Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  After meeting with Galleto, I pose the question of what happened to Paul Mallett, the interim special agent in charge of the Miami FBI at that time, replacing Paul Philip, who took a job with Mayor Penelas’s office soon after the Cunanan investigation. “You’ve seen the nature of our responsibilities here,” says Mallett. “Once we solve a crime, unless we need to continue to maintain an aggressive posture, that case is closed.”

  When I ask about the Germans, Mallett dismisses the “rumors” about the German connection to Andrew Cunanan as “probably unfounded.” Then he gives me an answer that is a bit poetic and condescending. “We’re talking about a den of iniquity among thieves and con men who lie at the drop of a hat and tell you anything. I don’t think you’re going to understand it. You’re trying to put a leash on a zephyr of wind out there.”

  LESS THAN A month later, Anthony Pike, the son of a rich hotelier on the Spanish gay island playground Ibiza, arrived in Miami from Australia. He was in town to try to sort out what happened to $65,000 that had been embezzled from his father’s account in London. He never found out. He was murdered within hours of being picked up at the Miami airport—shot twice in the head. In what authorities thought was supposed to look like a gay murder, his nude body turned up on an isolated beach on a key near Miami favored by windsurfers. Says a prosecutor, “How many people would know that beach is there?”

  The man Pike was meeting at the airport, who was later charged with fraud, perjury, related charges, and suspected of murder, was none other than Kico Forti, the Italian producer who claimed to have bought the houseboat and who wanted to do a book and film on Versace. Forti, the former windsurfing champion, immediately pointed the finger at a German tennis pro, Thomas Knott, who lives in the same building as Forti on Williams Island; Knott in turn implicated Forti, who sold one of his Williams Island condos to make the nearly half-million-dollar bail.

  Knott, who Galleto says is a close friend of Axtmann, has a series of fraud convictions in Germany, where he was jailed. He also was charged with fraud in the Pike case, and in the wake of Pike’s murder, had pleaded guilty to one of two federal gun violations. In addition, police found Internet material in Knott’s apartment on how to make fake passports. At the end of 1998, both men were suspected of murder, and both were awaiting trial for fraud.

  41

  Echoes

  FIVE MONTHS AFTER Andrew Cunanan died, the “Houseboat of Horrors,” as the Miami Herald dubbed it, was still making headlines. First Fernando Carreira, who continued to take care of the houseboat, made some headlines of his own. Carreira collected a total of $55,000 in reward money from various entities—the FBI, the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, and finally the Miami Beach police, FDLE, Dade County, and the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau—but not without a series of well-publicized struggles.

  Within a day of finding Andrew, Carreira had acquired an aggressive lawyer who accompanied him on an all-expenses-paid victory lap to New York City for his numerous media appearances. The New York media started a campaign on Carreira’s behalf after New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani refused to give Carreira the $10,000 reward New York had offered because he hadn’t called the New York tip line. But when Giuliani wouldn’t budge on handing the caretaker his Big Apple reward—which stung Carreira, who had brought along his honorary New York Police Department badge—Miami was shamed into giving him the Florida reward money. “Both Miami Beach and the Feds didn’t feel he deserved it,” says Dale Twist. “They felt forced by New York—it was political pressure at that point: ‘Poor guy, you said you’d give a reward, and you didn’t come through.’”

  Naturally Carreira disagreed. “Because of me they found him. There were more than a thousand agents, the FBI, the policemen, a thousand a day working around the clock, twenty-four hours a day looking for him. You know how much money I saved the government, the taxpayers?” Carreira, who appeared on Geraldo and Larry King Live and flew back to his native Portugal for the first time in more than forty years, started wheeling and dealing almost immediately. He was a celebrity now, and he even started wearing a knock-off silk Versace shirt. Still, as he disavowed his fifteen minutes, he pithily summed up our tabloid age. “The cameras and the reporters—not the kind of thing I want to be involved in,” Carreira says. “But since I started, no way to avoid. So, since no way to avoid, keep going. That’s it.”

  Carreira was also given power of attorney over the houseboat by Ruehl, and he and Forti clashed over who could give access to the media to film the houseboat interior. Forti had already collected a hefty fee from American Journal when Carreira gave the go-ahead to the Today Show for free, as compensation for his having appeared first on Good Morning America, ruining Forti’s upcoming deal with Geraldo. Then, just as Forti concluded another deal that would give him possession of the houseboat on December 31, 1997, the houseboat started to sink. By December 23 it was tilting at about a thirty-degree angle. Carreira and Steinberg both claim the sinking was sabotage pure and simple, saying that a diver they hired found a wooden plank wedged strategically between the sea wall and the houseboat to jam the hull.

  The city did not bother to investigate—they wanted the houseboat destroyed. But Steinberg raced to court to save the notorious structure, arguing that it was a historic landmark. “Any bathroom, any commode Mr. Cunanan used is not a historical site,” Robert Dixon, Miami Beach deputy city attorney, told the Miami Herald. “This is not a good attraction; this is an infamous attraction.” He added, “The owner is just seeking the right to do this B-grade movie on Cunanan.”

  Before the final disposition of the houseboat was decided, however, Carreira and Ruehl, who had come over from Germany, tried to salvage it. The boat had to be lightened before it could be raised, and a spontaneous sale began when passersby started asking if they could buy items being taken out of it. “So the people start to ask, ‘Do you want to sell?’” Carreira relates. “And so I ask Doctor Ruehl and he say, ‘For sale.’” Drinking glasses and pillow-cases that Andrew might have used started going, and soon TV camera crews appeared. “They found out before me,” Carreira quipped, but the city was not amused. Carreira got slapped with a fifty-dollar fine for holding the yard sale without a permit.

  On January 8, 1998, the city seized the houseboat. The contractor who was awarded the demolition did not have proper insurance, and so the vessel stayed tipped in the inland waterway until January 28. About then, Carreira and two partners started marketing the CareTaker Quick Draw concealment holster, to be worn inside the waistband so that one would not have to fumble as Carreira had when he was confronted with the presence of the serial killer. The nylon holster cost $24.95, and Lonnie Wood, one of Carreira’s partners, assured me that a number of Venezuelan generals were interested in buying it.

  In early February 1998, a second houseboat owned by Torsten Reineck was destroyed by El Niño.

  The Normandy Plaza Hotel changed all of its room numbers lest guests feel creepy staying in the same room as had Andrew.

  TURMOIL CONTINUED TO surround the Cunanan case. Although Andrew’s autopsy showed that he did not have any drugs in his body, no hair test was done, so previous drug use could not be ruled out. “If there is no direct importance at the moment of suicide,” says toxicologist Dr. Lee Hearn of the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office, “it is of no concern to us.” Andrew’s corpse became an attraction unto itself at the “teaching autopsy” room off to the side of the morgue, with a parade of law-enforcement and city VIP’s wanting a peek, some reportedly posing with the body while others snapped Polaroids. Finally a hand-lettered sign went up. No admittance. One day Scrimshaw got a call complaining that someone at the crematorium where Andrew’s body was awaiting incineration was trying to sell the toe tag off his corpse. The body was not shipped home immediately, because his parents were in a bitter dispute over who should claim it. Andrew’s father originally wanted his body to be buried in the Philippines, but his cremains eventually landed in Californi
a.

  About the only thing Andrew’s mother and father agreed on was that their son had been set up by the Mafia to kill Versace. This idea grew out of comments made by Frank Monte, a heat-seeking private investigator in New York who insisted that Gianni Versace, shortly before his death, had hired him to investigate the murder of a friend and to find out whether money was being laundered through Versace’s company. Monte’s most audacious media moment came when he charged that Andrew had not committed suicide but had been killed before Versace and frozen, then later taken secretly to the houseboat. The Versace family angrily denied that Gianni Versace had ever even met Monte. Nevertheless, Monte’s wild assertions spurred many—especially in Europe—to subscribe to the still unproved belief that Versace’s murder had been a Mob hit.

  Clinging to this Mafia conspiracy theory, Andrew’s parents sought to cash in on the tragedy. The family started to negotiate with TV producer Larry Garrison, who specializes in signing up the “life rights” of individuals involved in tragic and sensational dramas. Garrison delivers interviews to tabloids such as Extra and also attempts to set up movie and book deals. Garrison says he quickly gave up on the Cunanans, however, because there was too much dissension among them. “The father came in from the Philippines and convoluted everything. Then the mother started doing shows like Hard Copy,” Garrison says. “The sister Gina didn’t want to do anything, so there was strife within the family.” They could not agree on “what they wanted to do and didn’t want to do.”

  Except for appearances on Larry King Live and Prime Time Live, Cunanan’s older brother and sister refused to speak to the media if they were not paid. Their mother, though technically bound to do the same, was hard to muzzle. After being burned the first time by Hard Copy, which she asserted had tricked her into answering her door for its crew, she appeared on the tabloid show a second time and apparently used her earnings for Andrew’s funeral expenses. In October she made another suicide attempt, but in December she surfaced again, on Larry King Live. The producers carefully edited her footage so that she would not appear excessively irrational. Her estranged husband, Pete Cunanan, just in from the Philippines, appeared on the same program but he was taped separately. He reputedly received $10,000 for an appearance on Inside Edition, but he went on Hard Copy for free in exchange for all the Associated Press clippings about the case.

  MaryAnn Cunanan’s smoky rasp became familiar to the police in the places where Andrew had murdered. She would call to protest an exploitation movie about Versace’s murder being filmed in Miami and ask the police to stop it. By fall she was also making impromptu visits to California Cuisine, where the startled staff remarked on the eerie similarity between her cackling laugh and her son’s.

  The only member of the Cunanan family to eschew making a buck off the tragedy was Andrew’s sister Gina, who was overwrought by the publicity the case brought to her just when she had gotten engaged and was planning to start a new life. She also kept an eye on her mother and tried to help her out. Gina Cunanan was married in the fall of 1998.

  The tabloidization of events and the resulting money frenzy altered relationships among its beneficiaries. Erik Greenman became a pariah in Hillcrest for accepting $85,000 from the National Enquirer to tell stories about Andrew’s obsession with Tom Cruise, which people acquainted with Andrew knew to be patently ridiculous. Erik cried all the way to the bank. He bought a flashy convertible and stayed out of sight for months. Nicole Ramirez-Murray had no such qualms about her transactions with the media. The gay activist and drag queen used the $5,000 she had received from the Globe for delivering photos of Andrew to get a face-lift—her eighth foray into plastic surgery.

  Robbins Thompson regretted having fled to Mexico in the wake of his close friend’s crimes. After Andrew’s death, he figured he should be remunerated for being so unceremoniously blasted out of the closet. He made the rounds of tabloid TV, getting $5,000 for an appearance on Hard Copy and a few thousand more from Sally Jessy Raphael. But Robbins missed the big-bucks money by waiting too long. Nevertheless, he ended up with a nice spread about him in the gay journal The Advocate.

  Anne and Rachel Rifat were contacted again by the National Enquirer the day after Andrew’s death and told that the price for their material would be lower now. The Enquirer, no longer willing to foot a big fee, put them in touch with the Gamma Liaison photo agency, which paid them $20,000 up front plus 60 percent of the proceeds from their photos worldwide. The pictures appeared in the Enquirer and Newsweek. Matthew Rifat, Rachel’s twin, sold pictures he had taken of Andrew at Bishop’s for less than $10,000; he also participated in an A&E documentary on Andrew, with the stipulation, he says, that it was for one-time use only. When A&E made a videocassette to sell in stores, he sued parent company CBS for $7 million for breach of contract and fraud.

  THE TRAILS AND the Madsons avoided the media, but they were hardly allowed to mourn in solitude. Both couples set up scholarships in the names of their sons. The Trails were struck by tragedy again early in 1998, when Ann’s oldest son, Mike Davis, died of a heart attack at age forty-nine. They began to attend church regularly, and they also entered a daunting bureaucratic maze in an effort to retrieve Jeff’s gun from the authorities. The Trails wanted to destroy the gun publicly as a symbol of the horror that Andrew had rained upon them and the other victims.

  Lisa Stravinskas, Jeff’s sister, spoke for all the victims’ families after Andrew died when she told the AP, “What we really wanted was for the killing to end, because every time a killing was linked to [Cunanan], it was like Jeff had been killed all over again, and the nightmares and sleepless nights would start again.”

  In December 1998, Lisa organized in Jeff’s memory a gun turn-in program in her hometown of Elgin, Illinois. On December 19, thirty guns and thirteen hundred rounds of ammunition were brought to the police; the program will continue twice yearly.

  THE MADSON FAMILY worked tirelessly to convince the public that David Madson had had nothing to do with Jeffrey Trail’s murder. They maintained that David had been held against his will by Andrew, and that he had died earlier than the official time of death, several days after Jeff’s murder.

  On June 16, 1998, more than a year after David’s death, the Minneapolis Police Department called a press conference to say that there was “no evidence which would implicate David Madson in the murder of Jeffrey Trail.” Without stating it directly, the department was trying to accommodate the Madsons and their attorneys. At the press conference, a formal “declination” of the original request to charge David with Jeff Trail’s murder, which had been filed by Tichich more than a year before, was issued by the county attorney’s office. It contained some sloppy errors. “Cunanan” was spelled incorrectly throughout the document, for instance, and the day of the week when Andrew and David were sighted walking Prints after Jeff Trail’s murder was wrong.

  As a result of the Madsons’ experience, Captain Strehlow announced that the Minneapolis Police Department was planning to institute a program on how to deal with victims’ families. A similar program is in existence in St. Paul, and Howard Madson sent an article about it to the captain with a note suggesting that Sergeant Tichich be the first to enroll. Strehlow concludes, “Something very valuable has come out of this.”

  The Madsons were heartened, but they are still far from being over David’s death. “We realize Christmas will never be the same, but our life goes on,” David’s mother, Carol, wrote in December 1998. “Losing a son and compounded by death in such a horrendous manner is hard to accept. God gives us strength to cope each day, whatever comes our way.”

  THE MIGLIN FAMILY continued to insist that Lee’s murder was a random act. Duke had put his acting career aside for a time in order to help his mother with the real-estate empire. By Thanksgiving 1997, he was also helping her sell her products on the Home Shopping Network.

  In April 1998, to the profound regret of Paul Beitler, Marilyn Miglin forced a sale of Miglin-Beitler, breaking up the
successful partnership and forcing Beitler to acquire a new partner, Howard Milstein from New York, who in early 1999 bought the Washington Redskins football team. Beitler says that if he had not agreed to an auction, Marilyn would have forced the sale through court action. “This nightmare will come to an end once Miglin’s name is off the door,” he said. It came off in October 1998.

  Yet Beitler has never really gotten over his partner’s death either. He was instrumental in having a street named for Lee Miglin, and has attempted to have a chapel built at O’Hare Airport in Lee’s name. “Lee was like my father. I lost my father at a very young age—he didn’t die, he abandoned me. I lost my mother this year. Lee was like a father to me. It hurt me. A lot of people’s lives were destroyed.”

  In November 1998, Marilyn Miglin, who had suffered mostly in silence, announced her engagement to a suave Egyptian widower via an item in Irv Kupcinet’s gossip column in the Chicago Sun-Times: “It was a romantic candlelight dinner at the Ritz Carlton Club the other night when Naguib Mankarious presented his love, Marilyn Miglin, with a multicarat diamond ring, especially made in his native Egypt. As a true romanticist, Mankarious had the ring ‘served’ in the dessert, which caused a howl of delight from the bride-to-be.”

  There was no hint that it had ever crossed the mind of a single law-enforcement official in Chicago that Lee Miglin’s murder by Andrew Cunanan could be ruled anything but a senseless, wanton, spur-of-the-moment killing. Weeks after Andrew’s suicide, there was finally tangible proof he had been driving the Miglins’ Lexus. New Jersey State Police were able to match Andrew’s fingerprint with one found on the inside of a back door handle on the Lexus. No Chicago police report was ever issued.

  REBECCA REESE, WILLIAM Reese’s widow, went into seclusion after her husband’s death. She appeared on camera only once—on Dateline, while Andrew was still at large—mostly, she said, because she did not want people to think her husband was gay.