Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Gregory Jones, the FBI supervising agent in charge of the Cunanan case, stayed for the press conference. Then, having been up almost two days straight, he headed for home. As soon as he walked through his front door, the enormity of the effort that he and everyone else had made searching for Andrew Cunanan overwhelmed him. He took two steps and threw up.

  Looking at Andrew’s corpse, Wilfredo Fernandez, who was one of the attorneys supervising the searches of the houseboat, did not think Andrew particularly good-looking. “I don’t know that I’d recognize him. He looked very Filipino. I expected white preppy.” Rookie detective Gus Sanchez disagrees. “I wouldn’t describe him as Oriental, but even dead he was interesting-looking. He had interesting eyes. Even dead I could see a certain magnetism to him.” As the cameras continued to whir, Andrew’s body was removed from the houseboat to be autopsied at 6:45 A.M., Thursday, July 24. “Hey, kid, do you want to come out on national TV?” a veteran cop asked Sanchez. “Stand next to the body.”

  PART

  FOUR

  40

  Dead Is Dead

  NOBODY IN THE Miami Beach police close to the case thinks Andrew was on the houseboat by chance:

  “My gut feeling is that Cunanan knew of this houseboat,” Chief Barreto said the following day.

  “I think Andrew had been there and knew of that place, and they helped him hide,” says Sergeant Navarro.

  “I’m sure there’s a connection between Gianni and Andrew. Why that houseboat?” asks Gary Schiaffo, lead detective at the houseboat scene. “There aren’t that many houseboats in the water. This particular one is vacant. Why there?”

  Andrew’s death came as such an overpowering relief to law enforcement that nearly all the investigating agencies concerned, especially the FBI, rushed to close the case. “Dead is dead and done is done,” said Scrimshaw cynically. “I feel Cunanan might have been used—I do. There is nothing in our report to back it up. If I can’t back up, it doesn’t go in.” Scrimshaw was most unhappy that the MBPD closed down its investigation before he thought he was finished. “Certain glaring areas needed to be examined.” Along with Sergeant Navarro and Detective Dale Twist, Scrimshaw had hoped for some answers from the FBI, which assumed authority to follow through on the houseboat owners and the international aspects of the case. Instead, says Twist, “they never asked for any input and we never got any output. I can’t figure it out.”

  “But why didn’t the Miami Beach police pursue the case on its own?” I ask. “They told us in so many words, ‘We’re shutting it down, we don’t have the resources,’” Scrimshaw explains. “‘Let the FBI do it, let the State Department do it.’ There was no one story.” Scrimshaw, who says he dislikes conspiracy theories, speculates anyway that Andrew was on the houseboat because “he expected to be rewarded and taken to never-never land, but then he was taken as the fall guy. It’s risky letting someone unprofessional do it, but if he fails, he’s a nut case.”

  One reason Scrimshaw may be unable to rule out such a scenario is that he was not allowed to prepare the “psychological autopsy” that he usually compiles for suicides. “For my sake and for the family’s sake, we try to interview everyone to eliminate the possibility this was something other than a suicide. Maybe that’s what the FBI was doing, but I don’t know whether they ever did that.”

  It appears not. From the very beginning, the houseboat posed intriguing mysteries, beginning with its caretaker, Carreira. According to Gary Schiaffo, the first detective on the scene, for example, Carreira did not initially mention to police that he carried a gun—that came out only in the retelling. Schiaffo also doubts that Carreira was too nervous to call in law enforcement. “How hard is it to dial 911?” After a night of interrogation, in which Carreira maintains he was never told that Andrew’s body had been found, the police told Carreira not to talk to the media. Yet he went to Fox Channel 7, which kept him for hours and got an exclusive interview while the rest of the media pack waited for him outside. The police were suspicious enough about Carreira that the Florida authorities were in no hurry for him to collect the $45,000 reward he claimed from them.

  Still, Schiaffo believes Carreira’s claim that he had been in danger. “If Cunanan had wanted, he could have taken him out,” he says. “Then [Cunanan] would have had a gun and keys to a car and been gone. But I think there were a lot of cops out on the street that day—Andrew was looking out the window and seeing cops. Carreira was pounding at the door. Andrew’s thinking, This is it. Finally they got me.” He adds, “He doesn’t want to be taken—he’s too vain—and he only had four bullets left.”

  Inside the houseboat, police found .22 caliber bullets under the bed, some “white powder in a clear plastic bag,” which was not tested, and a fake passport and driver’s license in the name of Matthias Ruehl, the same alias that Torsten Reineck used—Matthias “Doc” Ruehl—as the operator of a gay bathhouse in Las Vegas. The passport and license were from the unrecognized principality of Sealand—a piece of rock about the size of a football field six miles off the British coast. “Sealand” was also the vanity license plate of the big Rolls-Royce Reineck drove around Miami.

  The Miami Beach police saw Reineck in Las Vegas declaring himself owner of the houseboat on TV, and they interviewed Carreira extensively about his contacts with the owner. Everything on the boat, including prescription bottles, were in Reineck’s name. Understandably, then, Miami Beach police were excited to get a call from the firehouse command post across the street from the houseboat on July 30, saying the owner of the houseboat was there to claim it. “So we’re hauling butt up there because we figure it’s going to be Reineck,” says Dale Twist. “But it wasn’t Reineck—it’s this guy Ruehl.”

  If there was any confusion among police between Reineck and Ruehl, it was soon compounded when both disappeared. Reineck had gone voluntarily to the Las Vegas FBI with a lawyer the day following the discovery of Andrew’s body. The FBI already knew he was wanted since 1992 in Germany for tax fraud (although Germany had not yet asked for his extradition) and also found out he had overstayed his visa. “He had serious [legal] exposure as to whether he could stay or not,” says Las Vegas FBI Special Agent in Charge Bobby Siller. Despite what he had said on TV, Reineck told the Las Vegas FBI that he had sold the houseboat on June 5 to Ruehl. He claimed to be a big fan of Versace’s and said he had met Versace’s press secretary once, but he claimed that he did not know Andrew Cunanan and agreed to take a polygraph test the next day “on the Cunanan matter only.” The Miami Beach police learned all of this secondhand, through verbal updates from Keith Evans. By then police knew that Reineck had a series of shell corporations listed with the houseboat address, but they were not given the chance to shape the investigation with the information they had gathered. “I would have asked different questions,” says Twist. “How did they know what to ask? I don’t know how they went into that interview.”

  The question was soon moot: Reineck never showed up for his polygraph. According to Siller, the FBI in Las Vegas didn’t even start looking for him again until a week later. “I know we had trouble locating him around the thirty-first,” Siller says. By then it had come out in the press that Reineck had briefly declared bankruptcy on the bathhouse in Las Vegas and owed people money there. As it turned out, July 31 was a big day for the houseboat. Under Florida law, a houseboat is like a motorcycle—a bill of sale is all that’s required to change ownership. Ruehl had first shown up with a bill of sale to claim the property from the Miami Beach police on the thirtieth. He said he had flown in from Germany via Las Vegas, where he said he had tried unsuccessfully to find Reineck. In order to buy time, the leery Miami Beach police told him that they would have to check the records at the courthouse, and that he should come back in the morning. They drove him to his hotel—and never saw him in person again. Instead, the perplexed police saw Ruehl on the Fox Channel 7 news on the night of the thirty-first; he was shown at the Miami airport, boarding a plane to leave the country. “Tha
t day we all looked at each other,” Navarro says. “Something’s going on here, because only four of us knew this, and all of a sudden Channel 7 knows? We were all pissed.”

  Meanwhile, yet another German had already entered the mix that day, when Schiaffo was contacted by Siegfried Axtmann, who lived on exclusive Williams Island in North Miami Beach. Axtmann told Schiaffo that he was a friend of Ruehl—who had been “instructed to return to Germany immediately”—and that he, Axtmann, “would be in charge of the houseboat from now on.”

  The police had heard of Mr. Axtmann. Axtmann was a large part of the reason Dieter and Galleto had originally sought to warn American authorities of a connection between Versace’s murder and Andrew’s being on that particular houseboat. Galleto believed that Axtmann was a partner in the Vegas bathhouse with Friedrich Ewald, a 250-pound high roller who bragged about knowing Versace. According to Galleto, who was acquainted with Axtmann and Ewald, Ewald had shown him a Versace watch he was wearing, boasting that it was “the first one made, and that Versace had given it to him personally.”

  Meanwhile, the police heard nothing from the FBI. The houseboat remained in police custody until early August; to the chagrin of the city, it quickly became a tourist attraction.

  On August 4, the ownership of the houseboat came into question once again. A Miami Beach attorney named Paul Steinberg called Navarro to say that his client Enrico Forti was “the new owner of the houseboat as of June eighth.” Navarro says, “I told him I needed proof.” Two days later Steinberg called to set up a meeting between Twist, Axtmann, and Enrico “Kico” Forti, a nervous fast-talker who speaks in broken English and who represents himself as an Italian film producer. (He has produced sports documentaries for ESPN.) “He’s an artsy-fartsy Ocean Drive film guy,” Twist says. “They all seem the same to me.” Steinberg counters, “Mr. Forti is a world-class athlete and film producer. He has competed in international tournaments in windsurfing.” When I asked if Forti knew the Versaces, Steinberg said, “I believe he knows members of the Versace family.”

  The meeting with Twist took place on August 6, and Axtmann and Forti, who lived in adjoining luxury condo-minium buildings on Williams Island, showed up together. Axtmann represented himself as a friend of Ruehl’s and an engineer. He denied he was Reineck’s silent partner in the gay bathhouse, but said that he had visited him there twice “to check construction.” Steinberg told Twist that Forti—who was planning to sell the rights to access the houseboat—was the one who had tipped off Channel 7 about Ruehl’s leaving town. Forti had big plans to write a book and make a documentary—The Medusa—on the “real” Versace, claiming he had spoken to Donatella Versace about it. With no word about any of these characters forthcoming from the FBI, Twist took the papers to the city attorney, and on August 8 Navarro released the houseboat to Enrico “Kico” Forti in the presence of Steinberg. (When I attempted to contact Axtmann, I got yet a different story from a woman who answered his home phone. She said that Mr. Forti did not own the houseboat, and was merely selling the houseboat rights for Mr. Ruehl. She told me that Mr. Axtmann was unavailable.)

  Reineck, who had not been seen since July 24, remained missing until August 11, when he showed up in Frankfurt and turned himself in to the German police, having previously worked out a deal. Leipzig public prosecutor Norbert Röger says, “In my opinion, it was his realization that there was no way out that made Mr. Reineck return to Germany.” Scrimshaw thought Reineck had probably been “ordered out of the U.S.” by Ewald and Axtmann, who had confided to Twist that Reineck had embarrassed German authorities by going on TV. “Why would a guy go running back to jail?” asks Scrimshaw, acknowledging that again he had nothing concrete to back up his thinking. Reineck, once known as the “beer king of Leipzig,” was sentenced to three years in prison for “intentionally delaying bankruptcy proceedings, 152 cases of fraud, breach of trust in two cases, bankruptcy, joint tax evasion and another misde-meanor for fraud.” Still, he claims he doesn’t know how Andrew ended up on his houseboat—not that anyone official has asked. Even attorney Paul Steinberg says, “Something doesn’t add up with Reineck and Cunanan.” When I ask Steinberg if either Axtmann or Ruehl knew Gianni Versace, he says, “I never asked the question.”

  Galleto, like Scrimshaw, was disillusioned. He did not believe that Reineck was not acquainted with Andrew Cunanan. At six feet five, with deep sunken eyes and the manner of a middle-aged jock, he had roamed the world as a major narcotics agent for the Germans and at times had been hunted himself. Now he cannot understand why the FBI did not hold Reineck when they had him. “They should take his passport and say, ‘Stay until we finish investigating.’ The FBI let Reineck go, and the Miami Beach police let Ruehl go.” Galleto cannot forget Reineck’s telling him one day that the burglar alarm on his houseboat was “so good not even a mouse can come in, my alarm is so perfect.” Galleto adds, “Carreira: He said the alarm never worked. The owner said, ‘not even a mouse.’” One day Galleto took me on a tour of his Miami in a big beige Mercedes convertible. We began driving up Collins Avenue with the top down, past the Normandy Plaza toward Williams Island, a gated community once heavily promoted by Sophia Loren. Along the way Galleto pointed out certain high-rises. “This one is half German Mafia, that one is Russian.” He knows Miami as a haven for big-time international con men and fraudsters and whoremeisters who are trying to set up clubs there. He said he could not believe the local authorities were letting it happen.

  Galleto said that the pimps loved to dress their whores in Versace and claimed that he had seen Ewald, who had bragged of knowing Versace, driving a dark green Rolls-Royce with a vanity license plate that read “Versace.” When Dale Twist ran a check on the car, sure enough, the Versace plate was found to be registered “to a bankrupt German” who Galleto said ran with that pack.

  While we were driving, Galleto, who keeps a rectangular electronic calendar on his lap, dialed Germany on his car phone. He yelled into the phone, “Ja, ja.” The only comprehensible words to me were “Versace” and “license plate.” “The mechanic on the car is a friend of mine,” he said. “The mechanic used to live in Miami. He worked on Ewald’s cars and made the plate for Ewald. He doesn’t know why he wanted it.”

  Galleto is convinced that “Cunanan must have connections to Las Vegas, to the gay bathhouse, and that’s why he’s on Reineck’s houseboat.” When I asked Galleto why, if he’s so intent on investigating them, they are still so successful in Germany, he answered, “The problem is the German guys know the Russians are coming. So they say to the authorities, ‘If you don’t give us peace, we’ll sell the business to the Russians, who are much worse.’”

  WHEN I TALK to Bobby Siller, head of the Las Vegas FBI, I ask him whether he knew, via the Miami FBI, that the two undercover narcotics officers had gone to the Miami Beach police and told them all about Reineck and the other Germans. “You have me. I don’t know anything about the DEA and those individuals,” Siller says. “I’m not denying it—I have no knowledge. I’m not aware of it at all.” In FBI records I subsequently obtained, the Las Vegas field office speaks of a number of individuals who identify Cunanan as being in the Las Vegas area shortly before he began his murder spree. One of them even states that he used the alias Andrew DeSilva. The report says, “The Las Vegas office is not prepared to dismiss a possible association between [Reineck] and Cunanan.” There is even a heavily redacted report that could be from Dieter and Galleto.

  On August 4, after Reineck skipped out on the lie detector test, the Las Vegas field office reported to the Miami FBI, “Leads regarding the [Cunanan investigation] are being left to the discretion of the receiving offices,” meaning that if Miami wanted Las Vegas to continue investigating, they should say so. In its final report, issued August 7, regarding who might have known Andrew in the Las Vegas area, the Las Vegas FBI describes the possible associate whose name is redacted as an individual who “closely matches the profile of wealthy gay males targeted by Cunanan to prostitute
himself.” And in another section, the report appears to come to the conclusion that Reineck and Andrew did know each other. “It is therefore unlikely that Cunanan, who supposedly frequented Las Vegas, would not be familiar with [redacted].” Who would that be? Reineck, the wealthy gay bathhouse owner? After August 7, according to the FBI records I was able to obtain, the Las Vegas office makes no more references to Reineck or Cunanan.

  “I’m surprised at the FBI,” Scrimshaw says. “They’ve got this guy—he kills an international celebrity and a rich person. There are all these ramifications. That’s it? He’s dead—we quit? Why? Because it wasn’t their case originally. Because all they were doing was fugitive work. If it’s something where they are not the primary investigative agency, they’re unconcerned, and they drop it.”