Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  In June 1997, the members of William Reese’s 14th Brooklyn New York State Militia staged the first of a series of memorial services for Reese, one of their founders. The services began in Laurel Lawn Cemetery in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey, and then spread to sister organizations in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Manassas, Virginia; and Fort Greene Park, New York. At each service reenacters in full Civil War regalia played taps and eulogized their friend. “I don’t know if he would have liked it,” says his friend Bob Shaw. “He was pretty humble.”

  Now at the reenactment that draws 30,000 participants to Gettysburg each summer, the hundred or so stalwarts of the 14th Brooklyn hear all about Bill Reese. According to Shaw, “They give a little talk, and Bill’s always brought up as a founding father of the regiment. His memory lives on. He’s not forgotten, because people want to remember who put it together and did a lot of the work.”

  Interviewed shortly after Andrew’s death, Craig Platania, Reese’s brother-in-law, gave an apt description of the effect Cunanan had on the family and those around Finn’s Point National Cemetery. “This thing was like a tornado coming over a hill—it’s not heard, it’s not felt, and all of a sudden this thing appears on your doorstep. Now we can see the tornado way off in the distance, and the clouds starting to clear, and everything that was in its place is now in another place.”

  THE VERSACES NEVER acknowledged Andrew Cunanan. “I am sure my brother never met him,” Donatella Versace said. In the first weeks after Versace’s death, the family did not inquire further of the police investigation. Ironically, the company’s sales soared. The tragedy achieved for Versace what he had so craved in his lifetime: the status of having an instantly recognizable name. In a Dateline interview with Katie Couric in December 1998, Donatella said she was “angry with people who didn’t make sure [Andrew Cunanan] was in prison” before Gianni died. She also said Gianni had been “cured” of his inoperable ear cancer six months before his death.

  Gianni Versace’s will provided that his eleven-year-old niece, Allegra, would inherit his 45 percent share of Versace SpA, and that her brother, Daniel, would receive his art collection. Both Donatella and Santo already had substantial shares in the company. Antonio D’Amico was given approximately $30,000 dollars a month, “inflation-proof,” for life, and the privilege of living in any of Versace’s houses around the world. Antonio, however, told a Canadian newspaper, “I’ll never set foot again [in those homes] because it would only be fruitless suffering.” In a further distancing, Donatella and Santo struck a deal with Antonio to take his monthly payments in one lump sum. He returned to his native Florence to launch his own design company.

  The Versaces were intent on managing their own version of the story to create a specially crafted image of continuity and triumph for Donatella, the new designer of Casa Versace. In order to enhance Gianni Versace’s image and standing as a “major historical figure of twentieth-century fashion design,” they poured significant sums into a major retrospective of his work at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sponsored in part by Vogue magazine, and inaugurated with a gala opening in December 1997 that drew Madonna, Sting, Cher, and Elton John. On December 10, the New York Daily News ran a short item about the gala: “Madonna, wearing a Versace sari-esque creation, raised eyebrows when she mentioned in a speech that Donatella ‘drops diamonds in her pockets’ when she visits. Friendship or marketing? You decide.” Ironically, the poster for the Met show was a picture of a sweeping black and white “behomoth eighteenth-century dress” for the San Francisco Opera production of Capriccio. Wags gossiped that the Met was quaking during the mounting of the show for fear that some unsavory item from Versace’s past would surface to embarrass the august institution. The Versaces, meanwhile, responded to any suggestion of Mob ties to their company with an aggressive legal strategy to punish errant journalists. In England they won two libel actions after Gianni’s death.

  Initially, the Versaces were determined that nothing would deter their longtime goal of going public with shares of Versace SpA on the New York and Milan stock exchanges. In July 1998, however, they announced that for the time being they would shelve these plans, owing to complications brought on by the estate laws in Italy, which mandated that an outside trustee oversee Allegra’s shares. As for Donatella’s designs for the House of Versace, after a first wave of sympathy heralded them, they began to receive mixed reviews.

  The Casa Casuarina soon became a must for tourists in South Beach. One day I observed a young European woman standing on tiptoe in her miniskirt and clogs and leaning over the chain barrier to finger Versace’s junk mail, which had not been pushed completely through the mail slot.

  SOON AFTER THE Cunanan manhunt ended, the FBI called representatives of a group of gay organizations to Washington for a meeting with the Bureau’s then number two, William Esposito. He says he told them, “We need to foster a better relationship, because if you’re being preyed upon by killers or victimized, we need to help.”

  “Esposito began by saying, ‘Yes, mistakes were made,’” says Sharen Shaw Johnson, then executive director of Gay Men and Lesbians Opposing Violence. “There was a clear and immediate and unprompted admission on their part that while cooperation was OK in some areas, it was abysmal in others. My sense coming out of that meeting is that they knew very well they were quite vulnerable.”

  “They started the meeting by emphasizing that in order to solve these crimes the FBI needed to find out more about the community they were in,” relates Darryl Cooper, former chair of Gay Men and Lesbians Opposing Violence. He remembers the meeting slightly differently. “They didn’t admit mistakes per se but that they had given wrong impressions—i.e., they weren’t doing anything. We tried to explain to them how the gay community is always wary of working with police agencies.”

  Cooper says that at times he “wanted to wring the FBI’s neck—like the times they said [Andrew] shaved his whole body and was wandering around in a dress.” However, he adds, “One rumor I heard is that he used crystal meth. I heard it from other Anti-Violence people, but they didn’t want to reveal it because it would make the community look bad. Gays want it both ways. I guess because we’ve been portrayed in such a negative way for so many years there are a lot of people in the gay community who want America to see us as we really are. But I think there is some censorship.”

  The Cunanan case prompted an outpouring in the gay press about the way gay crime is reported. The well-known Miami crime writer Edna Buchanan felt compelled to go underground after making remarks on TV which were interpreted to mean that the community of South Beach had brought the crime on itself by its campaign to attract gays to party there. Tom Brokaw was roundly criticized for introducing a segment on NBC Nightly News by characterizing Andrew as a “homicidal homosexual.” Also in the wake of Andrew, GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, issued a glossary for the media to use when describing the gay lifestyle.

  THE MIAMI BEACH Police Department’s handling of the Cunanan investigation, much maligned in the immediate aftermath, was the subject of a report issued by City Manager Jose Garcia-Pedrosa. The report delved into what really happened regarding the sub shop 911 call, the pawnshop form, the parking garage, the closing of Collins Avenue, the role of the warrant service team at the Normandy Plaza, the shutting down of the Public Information Office during the weekend of the manhunt, and the misinformation conveyed to the media concerning the body on the houseboat.

  The report said that “the investigation itself was on the whole very well handled by our Police Department. Not only did we ‘catch our man’ (whose suicide followed an intensive and ultimately successful manhunt), but we did so under relentless media scrutiny and pressure, and in unusual and difficult circumstances.” The report chided the Public Information Office for shutting down “in the midst of an international story” and admitted that, “to make things worse for the media, we provided little or no information, deferring to the l
egitimate though different needs of prosecutors, whose concerns in retrospect, we probably took too literally.” The report concluded, “Whatever the weakness in our protocols our Police Department cannot be faulted for not finding Andrew Cunanan before July 15th, especially when one considers that in the past we have not received copies of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.” (Apparently this reference is to the FBI fliers on Andrew that did not get distributed.)

  In order that such mistakes would not be repeated, changes were instituted. The pawnshop detail is now computerized—there is a direct link between the police and every pawnshop in the city, providing instant access to all transactions. The garage is under new management, and tickets must be purchased each day for every vehicle. The police and the Miami Herald, which were often hostile to each other during the investigation, in essence kissed and made up.

  Inevitably, much of the blame came down on the head of Al Boza, the veteran public information officer. The city manager’s office wanted a civilian to take over his position, but at the end of 1998 he was still in his job.

  It was not until the last days of 1997 that the Miami Beach Police Department issued its final report on the Cunanan investigation—seven hundred pages in three plastic binders with more than one thousand photos. That fall I met Sergeant Navarro, who still had not been given any information by the FBI to say that Cunanan and Versace had ever crossed paths. I later gave the police the names of two of my sources in San Francisco, who told Navarro that, based on their eyewitness accounts, Andrew and Versace had certainly met.

  Shortly after Andrew’s death, the medical examiner in a public meeting did admit—in a slip—that Andrew had not been HIV positive. That eliminated one of Scrimshaw’s putative motives. At the press conference announcing the final report, Chief Barreto said that the police could not come to any conclusion as to why Andrew had acted as he did. “The real answer to that went down with the ship, so to speak, when Andrew Cunanan committed suicide.”

  PAUL SCRIMSHAW COULD not accept that conclusion. Disillusioned, he retired from the force after twenty years in July 1998 and left Miami Beach to live on the side of a mountain in an isolated part of New Mexico. He is still haunted by the biggest case of his career, which he feels he was prevented from pursuing. He cannot get over the fact that the bullet with which Andrew Cunanan shot himself traveled almost the same path inside his skull as the path of the bullet Andrew Cunanan had shot inside Versace’s brain. Somehow, in his final desperate act, Andrew Cunanan was creating a parity between himself and Versace, someone whose wealth and fame he had felt should be his as well. Sadly, the only way that Andrew Cunanan could ever achieve any measure of recognition, however, was with bullets, blood, and evil.

  Shortly before Andrew’s body was found, Robbins Thompson went sailing on Dr. William Crawford’s boat with Norman Blachford, keeping a sunset vigil for what they both realized would be Andrew’s inevitable fate. Robbins says, “The more and more I think about this, I think he went on a suicide run. He could have gone back to Norman—he was unwilling to do it. It’s almost like he wanted the glory to go out with a bang, like a rock star: Live fast, die young, stay pretty.”

  In an effort to avoid the humiliation of his own failed life, Andrew Cunanan, who had wasted his gifts and lived resolutely on the surface, struck back. Fueled by drugs and filled with rage, his unmitigated ruin also drove him to destroy others, including the only person he had probably ever loved. With the exception of William Reese, each one of Andrew Cunanan’s victims—Jeff Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, and Gianni Versace—was like a piece of himself. In the end, Andrew Cunanan was a sad testament to vulgar, unrealized aspiration. The little boy who wanted a big house with an ocean view died hunted on the water with a gun for his last companion.

  Index

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  A

  Ahearn, Peter, 386, 436, 451, 456, 458, 461–464

  AIDS epidemic, 69–70, 123, 151, 156, 366, 403, 459, 467–468, 523

  Aikin, Lawrence, 312

  Albin, Glenn, 362, 390, 394

  Allen, Rick, 188, 190

  Aller, Michael, 418

  Andreacchio, Dominick, 198, 212, 219, 342

  Antonacci-Pollock, Rose Marie, 418, 426, 433, 439, 446, 447, 493

  Antoni, Brian, 362–363

  Arnold, David, 311

  Aston, Lincoln, 86, 97, 133, 136, 142, 146, 147, 149, 341

  Austin, Tom, 361, 365, 443

  Avery, Robin, 377

  Axtmann, Siegfried, 501–503, 507

  B

  Bacon, Francis, 378

  Baez, Gail, 338, 339, 343

  Ball, Lou, 140–141

  Banca Comerciale Italiana, 402

  Band, Michael, 422–424, 430, 465–466, 469, 485, 489, 493

  Barreto, Richard, 394, 395, 418, 423, 481, 485, 493, 497

  Barsness, Dale, 231–232, 258, 338, 344

  Barthel, Tim, 88, 90

  Bauder, Don, 296

  Beck, Allegra, 369, 434, 518

  Beck, Daniel, 369, 434, 518

  Beck, Ginger, 230

  Beck, Paul, 369

  Beitler, Paul, 261–262, 265, 276, 284, 285, 308–310, 332–334, 351, 470, 516

  Benjamin, Kenny, 408

  Benning, Diane, 184, 247

  Bergé, Pierre, 177

  Berkley, Elizabeth, 368

  Berky, Rad, 440, 441

  Berland, Abel, 264–265

  Beuerle, John, 101

  Bishop’s School, La Jolla, 38–52, 54, 63, 86, 143, 144, 183, 372, 451, 513

  Bitter, Eric, 265

  Blachford, Norman, 144–152, 158, 166, 167, 172, 173, 176–180, 217, 219, 225, 248, 258, 259, 296, 384, 450, 463, 523

  Bong, Gary, 25, 27

  Bonita, California, 22–25

  Bonita Vista Junior High, 27

  Bonnin, Rich, 163, 165, 166, 172–174, 188, 191, 203, 215, 242, 347

  Booher, Laura, 216, 228–230, 243

  Bourgeois, L.V., 83

  Boza, Al, 422–423, 429, 441–442, 478–479, 485, 522

  Bralower, John, 316

  Brazis, Betsy, 278, 284, 311, 314–316

  Bright, Gail, 423

  Brokaw, Tom, 309, 521

  Brown, Denise, 85

  Brown, Willie, 77

  Browne, Don, 486

  Brubach, Holly, 369, 371

  Buchanan, Edna, 521

  Buchman, J., 110, 114–116

  Bundy, Ted, 352, 382

  Burgart Weir, Kim, 43

  Burton, Eric, 232

  Buttino, Frank, 462

  Byer, Barbara, 266–268, 271–272

  Byer, Stephen, 266–272, 280, 284, 315

  C

  Caen, Herb, 77

  Campbell, Jack, 379–380, 477

  Canales, Louis, 364, 365, 370

  Caniparoli, Val, 79, 80

  Cannavo, Tom, 324, 325, 329–330

  Cappachione, Jesse, 159

  Capriccio (Strauss), 79, 81, 427, 519

  Cardona, Jaime, 361, 404, 432

  Carlson, Scott, 218

  Carreira, Fernando, 476–478, 491–492, 498–499, 504, 510

  Casa Casuarina, 360, 361, 367, 372, 405, 414, 428, 431, 519

  Chandler, Carl, 451

  Cher, 519

  Chibbaro, Lou, 335

  Chiles, Lawton, 434

  Chrysler, Larry, 176–177

  Clark, Kenneth, 378

  Clark, Marcia, 489

  Cogswell, Ed, 387

  Colakovic, Mersiha, 411, 413, 424–425

  Combs, Wes, 154

  Compton, Kathy, 162, 216, 217

  Conaway, Doug, 6

  Cooper, Darryl, 386–388, 520–521

  Cooper, Peter, 296

  Copley, David, 86, 296–297, 460

  Copley, Helen, 296

  Coté, Emmy, 60–62

 
Coté, Grimmy, 66

  Coté, Liz, 60–62, 64–67, 81, 82, 102, 343, 383, 471–472

  Coté, Raymond “Bud,” 61

  Coukoulis, Theodore “Vance,” 129–141

  Couric, Katie, 518

  Crawford, Cindy, 106

  Crawford, William, 86–87, 126, 523

  Creamer, Larry, 319

  Cronin, Tom, 353–355, 473

  Cruise, Tom, 191, 448, 450, 453, 513

  Cudal, Ted, 108

  Cunanan, Andrew

  aftermath of death, 508–523

  AIDS epidemic and, 70, 459–460, 467–468, 523

  Aston and, 86, 97, 132–133, 146, 147

  autopsy of, 511

  birth of, 21

  Blachford and, 144–152, 157–158, 165–166, 167, 172, 173, 176–180, 219, 225

  childhood of, 21–33

  Coté and, 61–62, 64–67, 102

  Coukoulis and, 130–135

  death of, 2, 13, 485, 487–494, 498

  DeSilvas and, 62–63

  de Wildt and, 77–78, 457

  drug use and dealing by, 3, 49, 114–115, 120–129, 135, 151, 193, 195–200, 201, 206, 215–216, 225, 373–376, 379

  education of, 23, 27, 30, 38–52, 82–83

  father, relationship with, 21, 25–26, 37, 44, 54–55, 58–59, 67, 72, 116–117

  FBI personality profile of, 470–475

  funeral of, 11–13, 511

  as greeter and matchmaker, 76, 111, 128, 134

  guns, fascination with, 67, 113–114

  homosexuality, early, 17, 31, 43, 47, 50, 66–67, 69–70

  on houseboat, 476–486, 487–488, 497–498, 504, 520

  life on run in Miami, 373–381

  lifestyle of, 104–119

  Madson and, 159–160, 165–168, 170–176, 178, 180, 182, 184–185, 186–191, 201–202, 203–206, 208–209, 213–220, 225–226, 228–232, 251–259, 285, 340–350, 467

  manhunt for, 287–288, 292–295, 304–306, 318–319, 382–396, 436–447, 456–467

  media coverage of, 2, 5–6, 295, 360, 448–455, 460–461, 483–484

  Miglin and, 13, 95, 168, 261, 274–286, 295–296, 308–317, 328, 331, 347, 350–356, 466–467, 469–470, 474