“He’s hiding,” a Miami detective sergeant said flatly, “and he won’t come out of his hole until the heat’s off.”
The detective who spotted the Little Havana lookalike was stunned by the resemblance. The man, carrying a newspaper under his arm, denied he was Cardenas. Told to look at the fugitive’s picture in the paper, he paled. “It looks like me,” he acknowledged. He was photographed, fingerprinted, and warned he would probably be stopped again. Trooper Glascock went to his grave, with the reward fund growing, vest donations mounting and the killer still running.
The public defender’s office opened a hotline for Cardenas to arrange a safe surrender. “We’re hoping the police will allow us to get to him first,” said assistant public defender Michael Von Zamft. “We don’t want anybody hurt. We’re trying to help the police.”
Minutes after the hotline number was broadcast on Spanish-language radio, somebody used it.
“Come get me. Come get me. The McAllister Hotel,” the caller said and hung up. Two assistant public defenders and one of their investigators raced to the downtown hotel. They ran up and down corridors and hollered down stairwells: “We’re here, Felix! We’re here to help you!” No one answered, much less Felix Ramon Cardenas Casanova, simultaneously sought in Palm Beach by police who believed they were hot on his trail and detectives in Miami who had surrounded a motel.
The manhunt became hell for the Felix Ramon Cardenas Casanova lookalike, who was afraid to be seen in public. Raul Llerena, a mild-mannered carpet installer with a wife and child, suffered nightmares, waking up screaming, “I’m not him! I’m not him!” He drove down back streets, stayed out of crowds and tried to avoid police. A dead ringer, he was “captured” repeatedly, fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned, fingerprinted and photographed again—”front, side, with a shirt and without a shirt”—and questioned some more. He feared being shot the most.
We met in a shadowy Little Havana parking lot. I brought a photographer. Nervously glancing over his shoulder, Llerena said urgently, “I want everybody to know it’s not me.” He stared bleakly at a news photo of Felix. “It’s my face,” he said, “but it’s not me.”
Three years earlier, he said, people began telling him he had a double. The two frequented some of the same Little Havana establishments but had never met. Now his double was the most-wanted fugitive in the country, a man with a price on his head.
“He’s in a spot,” said Eduardo Perez, a friend with him. “If I was a policeman I’d shoot him right in the head and collect the reward.” Llerena did not laugh.
Police had issued him a card stating that he was not Cardenas. But the Highway Patrol never gave him a chance to whip it out when they “captured” him again that night.
When police showed the fugitive’s photo in Llerena’s neighborhood, helpful residents sent them to his mother-in-law’s home. They flashed the fugitive’s picture. “It looks like my brother-in-law,” his wife’s brother said truthfully.
“I can’t afford plastic surgery,” he said desperately. “I’m afraid I’ll get shot.”
“I guess you’ll be relieved when Felix is captured,” I said.
“I don’t want bad things to happen to anybody,” he quickly insisted, unwilling to offend even the fugitive. “All I want is for my life to be like before—quiet.” He had canceled two carpet-laying jobs that week, afraid to go out on the street. Wherever he went now, he said, people stared, acted strange and headed for telephones. Many tips to police had obviously been sightings of the terrified Llerena.
I told him not to worry, our story would make it clear he was not the wanted man.
“Look at him,” said his cheerful friend, Perez, who also knew Felix Cardenas. “The same nose, the same hair, the eyes …”
Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder. “Please, tell them it isn’t me,” Raul pleaded, then darted into the shadows.
Shortly after ten A.M. the next day, the fugitive called Miami homicide and offered to surrender quietly “with no uniformed police, no sirens, no publicity and no lawyers.”
Trooper Anthony Valdes and Miami Homicide Detective Luis Albueme asked the caller for Cardenas’s birth date. His answer was correct: November 11. “I’m the one who shot the trooper,” he announced and promised to surrender shirtless, to show he was unarmed.
Cardenas had wandered into the tiny meter room at the rear of a friend’s marine shop at three A.M. He slept on dirty newspapers until the man opened for business. Cardenas said he had expected the heat to fade, but it had not, and he realized he was going to be caught. They decided he should surrender and called homicide. Cheers rang out at headquarters when Albuerne radioed that he had Felix in his car.
He freely admitted shooting the trooper but said, “I don’t know why I did it.”
During his eight days on the run, he had been sneaking around in the night, hiding in palmetto bushes and sleeping in cars and utility rooms. On the second or third night he had rented a Little Havana motel room and paid a man twenty-five dollars to buy bandages for his wounded trigger finger. He hid in the motel bathroom so the maid could not see his face. Fearing she was suspicious, he had fled. He had asked many people for help but got none.
“We want to thank the public,” Sergeant Mike Gonzalez said. “They helped us by not helping him.”
Tired, nervous and disheveled, his wounded left index finger swollen and infected, Cardenas appeared relieved that the manhunt was over. “I know what I did was wrong, and I’m willing to accept the consequence,” he said.
The consequence was a life sentence.
A week after the arrest. Highway Patrolman Don Boniface, a colleague of the murdered trooper, answered his door. There stood five neighborhood youngsters he had known for years. “Here’s the money,” one said. “Go get yourself a bulletproof vest.” They handed him a bulky sack containing seventy dollars in nickels, dimes and quarters and fifty dollars in one-dollar bills they had painstakingly collected.
These were kids he had spanked, taken home and lectured. He had coached some of them in Little League and, when they grew up, had issued traffic tickets to a few. The youngest contributor, age three, had donated her candy money.
The six-foot, two-hundred-pound trooper had to duck back inside for a moment in order to maintain his tough-guy composure. The kids wanted Boniface to buy his vest at once and said that any money left should help buy vests for other troopers. They warned that if they ever caught him not wearing his, he would be fined five dollars.
Sounded right to me.
Bulletproof vests work. A lot of cops don’t like to wear them, especially in the summer—but there are police officers in Dade County and a growing legion throughout the nation who would be dead today without them.
Metro-Dade Officer Michael Cain stopped at one A.M. to check a suspicious man in the shadows behind a convenience store. When he stepped out of his cruiser, the man walked quickly around the building. Cain followed. The man was waiting. “I heard a pop and saw the muzzle flash,” Cain told me. The bullet slammed into his midsection. I’ve been shot, he thought, but I’m still standing.
The vest held.
The impact, however, nearly knocked him off his feet. Staggering back, he fired at the fleeing man, who got away.
“I’ve been hit,” Cain radioed. “But I’m okay.” He asked everybody speeding to his aid to slow down. No sense in anybody being hurt.
This was the third time he had been shot at, the first time he was hit. The bullet had ripped through five layers of the twelve-layer Point Blank bulletproof vest. The flattened slug left a small, neat hole in his brown uniform shirt and a painful red bruise over his liver, but the skin was not broken.
The $242 vest was Cain’s second in six years. He wore out the first one. He had almost stopped wearing it after suffering heat stroke while chasing a suspect four years earlier. But now, from a wheelchair in the hospital where he had been taken for observation, he said: “
The vest is cumbersome. It’s heavy. It’s hot in the summer and it’s warm in the winter. But I wish all my friends would wear them.”
When Miami Officer Nathaniel Broom was shot, his bulletproof vest was hanging in his locker at headquarters blocks away. Had he worn it, it might have saved his life.
A steel-jacketed, hollow-point bullet fired from a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson pierced his heart. The fatal impact hurled him back, off his feet, and a second slug slammed through the sole of his shoe.
He was twenty-three. He had stopped a green Volkswagen Beetle headed the wrong way on a one-way street in Overtown. He had been a Police Explorer and served as a military policeman, but Broom was still only eight months out of the police academy. His partner was also a rookie, two months out of the academy. They had no way of knowing the Volkswagen was stolen—or that the driver who jumped out and ran was armed.
Broom bailed out of his patrol car and darted after him, across a busy intersection. Two months earlier, Broom had stopped a stolen motorcycle several blocks from where he had stopped the Beetle. The driver also ran. Broom won a commendation for chasing him down, which may explain, in part, the young officer’s zeal this day.
By the time his rookie partner wheeled their patrol car around. Broom was out of sight, pounding down an alleyway after the suspect. The alley stretches between an aging church and a two-story structure with businesses at street level and apartments above. It is a dead end. The fleeing man tried to escape through an adjacent shop. An employee saw him and shouted to a fellow worker.
“I looked in his face, and he looked in mine,” one of them said later. The cornered man turned and drew a black revolver. “He fell back behind the building for cover. He had the gun in his right hand, balanced it with his left, took his time, aimed and fired. I was astonished. I haven’t seen anything like it since Vietnam. Then he jumped the fence and ran.”
From his vantage point, the man I spoke to could not see the gunman’s target but was sure from his reaction that the victim had fallen. He ran into the street and heard a shout, “Somebody just shot a black policeman!”
It took several minutes for his partner to find Broom, sprawled in a clump of weeds behind the building.
It was too late. They tried anyway. In the emergency room they opened his heart to try to clamp the aorta and saw that nothing could be done.
His brief career had been so outstanding that Broom had been scheduled to be a training officer for the next academy class.
More than 150 Miami police, joined by more than fifty Metro officers, searched buildings and fields with helicopters and dogs, stopping dozens of suspects. They found guns everywhere, in a dumpster, near an expressway embankment, in a patch of weeds. Guns are not unusual in that neighborhood.
Miami’s crime rate was the nation’s highest at the time.
It was not a cop, a chopper or a dog that cornered the killer—it was a machine, a half-million-dollar Rockwell computer system put online by police six months earlier. Forty-eight minutes after the shooting, fingerprints lifted from the Beetle were fed into the computer. It instantly compares a print with hundreds of thousands on file. Within minutes, the computer spit out the name of car thief Robert Patten, age twenty-seven. Such an accomplishment would be a lifetime task for technicians comparing fingerprints.
Witnesses identified photos of the rail-thin six-foot, 120-pound suspect as the cop killer. The murder weapon was found hidden at his grandmother’s home. Cops staked out a motel where Patten’s girlfriend and infant daughter were staying. Police hoped he would appear, and he did. He tried to run, but they tackled him.
His girlfriend told me it might have been all her fault. They’d had a jealous spat before dawn. “I kicked him out,” she said, “and told him he couldn’t see his baby no more.” Now more forgiving, she called him a “gentle man who goes to the park and plays John Denver songs on his guitar for the children.”
Police called him something else: a career criminal. His mother washed her hands of him, saying he had been nothing but trouble all his life. Nathaniel Broom worked a paper route, bagged groceries, graduated from high school and enlisted in the army while Robert Patten was stealing, using drugs, dropping out and building a police record. The gun was stolen, and he was on his way to sell it when he drove the wrong way down a one-way street.
This cop killer was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to die in the electric chair. That’s not the end of his story.
To while away his hours behind bars, Robert Patten ran a personal ad in a supermarket tabloid. He and a Rhode Island woman exchanged photos and letters and fell in love. She moved to Florida, and they were married—presumably, to live happily ever after, or at least until his appeals run out. A color photo was published of Robert Patten and his new bride, grinning and cuddling in front of a gaily decorated Christmas tree: Merry Christmas from Death Row.
Too bad Nathaniel Broom, the young black cop killed by a white car thief, will never marry or see another Christmas.
14
Heroes
Courage is “being scared to death—and saddling up anyway.”
—JOHN WAYNE
The stories I most love to write chronicle the daring and the noble deeds of Miami’s real-life heroes. The best and the bravest among us are not necessarily cops or firefighters; they are often ordinary people who do the extraordinary when they must.
Take bus driver George P. Brown, who was tooling along the airport expressway, following another empty bus back to the barn after an uneventful day. An inner tire on the other bus blew out, and fire began to fall from the wheels. Brown leaned on his horn, drove up alongside and shouted to the other driver, who pulled over where the expressway curves above a low-income residential neighborhood, where dozens of children play on streets that deadend at the highway. Brown maneuvered his lumbering vehicle through traffic and parked it across the expressway to create a barricade. A security guard stopped to help as the two bus drivers scrambled down the embankment to call the fire department.
What Brown feared happened as they returned: Flames ate through the brake linings, and the burning bus began to roll backward, rapidly picking up speed. A Miami policeman came charging up the side of the hill carrying a fire extinguisher—too late. The flaming bus careened off the security guard’s car and crashed into Brown’s bus, setting both afire, but no one was hurt. No one knows where the burning, driverless bus would have gone had it not been for Brown, but in its path were houses, traffic and children.
George P. Brown never read about the technique he used in any driver’s manual. He improvised.
Take the Miami banker faced by a man brandishing a gun and what appeared to be a bomb. The man demanded fifty thousand dollars. The banker coolly reached into his desk drawer for a revolver. “If you blow us up, we go together,” he announced. “Put the gun down, put the bomb down, and raise your hands.” The robber folded first. By the time police and the FBI burst into the bank, he was spread-eagled against the wall. His .357 magnum was loaded, but his bomb was only a cardboard Kotex box rigged with wires and a light switch.
For years I have tried to figure out what makes a real hero and what they share in common. Real heroes think about the safety of others first, not what might happen to themselves. Unlike Hollywood heroes, real heroes are usually unimpressive in appearance and diminutive in stature. None looks like Rambo.
Take Manuel Rodriguez. He was in a nearby Burger King when a van struck a light pole and overturned. The driver, who delivered fruit and vegetables to Miami Beach hotels and restaurants, was pinned underneath. His two small stepchildren were hurled through the windshield.
Rodriguez, twenty, heard the crash and came running. So did Dan Jacobson, forty, a photographer, from his studio across the street.
The driver’s feet protruded from under the truck. There seemed little hope he could still be alive. Rodriguez prayed in Spanish as he tried to pull the truck off the man. Jacobson sc
reamed for jacks.
Rodriguez, five feet seven inches tall and an insulin-dependent diabetic, yelled for help. Motorists came running, with sticks and jacks from their cars. When Miami Beach Police Officer Rick Trado arrived, a dozen people were straining to lift the truck. They managed to hoist it high enough for Trado to scramble beneath. The truck gushed gasoline, and Trado cut his hands on broken glass crawling to the unconscious driver. Then the truck started to slip and the would-be rescuers struggled to hold on to it. Trado wanted out of there. He looked back in alarm and saw “this guy put his shoulder under it.” It was Rodriguez, praying aloud, “Lord, give me the strength! Give us the strength!”
Rodriguez put his back under the truck and groaned, shouldering the weight until Trado dragged the driver to safety. Shaken and trembling afterward, all Rodriguez could remember was praying.
The truck driver died later, but not because no one tried to save him.
Some people resist rescue, and an unpredictable public often refuses to help.
Taxi driver James Pearl, slightly built at 130 pounds, fought for fifteen minutes to save a stranger as people ignored his pleas and slammed doors in his face. A station wagon weaved all over the street in front of Pearl and another cabbie just after dark. Drivers slammed on brakes and leaned on horns as the drunk rammed a parked car head-on. The man was a menace. Pearl stayed to help, as the other cabbie left to report the accident. The intoxicated driver climbed out of his damaged station wagon and fell down, staggered to his feet and fell again. A car almost hit him. Pearl dragged the man out of traffic and asked a truck driver to help him put the drunk back into his car. The trucker refused. Pearl asked other motorists to help him get the man out of the street because another car had just missed him. They drove away. Pearl tried to lead the man to safety, but “he lurched away so hard he nearly fell in front of another car.”
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 23
