As I Saw It
Page 2
“I don’t think so,” she shot back. “Just to be with me is revenge enough.” “I’m not easy.” Similarly, when I asked Burt if he had married Linda out of guilt, he was quick to answer that he hadn’t.
“That I would not have done,” he said. “I’m not that noble. It was that I loved Linda, and I wanted to take care of her.”
We reminisced about some of the other times we had met over the years. I remembered my first visit to their apartment to interview them after they reunited, when Linda reached under the bed to reveal a box of news clippings she had saved. Yellowed with age, these were all mounted in scrapbooks, detailing every episode of their unusual love story.
At one point in the interview, Linda interrupted her husband to say, “You know, Burt, if not for Marvin Scott, and me seeing you on his broadcast, you’d still be looking for me.”
Smiling, Burt turned to me and exclaimed, “Thank you, Cupid.” I had been called many things in my long career, but this was the first time I was called Cupid! Still, the nickname stuck. When they presented me with a copy of their book, A Very Different Love Story, Burt and Linda inscribed it, “To Marvin Scott, the cupid who got us to the altar.”
* * *
Getting to know the two of them over the years, I came to sense that in many ways, the Pugaches genuinely needed one another. They claimed they never talked about the past, or rehashed old wrongs. As infatuation had given rise to the embers of hatred and anger between them, in turn the same embers fed the flames of their love over the years, and the couple insisted that through everything, they remained totally devoted to one another.
“You try to hurt me,” Burt hinted, “she’ll kill you.”
Still, it was hardly a perfect union. Though Burt once described their bond as a “fairytale marriage,” they fought like crazy, constantly bickering over the most inane things. Linda would sometimes refer to Burt as “El Creepo.” And although Burt has always been open with his expressions of love for Linda, “love” is a word Linda could not use.
“It’s something psychological,” she once confided in me. When I asked her if she loved Burt, she replied, “Yeah—when he behaves.” This was in reference to a time when he didn’t behave, and had gotten caught with another woman whom Linda had threatened. That story, like many others of their life together, made headline news. Nonetheless, Linda stood by her man. “So he strayed,” she told a reporter, downplaying the incident. “He’s not the only man who’s strayed. The only thing is, he was stupid to get caught.”
Back in the seventies, I tried to interest a number of producers in making a film based on the Pugach tale. Most of them considered the story too bizarre, and passed. But in 2010, producer Dan Klores was inspired to tell the couple’s saga in the HBO documentary Crazy Love. During a broadcast following the release of the film, I asked the couple what it was that they thought had held their marriage together for more than three decades. Almost ten seconds of silence elapsed before Linda prompted her partner,
“You wanna answer that, Burt?”
“I’m still obsessed with her,” he proclaimed. For her part, Linda tried to explain why many people had difficulty accepting their twisted love story, which had endured for so many years.
“Because people don’t like happy endings,” she reasoned. “Our story has a happy ending.”
2
REMEMBERING JFK
JFK during a press conference in Charleston WV, April 1960. Photo taken by author and donated to the Library of Congress.
John F. Kennedy struck me as a towering, impressive figure the day I came face-to-face with him in front of the state capitol in Charleston, West Virginia. He was good-looking, and as vibrant as the afternoon sun bearing down on him. His message to the voters in the economically distressed state in the belly of Appalachia was one of hope. He pledged that if he was elected president, he would work unceasingly to improve economic development and create jobs in the poverty-stricken area. West Virginia was a battleground state, and a victory there would be pivotal for Kennedy in winning his party’s nomination. Yet though his message—delivered in his rich Boston accent—was strong, his odds of winning that state’s presidential primary just four weeks away were slim. He was a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant state, and the polls that day in April 1960 had him 20 points behind his Democratic rival, Senator Hubert Humphrey.
With his Ivy League demeanor, Kennedy was the ultimate preppy candidate, a portrait of sartorial splendor in his two-button dark suit. Yet there was a down-to-earth quality about him as he greeted the West Virginian voters, grasping their hands and encouraging them to vote for him. I followed him to the coal mines, where he sat, shoes muddied, alongside miners trying to eke out a living. After a news conference at the Kanawha Hotel, I engaged the Massachusetts senator in conversation. He told me he recognized he had a difficult battle in the weeks leading up to the May 10th primary, and that he planned to travel up and down the state encouraging voters to place their trust in him.
Adding to the candidate’s appeal, of course, was that of his beautiful wife, Jacqueline. I’ll never forget the night I made eye contact with her as I sat at a press table at a fund-raising dinner. She was elegant, radiant. At one point she caught me staring at her admiringly, and smiled back at me graciously.
Ultimately, Kennedy’s warmth and charisma made a strong contrast to the studied, stereotypical political style of his opponent Humphrey, and triumphed over his image as a wealthy politician. He won a landslide victory, winning almost 61% of the primary vote. Unable to match Kennedy’s well-financed operation, Humphrey bowed out of the race, assuring Kennedy the Presidential nomination.
Kennedy’s historic victory in West Virginia remains mired in controversy. Frank Sinatra’s daughter Tina has claimed that Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family, reached out to her father for a favor, to ask Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana to help deliver the union vote in the Mountain State.
Giancana reportedly agreed, telling Sinatra, “It’s a couple of phone calls.” But the deal Sinatra brokered, it is said, came back to haunt him when the Kennedy administration cracked down on the Mafia, an effort led by JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy, who at the time was Attorney General. Over the years since President Kennedy’s death, skeptics of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald have theorized that the Mafia, acting in retribution, was in fact responsible for the murder.
* * *
For many, the assassination of our 35th president endures as a deeply personal experience: a lingering mix of heartbreak, nostalgia and the lost promise of Camelot. And they can tell you exactly where they were when the shots rang out in Dallas, that fateful day in 1963.
As a fledgling reporter, I was in the newsroom that day, and I’ll always remember the relentless sounding of bells from the teletype machines—a rapid succession of ten tones accompanied by the word “Flash,” alerting us that something catastrophic had happened.
It began with a teletype operator frantically breaking into a transmission—Urgent—“shots fired at President’s motorcade,” quickly followed by five more bells—Bulletin—“Kennedy hit.” The sound was piercing; the keys kept clattering. Then came the rarely heard ten bells, and the words “Flash—President Kennedy is dead.” We were numb.
Over the years, those bells have resonated in my mind at moments that seemed to bring the past into the present—as when I stood on the Grassy Knoll years later, and listened to foreigners tell me how much they had loved our young president. I will never forget the man I first met campaigning for the presidency in the coalfields of West Virginia, when he was young and full of life. And I will never forget the bells that proclaimed his death.
3
CHARLIE’S ODYSSEY
Charlie Walsh being interviewed by me on the steps of city hall.
Charlie Walsh was a bank thief of sorts, but not the John Dillinger type. The theft wasn’t his idea—it was the bank’s doing. One day in 197
8, in a massive computer error, the Commercial Trust Company of New Jersey handed him more than $100,000. Charlie gave them a few weeks to catch their mistake. But they didn’t; and so, down on his luck and destitute, the 55-year-old former Wall Street clerk took off with the loot on what would be a three-month, 17,000-mile cross-country odyssey.
Later, his body racked with terminal cancer, Charlie was nevertheless having a ball reliving his great adventure for me from his hospital bed. From time to time a nurse would interrupt to take Charlie’s blood pressure or feed him some medication. But sick as he was, it was easy to see that Charlie’s wild ride had made him a happy man.
Sitting beside his bed at the Jersey City Medical Center, I could see the gleam in his pale-blue eyes—sheltered behind thick bifocals—as he remembered the cold day in December when he opened his bank statement and saw a balance of $101,885.13. He knew something was wrong right away; all he actually had in his account was $1,300.
At first, “I really didn’t think anything of it,” he said, adding, “I knew it was a mistake and I figured I’d get a corrected statement in the mail in a day or so.” I needled him a little, and brought out an infectious giggle. “Well, I did do a little daydreaming,” he confessed. “I couldn’t help it. What if it really was my money? What would I do with it?”
It would be almost a month before the quiet, unassuming man would let his daydreaming carry over into reality. The timing of the bank blunder, Charlie said, couldn’t have been better. He laughed, “it was like hanging a steak in front of a hungry dog.” A loner by nature, Charlie had been unemployed for four years, and lived on his own in a ramshackle old house that he was about to lose to the city because he owed more than $17,000 in taxes on it. Even so, he had waited patiently for the next bank statement to arrive; and when it did, it still showed the large balance. “Then I really started daydreaming and thinking about it,” he said.
Still figuring the bank would catch the error sooner or later, Charlie walked into a local branch and asked the teller to check on his balance. To the penny, it was still $101,885.13. Four days later, Charlie decided, “What the hell,” and started to withdraw the money.
“The first day, I took $11,500 in cash in the morning,” he recalled, “and I went back in the afternoon and took out about $40,000 in treasury checks, in $7,000 and $8,000 denominations.” For a man who never had as much as a parking ticket to put him on the wrong side of the law, Charlie insisted he wasn’t a bit nervous or scared. “That’s what surprised me,” he said. “I just walked in like I owned the damn bank, and drew out the money. I don’t know where the hell I got the nerve. I did it very well.” He stuffed the money into a beat-up old attaché case, and was so pleased with himself, he decided to take himself to a movie—Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yet even in celebration of his newfound prosperity, he was hard-pressed to shake his old frugal mindset. “I was sitting there with all this money in my lap, cursing myself for wasting $3.50 on a lousy movie,” he chuckled.
Over the next several days, Charlie traveled from one branch to another, withdrawing more cash and treasury checks. A couple of tellers queried why he was taking out so much cash at once; he told them he was a coin dealer, and was buying new coins for his collection—not too far off, as Charlie was in fact a coin collector. He thought it was all over during one of his last withdrawals, when the bank manager informed Charlie that they were looking into a possible error with his account. Choosing not to stick around, Charlie quickly told the manager that he was in a hurry and would come back the next day—then went to Barclays Bank in New York to purchase $23,000 in traveler’s checks.
“That would be an easy way to unload the money without any questions being asked,” Charlie reasoned. Charlie withdrew all the money in his account over the next few days—except for $85.13. “Why did you leave that?” I asked. “I didn’t want to be a pig,” he laughed. “I didn’t want to close out my account.”
Charlie was hardly oblivious to the fact that he had committed a crime, and could be caught.
“When I did it, I knew it was wrong,” he said. “I knew the money wasn’t mine.” But, he reasoned, “everything was going down the tubes, and I decided, sure, I’ll take a chance. What have I got to lose?” He had already sold off most of his valuable coin collection, along with his insurance policies, and was as down and out as he had ever been. “You feel like a bum when you can’t even buy somebody a drink,” he quipped. He figured he would try to make his newfound riches last for the rest of his life, and perhaps open a small hobby shop somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Now, 55, overweight and balding, Charlie set out on the journey of his life. His first major purchase was a flashy—but used—Ford LTD with racing stripes, like the one made famous by the then-popular Starsky & Hutch television series. He paid cash for the car, peeling off 32 hundred-dollar bills, and hit the road.
As Charlie began his drive west—heading for Las Vegas, where he figured he could easily cash all of his traveler’s checks—the bank finally discovered its error, and filed grand larceny charges against him. Charlie, however, was nowhere to be found. Detectives trudged across the unshoveled snow piled up on the sidewalk in front of his dilapidated house, only to find that the house was completely vacant.
* * *
That’s when I was introduced to Charlie Walsh’s story. Doing a report for my nightly newscast, I listened to neighbors describe Charlie as a pillar of the community, a kind, polite man who helped others. The more I learned about Charlie and the deeper I got into his plight, the more empathy I felt for him. Here was a guy who had hit rock bottom, and was living out a fantasy to which most people could relate. And relate they did. While some locals I interviewed expressed surprise that Charlie would “steal” money from the bank, many flat-out rejoiced for him.
“Take the money and run, Charlie,” exclaimed one neighbor.
Charlie did run—but cautiously. He did everything in his power not to draw attention to himself. He stayed in nice but second-rate motels, ate at “halfway decent” restaurants and limited himself to one drink at bars.
“I didn’t want to get drunk and lose the money,” he recalled. “I had all that money with me, and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” At one local bar, he was drawn into a hot discussion about a councilwoman who had given back $20,000 that a bank had erroneously credited to her account. What would you do? was the question among the patrons; and when it came around to Charlie—sitting on a stool with $100,000 on his lap—he said, laughingly, “Hell, I’d call the bank and tell them they made a mistake.”
Though police had put out a national alert calling for his arrest, Charlie said he wasn’t looking over his shoulder while he was driving. “I don’t know why, but it didn’t bother me. I was just enjoying the scenery, and having a good time. It was the first time I’d traveled like that.” Still, he knew he could be caught if he was ever stopped and had to produce identification. His license plate, too, would be a dead giveaway. So he stopped in a few bars and tried to engage people in conversation about how to obtain false identification, once even going so far as to drive to a darkened neighborhood to meet up with “some guy”—but fear set in, and he drove off without getting his fake ID.
He had a close call with police in Oregon, where he was pulled over for going 62 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone.
“It was a speed trap, and I got caught,” Charlie related. “I figured the next thing I would see were handcuffs.” But instead of asking for his license, the police just handed him a ticket and told him to mail it in with $17 to the local court. With a deep sigh of relief, Charlie drove on. “It was my lucky day,” he chuckled.
* * *
Charlie had been on the run for two months when I called police for a follow-up report. They told me they had traced him to Las Vegas, but he had already left by the time detectives arrived; and as I pressed for information, it became clear there was none. The national manhunt for the portly, balding man with thick glasses and
no previous criminal record had gone cold. He had never changed his appearance, his license plate or his personal identification—and yet, in the vastness of America, Charlie Walsh had disappeared.
Charlie’s face would later brighten with excitement as he recalled his adventure in Las Vegas, where he was dazzled by the city’s neon lights—and his ability to easily unload his traveler’s checks. He was right in figuring that the casinos would cash them without question, so now he went from casino to casino, ultimately cashing 42 of his 56 $250 traveler’s checks. He was tempted to gamble along the way, but resisted.
“After seeing all that money being shoved down the rat-hole in the table,” he mused—“no, thank you.” He only gave in once, to the lure of a slot machine. He fed seven nickels into the one-armed bandit, and on the last one, lights flashed and bells rang. Charlie had won—all of $7. Meager winnings, perhaps—but the moment he won, Charlie felt a greater sense of accomplishment than he did in getting away with the bank’s money.
Polite and mild-mannered as he was, Charlie wasn’t particularly good-looking, and had never been a ladies’ man. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been out with a woman, much less had sex with one. Now, in Vegas with tens of thousands of dollars stashed away in a little vinyl bag—his attaché case had proven too big and beat-up for the journey, so he replaced it along the way with a $5 bag from Woolworth’s—Charlie decided to do something he had never done before. He enlisted the services of two prostitutes for $100 an hour. At first this was far more than Charlie had bargained for: he felt inadequate and uncertain about what to do, and was embarrassed to get undressed in front of the women. But they reassured him as professionals can, and it was with a loud chuckle that Charlie later recounted his three-hour love tryst.