by Charles Fox
The next two days I talked to them several times giving them hell for why they didn’t stop me. At first they didn’t believe I’d made the run. They didn’t realize that Gail wasn’t knowledgeable about the details. They said I hadn’t made the trip. I gave them hell, told them about the snow, what I’d seen, the different villages. They came back and said, “I guess you did. It was a bad night, wasn’t it?” So they backed off and got all friendly and said, “Let’s try again.” I said okay but I refuse to drive all night. If you don’t stop me by such and such a time I’m turning back, to hell with you. I’ll drive down the road at the speed you give me and when I get to a certain time I’m coming back, and it’s your problem, not mine. I’m not going to keep driving through Calabria in the middle of the night.”
I told Gail, “Okay. I’ll do it again but no questions. You don’t ask me any questions. It’s going to be done. You just keep out of it.”
I made the second run with Mr. X. Again, I told the police to stay out of it. Follow me but don’t louse it up. They assured me they wouldn’t. Driving down the road Mr. X and I were doing a very careful check of cars that passed us and passed us again and I identified the police in a plain car stopping and looking at a bridge in Solerno. I’d seen him pass me in a blue Alfa Romeo, assumed they were cops, identified them—blue and white car. So they were in the offing, being very discreet, staying out of the way.
After we passed Naples we increased vigilance, Mr. X kept descriptions of drivers on a yellow pad, tracking cars that passed us. One car went by twice, the driver took a look at me so I told Mr. X to take down his description. Then the same car passed with a different driver. We were in business. He went by several times then pulled into a gas station ahead of me. I went into the station and pulled in behind him. The driver got out, and turned his face away. I was surprised he hadn’t seen me drive up behind him. I got a good look at him and he went off to the restroom in a hurry. I checked his car, I didn’t see any sign of hardware and he had three empty suitcases in the back—leather suitcases, pretty good quality. As I was doing this, the service station attendant came. He was obviously wondering what the hell I was doing. I waited for almost ten minutes. The driver stayed out in the washroom watching me so I went my way. No sign of the police car.
I was toodling along at 2:30 P.M., going slowly, minding my own business, keeping alert, smoking my pipe. If it had gotten dark, I probably would have put my pipe away and had my hands free and watched what was going on. I figured I had at least two or three hours to go before anything happened. We were completely relaxed. Gravel hit the windshield. It was the signal. I didn’t think I was going to be stopped until dark. It happened. There was no way anyone could have known where they were going to do it unless they were a member of the kidnap gang.
I stopped. We were off the autostrada on a curving road. As we were going ’round the corner gravel hit the windshield. I slowed down and saw movement, people.
I was driving slowly, when a bowlegged type, rickets, all Italians have rickets down there, came out with a gun in his hand and a handkerchief over his face waving his arms.
I stopped and got out. He kept waving his gun around, telling me to back up. I told him I was going to give him the money, and to be calm and stop waving his gun. I took my pipe out of my mouth, blew some smoke at him, put my pipe back in, and looked at him; he lowered his gun. I turned as his friends were crashing through the underbrush. I think there were three of them but I couldn’t make it out. A guy moved at me a little and I told him to stay where he was. He did. I put it at the edge of the road and then I drove off.
I went back to the apartment I was staying in, and phoned the police and told them to bring over all the photographs of all the people they suspected of being in the kidnap gang. They came over and laid the photos on the kitchen table and I picked out of a whole deck, two men that I had seen that day. I said, “Those are your men.” They were the Malevito brothers, Saverio and Vincenzo. Very tough guys.
I told the police everything that happened, spoke to them for two hours.
In Gail’s telephone conversation with Fifty, they seemed like estranged lovers.
Gail:
Fifty called me after the drop. In many ways he was really so nice. He said, “I don’t have to call you and I really shouldn’t be calling, but I want you to know that it’s all right and we have the money.”
I said, “Is everything okay? You’ve got the money. Is my son all right? Please give him my love. When are you going to let him go?”
He said, “It’s going to take time. Please trust us and please be patient.”
I said, “Come on. Why? You’ve got the money. Please don’t do anything.” There was this whole trust thing. At that point I believed him.
He said, “Trust us. Obviously we have certain things we must do. Give us the time to do them and as soon as I can…” And I said, “Will it be tonight, tomorrow, when?”
He said, “I can’t tell you when it’ll be, but as soon as we can organize ourselves, we’ll release him to you.”
15.
Paul’s release was a complicated exercise carried out in the dead of night.
Paul:
About seven, they led me from the tent. They had kinda dressed me up. It shows you the Italian mentality, isn’t it incredible? They had flannel pants on, new little shoes, blue socks, a white shirt, thick white sweaters. They had expensive clothing, way into that sort of thing. Italians are like that; you have to be at least presentable when you go home. It was snowing, imagine, a hundred miles north of Africa, it was all snow and ice. The snow was high. There was a cliff right in front of us.
I’m sure it was only a five-minute walk, but they made me walk around so it would look longer. They turned me around and around. I was still weak from so much loss of blood. It took so long to walk a kilometer; it took three hours. I couldn’t see anything, they made me wear one of those ski masks with the hole for the face, over the whole neck, but they turned it backwards.
They all said good-bye. Five or six of them, Piccolo and VB1 weren’t there. I think they’d been with me so long; they were scared I would recognize them. One of the guys told me, “Now, don’t talk. Promise not to talk.”
They put me in a car. It was all very organized. “You guys pick him up, then you keep him, you guys let him go…” It was more serious than one thinks. They drove me for, like, seven hours. I slept. I really slept. I bet it was really only forty-five minutes. They just went around and around.
They had patrols. They were more organized than the police. They had systems, incredible systems. They got me and let me go, then caught me. The car would go for a mile, then it would stop and the car would meet another car. Then they would talk and say okay. Then a car goes ahead with us behind. If something goes wrong, they’d wait at the exit. It was like five or six cars—Morris Mini, and an old Alfa 600. You see, they knew that they were really looking for me. The hills were full of police.
At this point they had the money, and they were scared to die. They had families, and they had been paid next to nothing. Maybe seven thousand dollars. I think that some of them must have some sort of debt with some guy. This guy brings them under his thumb, they have to do what he says. One of them didn’t even know my last name.
They talked with the guy at the toll gate. They paid for the ticket with me right there, right in front of him. I was not even lying on the floor, the seat. It wasn’t dark; it’s all neon there. They were joking with him, like, yeah we’ll see you later. That’s it. They’re all the same.
They changed cars again about five minutes from there, on the side of the road. A Fiat 1100, those old Fiats. All military people have them; most of the government cars are like that.
They never went off the autostrada. They made U-turns, going back and forth. But you see it doesn’t matter, the autostrada was deserted. Two kidnappers went to phone my mother. They told her that she could find me exactly here, or there. So she drove out. Th
ese were new guys. They were not from the south; it’s impossible to be from the south and not have an accent.
Gail remembered the call.
Gail:
Fifty called me at eleven-thirty and said, “You’d better hurry. You’d better get in the car right away, because at one-thirty this morning, we’ll be releasing Paul at such-and-such a place.”
I said, “One-thirty? It’s going to take me a long time to get there. The weather’s horrible. How’s he going to be?”
Fifty said, “Don’t worry. We’ll give him blankets. We’ll tell him what to do. He’ll be told to wait there for you. Can I tell him you’re coming?”
“Absolutely.”
He also threatened me. He said, “Don’t come with the police and don’t talk. There are a lot of things you’re never supposed to say. No matter where you are in the world, if you turn us in, we’ll get you, all of you. Please hurry. It’s cold.”
“Please tell Paul I’ll give our family whistle, and not to be afraid to just come down when he hears it.”
I immediately called Iovinella. He didn’t want me to go. I knew what they were thinking. They were sure Paul was going to be as dead as could be. We argued about who was going to go. They said, “We’d rather you didn’t go.” And I said, “I am going to go and there’s no question about it. But who’s going to go with me?”
Lou obviously wanted to, but it wasn’t possible. I panicked. I said, “Can’t Chace and I go by ourselves? If you want to come some other way, okay, but can’t we be in separate cars? I promised I wouldn’t come with the police.”
Then the big problem was how to get me out of the house because there were press all over the place outside my door. We made plans for me to go up ladders, over rooftops, down drainpipes, and out alleys and finally the d’Almeidas said, “If someone could just take her out the front door like she’s going out. Then we’ll dash off and meet at a certain place. From there, we’ll decide what to do.”
So this friend of mine took me down and got me out the door and shoved me into a funny little car, took me to a private residence, where Iovinella was. There were lots of police there. I told them, “I’m going.” They said, “Okay. If it’s not good, can you take it?” We left. Chace came with us in Iovinella’s car with another car following.
The moment Paul had been dreaming of for five months had finally arrived.
Paul:
The one who wasn’t driving said, “Don’t talk, or else we’ll cut your tongue out.” The other driver said, “Maybe we shouldn’t let him off, he’ll talk. I promise you in six months, he’ll talk.”
They stopped and let me out. There was a cold wind and it was night. There were enormous blocks of ice on the side of the autostrada. There was a big concrete drain thing, a pipe. They lifted me over that, walked up the hill across a field or something. They gave me blankets and a pack of cigarettes. That was really nice. They were going to give me fifty lire, but they didn’t.
I said to them, “Don’t worry after me, guys, I won’t say anything. I won’t incriminate you.”
He said to me, “There’s a guy watching behind, so don’t turn around; wait ten minutes, take off your mask. Your mother will be here in a few hours.”
He went to get in the car with the other guy and then turned back and gave me his coat. I felt great. I wasn’t scared. Not at that point. They were much more scared than I. But they kept their word, men of honor.
I heard the car start, the shifting of gears, first, second, third. It was a strange feeling. It was like a huge weight taken off me, twenty pounds on first, twenty pounds on second, twenty on third.
I got up, took the mask off. It was dark.
I walked down across the field and up the autostrada to a gas station. There was a phone there but I didn’t have any money. I asked a soldier who was outside for a gettone. He refused. I went in and asked to use the phone. I didn’t have any shoes on and my head was all bandaged up. There were about three people inside and they just looked at me and didn’t say anything. I obviously freaked them out. They wouldn’t give me anything, so I left.
I walked on down the autostrada through a tunnel to some houses, knocked on doors, nothing. That was such a downer, you know? My God, after all this, I have to come back to this indifference? Really cold. I walked up a mile and lay in the middle of the freeway, looking dead. A few cars and people stopped, but then they’d go again. An ambulance passed me. Exasperation. I left the autostrada on the turnoff to Lagonegro.
Finally a truck stopped. I told the driver, “I’m Paul Getty.”
He said, “You are, aren’t you?” Then he drove off.
Once again Capt. Martino Elisco, the carabinieri officer who had led the unsuccessful storming of the house where Paul had been kept, was called into the case. Captain Elisco was stout, with a smooth, round face, large teeth, and small feet.
He was in charge of a carabinieri station in Lagonegro, a small, impoverished hill town built on two sides of a gorge, four hundred kilometers south of Rome.
Elisco:
In Lagonegro the people are very poor and very quiet. There is virtually no delinquency to deal with, no bar fights. There used to be crimes of “honor” in the area, but even they have died out, apart from sheep rustling, I deal almost all the time with robberies. The Getty kidnapping put Lagonegro on the map, unfortunately.
I was patrolling the area until about two in the morning. We knew that somewhere the boy was being released. They had told us in Rome earlier in the evening and I had been cruising up and down the autostrada through fog and snow, but I had seen nothing and went home to bed.
I was sound asleep when I was called at two forty-five and told that Paul had been spotted at the bus shelter south of the carabinieri garage. I dressed and drove my new blue Alfa Romeo to where the truck driver said he saw Paul. There was sleet falling and heavy snow before that. Lagonegro looked like a German village under the snow. There was the boy, trembling badly, soaking wet, with no shoes.
Paul climbed into my Alfa and we drove to Lagonegro. I told him, “You know, nobody thought that you were kidnapped, until just now.”
“Yes, that’s what makes me so sad.”
“Do you know how much was paid?”
“No,” he said. I told him and asked him if he knew who paid. “No.” I told him it was his grandfather, his family. “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “They’ll take it out of my inheritance.”
The carabiniere’s office is across the piazza in the Old Town. The captain led Paul past a little shrine with a couple of candles in the wall and up three flights of gray marble stairs. Carabinieri with thick black mustaches and crisp khaki uniforms looked on with reserve.
Gail’s route to this office was circuitous.
Gail:
We arrived at the place on the autostrada where we’d been told Paul would be waiting around four in the morning. It was still dark. It was freezing cold and we didn’t know where we were, whether we were at the right place or not. The kidnappers said they would leave someone with him. I actually thought when I whistled or called and they heard my voice, these people would shove him forward. And that would give them time to disappear. I believed it. I was a fool. Obviously they weren’t going to be sitting there waiting. We searched around, looked in all the concrete culverts, expecting to find his body stuffed in one of them. Nothing. It got lighter and lighter. They broke into the house opposite, to see if he was there, and finally they sent one of the cars on down through the tunnel south to see if anything could be found.
I thought maybe he had hidden himself under a tree or fallen asleep. He was alive. There was no question in my mind. He was just up there on that hill somewhere. Finally the police were getting fed up. They said, “We’re really wasting our time here.”
Chace said, “Before we go away, let’s just think about this a little bit. If you were a young boy and you had been held for five months and four days, would you sit on a hill because they said to wait for y
our mother? I wouldn’t. I don’t know this boy, but from what I hear there’s no way he’d sit there. I’d get out as soon as I could.”
I didn’t want to leave this place, because I somehow felt if I left … I said, “Could we just do one more look, please? Let’s all look around. We may find something.” One of the men from the squadra mobile climbed over the wall in the area by the fence, went up a little, and came up with a blanket and a blindfold, holding it above his head, dancing and shouting. We got back into the second squadra mobile car, with Iovinella driving. Now we knew that he had been here, all we had to do was figure out if he’d gone north or south. They sent the two cars we had with us off in opposite directions, one north, one south, to see if we could find him.
Meanwhile, Paul was being well looked after by some extremely curious carabinieri who each wanted to get himself in the photograph with the boy.
Elisco:
Back at the station, I was amazed how good his physical condition appeared to be, standing without any shoes in the freezing road for six hours. We called the doctor. He came and gave the boy a shot of tranquilizer while my wife cooked him a meal and I gave him some clothes—a sweater and a pair of pants. But I have small feet and I couldn’t find any shoes in the station that would fit him.
Gail was still floundering around in the snowstorm.
Gail:
We drove south on the autostrada because we had to drive south anyway; we headed that way when we stopped. We saw a carabiniere’s car and we asked if they knew anything. The carabinieri don’t care for the Roman squadra mobile. They’re very defensive. All they would tell Iovinella was, “Yes, he’s been released. He’s been taken somewhere and we do have a report that he’s all right.”
They wouldn’t tell us where he was. “Can you give us an idea where he is?” They told us, “Well, if you’ll come to such and such a place, maybe they’ll know something.” There was a fight between the carabinieri and the squadra mobile. The carabinieri spoke with another car on the radio and were told nothing had happened, or that maybe somebody had been taken to Potenza, that maybe we should go there and check. They told us, “All we can tell you is that the boy is in the hands of the carabinieri, but we don’t know where.”
