Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Esposito also says that Andrew had contacted the mother of a Bishop’s classmate living on the East Coast to inquire about obtaining a passport. These old friends whom he contacted, however, did not come forward voluntarily. The FBI learned about them in the course of interviewing other people who knew Andrew. The FBI needed more people who were willing to open up, and yet it did not know where to reach out to find them. In San Diego the situation became so desperate that Ahearn was willing to meet with a former FBI agent who had been dismissed from the San Diego office in 1990, after twenty-one years, for lying about his sexual orientation: Frank Buttino, who had already written a book about his experiences, A Special Agent: Gay and Inside the FBI. According to Buttino, “So here we are Monday [after Versace’s murder] and the FBI never came to me, the most prominent gay FBI guy in the country. I know gay FBI people all over the country. You’d think they’d contact me.” A female agent who was not assigned to the Cunanan case finally asked Buttino if anyone had. When Buttino told her no, she arranged for him to have coffee with Ahearn. “To me it’s an eye-opener, sitting there having coffee and walking on eggshells,” Ahearn relates. “I said ‘homosexual community,’ and Buttino says, ‘You know, we prefer to be called gay.’”

  Buttino had already told the female agent, “This is a very difficult one for the FBI, because they have no sources, and the gay community distrusts them. It’s not like the black community, where they’ve built up sources over the years. A lot are closeted, so how do you reach them?” Buttino now told Ahearn, “I’m going to do this very publicly with the gay community, especially with Gay Pride Week.” They struck a deal: Buttino would become a paid consultant with a phone and a desk at office headquarters. He would teach, as he says, “Gay 101. They need to know the gay and lesbian community and how much the people have to lose talking to you.” Buttino suggested, “Why not team me up with a gay person who knows Cunanan, and we could hit the bar scene in Miami—put a wire on or whatever.”

  Robbins Thompson, in fact, had already suggested just that to the FBI, but they had never gotten back to him. (Steve Nauck had already gone out wired hitting South Beach gay bars one night with Miami Beach police, to no avail.) “I offered to fly to Miami. I’d go to a bar—I’d find the guy in one day. I’d sift through leads. I’d say, ‘Give me these tips,’ and I could go through them in twenty minutes.” Robbins felt he was getting the brush-off. “I thought it was a bit of a gay issue,” he says. “They wanted to play by the book in case they got into trouble.” Ahearn counters, “Give me a reason and I’ll send him there, other than ‘I’ll hang out on a street corner.’ It wasn’t cost-effective.” Both Robbins and Norman Blachford thought that Andrew would go next to New Orleans, where weather reports were predicting Hurricane Danny. Blachford had even volunteered to go to New Orleans to help. He felt that he knew where Andrew would most likely hang out, and he was sure he could speedily identify him. The FBI simply had no clue where Andrew was. Homicide Inspector Joseph Toomey of the San Francisco Police Department listened in on the conference calls in the FBI’s office there during the manhunt. He says, “I didn’t have any sense they knew he was in Florida.”

  In Hillcrest, where people were freaked out, the FBI was undercover all over the neighborhood. “The FBI was a girl who pulled me aside and gave me her number,” says Matthew Roman, manager of Hamburger Marys. “She told me if I knew information or felt something was up, don’t worry—everybody was being protected in the whole community.”

  Erik Greenman was being tailed everywhere, most solicitously. “We had the FBI outside our bar I don’t know how many times,” says Joe Letzkus, part owner of Flicks, who is active at the Gay and Lesbian Center, “because Erik would continue to come in.” When the FBI needed to talk to Erik, however, it had to schedule talks around his media appearances. “You get disappointed when people would rather talk to the media than us,” says Ahearn. “For example: ‘I’m not going to talk to you, but I’ll fly to New York, and if you get me at five-thirty A.M., on my way to the airport, fine.’ [Greenman] knew we were busting our ass to talk to him.”

  When the police and the FBI showed up on Tuesday at the Gay and Lesbian Center to discuss with the community their concerns for Gay Pride observation the following weekend, there were more media than attendees. “They had every station in the country and thirty satellite dishes,” Letzkus relates. Ahearn was amazed by the meeting, which the San Diego police had organized. “I was humbled by the gay community’s treatment of us, and the leadership there. We went up to this conference. We expected it to be accusations: You’re not doing enough. It was information-sharing, preparation for the parade.” Recalling his wonder, Ahearn asks, “Did you hear about the rainbow? I’m standing to one side. All of a sudden, everybody said, ‘Look at the sky.’ There was a big circular rainbow over the meeting.”

  38

  Profile and Prosecute

  A WEEK INTO the Miami manhunt, three months after Jeff Trail’s murder, police and prosecutors were still struggling to understand Andrew Cunanan and assess his motives. The Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit of the FBI—the profiling unit—was eventually put on alert to profile Andrew. The process was to begin on Wednesday, July 23, when investigators from all the places in the country where Andrew had killed people would meet at the unit’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Tichich was expected; so were Rivard and Scrimshaw. The investigators and the profilers hoped to pool their knowledge of Andrew. Each jurisdiction would give a presentation of the evidence it had accrued and show pictures of the crime scenes. This gathering would serve as a prelude to another scheduled meeting for prosecutors who were planning to assemble at 11 A.M. on Friday, July 25, in Miami. Chief Assistant State Attorney Michael Band had called the meeting so that if and when Andrew was caught, they’d be ready with a plan to bring him to swift justice—preferably with the death penalty.

  Band recalls, “The first time that prosecutors spoke [with one another] was when I literally picked up the phone, after I essentially said to myself, You know, I’ve talked to the public, but have you talked to the other agents?” When he found the same held true for the others, he told them, “Whether or not he’s found with a bullet in his head, or the cops catch him, we need to get ourselves together, to organize how are we going to handle the prosecution of this case.” Band had already decided not to prosecute first, if Andrew was captured in Florida, in order to protect the other jurisdictions because of Florida’s liberal discovery laws. He also realized that the media would question any obvious strategy. “We professionals would make a decision here, but it would go back to my boss, [and to] their bosses, who are political,” Band says. “I don’t know that one wanted to say, ‘Hey, I want to go first.’ I wanted professionals to make a reasoned decision on who should go first.”

  So far, there had been little sharing. New Jersey still had Miglin’s Lexus. Minneapolis had done no DNA testing of the bloodstained jeans or the dop kits to see if there were matches with the beard stubble in Chicago or the clothes left behind in Florida. The blood in the trunk of the Lexus, in New Jersey, hadn’t been tested by Chicago. Band had insisted that Scrimshaw bypass the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab and instead bring the clothes found outside the red pickup to a qualified Ph.D. for blood testing. Scrimshaw says he ended up at the Dade County crime lab, where he was informed, “We don’t do blood testing unless we can see the blood.”

  In the end, the thumbprint on the pawnshop form matched Andrew’s thumbprint on his California driver’s license, which had been found in the red truck. On Monday the FBI finally learned from Duke Miglin that gold coins were missing from Lee Miglin’s safe. The coins—tokens of appreciation that Miglin had routinely given out to employees—had not been reported stolen previously. Their identification brought up the whole question of how Andrew could have gotten into Miglin’s safe if he had just happened upon him in his garage. Did Andrew manage to get Lee Miglin to give him his safe combination while Andrew found
a pencil and wrote it down in the middle of murder? Or were they in the house together?

  Such questions plagued investigators. Minneapolis had not charged Andrew in Jeff Trail’s death because it still did not have a level of proof necessary to bring him to trial. Chisago, according to Rivard, had made a deal with the FBI to yield to a death-penalty state if the FBI came into the case. Whether Chisago investigators realized it at the time or not, they were wrong about the time of David Madson’s death, a mistake that would have jeopardized their case. So far no other jurisdiction had been able to match a single print besides the license/pawnshop-form match. The most conclusive evidence that Andrew was guilty of the murders was the match-up of bullets from Jeff Trail’s .40 caliber gun. But investigators did not have the gun, so the case thus far was anything but slam-dunk.

  Scrimshaw was trying to figure out a way either to prove or disprove one of his theories about the motive for Versace’s murder—that the designer had given Andrew AIDS. He could do this only if he could test Versace’s and Andrew’s clothes for viral DNA. Although Florida authorities knew Versace’s HIV status from the autopsy, the laws of confidentiality regarding DNA makeup of the virus are so strict in Florida that not even Scrimshaw was allowed to know those results, even in investigating a homicide of this magnitude. Yet, the medical examiner at a public meeting did say that Andrew was HIV negative.

  The FBI did not have the same constraints regarding viral DNA. “Since we couldn’t get official results and ‘he dead,’ we were going to go for DNA on the clothes in the beginning, before we caught Andrew,” Scrimshaw explains. “If both had the same viral DNA, then the case is closed. You could tell if one gave the other HIV—a viral DNA study shows where the two strains come from; if both have the same DNA strain, you can assume both came from the same source.” Scrimshaw did not want to embark on this complicated notion if there was no hope that it would prove correct, however. “I had to know whether Gianni Versace was HIV positive or not, and I was able to find out from autopsy results that he had tested positive for HIV.”

  Knowing that, Scrimshaw could now see why the Versace family had been so determined to cremate early and leave the country. Furthermore, nobody was getting back to him with his questions about the Versace business in Italy, and he thought that he should be getting a lot more cooperation all around. Versace’s murder investigation dominated the airwaves and the Cunanan manhunt held the whole country in its thrall, but the investigative effort was not in the least coordinated. “We needed background information on Versace. We needed to understand what we were looking at here,” Scrimshaw says. “We needed information on Cunanan, and we talked to one lousy person [Steve Nauck]. And we weren’t getting any information back from the FBI, even though we were asking for it. Once the focus changed—by Friday with the Normandy Plaza information—it was a full-throttle manhunt. Marcus and I were still making inquiries, talking to Chicago—it was real one-way. Chicago was very interested in what we found in the truck. I’m getting some information back, but not much. And I’m getting next to nothing on Reese, because it’s an FBI investigation.”

  George Navarro did not share Scrimshaw’s negative views; he thought that the FBI was cooperating. But Navarro did not have to run down leads the way Scrimshaw did, and did not face the frustrations of that process. For the Quantico meeting, for example, all participants were asked to bring crime-scene photographs. But under Michael Band’s policy of no leaking and his fear that they might end up humiliated like the O.J. prosecution, Scrimshaw was forbidden to take the Versace crime-scene photos. “Band says, ‘No, because we don’t know what will happen to them.’ I say, ‘You are talking [about showing them] in front of the FBI. Are you telling me the state attorney doesn’t trust the FBI?’” Scrimshaw took the photos anyway. “We certainly wanted the profile.”

  Tichich and Scrimshaw arrived at the meeting well prepared. Chicago’s representatives dressed down in jeans and T-shirts and were less impressive. “The Chicago people were very uncommunicative, but they had far more evidence than anybody else,” Scrimshaw says. “They had latent fingerprints from the scene but nothing to compare them to. Chicago had [Cunanan’s] teeth marks from the ham. They only brought four-by-five snapshots.” What caught everyone’s attention was Chicago’s deliberately downplayed report of a male prostitute who had come forward on July 18, three days after Versace’s murder, to claim that he had provided sex to Lee Miglin and Andrew together on two occasions. “They didn’t think it was much,” recalls Tichich, “but we were looking at each other and saying, ‘This sounds pretty good.’”

  According to FBI records, a “rent boy” who goes by the name of Daniel and pays his way through college with his earnings was solicited for sex by two men, one older than the other, who answered an ad he had placed in a gay magazine. The younger, who called himself “Tadd, Todd, or Tom,” was driving when he and the older man picked Daniel up in a car—possibly a Cadillac or an Oldsmobile. They took him to a second-floor apartment of a doorman building (the exact locations have been redacted in FBI files). They had a drink and sex, and after a “fifty-minute hour” he was paid $140 plus money for a cab. The older man was introduced to him as “Lee.”

  “Approximately one to two weeks later, he received a second call on his voice mail from either ‘Lee’ or ‘Todd.’” He was told to come to the same building. On the second occasion, which was more friendly, “‘Lee’ spoke of the fact that [redacted] was involved some way with the ‘Home Shopping Network.’” “Todd” told him that he too was a rent boy and placed ads in a magazine, the Advocate Classified. Daniel saw “Todd” once more, at a gay bar about a month later. Todd did not speak to him but bought him a drink. He saw Lee once again in a store with another couple.

  The physical descriptions Daniel gives are fairly close, but he remembers Lee as having short, stubby fingers and a pinkie ring, and Paul Beitler says Lee didn’t have stubby fingers and he never wore a pinkie ring. Daniel told police and the FBI that he did not recognize Andrew as the person he had met until he saw a photograph dated April 1997, in which Andrew was heavier and his face fuller. Then he realized “that this individual was in fact the person with Miglin when they had sex.”

  He told the authorities, “It is common knowledge in the ‘gay community’ that Lee Miglin is gay.” Daniel, who later reportedly supplied police with the exact address of the building to which he had been taken, told them “that he was not providing this information to ‘dirty Miglin’s name,’ but was attempting to assist in the investigation. He explained that whatever Miglin’s sexual preference was, it was no reason for him to have been murdered.”

  BY NOW THE FBI had completely reversed itself. From purporting to be disinterested in Andrew’s personality profile and to be pursuing him solely as a fugitive, the Bureau now tried twice-a-day post-Versace conference calls to dissect Andrew’s innermost psyche. The calls dealt with “historic information, pre-Minnesota, his lifestyle,” says Gregory Jones, the Miami FBI supervising agent of the Cunanan case. “It began to paint a picture to us—where to send the next lead off to. We were particularly interested in these subtle nuances—he liked to do this and that, his general lifestyle, his haunts at bars.” Suddenly Andrew being gay was also germane. “It was important from the standpoint of the homicide,” Jones asserts. “From the fugitive standpoint it wasn’t that important.”

  Jones says the briefings revealed a “cold-blooded person. We heard he had a high IQ. I don’t remember anything being discussed about porn or S&M.” Profiling chief William Hagmaier says, “We were trying to learn everything we could to see what his soft spots were and who might be able to talk him out—if it was possible. We were trying continuously to put pressure on him obviously, to try to look like we could back him into a hole.”

  The profilers felt that Andrew’s old friend and house-mate Liz Coté should make the appeal, because she would appear to be more independent and less controlled by the FBI than Andrew’s family. According to P
hilip Merrill, Liz Coté suggested on Sunday that she make a plea to Andrew via TV. On Monday she gave the agents a draft she and Merrill had written. The FBI edited it, and on Tuesday John Hoos of the Los Angeles FBI arranged for Coté to be taken to the local ABC-TV studio, where she recorded the plea for general release on Wednesday. She was also available for interviews that other networks would have prized.

  At that point, Merrill says, as his and Lizzie’s close relationship to Andrew became known to the media, even his corner grocer was being offered interviews, “just because he was my corner grocer.” Once the media realized that Liz Coté was the woman whose photo Andrew had shown around while pretending she was his former wife, and that she and Phil Merrill had lived with Andrew during his years in Berkeley, they were both besieged. “Lizzie’s sister-in-law was offered $16,000 from the Globe for an article and picture,” says Merrill.

  John Hoos, who acts as the media spokesperson in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, told Coté she should get an agent. Merrill recalls, “He said, ‘You’re going to need somebody who will take care for you, and who will field some of this stuff down the line, and the movie of the week or something—that’s just going to get made anyway.’” Merrill says that Hoos, “based on his good relationship with the local ABC affiliate,” also facilitated things for ABC to put Liz Coté on Good Morning America and Nightline. When she was later offered an exclusive consulting deal for a movie of the week (that never got made), Coté called Hoos, who told her, according to Merrill, “‘Yeah, sure [do it].’ She kind of felt she had his blessing to do that and called him before she signed the papers and stuff.” John Hoos will not comment. “I have no desire to have my name associated with Mr. Cunanan in a book.”