by Charles Fox
Fifty told me that if we didn’t start to cooperate, then they were going to have to do it again. I promised him the money had arrived, no problem. We told them two days. I said, “Look, please, I believe you. Let’s stop fighting each other. Please give me time. I’m fighting an empire.”
14.
It became apparent that Big Paul was still the problem. He would not sign his father’s note. Chace scoffed at the family infighting and boasted that he’d had the power to pay the ransom all along.
November 14.
Chace (notes):
Gail was having a fine old time with Big Paul, but I wasn’t involved with him at all then. I said, “Fine. Bully for you. I hope you get Big Paul to give you x million dollars. Go to it kid.” I didn’t give a damn about Gail’s relations with her ex-husband. It was family business, dirty laundry. I’m not going to get involved. There was a big argument about whether Big Paul was going to give us the money or Old Paul was going to pay the whole thing. It was on and off, on and off. I didn’t have the money from Old Paul yet. I didn’t talk to anybody about whether or not I could get it. The whole thing was whether Big Paul was going to come through with something. It was back and forth. He kept changing his mind.
I wasn’t concerned because I had confidence in the Old Man that whatever money we had to pay we could pay. I didn’t say anything about it but I wasn’t ready to get away from simultaneous exchange. I was aware of all the family feuds going on but I didn’t get involved or give a damn because I wasn’t really concerned. From the beginning I was the person who was going to pay the money, obviously. I knew when I needed x amount of dollars, I would get x amount of dollars, I knew that all the time. I didn’t have to worry about the money I was paying to my informants and other expenses. I knew I had strong financial backing because Old Paul told me, but I wanted to handle it all properly. I didn’t need to pin him down to dollars and cents. He’s never questioned one of my expense accounts yet. He trusts my judgment on millions of dollars. I spent sixty million dollars of his money in Japan. He trusts me with it. And I didn’t have to pin him down on two million or $750 million. I was single-minded and I was trying to get something worked-out. I couldn’t get involved in all this family haggling and I didn’t care, I knew there was money when I needed it.
As time passed, pressure continued to build on Gail, the kidnappers kept threatening, and in London the family quarrel dragged on.
Gail:
I had to keep thinking; maybe a new idea would come to us on how to get the money. It was like bashing your head against the wall. What do I do? How do I convince them it happens to be their grandson, their son, my son. It was absolutely day in and day out. I was so desperate I wanted to scream, “I can’t take one more second.” I just couldn’t do it. I used to run into the bathroom and cry till I thought I’d die but then I had to come out because the press were there, or the police, or Fletcher, or I had to call my father, or the kidnappers were going to call.
My mother asked me, “How do you empty out your mind, not exactly turning off, but what is it that you do?” Well, you learn it—I don’t know how, you just do. There are times when you aren’t dealing with it anymore, when it’s time to go to bed. Then what do you do? You really empty your mind out. You don’t allow yourself to think about what’s happening. Obviously, I did it some of the time, but had I done it all the time, I would never have been able to talk to anybody. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We had no idea.
Everyone used to say, “Oh, you poor thing” and “How you must be suffering.” I’d say, no. Yes, I’m suffering emotionally and I’m hurting because this is happening to one of my children whom I love very dearly, but he’s the one who’s suffering. I’m not. I’m locked in a house. I have a nice home and I have people around me and I’m comfortable and everybody is trying to see that I’m comfortable. And where is he? What does he have? It was really Paul’s guts that got me through. Because, somehow, I knew he was going to make it and they didn’t understand that. “Oh, you poor thing.” Me? Me, the poor thing? Here I am, surrounded more or less by everything that I know, except I’m forced to fight. What does he have? I have a bed to sleep in. Nobody is hurting me. Nobody cut my ear off.
Two days later at five o’clock in the morning the doorbell rang. It was a reporter from Intento saying they had some photographs that I must see. I was in bed, Lou went down to answer the door and told the caller over the intercom I would look at them at noon because I didn’t get very much sleep and to not torture me in the middle of the night when it was dark and I was scared.
The man said, “She should see them. It’s important that she sees them.”
Lou said, “The answer is no. What difference does it make anyway? The photographs won’t change.”
After a half hour they gave up and left the photos there. I couldn’t look. I finally did, at least I tried. These photographs were the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s one thing to look at an ear in a plastic bag and it’s another thing to see Paul’s face just like that. I hid the photographs under my mattress.
Chace arrived at noon. He shook his head. He just didn’t believe it. He didn’t know what to do. He said that Big Paul was demanding custody of the children and until he had it wouldn’t sign the note. He would pay a ransom of one million dollars if the children were on the next plane to London.
I blew up. “I don’t want to give up my children, but if it means that he’ll pay Paul’s ransom, I’ll take five million, and the children will be on the next plane.” Chace went to telephone. When he came back he told me that Big Paul was still saying, “No. One million and the children.”
I said, “No way, no way.”
Chace said he’d tell Iacovoni to offer one million dollars anyway.
A week later the kidnappers rejected Big Paul’s offer. Big Paul said publicly he wouldn’t pay more. The old man was waiting for his son to do his duty. The son didn’t know what his duty was or didn’t want to accept it, or still didn’t believe, or couldn’t face reality.
The kidnappers told me they were going to cut off the other ear. They’d cut off one, it would be much easier to do the second. They were going to get off on mutilation. I didn’t know what to do. I spent a lot of time on the phone with my family, trying to figure it out. Chace said he was trying to figure it out.
Then, at three o’clock in the morning I was talking with Lou and this idea came up. I’d appeal directly to Nixon. Old Paul was one of his big supporters. Why not? It was absurd, ludicrous, silly, but why not try? The worst that could happen was I would look like a fool, but what did I care? I picked up the telephone and called ANSA, the Italian news service, asked them how I would go about it. They suggested that I call either AP or UPI. I did; then I dictated a telegram to President Nixon in the White House.
“I’m appealing to you as a citizen of the United States. I have no more options. As a citizen, one is supposed to be able to appeal to their president. As a friend of my father-in-law, and as a human being, please help. I don’t know what else to do.”
Two days later I opened a newspaper and saw in the headlines that the family had agreed to pay the money. I called Iacovoni. He was sheepish. He said yes, he had received a telephone call from London saying that they would pay the full three million. I didn’t believe it. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” He told me that a second of the grandfather’s men had arrived and was using his office. This man had told Iacovoni, “Now that it’s coming down to real money and the arrangements of the drop, we don’t want Gail talking to the kidnappers. Chace has to do all the talking. He’s setting up a phone in an empty apartment and having it monitored by the police and recorded. He’s told the kidnappers to only call at certain times because otherwise no one will be there. Then he can go down to the police station and re-listen to the conversations.”
All of a sudden the money was there, I wasn’t about to ask any questions or make any waves. I just wanted to get on with it
as quickly as possible. I assumed that the boy’s father had signed his father’s note.
Chace told Old Paul’s other man, “Okay. I’ll handle it from here.” He started taking the kidnappers’ calls and they got pissed off. They didn’t understand a word he said. An interpreter wasn’t allowed. Fifty told me that Chace would shout at them in Spanish mixed with one Italian word, four English words, and two half-Spanish words. It made me sick to my stomach. The kidnappers were silent for days. We thought maybe they were cutting Paul up again.
December came in as they waited. The cold was bitter. There was an extraordinary tension in the air.
Gail:
To get three million dollars [1.6 billion lire] together in small used notes is an incredible logistical exercise. There were a lot of people working on it. All of a sudden there was an awful lot of fuss going on in the bank; there are various clerks involved in preparing a large amount of money. They had to find a special machine to photograph all the notes because, obviously, the kidnappers were concerned about whether the money was going to be marked. It was the first thing they thought of. I assured them it wasn’t marked, and it wasn’t.
The fact that the ransom money was being prepared was, like everything else, in the papers every day. We tried to persuade the kidnappers that the handlers of the money should be armed. Maybe someone would follow the money out of the bank. They said, “No way.” I said, “Okay. It’s your risk. It’s your money, and if something happens…” They said, “How could anything happen?” I said, “If you lose the money, we lose.” They said, “If we lose the money, you lose your son.” I said, “You’re the ones causing this. Please let them be armed, they’re not going to use their guns on you.”
There was very little discussion about the details of the drop. Fifty didn’t want to go into it with me. He told me they wanted me to make the same run I had been instructed to make in July. That was their pattern. They had a reason for everything I was to do. They gave me the same instructions except that in July, they had wanted a Cynar sign, but now didn’t. Now they wanted a car with a luggage rack with either two white suitcases on top or a plastic water container—one of those big, plastic, square things. Fifty told me, “You tell us what kind of a car, do the same thing. Leave at eight o’clock in the morning, proceed down the autostrada, eighty kilometers an hour, don’t go over eighty, don’t go under eighty.” If had I to stop, where and how to do it? Pull in a certain way? Obviously, the car would be watched all the time. Which is probably why they said we didn’t need to be armed, because they would be following me anyway. Who was going to be in the car? They didn’t want Chace. They didn’t trust him. They wanted me. They kept saying, “Please have faith in us. Please trust us, it’s our honor,” all that kind of thing. But Chace wouldn’t hear of it. The family didn’t want me around the money. The kidnappers realized in the end they didn’t have any choice. Either he dropped it or there was no money.
Five months almost to the day since it was begun, Chace took sole and undisputed control of the proceedings. He rode into power showing no sign of annoyance at all about his carefully laid plans for splintering the gang or simultaneous exchange being peremptorily swept aside. What remained was a perfect mission for the man who loved danger, though the kidnappers seemed in fact to have him under their thumb throughout. Now, too, at the last, his complicated relationship with Gail came close to exploding.
Chace (notes):
I rented a big car, the Fiat version of a Mercedes, a 132, a big, fancy, heavy car. I just changed cars for the hell of it. I didn’t care what the kidnappers had told Gail. When they called Iacovoni for the last time, he would tell them. The money was in the Banca Commerciale. I counted it forever in the boardroom. The bank’s cashier was there and their director. We had stuff all over the table, money all over the place in bundles. It was all there. We counted and sacked it. I had the money in three sacks in the trunk; it weighed about sixty-seven pounds a sack. It took two hands to swing a sack. I had Frazer [sic] with me, a personal gunman in case tourists stopped us and beat us over the head with their wristwatches. A shotgun man because I was carrying three million dollars. We both had guns. He wasn’t Italian or American.
I left Rome on the morning of December seventh. My instructions were to go through the autostrada gate at exactly nine A.M. I only told Iovinella [of the Rome police] I was leaving and not to let the police anywhere near me. I didn’t want it spread around because I didn’t trust the police not to have some cousin in the Mafia hijack me. If they could keep a close eye on the operation, fine. The police never spotted me going through the autostrada gate. I went with a mysterious person. The kidnappers told us to continue on the road to Reggio Calabria. We would be given a signal; they would throw gravel on the windshield. I drove 460 kilometers south, beyond Lagonegro. I had to drive slowly due to the instructions, the hills, snow, horrible weather. Nobody threw the gravel. We were finally stopped by the fog, snow, and ice. We came back with difficulty because of all the gasoline stations being closed due to the oil embargo. There was a curfew and the police had refused to give me a pass. No one was supposed to be on the road at all.
We got back at about one A.M. I’d run sixteen hours. Nothing happened.
Gail was upset because she didn’t know I was going. She didn’t know when I was going or where I was going. I don’t trust anyone. It was my life and I was driving with three million dollars and I didn’t want anybody to know that I was going to drive all the way to Calabria.
In the middle of that first morning, Iovinella had come to Gail, asking her to sign an indemnity for ordering police to hold off on accompanying Chace. He said the police were working on the principle that it was a kidnapping and, accordingly, staying out of it. So she knew what was afoot, although she didn’t know the details and she didn’t want to know. Early the following morning, when Iovinella told her that Chace had attempted a drop without success, the accumulated tension of five months exploded. She went wild and Chace did too. In his customary fashion he said only, “I gave her a bit of hell,” and blamed her for everything. When they had stopped shouting at each other, she was still able to exclaim, “Poor man.” Their relationship was symbolic of the unlikely alliances forged by this affair.
Gail:
Iovinella came to the house and I signed a paper saying to the effect “No police interference.” Iovinella and I were in touch throughout the day. “Have you heard? What’s going on?” I got very nervous when it got late and called him. He called me right back, and said that he had just spoken to Chace. He was in the toll gate entering Rome with the money. The drop had not been made. I tore into him, “Why did Chace wait? Why did he wait till he got all the way back to the last toll gate to call?”
When Chace called me, I screamed, “My God! Why didn’t you tell me before?” He was wild. He shouted, “I don’t trust you! You’re the fault of everything that’s gone wrong in this whole kidnapping. Women shouldn’t get involved in things like this. You’ve messed up everything. You should have told me what you were doing. I was in a very dangerous position, and you made it worse by ordering the police to stay out of it.”
He was hysterical. I said, “You’re frustrated by not being able to make the drop. I understand. Maybe they did this run so they could find out how long it would take. They aren’t fools.”
He said, “I can’t believe you ordered the police not to protect me. You blew it. This whole kidnapping is your fault. You’re the one who’s delayed everything.”
“Whether you are protected or not didn’t make any difference, and if you knew that you weren’t being protected why did you go on with it anyway? And when did you know? Did you find out at the toll gate? Or did you find out just now? If you did, how could it have been my fault?”
“Now I know what kind of woman you are. If your son dies, you’re going to blame me. I want a letter from you saying you won’t hold me responsible for whatever happens and that I’ve comported myself in a proper fashion th
roughout this business. I know the kind of person you are. You and your father. If something happens to Paul, you’ll take me to court and blame me.” He screamed at me, “You’re nothing but trouble!”
By the time he’d finished, I was in tears, destroyed. I couldn’t figure out what in God’s name had gone on. I said, “Fletcher, I’ll write you a letter. Don’t get excited. You’ve had a long day. I’ve had a long day. Maybe there were mistakes made, but here we are right at the end. Let’s not blow it by fighting.”
Fortunately for all of us, Fifty didn’t call until eleven that night, so I was able to tell him that a man had left at eight o’clock yesterday morning. “He did exactly as you told him, he went to the point where you told him, he didn’t get a signal, it began to snow and, having so much money in the car, he turned ’round and came back.” Fifty said the kidnappers were all really mad at me, screaming and yelling and carrying on. I said, “I don’t know what happened. I promise you, I guarantee you that the man went. The money was in the car. It’s all perfectly regular. I signed a paper to make sure there was no police interference. It was all straight.”
Suppose the kidnappers had called earlier. I wouldn’t have known what to tell them. They would have thought we were really doing a number and they would have cut off Paul’s other ear.
The next day the papers said “the drop had been made” and reported that police had set up to film it. Of course, anything that was reported in the paper at that time was likely to be nonsense. I said, “I really have nothing to say,” which usually means “yes.” We wanted them to think the drop had been made, but it hadn’t.
Two more days went by. Both sides were bruised by the failure of the first run and each was highly suspicious of the other.
Chace (notes):
