by Maureen Orth
By the time I got to the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach, the tsunami had hit. I had about two dozen requests for interviews, including all three TV networks and newspapers throughout the country and the BBC. They continued to pour in all day. Out by the Raleigh’s pool, crews lined up to do interviews with me. I had a choice—to keep accepting interview requests in order to publicize my piece and the magazine, or to try to report the story myself. After appearing on all three network newscasts, I bailed out of Larry King Live early to meet Cathy Horyn, have a drink with two great sources, and hit the Boardwalk, the hustler bar where witnesses had seen Andrew. When one of the male go-go dancers rubbed himself up against me so that I could feel his protrusion—the usual manner of asking for a tip to be put in the top of his briefs—I had no idea what he was doing and recoiled.
I was amazed at how much South Beach resembled Hillcrest, and how easily Andrew would have fitted in there. The next morning at 6:30, Cathy and I walked on Ocean over to the Casa Casuarina. The bloodstains were still on the front steps, which had become an ad hoc shrine to Versace. Even at that hour, women in skin-tight leotards and shorts were pretending to stroll by the mansion, hoping to be caught by the cameras of at least a dozen TV crews set up on the lawn across the street. For the next ten days along Ocean Drive, Andrew’s face would be on every TV in the bars of the outdoor cafés and restaurants. The reports about Andrew and Versace, in English and Spanish, would drone as relentlessly as the tides on the beach across the street. The News Cafe, where Versace had bought magazines just before his murder, was mobbed day and night with foreign TV crews.
Another video camp was set up on the plaza in front of the police station, much to the consternation of the homeless who considered it their turf. When a CNN producer complained about a one-eyed, alcoholic, homeless lady trying to get into his shots, Al Boza defended her, saying, “This is her backyard. She hasn’t made a complaint about you people, so we learn to behave with each other.”
One unnerving individual, a neighborhood fixture, invested himself with full authority. “All of a sudden he began to realize that this was the greatest thing that ever happened to him,” Boza says. He walked up to a very pregnant female reporter during a live feed to her Miami TV station, and interrupted her in the middle of her stand-up, saying, “I got important information. Are you live on the air?” The woman was so startled that she let out a bloodcurdling scream right on the air and then ran for the safety of her satellite truck. She later filed a harassment complaint against the man with police, and he sued her in return. The media circus was on.
34
The Family
VERSACE’S BODY WAS autopsied in the early evening of the day he was shot. Florida law demands that any body involved in a homicide remain intact in the state for at least forty-eight hours. Since the Florida autopsy would test for AIDS, the HIV secret Versace had so fiercely concealed would be revealed. The family did not want to wait forty-eight hours; they wished to rush the cremation and get the ashes out of the country as soon as possible. Furthermore, they didn’t want to stay around to talk to police. “They did want it to move quick,” says Chief Assistant State Attorney Michael Band. “And they came to me. I told them, ‘Absolutely not.’”
The autopsy was performed by Dr. Emma Lew, a slim, attractive Chinese woman with a ponytail and purple beesting lips, and arresting eyebrows shaped like pagodas. In her office she had a paper tiara that said, “Scene Queen.” Dr. Lew also performed the equivalent of a bird autopsy, a pecopsy—her first—on the dead bird found next to Versace. “It was a cute little thing. The only area of damage, of course, was the left side of the head,” Dr. Lew says. “The eyeball was hanging out of the socket, just clinging to the left side of the head. When I X-rayed, I found tiny radial paint fragments, which means there were tiny fragments of metal in that eye. Which is even more supportive evidence that this bird was knocked by this ricocheting projectile.”
Versace’s autopsy was straightforward—simple but instantly destructive head wounds from two bullets fired at close range. “We knew that this was a very high-profile case,” says Dr. Lew, “and we took extra care to ensure that everything was done properly.” She says there were small traces of prescription drugs in Versace’s body. Dr. Lee Hearn, the Dade County toxicologist who would later perform toxicology tests on Andrew, told me that drugs taken for HIV are normally so water-soluble that they do not show up in testing. In any case, Florida laws concerning confidentiality are very strict about releasing any information about infectious diseases such as HIV.
“Did Versace appear to be in good health?” I inquired of Dr. Lew. She answered elliptically. “He had no natural disease that would have caused his death at that time.” The usual procedure in a homicide investigation is for the police and the medical examiners to obtain a medical history of the victim from the family and to pool information. The police, says Dr. Lew, “compile what we call the pump sheet, a summary of the case.” According to Scrimshaw, “That procedure wasn’t done because the information was not available to us.”
Versace’s body was kept overnight at the morgue and released on Wednesday morning to the Riverside Gordon Funeral Home in North Miami, a Jewish funeral home chosen because it was out of the way, but the paparazzi discovered it anyway.
Santo and Donatella Versace, stoic and withdrawn, had arrived with a bodyguard by private jet Tuesday night. They proceeded to distance themselves, literally and figuratively, as quickly as possible from Andrew Cunanan and the crime. They and their publicists and lawyers, who had gathered at the Casa Casuarina, were emphatic that Gianni had not known Andrew Cunanan and that they did not want to talk to police before Thursday. At one point they had thought of offering a reward for Andrew’s capture, but the idea was nixed. “We said, ‘Wait and see what happens,’” says Lieutenant Noriega. “We had ten thousand dollars [already offered]. We didn’t want it to appear that we couldn’t catch him.”
Scrimshaw and Navarro, as well as the FBI, were eager to talk to the family before Thursday, but it was made clear that they would not be allowed to. The state attorney for Dade County, Kathy Fernandez Rundle, and her deputy, Rose Marie Antonacci-Pollock, would be the go-betweens. “They claimed they were trying to make it easy for us,” says Navarro. The family would not talk unless their lawyer from Italy was present. They also hired a Miami lawyer.
Police had questioned the household staff on Tuesday. Antonio had told one detective about his and Versace’s use of male escorts, but he said they’d done this only in New York, never Miami, and not in the past two to three years. (Jaime Cardona’s memory was prodded by means of a sub-poena, and he later admitted to police that he had procured for Versace and D’Amico.) Scrimshaw, meanwhile, had developed four theories for why Versace was murdered: (1) It was a Mafia hit; (2) the motive was robbery; (3) Versace had given the murderer AIDS; (4) it was a completely random act of violence. He also wondered whether there was a substantial insurance policy on Versace, and for how much. “Was he worth more dead or alive?” Scrimshaw wondered. “I don’t find it strange to ask that question. You always look close to home first with murders. It’s not just theory to kick around, but de rigueur in the initial stages of an investigation.”
Scrimshaw never got the opportunity to ask, and he suspected that the two state attorneys were bowled over by celebrity. “There was a verbal agreement with Kathy Rundle over at the house with the family,” Scrimshaw charges. “We tried to get in for a couple of days—we were pissed we weren’t privileged to get in. I’m bitter because in the first few days the state’s attorney’s office absolutely impeded the investigation by shielding the family and taking part in decision-making they should have taken no part in.”
“We may have made an arrangement to meet with them on Thursday,” says Antonacci-Pollock carefully. “I never got the idea that this family was stonewalling us. I know the police did.” With the state’s attorneys in charge, the customary “next-of-kin conference” never took place i
n the usual sense, and no probing questions were ever put to the family. “We never had a sit-down with Donatella or Santo,” Navarro says, calling the experience “odd.” He and Keith Evans talked only to the family lawyers while Donatella and Santo were in other parts of the house, and “[The family’s lawyers] denied having anything to do with the Mob or anything bad.” Neither Antonacci-Pollock nor Fernandez Rundle brought up such unpleasant subjects as a Mafia hit or who might have wanted to get rid of Gianni. “We didn’t go into a lot of detail with them like that,” says Antonacci-Pollock. Rather, her major concern was from a “victim’s rights” point of view. “I didn’t want the family going back to Italy, if [Cunanan] had been caught and not charged, thinking, Why not? That’s why we spent so much time with the family, frankly, and they were gracious and understood.” Moreover, Antonacci-Pollock says, “It kind of bothers me, being Italian, that everything that has Italians involved—[people assume] it’s the Mob.”
On Wednesday, the FBI’s liaison from the Italian government in Washington called Scrimshaw to offer his assistance as a go-between to get answers to questions about Versace and his business from the Italian authorities. Scrimshaw was interested in finding out if there were any ongoing investigations in Italy. Only two months previously, in May 1997, Santo had been convicted on a bribery charge, which was later overturned. But Scrimshaw was never told that.
Also on Wednesday, the Versaces used all their clout in an effort to get the body out of the United States before the required forty-eight hours were up. While the body was being embalmed—it had been released to the funeral home from the morgue at 8:50 A.M. on Wednesday—a donny-brook ensued between the Versace lawyers and handlers and the lawyers for the funeral home, who insisted that the law could not be subverted. The argument went on for hours. “The mayor stuck his nose in,” says Band. At one point things got so heated that Florida Governor Lawton Chiles was reportedly appealed to directly on the phone to query the law—hoping that Versace’s remains could be removed. The request was denied.
In the early afternoon before the cremation took place, there was a viewing of the body for the family. Israel Sands, the Versaces’ florist in South Beach, had created five elaborate arrangements to place around the coffin, each representing a member of the family—white for Donatella, blue for Santo, bright yellow for Gianni, pink for Gianni’s niece, Allegra, and blue for her brother, Daniel.
After the viewing, the body was transported to a crematorium in Pompano Beach in hopes that it could be cremated immediately. It was never left alone. First it was in the care of one of the Versace publicists. When it became impossible for the body to be cremated before the forty-eight hours had elapsed, Charles Podesta, the family cook, was sent to spend the night with the corpse. Gianni Versace was finally cremated on Thursday morning.
Early Thursday afternoon, Donatella, who was scheduled to talk to the authorities but never did, called Israel Sands and asked him to decorate with flowers the 20-by-14-inch gold Versace neoclassical box that would carry Gianni’s ashes back to Italy. When Sands arrived about 4 P.M., Antonio was being interviewed by the police, and he was far more candid about his and Gianni’s use of male prostitutes in Miami Beach than he had been on Tuesday. The interview was cut short, however, by the family’s request that he be able to assist with the ashes.
Israel Sands, meanwhile, was taken to a room in the cellar with white walls and a big table in it. When Charles Podesta came in with the Italian consul and the box containing the ashes, Sands was asked to move to the library. “Charles said, ‘I want you to work upstairs. I don’t want to take Mr. Versace into the cellar.’” The box with the remains was then placed in a larger wooden box with official seals all over it. Finally, the box was wrapped with wire tape in the presence of the consul.
Donatella had asked to have lots of white orchids on top of the box. Sands remembers thinking, “If I have to tie it, I’ll do the whole work as a gift wrapping. I did two garlands to be able to encircle the box in both directions with dentrobium orchids and weeping podo carpus branches.” Observed the whole time by a member of the household staff, he worked fast because the Versaces “were in a big hurry.” Sands left at 7:30 P.M. “Twenty minutes later Donatella was in a car on the way to the airport.” She has never returned to South Beach.
35
Miami Mishaps
THE MURDER OF Versace and the massive amount of coverage it engendered jolted both the FBI and local authorities. “Absolutely, the press drove it,” says San Diego FBI’s Peter Ahearn of the ensuing investigation. Andrew Cunanan suddenly became the subject of one of the largest manhunts, if not the largest manhunt, in FBI history, comparable to the hunt for Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray or in its day the Bureau’s successful pursuit of John Dillinger. The evidence discovered in Reese’s pickup led both Chicago and New Jersey to issue warrants for his arrest for first-degree murder. Both charges carried the death penalty—New Jersey’s in federal court, Chicago’s in the state of Illinois.
If, in the first hours after Versace’s death, the Miami Police Department had to make do with shoe leather and few computers, within a day the force was inundated with the most up-to-date technology available—analysts and computers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the FBI and all of the FBI’s resources, from its top guns at headquarters in Washington to its agents in fifty-six field offices across the country.
“With the Versace killing,” says the FBI’s former number-two deputy director, William Esposito, “I called the people who were supposed to be in charge of this investigation and I said, ‘Look, we have got to find this guy. I want the command center activated. I want two conference calls a day with all the offices involved.’ But I want it at lower levels—usually I don’t want the agents in charge. I want the super case agents on the supervisory level.” He ticks off all the offices on the hunt: San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Miami. “‘I want twice-a-day phone calls out of our command center to find out what’s going on and what they’re going to do in the next twenty-four hours.’” Moreover, Esposito told FBI special agent in charge in Miami, Paul Philip, “I don’t care if you have to put all four hundred agents on the street. I want you to do it. I want you to leave no stone unturned.”
While the FDLE created a time line of Andrew’s crimes and whereabouts and monitored the media from a newly constituted command center inside the Miami Beach Police Department conference room, fliers of Andrew were finally going up all over South Beach. Paul Philip turned his office into a mini–TV studio, “to keep the heat off the troops,” he explains somewhat disingenuously. “We’d start with the Today Show live shots at six A.M.” His first interview of the day, Philip says, was “with Good Morning America or Today, depending on who won the fistfight, and I’d close with Nightline. You just can’t keep this up.” The only real news to report, however, did not make law enforcement or local government shine. How could it be, people asked, that Reese’s red pickup could have stayed at the municipal parking garage for such a long time without being tagged by police? A parking attendant I spoke to explained that cars started to be checked only after about the fourth or fifth week. It was not unusual for people to stash cars there for weeks in the off season.
On Wednesday morning, Vivian Olivia of the Cash on the Beach pawnshop called Lieutenant Noriega about the pawnshop transaction form she had submitted with Andrew’s information six days before, on July 10. At the police department, pawnshop forms were not computerized but hand-filed. Because Andrew’s concerned a coin, it was passed along to property detectives, who were asked if anyone had reported stolen coins. They said no. The detective in charge of the pawn receipts then took three days off. When he got back, the day Versace was killed, he was pulled from the pawnshop detail to help with the Cunanan investigation. Meanwhile, the form languished on his desk until it was discovered the next day, after Olivia called in. As if the police weren’t embarrassed enough, the
Miami Herald reported—incorrectly—that the pawnshop ticket had been found in Reese’s truck.
The Herald, the hometown paper, never quite got up to speed. For the first crucial days, it allowed the biggest story in the country to be covered by reporters from its “Neighbors” section of local news, while its top crime reporter wasn’t anywhere near the beach. The competing Sun-Sentinel, however, deployed a full team and blanketed the area. In an unfortunate coincidence, the Herald had started, the previous Sunday, a well-researched, multi-part exposé of a Miami Beach Police Department overtime scam under the headline “Collars for Dollars,” which said the scam had been “tolerated by police brass and prosecutors for years.” Now editors at the paper felt—mistakenly, the police argue—it was payback time from the MBPD. According to one state attorney, “I received a call from an editor over there who was desperate for information, and the quote essentially was ‘We’re getting our ass kicked in our own backyard.’”
Olivia told police that Cunanan might return to her shop, because she had felt that the coin Andrew pawned had special meaning to him. The police began to stake out the pawnshop, but by Friday the news had leaked. Both America’s Most Wanted and the New York Post sent reporters. Olivia recounts, “I said, ‘I say nothing,’ because I was sure the Cunanan guy would come back.” By Saturday, however, she says, “I was feeling like Bill Clinton. I had to run like Madonna with sunglasses to the store.”
