59 Hours

by Johnny Kovatch

  Valencia used classified tracking techniques to keep up on Jack 24/7. “I knew where he was and what he was doing at all times. I would go in plainclothes and just watch him.” Jack “gave it to us,” the lead that would send Valencia to Brazil—after moving around seaside resort towns, Jesse Hollywood had planted himself for the last year in a small fishing village called Saquarema near Rio de Janeiro.

  * * *

  The FBI was in charge of the UFAP warrant. An agent by the name of Dave Cloney was assigned to it. He would head to Brazil with Valencia. “Dave is one of my heroes, a very, very good guy. I have nothing but good things to say about that man—a true patriot.”

  Agent Cloney wasn’t only a mentor; according to Valencia, “Guys like that make you a better cop.” The state and the FBI didn’t always see eye-to-eye. “I’ve had cases where I worked undercover and we were side by side and it didn’t work out well just because of difference in legality. But as an agent? This guy—I haven’t had a problem with any FBI agents, even the guys in Chicago.”

  Agent Cloney had taken over the Hollywood case on the FBI side from Agent Kevin Kelly, who was retiring. Cloney joined the case when it was four months old.

  By continually tracking Jack’s phone, Valencia learned that the distant family member visiting Rio de Janeiro would meet with Jesse Hollywood at an outdoor mall by the beach.

  However, how could Valencia be sure that the tip he received about Hollywood being in Brazil would pan out? Hollywood had seemingly been spotted everywhere. Even Kirk Miyashiro had put his school on lockdown because reports had surfaced that Hollywood had been seen back in the area. Miyashiro was worried that Hollywood might have been looking for payback at the high school from which he’d previously been expelled

  Valencia decided to trust his training and go back to square one. He pored over every interview police had conducted with Jack Hollywood. The sheriff’s department had forgotten about “one of the original interviews dad had—it was on paper—it’s in our police reports—dad had tried to make arrangements for him to go to Brazil, and people kind of forgot about that.” When Valencia went back and reread it, “I saw that he had contacted someone who was identified as getting his son to Brazil. That was week one of the murder. I wasn’t involved in any of that.”

  Valencia also had another informant in Brazil. He tipped Valencia off that Jesse Hollywood was indeed there.

  There was only one issue. Valencia couldn’t travel to Brazil as a representative of law enforcement. He had zero legal authority, nor police powers in Brazil. The Brazilian Interpol was calling the shots. Valencia had to leave his shield behind and travel unarmed as a tourist, with nothing but his passport. He no longer existed in any police capacity. He was considered an advisor.

  Jesse Hollywood had chosen Brazil for one reason alone. He had heard about an Englishman, Ronnie Biggs, who participated in the Great Train Robbery in the 1960s. Biggs fled to Brazil after learning that the country wouldn’t extradite if that fugitive fathered a child by a local. Following in Biggs’s footsteps, Hollywood linked up with Marcia Reis, who was ten years older. Reis was now six months pregnant with their first child. However, Hollywood wasn’t aware that this specific law no longer existed. Now, because Hollywood was illegally residing in the country, Valencia didn’t have to worry about the UFAP arrest warrant and had grounds for deportation.

  Now twenty-five, Hollywood tried to keep a low profile in the fishing village, even though his photo did appear on a travel brochure. Locals knew him as the young gringo Miguel, or “Mike,” who would jog the shore with his two pit bulls when he wasn’t engaging in domestic or drunken arguments with his girlfriend and locals. In fact, he was known to start running his mouth as soon as he started drinking. Patrons would joke with him, calling him Mike Tyson. Hollywood would counter and tell them that while Tyson used his fists to defeat his opponents, “I use a baseball bat to defeat mine.”

  Hollywood was living off twelve-hundred-dollar monthly checks sent by his family. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar home he used to hole up in was replaced by the shabby one-story abode, twenty paces from the beach.

  While Hollywood was known to throw raging barbecues for out-of-town guests, Valencia was busy operating within a different type of dynamics: working with Brazilian Interpol. “They were great. Their heart is in the game. They just didn’t have the logistical equipment. We would do anything to help them out. They were very, very poor.” Their police station was a 1920s naval building. The floor was almost dirt. “[They had] a hard, hard road ahead of them.”

  Valencia got on well with every member of Interpol. Except for one. And it was over a simple misunderstanding. The head of Interpol thought Valencia “was the sheriff of Santa Barbara County.” As a courtesy, Valencia “brought all these pins [from the department] to hand out. I had run out by the time I had reached him, and I didn’t know he was the boss of Interpol. And he was upset. In hierarchy, I should have given it to him first. I felt bad. He didn’t understand I was just a ground troop. He thought I was his equal and didn’t treat him as such.” Valencia quickly remedied the situation and placed a call for the department to send him more pins. The Brazilian agents thanked the “Big Indian,” which was translated from Portuguese. They couldn’t remember his name, so “Big Indian” was how they would refer to him. “I would hear that and would know they [were] talking about me. They were awesome. They were in the cause.”

  Valencia planned to be in Brazil for a week. Day six was when the arrest would go down. At one point, Valencia found himself at the iconic ninety-three-foot statue of Christ the Redeemer—Jesus, with outstretched arms. The cultural icon, composed of reinforced concrete, is perched atop Corcovado Mountain. It looms some 2,300 feet over Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay. But Valencia wasn’t up there to enjoy one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He had undercover work to perform on Jesse Hollywood—a type of surveillance that he would never be allowed to publicly disclose. This “tourist” decided that day to wear a seemingly innocuous tank top, showcasing sleeved-out tattoos from elbows to shoulders.

  One particular tattoo on his shoulder that stuck out was a “red condor over a skull” with the image of the sun. Valencia, thirty-six, had it done in his twenties. It held reverential significance. (He had to wait to get all his tattoos because he had wanted to do recon in the Marine Corps—they discouraged identifying marks.)

  Valencia took to heart an old legend. “The condor is one of our sacred birds, and there’s a story where it got too arrogant and flew too close to the sun, which is why it’s now black.” The skull on his shoulder had a red condor on it to always remind him to remain grounded. “Know your capabilities, know your limitations.” What the skull represented was simple. “What’s the end result of arrogance? Of being too overzealous, forgetting your roots?” The condor was purposely inked in red and not black. Valencia knew you had to maintain honor “by staying red.” By staying grounded. This same insight could have benefited Jesse James Hollywood.

  However, locals regarded Valencia’s tattoo as the mark of an assassin. A profession for which Valencia—after spending five years as a sniper on a SWAT team—definitely possessed the parallel skill set. He finished up the undercover work at Christ the Redeemer and left without incident or compromising the ticking clock on the investigation.

  However, there was one small hiccup Valencia hoped would not compromise the arrest. Due to “an error” made “during calibration of the equipment,” one of Valencia’s colleagues accidentally phoned Hollywood on his cell phone. The problem was that the caller spoke English to him, not the country’s official language, Portuguese. It took a moment to realize it was Hollywood who had been called. The colleague quickly hung up. Was the investigation now compromised? Would Hollywood grow suspicious and flee? No one knew. They would have to wait and see.

  Valencia never touched alcohol. If he was ever going to have a drink to calm his nerves due to a mishap, he saw this as a good enough reason as any.
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br />   Chapter 25

  Go Time

  THE ARREST WOULD HAPPEN ON day six. There would be no day seven. No, that day was reserved for the sixteen-hour flight stateside.

  Interpol was informed of the logistics—Hollywood had not seen this family member for some time and wasn’t sure of the woman he was looking for. He would know her when she approached. Valencia made sure that meeting never happened. He would send in an undercover agent in her place. The only obstacle? He had to keep the real family member from showing up. Through intel, he knew she would be riding on a commuter bus, then meeting at a table at an outdoor mall. What were his options? He couldn’t detain her on some bogus charge—he technically wasn’t even law enforcement. He didn’t want her arrested alongside Hollywood. She could present unknown variables. Valencia, Agent Cloney, and Interpol decided on the path of least resistance instead. As Hollywood’s family friend was en route, Valencia ordered the bus she was commuting on to be pulled over. The bogus reason? Passenger count and weight inspection. It was a surreal moment for Valencia as he proceeded to drive around the stationary bus en route to the meeting spot to arrest Hollywood. He had been given two years to find the fugitive. Now these last eight months on the case—and nearly five years after Nick’s murder—would come down to these next fifteen minutes. That was all the time they could buy until the bus was back up and running. It turned out, that was all they would need.

  * * *

  Valencia was at the meeting spot. It was, in Valencia’s words, “a violent scene” when they took Hollywood down. The undercover officer approached Hollywood and made the initial arrest. That set off a preconditioned response by terrified locals. “A lot of kidnapping goes on.” This was the assumption. After all, every one of the officers were plainclothes. Marcia Reis began screaming, “Kidnap, kidnap!” Even the military police were convinced, drawing their “long guns.”

  The scene was chaotic and had reached a boiling point. “Other agencies rolled in and were pointing guns at everybody.” Over shouted commands, Interpol finally reasoned with the military police. It was a standoff where Valencia was helpless to intervene. Observing, he couldn’t even take part in the arrest. “I went over there as a ‘vacation’ on my Visa.” So as a tourist, all he could do was walk by. His simple nod served to officially ID Hollywood as their guy. Thankfully, Hollywood hadn’t gone as far as Ronnie Biggs and had plastic surgery.

  But as surreal as the arrest turned out to be, the aftermath was just as bizarre. In fact, to Hollywood’s girlfriend, it was as if it never happened, judging by her nonchalant attitude afterward. “When it was it all over,” the mother of his child “got a Coke and walked away. It was like nothing.”

  One thing did put Valencia’s mind at ease before the arrest. Hollywood’s flip-flops. There would be no outrunning anyone. As soon as he saw what was on the fugitive’s feet, Valencia knew, “It was over.”

  * * *

  Michael Costa Giroux. That was what Hollywood’s passport read. Valencia didn’t know the alias, but the Brazilians did. Under duress from questioning, Hollywood remained defiant about his identity. “They were grilling him. He was a professional. I mean, he just knew the drill. His ID was in the name of a magistrate’s son, and he had it set up pretty good that family names were all involved in government or corruption in Brazil.” With bribes so prevalent in Brazil, Hollywood was hedging that he could use his politically affiliated name to buy off officials. “We didn’t know that either. The Brazilians told us.” Hollywood had also obtained a fake birth certificate at some point. “He got everything from his father. His dad loved his son, I give him that.”

  There was a ticking clock on transporting Hollywood back to the States. “When we arrested him, we were waiting for the next plane. We didn’t want anything to go wrong.” They had to buy tickets in a heartbeat. “There were a lot of issues behind what we did.” Brazil “doesn’t extradite for the death penalty.” That was what Hollywood could possibly have been facing. “We circumvented that, but it was our job to get him home.” He was deported for being in the country illegally.

  During questioning, Valencia stayed in the shadows, blending into the background. Hollywood had no idea who he was or what department he represented. He thought Valencia was Interpol. “I just stood back, and you really don’t know what nationality I was. In Brazil you can’t tell about anybody. There’s all nationalities, they all speak Portuguese.”

  But Valencia’s patience had a sell-by date. “Somebody there spoke both Portuguese and English and was telling me what was going on. Finally I got tired of it. I introduced myself, told him who I was and where I was from, and you almost saw the life leave his body—it was over.”

  Hollywood “fell back in his chair and reached out to shake” Valencia’s hand. Hollywood was arrogant about the fact that he had been caught. So full of hubris he told the detective, “You’re the one.”

  Interpol was stunned. “They were blown away because his Portuguese was almost perfect. They didn’t believe me that we had the right guy. His ID, everything was perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.”

  Valencia never once questioned the real identity of Michael Costa Giroux. “It’s not like they have Live Scan, where I could scan his fingerprints and send them back home. There was just no way. And cell phones weren’t working to take his picture. But I knew it was him. But the problem is, like, I’m five-eleven and healthy, and I had been chasing him for so long and staring at his pictures that I had imagined this big, menacing criminal. Then when I see him, he’s just a little boy.” Valencia couldn’t believe it. “Just a little boy. That’s all he was. That just made the wrong decision and wrong choices and has to live with them forever.”

  But wasn’t Valencia worried about Hollywood making that first phone call home? And buying his way out of custody? After all, “Brazil is full of bribes.” What Hollywood didn’t know was that it was going to be impossible for the one man who might be able to manipulate his release—his father—to take action. Valencia had authored a warrant for Jack Hollywood that he timed to coincide with Hollywood’s arrest. Hollywood “told detectives, ‘I’m going to be released. I’m going to be released by morning. You don’t know how it works down here.’ ”

  Valencia wasn’t intimidated or worried. He gave it right back to Hollywood: “I’ll tell you what. If you are released by morning”—they were waiting for their flight—“I will shake your hand and say no hard feelings and be on my way. He didn’t know I arrested dad already. Dad was in custody for another warrant, which we didn’t even file. We just arrested dad to get him out of the picture in case phone calls were made. I just needed him on the plane and then he was mine. So we took dad out of the picture early.”

  And speaking of Jack Hollywood, Valencia had kept tabs on him before heading to Brazil. He didn’t perform surveillance with binoculars from an unmarked vehicle three blocks away or from some second-story rooftop. No, Valencia was often right next to him. On the set of Alpha Dog, the 2007 movie that was loosely based on this case and featured Justin Timberlake, Jack Hollywood was hired as a consultant.

  Valencia seamlessly blended in with the grips and the gaffers, carrying ropes and equipment. No one knew who he was, and for good reason. He didn’t exist. On off days or downtime when the film wasn’t shooting, Valencia would take surveillance to a new level. He would act as a random beachcomber on Jack Hollywood’s trips to the ocean. “There was one time I was following his father.” But Hollywood’s father wasn’t alone. One of the actors accompanied him. “They went to the beach and they were playing football like I would throw it to my son. It was really weird. He was interacting with this actor who was acting like his son. It was sad.”

  Jesse Hollywood didn’t represent the ideals of what the Red Condor symbolized. But how could he? “His dad was a street-level doper, and that was the life he knew.” Valencia knew Hollywood’s origin as a dealer. “He started with Ecstasy, selling a couple tablets here and there, and his dad was teaching
him how to switch up locations and do standard doper stuff.”

  Valencia couldn’t believe a father would set up his son for such a downfall. “Jack [Hollywood] did create the situation. He doesn’t understand it. He is essentially the snowflake in the avalanche.”

  * * *

  Even though Jesse Hollywood was in custody, Valencia couldn’t control his legal rights. After all, he was a tourist until Hollywood boarded the plane. He couldn’t Mirandize him and record his statements. Any taped interview would have been inadmissible in court.

  Valencia secured the last two first-class seats. His partner had to fly economy. Valencia made sure Hollywood wouldn’t attract attention to himself or cause a scene on the plane. He instructed Hollywood on how he would behave prior to boarding. Because Valencia was no stranger to performing extraditions, he laid down his nonnegotiable ground rules. “There’s a very standardized speech I have that if they disrupt the flight, they will hit the ground before the plane does. And I am very serious about that. But I have to be.” What Hollywood didn’t know? “We weren’t armed.” Valencia wasn’t traveling with his issued .40 cal—only his stamped passport.

  Hollywood had yet to be officially arrested. “As soon as he was deported, we just happened to be there to take custody of him, because you’re in the custody of the country you’re in transit to. Essentially, we arrested him on the plane.”

  That meant also binding him. “We had to buy handcuffs. We had to restrain him getting him on the plane. We had a hoodie, you put your hands in it.” That was when Valencia cuffed him—with his wrists bound inside the sweatshirt’s front pocket. None of the passengers had any clue.