Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Andrew’s anger and desperation did not seem to register on his self-absorbed friends, though; they continued to see him as the glad-handing money machine. “Andrew was losing his looks. What he lacked in looks he made up for with money,” Franz declares. “Because of his personality and money, people just never questioned him. The money took care of everything.”

  Andrew’s dark fantasies were fueled by crystal meth, cocaine, and pornography. “Everyone has his own sexual fetishes,” says Erik. “His was watching that.” Andrew especially liked the popular gay porn star Cort Stevens. “I told him once I was going up to San Francisco,” Franz relates. “Andrew said, ‘I want you to get me a video with Cort Stevens. Franz, I’m giving you fifty dollars. Rent the movie. You need a fifty-dollar deposit without a credit card. I want to keep the movie.’ It was a weird movie,” Franz says. “In every scene Cort Stevens is tied up, getting shocked. The other guy in leather has six or seven types of Tasers [stun guns], touching every part of Stevens with a Taser, and every time he’d get a shock.”

  Apparently Andrew would masturbate while watching porn tapes. “Erik was joking with me a couple of nights after I brought the videos,” Franz reports. “Erik said, ‘I came home, and that video was on the VCR, with a jar of Vaseline next to the TV, with a dirty rag.’”

  Erik felt that Andrew’s sexual proclivities were so extreme that they precluded the normal pickup, “tricking” situation. “Whether it’d be the whips or making the guy walk around in shackles—who knows? You need privacy for that. He’s always had bondage videos … Andrew always liked S&M—more the tying up, just the degradation, not the asphyxiation.”

  WITHIN A FEW months, Erik says, Andrew was again delivering mysterious briefcases full of cash. He had a separate phone line under the name Andrew Cunanan for drug transactions. “Jeff flat-out told me that Andrew was dealing drugs,” says Michael Williams. “Ecstasy, crystal meth, and cocaine. He said, ‘He’s up to his old profession.’”

  Andrew had landed right in the middle of a drug ring that operated with impunity on one of Hillcrest’s busier streets, fronted by several legitimate businesses. The San Diego police seem to know nothing about it to this day. Two retail stores share a common loading dock, where their large delivery truck allegedly comes up from Mexico or Arizona filled with crates of colorful ceramics and plaster garden ornaments, which in turn are filled with large quantities of crystal meth, pills, steroids, marijuana, and cocaine. The proprietor of a nearby pornography business is also allegedly involved and has a drop behind his store. The drugs are then shipped to the East inside the products of one of the businesses, and all payments are made with briefcases full of cash such as the ones Andrew carried.

  This is by no means the only drug ring in Hillcrest, however. Several bartenders deal—one allegedly uses an old sewer pipe two floors below a decorating-business front as his drop. Anyone in Hillcrest can easily score drugs all over the neighborhood. “They’re making an enormous profit,” says former California Cuisine waiter Anthony Dabiere. “There’s more than proof in the pudding. There’s dipsy dooodly and you-you hoo.” Andrew was working close to home.

  That summer and fall of 1996 after Andrew and Norman broke up, Andrew started hanging around with Dominick Andreacchio, whom he deemed another Tom Cruise look-alike. He liked showing Dominick off, but he never stopped talking about David Madson. “He was so into him,” says Dominick.

  One day when Dominick was shopping with Andrew, he happened to see Andrew’s credit card with the name Cunanan on it. Dominick recalls, “‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s my other name.’ And he showed me his other passport. He had a couple.” But Andrew denied that he was mixed up in drugs, though he freely admitted to Dominick that he was into illegal activity of a different kind. He said that “things would just fall off trucks. And I was, like, ‘What are you talking about?’” When Andrew gave Dominick a CD player, for example, he told him it came from an inside job. “Like big electronics truck shipments to some-place; he would be on the inside with other people and steal the electronic equipment.”

  Dominick had a boyfriend, so Andrew did not come on to him overtly. But he was very open with Dominick about what he liked sexually. “He used the electric-shock stuff. It was always very weird. He said stuff like, ‘Oh, I’d like to electrocute him.’ And I was, like, ‘Whatever, you weirdo.’”

  15

  Spinning

  IN SAN DIEGO over the holidays of 1996 Andrew had periods of uncharacteristic quiet, but then in a moment he would become the manic, witty Andrew of old. He and Erik gave a tree-trimming party, which he insisted also be called a Chanukah party. On another occasion, taking his Jewish identity even further, he boldly extracted a $100 bill out of his friend Arthur Harrington’s hand as he was holding it out to pay a bartender at Flicks, declaring, “This is my Chanukah present.” On Christmas, Ken Higgins, one of Andrew’s friends from his professional clique, invited him to a big seafood dinner. In the middle of the meal, Andrew left the room to go and read a magazine. “Uh-oh, this is a mood swing,” Ken would tease him at such times, but no one was really alarmed. Few knew that Andrew had started using morphine and Demerol in order to go to sleep.

  Late at night, Andrew’s roommate, Erik Greenman, would see him injecting himself with his drug of choice, crystal meth. In the morning, “he’d be coming down and feeling awful,” remembers Erik. Sardonically, he would tell him, “Never do crack, Erik. It’s a ghetto drug.” There was speculation that Andrew was also using heroin, but no needle tracks were found on his body. In Andrew’s world, though, drugs and pornography were so prevalent that nobody bothered to wonder if the two might be feeding on each other, in his case, in a way to cause alarm. Experts on serial-killer behavior say the combination can be explosive. Andrew’s narcissism and his pathological lying had already made him a borderline personality; mental illness also ran in his immediate family. But Andrew made sure that no single person had all the facts. Finally there was such a high level of tolerance for his behavior that in fact he was surrounded by enablers. When Robbins went to some of Andrew’s friends out of concern for his rapidly depleting finances, for example, their response was, “Yeah, we sure are going through his money, aren’t we?”

  On New Year’s Eve, Sheila Gard was shocked when she saw Andrew for the first time in months. She recalls saying, “‘Wow! What happened to you? You’re disheveled!’ He looked bad. His eyes were sunken, he was overweight, not talkative. He was completely different, all by himself. He seemed depressed—he was not running around, not being the life of the party. He was not in a good mood.” He also had dark circles under his eyes because he was frequently staying up all night at Wolfs, the tweakers bar. Nevertheless, on New Year’s David got a call from Andrew, who told him, “I’ve left my old ways. I realize how close I was to losing everything, and I just want to make an honest living.” He thanked David for helping him see the light and told him that he was going to start a construction company in Mexico for building set designs—appropriating Robbins’s life once again.

  The truth was that Robbins had offered Andrew a job, and Andrew had refused his help. His phony grandiosity had kept him from being anything but slippery and scared. Andrew was boxed: If he admitted the truth, he would be mocked as a loser and a liar. But he had come to the point where his lies were costing him the only two people he really cared about. He had no job, and little money, and he was in the throes of a major depression. Where was the light? Andrew began spinning out of control.

  NEITHER JEFF NOR David wanted Andrew around, but they couldn’t bring themselves to tell him that outright. At the end of January, Andrew returned to Minneapolis. He stayed with Jeff, who was suffering through the Minnesota winter and desperate to find a new job in a warmer climate. Jeff had also acquired some of Andrew’s expensive tastes and was piling up bills. Robbins Thompson began hearing reports that Andrew had lent Jeff several thousand dollars. If so, that may have made Andrew think he had license to pre
ssure Jeff into helping him in his drug business. For even if cocaine was a no-no, one could still make a nice living in the Midwest selling steroids. Steroids did not carry the same stigma in the gay community as other illegal drugs; they were seen as workout boosters. Jeff may not have had much choice about having Andrew as his ever more frequent guest.

  In the end, “Jeff and David were very supportive,” says Robbie Davis. “If Andrew came into town for whatever reason, Jeff had Andrew stay at his house. Or if David was out of town, there was no problem for Andrew to stay and keep David’s dog.” Andrew seemed determined not to be forgotten by either of them.

  After Andrew picked up a big dinner tab one night, Robbie asked David where all the money came from. “David said, ‘He dabbles in cocaine, and he’s got a sugar daddy who takes care of him.’ I said, ‘Hell of a sugar daddy to pay three hundred fifty dollars on a meal when you’re only doing it to show off in Minnesota.’”

  That particular weekend in late January 1997, Andrew went to a birthday party David gave for Robbie. Jeff was also there with a young date. Andrew told Robbie that he was kept by “an older, real-estate tycoon.” He also mentioned that he had been in Chicago, but he did not link the two things. Andrew was so “giddy and jumpy” that Robbie thought he must be on cocaine.

  “Are you messing around with whitey tonight?” Robbie asked him.

  “Been there, done that” was Andrew’s dismissive reply. Robbie thought of Andrew as an intrusive wimp. “But David’s explanation was, ‘He’s my friend. He’s an ex. I don’t see him that often, Rob. There’s nothing to worry about.’”

  By now, back in California, Andrew had shaved off most of his hair and forsaken his trademark glasses for contacts. He was heavier and wore loose, sloppy clothes. “What’s up with the hair?” Franz asked him. “Low maintenance,” Andrew replied. His moodiness continued, but he refused to let anyone penetrate his shell. One day he got up from the sofa in his apartment and said, “Erik, I’m unhappy.” Erik says, “Then he’s up and gone. He’d give you a glimpse, and then he wouldn’t.” Robbins attempted to reach him more than once. “He just said he was tired, and that was the closest it ever came.” Robbins pressed him about what he was going to do, because he was “definitely at the end of his rope” and obviously running out of money. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Andrew replied, and announced that he was leaving San Diego and moving to San Francisco. He once confided secretly to Franz that he was mulling a job with a real-estate title company in North County, near Rancho Santa Fe.

  Meanwhile, two bartenders at Flicks noted independently that beginning around February 1997, whenever anyone complained about somebody else’s behavior, Andrew would say, “Well, we’ll just have to kill him.”

  Andrew began drinking much more, often at Mixx restaurant. “He would order thirty-six-dollar bottles of Stone Street merlot like there was no tomorrow,” says maître d’ Rick Rinaldi. Other nights he’d buy for the table one-hundred-twenty-dollar magnums of Duckhorn merlot. Andrew would also eat rich foods—foie gras and desserts. (People who use a lot of crystal meth eat very little, but it is not unusual for longtime users to keep eating and for others to binge from time to time.) Andrew was so good for business and such a lavish tipper that Rick Rinaldi would rotate waiters to serve him. Andrew would jokingly tell Rinaldi that he couldn’t decide whether to go to L.A. or Paris for dinner. In fact, around this time, he falsely told people that he hopped the Concorde with a friend who had a ticket for a companion, and spent four days in Paris. He “came back” raving about the hottest new restaurants.

  One evening at Mixx, Andrew pointed to a man standing near the piano with a couple. “Do you know who that is?” he asked Rinaldi. “It’s Joseph Wambaugh.” Then Andrew went up to the man. Later, says Rinaldi, “I saw Wambaugh’s name on the credit card.” The famous crime author is a local celebrity. (Wambaugh has denied knowing Andrew.)

  Rob Davis says he saw Andrew again in Minneapolis on the weekend of February 7, 1997. On Valentine’s Day, David and Rob broke up, and David immediately starting dating another tall, good-looking African-American, a cable-TV producer. According to Rich Bonnin, Andrew briefly faded from the picture.

  But not for long. Andrew confided to one friend in San Diego that he wanted to give David Madson a ring but David turned down his proposal. In mid-March, as Easter approached, David mentioned to Rich Bonnin that he had some frequent-flyer miles and was thinking of going to Los Angeles with Andrew to see his friends Karen Lapinski and Evan Wallit. By then David had a new African-American boyfriend, Cedric Rucker, the assistant dean for student activities at Mary Washington College in Virginia, whom he had met on a trip to Washington, D.C.

  Andrew had proposed that Karen, Evan, David, and he take a European vacation together, but Karen had school, so they decided on Los Angeles instead. Andrew went to San Francisco and manipulated Karen and Evan into luring David west. Karen, whose father had died, asked David to walk her down the aisle at her wedding. Andrew grandly insisted that he would pay for the couple’s wedding reception, and he also bought Karen a $900 leather coat. Karen and Evan were pleased to accept it all. He told them and David that he had fifteen thousand dollars that he had to spend for tax purposes by April 15. He thanked David again for showing him the straight and narrow and shrewdly appealed to his sense of compassion. At the same time, he dangled expensive gifts.

  “David’s weakness vis-à-vis Andrew was that he was dazzled by his materialism,” says Robbie. David was susceptible to Andrew’s supposed wealth, and even though he suspected Andrew of drug dealing and possibly worse, he continued to take expensive presents from him. Andrew FedExed David a $739 round-trip ticket from Minneapolis to Los Angeles and rented a $395 room at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood for himself and David. He also took along a trunk full of sex toys—slings, harnesses, restraints, and dripping wax—he had picked up in San Francisco at Mr. S Leather.

  The weekend was a moveable feast, all at Andrew’s expense. The group lived at full-tilt boogie and dined in great style: a $1,400 dinner at Valentino Restaurant in Santa Monica on Friday night; a $1,300 sushi lunch for four at Ginza Sushiko, Beverly Hills’s most expensive restaurant, where the rare fish is flown in fresh from Osaka; a $200 late supper at Coco Pazzo in West Hollywood on Saturday night.

  In between meals, they shopped. Andrew bought a $1,200 Armani suit for David and $2,000 worth of clothes for himself and the others at Neiman Marcus and Zegna in Beverly Hills. Karen was an old chum of Friends TV star Lisa Kudrow, so one night they went to a studio party Lisa invited them to, and they had a meal at her mother’s house, which Andrew would brag about for weeks. Naturally, Andrew tried to impress the celebrity—at one point he was taking credit for producing much of Titanic. She tried to blow him off. David called Cedric from the party and was on the phone for almost an hour. Back at the Chateau Marmont, Andrew wanted to have sex with David, but David balked. Andrew, who by then had charged about $8,000 on his American Express card, was furious and began to pout. “I think David used Andrew a lot,” says Erik Greenman. “Andrew did shower him with gifts. David would readily accept them and then say, ‘I just want to be friends.’”

  Karen Lapinski later told police that Andrew clung to David, begging for sex. She also said it was obvious that Andrew was very much in love with David, but David did not reciprocate. David had told Karen that in the beginning his relationship with Andrew was “very wicked.” She felt that Andrew wanted “a violent sexual relationship” while David needed “a loving relationship.” In Minneapolis, for instance, the TV producer said that sex with David was “vanilla, vanilla, vanilla” and not at all violent. David told him that they had all had a “great weekend with a lot of shopping and they went to dinner at Lisa Kudrow’s mother’s house.”

  The producer, who sensed that David had a gift for listening and teaching, also came to realize that “David was pretty impressed with money and the power money can give people.” One of the first things David had told him was
“Successful people hang out with successful people.” He says that David represented himself as having grown up in Chicago. “I had no idea he came from a middle-class family and that his father owned a hardware store.” Now, David told him that he had bought an expensive suit on Rodeo Drive. “That whole weekend was about money and star-fucking,” the producer says. Andrew, who so much wanted to control and who was so dangerously off balance, did not get his way with David that weekend. David was in control. And Andrew’s rage was building.

  WITHIN THREE DAYS Andrew was back in San Francisco, supposedly looking for a place to live. He stayed for two weeks, and rumors circulated about his drug use. Out of the blue, he called his sister Gina, who was living there, and they had a drink. She hadn’t heard from Andrew in several years and was thrilled to have him back in her life. He took his young niece, who was visiting Gina for spring break, to the movies. That was the last time anyone in the family saw him.

  Driving around in a rented red Mustang, Andrew told various friends that he had found an apartment in the Marina district, on Russian Hill, or in the Castro. He saw Karen and Evan frequently, and he stayed at the Sherman House in lower Pacific Heights and also at the Mandarin Oriental. To a bartender at the Badlands Bar whom he took out to dinner, he represented himself as an army intelligence officer. When the bartender called his room, Andrew answered the phone, “Commander Cunanan.”