by John Pearson
‘Signora, it’s a job like any other,’ he answered. And although he continued bringing her Paul’s answers to her questions, he never actually forgot his ‘job’ for long. He kept telling her how urgent it was to start negotiations. Some of his friends were becoming unpleasantly impatient. He also kept repeating something that she couldn’t bear to hear – the danger her son was facing if the Getty family continued to regard the kidnap as a hoax and refused to take it seriously.
It was now five weeks since Paul had disappeared, and from things Cinquanta said, Gail was becoming frightened that the kidnappers were about to harm him. She told her father so when she telephoned him in San Francisco, and since Judge Harris was one of the few people Jean Paul Getty respected and would talk to on the subject, the Judge was able to convince him that something must be done.
The old man still insisted he would never pay a ransom, but he did agree to send somebody to Rome to offer Gail professional support and deal with the situation. The man he chose was a former spy who worked for Getty Oil, J. Fletcher Chace.
Chace has been described as ‘one of the good ole boys from the good ole CIA’, and since retiring he had worked as security adviser to the Getty installations in the Neutral Zone. At six foot four, with very bright blue eyes and craggy profile, he was a handsome man, and Getty, who was impressed by clean-cut men of action, thought him the ideal character to deal with the case. But as far as his grandson Paul was now concerned, Fletcher Chace was probably the worst emissary the old man could have chosen.
*
For by now the situation in Rome had actually become extremely simple. From the moment Paul was kidnapped there had been two alternatives if he was going to return alive – either the police would catch the kidnappers, or the Gettys would have to pay a large sum of money as a ransom. After more than a month of trying, it was clear that the Carabinieri couldn’t have solved the case had Paul been held by Donald Duck – which left the family to face the second option. However distasteful it might be, the only point remaining to be settled was to negotiate a price – and get the boy released as soon and painlessly as possible. Anything else was quite irrelevant, and would serve only to extend the agony.
But since Jean Paul Getty utterly refused to pay a ransom, the agony had to be prolonged until he would, and handsome Fletcher Chace prolonged it with a vengeance.
Like many old ex-spies, Chace was a great conspiracy theorist. He was also highly confident of his abilities. When he arrived in Rome on 12 August Gail was relieved to have this assured professional to deal with the case. One of his first priorities was to make contact with the kidnappers in person, so she readily agreed to let him take the call when Cinquanta next telephoned. But Chace spoke no Italian, and his rusty Spanish started by baffling Cinquanta, then annoyed him, and finally convinced him that, for all his warnings, the Getty family still refused to take the kidnap seriously.
Chace was in fact a natural victim for the double-dealing and deceit which was building up around the whole affair. As a former spy he might have realized that the girl he met in his hotel and started sleeping with was actually an agent on the payroll of the Carabinieri and that her task, apart from making Fletcher feel at home, was to feed him the views of those she worked for and find out what he knew himself.
Chace actually knew very little. There had been numerous reports of false sightings of Paul – several from people Gail knew quite well – and as Chace insisted on following each one up personally, this took time. There was one from a plausible young man who claimed to know where Paul was hiding, and who took him to the monastery town of Monte Cassino, where he pocketed the $3,000 Chace offered him and promptly disappeared.
So, far from bringing matters to a head, Chace’s arrival on the scene served to complicate the situation which was already getting out of hand, and postpone yet further any chance of serious negotiations. Indeed, by the end of August a distraught and highly frustrated Fletcher Chace was falling back on the Carabinieri’s theory of a hoax. Baffled, bad-tempered and thoroughly bewildered, Chace believed he was at the centre of a considerable conspiracy himself – and reported all the details back to Sutton Place, where they strengthened the old man’s resolution not to pay a penny.
It was now early September, and to deal with this supposed conspiracy, Chace thought the time had come to baffle the opposition and the Italian press by taking Gail and the children out of circulation. Given the situation, it was actually extremely dangerous to break off contact with a group of jumpy and potentially dangerous kidnappers at a time like this, but Chace was adamant, and insisted on flying Gail and the children back to London, where for ten days he kept them in conditions of maximum security in a carefully prepared ‘safe house’ at Kings-ton-upon-Thames.
It was the sort of cloak and dagger operation he enjoyed, but its connection with a kidnapped boy in Calabria was none too clear. Nor did it give Gail the chance that she was counting on for meaningful discussion with her former husband – nor with Big Paul himself at nearby Sutton Place. Paul Junior had been growing even more reclusive, and when she saw him at Cheyne Walk he refused to talk about the kidnap.
So did his father, who was so frightened of the Mafia by now that he insisted any contact with Gail had to be through Chace. Chace made even this an undercover operation, meeting her at secret rendezvous in the park, but although he promised to convey her frantic pleas to Getty to do something for his grandson, there was never any answer. Big Paul was sticking by his principles, and was now thoroughly imbued with Chace’s version of events, and the tales of the undercover world he told him. After ten days Gail and her family had had enough and returned to Rome. Chace remained for several days at Sutton Place to reassure his master.
By mid-September it was clear that the situation was a disaster and that none of the people meant to deal with it could cope. But two things did make Gail’s life a little happier. The first was that she managed to move to a new apartment in the heart of old Rome, in a livelier area than anonymous Parioli. The new flat practically overlooked the old Campo dei Fiori market; both the girls loved it, and she felt less of a prisoner than she had in Parioli.
The second was that a member of the Getty family arrived to keep her company – her thirteen-year-old son Mark. Despite determined efforts by his grandparents to keep him safely in San Francisco, he had been pining for his family and in the end they had to let him go. In her new flat and with Mark beside her, Gail began to feel a little stronger.
This was as well, as relations between Cinquanta and the kidnappers were worsening dramatically. Cinquanta had already warned her that, baffled by the silence in the press, members of the gang were planning something drastic which would prove they still meant business.
From the way he spoke Gail knew he wasn’t bluffing – any more than he was taken in by her excuses for failing with the ransom – and he suddenly produced a fresh demand.
‘Signora, you must come to talk to us yourself. We will deal with this together. You will be able to see your son, and I will guarantee your safety.’
She asked for time to think this over. He replied that he would telephone next day for her decision.
All her instincts told her she should go. Of course she knew the dangers, but by now she was long past caring. For she also knew that she was doing Paul no good in Rome, and that if things were left to Chace and the Carabinieri the kidnap could go on for ever. By meeting Paul’s captors face to face, there was at least a hope of bringing the situation to a head and diverting their anger from her son. She was also naturally excited by the chance of seeing him again.
So when Cinquanta telephoned she said she’d come. He seemed relieved and gave precise instructions. She was to drive a car of a certain make with a bumper sticker and a white suitcase on the roof-rack. She should travel so many kilometres down the autostrada to a point south of Naples, where a man would be waiting by the roadside at a certain time. He would throw gravel at her windscreen as a signal for her to s
top. Someone from the gang would then take over and bring her to the place where Paul was hidden. Once again Cinquanta guaranteed her safety. Gail said she understood and once again agreed to come.
But afterwards pressure rapidly built up against the whole idea. When she told Judge Harris he was alarmed for her safety and told her some of the risks she would be taking. ‘What would happen to the other children if they killed you – as they might – and what good would that do Paul?’
Chace, now back in Rome, was even more opposed to the idea, and firmly banned her from going. With so much opposition, Gail changed her mind.
She now believes that this was ‘a terrible mistake. For had I gone, it could have brought everybody to their senses and got things moving. Besides, I would have been with Paul, and might have stopped them doing what they did.’
Instead, her last-minute cancellation of the meeting made relations with the kidnappers that much worse. She had no way of telling them she’d changed her mind, and they were furious when she failed to come. Even the normally polite Cinquanta was enraged when he telephoned her later, accusing her of playing tricks like all the others. At one point they were screaming at each other down the telephone, and the call concluded with Cinquanta saying he had done his best, that harder men would now take over and that whatever happened wasn’t his responsibility.
As Gail soon discovered, Cinquanta wasn’t bluffing, and Paul’s sufferings began in earnest as his captors took their anger out on him. They began by confiscating his radio, which had been his one link with the world outside. Fresh chains were fastened on his legs. A small bird he had made a pet of was killed before his eyes. Then they told him that, because his grandfather wouldn’t pay to save him, the time had come to do the same to him. They kept him bound and gagged for several hours, then played Russian roulette against his forehead with a .45 revolver.
He never knew if the gun was loaded. After it failed to go off several times he was blindfolded, bound more tightly than ever and left like this until next morning.
Around this time a fresh event occurred which added to his misery. As Cinquanta had hinted, some of the original kidnappers sold out their stakes in Paul just as they might have sold on a piece of real estate or a share in a casino. The new purchasers ranked higher in the N’drangeta and were particularly anxious to raise capital to develop the narcotics business on their own account. They were older and more ruthless men than their predecessors, and were looking for a quick return on their investment.
Paul’s captors were unusually affable that morning, which instantly aroused his suspicions. October had come, and with the colder weather they had been giving him cheap Italian brandy to keep him warm, but never before in the morning. When he said it was too early to start drinking, they told him to take it – it would do him good. Then they told him that his hair had grown too long and needed cutting.
He tried to argue with them. He liked his hair long, and didn’t want it cut, but they said it was dirty and insisted. He might have struggled but there were four or five of them, and he had grown weak with captivity and could see that they meant business. So he sat quietly as one of the men sheared clumsily at his long red hair with small blunt scissors. It was the first time he had had a haircut from a barber with a mask, and the man took particular care to clear the hair from each side of his head. When he finished, he dabbed alcohol behind his ears.
It was then Paul guessed what they intended.
Again he might have struggled, but again he knew there was no point. If he attempted to resist them they would only hurt him, and they would end up doing as they wanted.
So when they offered him more brandy he drank it. And when they gave him a rolled-up handkerchief to bite on, he placed it in his mouth and started biting. And while he was still biting he felt somebody behind him grab his right ear between a roughened thumb and finger and hold it tight.
Then came the searing pain as with one swift stroke of a cutthroat razor the whole right ear was severed from his newly shorn head.
On 21 October Cinquanta informed Gail of what had happened but refused to elaborate. At first she refused to believe him, but he insisted it was true and said he would send her photographs to prove it.
Like any mother, she felt sick with horror at the thought of the mutilation of her child. Despite so many warnings, she had never quite believed that Cinquanta and his friends would do it. Now that they had, she tried to stop herself thinking about it all the time. But it was hard to stop brooding over the savagery of such men and the fear and suffering they had cold-bloodedly inflicted on her child.
With this latest touch of horror she began to wonder how much longer this interminable kidnap would continue – and how much longer she and, more important, Paul could take it.
As a result of a call to the police, polaroid snapshots of Paul were discovered in a waste bin at a certain spot in Rome. They had been taken recently outside a cave, and when Gail saw them she was horrified, for they showed an emaciated Paul and the unhealed wound where his ear had been.
Shortly afterwards Cinquanta rang again. He asked if she believed him now, and said he had warned her it would happen. He added that the ear was in the post.
She was too numbed to argue with him then, but later, when the ear failed to arrive, and Cinquanta rang again to ask if she had received it, there were furious exchanges, with Cinquanta insisting that the authorities must have it, and Gail attempting to express something of her rage and horror at what had happened.
By now the disappearance of the ear itself was creating yet another mystery, more misunderstandings, and further excuses for inaction.
The kidnappers had in fact sealed it in a plastic container filled with preserving fluid, which in turn had been placed inside a padded bag and mailed from the main post office at Reggio Calabria to the editorial offices of Il Messaggero on 20 October.
If nothing else the arrival of this gruesome package should have ended all talk of hoaxes and added a sense of urgency to the negotiations. It would have done so anywhere but in Italy, but as Gore Vidal happened to observe around this time, ‘There is no such thing as a mail service in Rome.’ Officially a postal strike was in progress, and Paul’s ear, along with countless other parcels for the city, mouldered in a warehouse till the strike was over.
Finally, on 10 November – three weeks after the mutilation – the package was delivered to the offices of Il Messaggero in the Via del Corso – and the editor’s secretary who opened the parcel fainted.
By now Gail, having lost all faith in the Carabinieri, had enlisted the support of their rivals, the Italian Polizia. Carlo, the head of the Polizia Statale Squadra Mobile – the Rome Flying Squad – had taken on the case and proved an energetic and effective officer. He had helped Gail come to terms with what had happened, and prepared her for the grisly task of identifying the ear, if it ever did arrive. At his suggestion she had studied photographs of Paul to check upon its shape and appearance.
So when Carlo told her it had arrived, and asked her to come to police headquarters, she was more self-possessed than the secretary at Il Messaggero had been. She ignored the press photographers waiting for her outside the building, and was quite positive when confronted with the ear. Yes, she recognized it by the freckles and the shape. It certainly belonged to her son.
It was four months now since Paul had been taken, but even now his agony was far from over.
There had been some small advances. Through Judge Harris, who was a prominent San Francisco Catholic, the Vatican had become involved, and Gail had met ‘the Pope’s Gorilla’, the massive Archbishop Casimir Marcinkus from Chicago, who had been very charming and said he might be able to assist her. This was the priest who would later become notorious for his connections with the corrupt financier Sindona, and also with Roberto Calvi, the head of the Banca Ambrosiana, who ended up hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London. So it was probably as well that Chace refused to let her take advantage of the Archbishop’s under
world connections when he told her, ‘I know some important people who I’m sure could help you. If you like I’ll talk to them about your son.’
The American government was also showing signs of some concern, since Gail had sent a personal message to President Nixon. Thomas Biamonte, a highly competent ex-FBI lawyer of Calabrian extraction who worked in the US Embassy in Rome, was assigned to the case, and speaking the local dialect of Calabria, had made useful contact with the kidnappers on his own account. Largely as a result of this, the kidnappers had dropped their demands from 10 miliardi, or $17.4 million, to a more realistic 2 miliardi, approximately $3.2 million. But having lowered their price, they had also made it very clear that they were sticking to it.
Back in Sutton Place, Paul’s eighty-year-old grandfather was also holding out. Hoax or no hoax, ear or no ear, principles were principles, and he still refused to pay a penny.
As winter started in the uplands of Calabria and the injured boy was dragged to yet another hiding place, his captors issued one more ultimatum. They were showing signs of losing patience once again, and said that if there was no deal soon, a second ear would be on its way to Il Messaggero, followed by further portions of the kidnapped boy’s anatomy if it failed to get results.
Paul himself was in a wretched state by now. The pain of the rough-and-ready amputation had continued, and infection had set in. Cold and malnourishment coupled with nervous shock from the operation had left him weakened and dispirited. Since childhood he had suffered from weak lungs, and what had started as a bad cold rapidly became pneumonia. His captors, anxious not to lose $3.2 million, began injecting him with such massive doses of penicillin that he became allergic to it. When he couldn’t take any more antibiotics and his condition continued to deteriorate, they panicked.
