Howard was getting paid on the side. "When Anna was not sober, she was easy to take advantage of. My friend Anna was Howard Stern's cash cow. Howard was taking advantage of Anna in every way, up until, and including, her death."
Daniel also told Jack Harding that he saw Howard give his mom drugs. "He gave everyone drugs," he told the P.I., "including me." He added that he had gotten himself off the drugs and was now clean. Harding noted that Daniel's eyes were clear that night. He was absolutely coherent, he did not slur his words or appear to be on drugs in any way.
