The articles had it all. That we searched the lake, the cottage, and the crawl space. That we were reinterviewing the elevator man, the doorman, the South Salem neighbors, the Albert Einstein dean, and Detective Struk. Whoever talked to the Times and the News gave away the store.
The worst part: Durst was referred to as a “suspect.”
Saturday mornings were generally reserved for my kids. Kiki was fifteen and Alex was eleven. The lunacy was predictable. Theater, hockey, haircuts, and a bottle of arsenic reserved for me at the end of the day. I remember David Hebert called me at home and said, “Take a look at the Times.” He directed me to page A-20 (not the front page).
I read the headline and my blood ran cold: DISAPPEARANCE UNDER SCRUTINY AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS.
“Oh, my God!” I screamed.
David said, “Can you believe this?”
I read the article, my blood boiling. “Did you get a call on this at all?”
“Judge, you know I would have told you if I did.” Then he said, “It gets better. Get the Daily News.”
I jumped into the car to go buy one. I didn’t have one fast enough to get to the deli down the street. And there it was, an article on page 8 with the headline, COPS SHAKE THE DUST OFF ’82 DURST CASE.
“Son of a bitch!”
Whoever talked to the press compromised our case!
And get this: Years later, in a Galveston courtroom, I would be the one accused of putting Durst’s name back in headlines. Right. I leaked the news that screwed the investigation I’d spent a fortune on and had been obsessed with for a year, just to make sure my office and my name didn’t get in it.
It wasn’t about credit. If I wanted credit for the DA’s office, I would have called Charles Bagli at the New York Times myself. I could have picked up the phone any day of the week and gotten headlines. Our every directive was to keep the investigation under wraps, to make sure an essential witness did not get a heads-up, could not rehearse or reach out for even more money from Durst to keep her quiet.
Douglas Durst gave Bagli a quote: “Robert Durst continues to maintain his innocence.” Not exactly a strong defense of his big brother.
Robert gave the News a statement about the reopening of the investigation: “I know nothing about it, but I would not have any comment.”
Two weeks later, People magazine gave the case the full treatment, with photos of Kathie.
I was furious. Again, no mention of my office. Some said I was upset because I wasn’t in the article. Like I needed more exposure in People? I’d already been named one of their 50 Most Beautiful. I didn’t need to see my name in there. I needed this case NOT to be in People magazine.
Now, what—or who—was the common denominator in all three articles? Only one member of law enforcement is mentioned by name in all three articles: Joe Becerra. But he wasn’t just mentioned. He was actually quoted.
It doesn’t take Woodward and Bernstein or a rocket scientist to conclude that he was behind the articles. Joe put himself smack dab at the center of the investigation as if he were single-handedly running it. He ran his mouth on the eve of our biggest interview yet.
A man with a reputation for being a notorious media suck-up, Hollywood Joe Becerra had the connections to coordinate the Times and Daily News articles appearing on the same day. If one paper had gone first, I might’ve believed that one dedicated reporter had found us out. That two papers covered it simultaneously proved that one person had given the information to both outlets at the same time.
Even if the Times and the Daily News had snatched the story out of thin air or from some other big-mouth at the same time, Becerra actually went on the record with both reporters. Hollywood Joe couldn’t resist getting his name in the Times, the Daily News, and People magazine. And, as if the world should thank him and him alone, he stood out, the lone cop for whom we should all be grateful. At the very least, he did interviews with reporters, without state police approval or our approval. And to make matters worse, he didn’t even bother to give us a heads-up that he’d done it. He knew, as did everyone else on the team, the danger zone we were in.
In direct disregard of our effort, he blabbed. You can’t have one member of a team going rogue. I’d worked with hundreds of state troopers for over twenty-five years, and this was the first time a police investigator had taken it upon himself to reveal specific details of a major case investigation. He alone decided to release facts that were not in the public domain. He betrayed his fellow law-enforcement officers and prosecutors and put others at risk.
Why did he do it? I can only assume his actions were motivated by ego, that he did it for credit and to get his name out there.
Now secrecy wasn’t possible. Becerra had tipped our hand. Sure enough, Durst lawyered up. We never got near him.
Susan Berman would have her back up now, too. We hadn’t spoken to her yet. Now she’d know everything. She could prepare and get her story straight with Durst. She could run.
I kept trying to figure out how we could get past this new problem that was wreaking havoc on the investigation. I’d made it abundantly clear that not talking to the media was the strategy. We weren’t really looking for more witnesses at that point. We were looking to talk to only one in particular. Not only that, Becerra knew full well that Susan Berman could only be approached cold. She couldn’t have the benefit of a warm-up or a rehearsal.
Members of my staff were deflated, but not because our office wasn’t mentioned. As professionals, they understood the peril that they, the case, and the potential witness were in.
Of course I confronted Joe about what he’d done. He blamed the leak on a civilian, the one person who had carried the torch to find Kathie for eighteen years, Gilberte Najamy, and accused her of taking money from the press. He said we should never trust her again.
I never trusted him again.
As he was talking, I thought to myself, Really? So what if she talked? What about you? You gave it the law-enforcement confirmation. You were quoted in the articles. Why wouldn’t you give us or the supervisors a heads-up?
I’d already spoken to Gilberte about that. Her name was in the articles, too. She swore she’d just been interviewed and had called no one. But she wasn’t in law enforcement and she had already been the most vocal firebrand about Kathie since the day she disappeared. Any reporter would automatically go to her for quotes. She was not informed about every step of our investigation. That information could only have come from the inside.
Besides which, Gilberte wasn’t under a code of silence. She was a regular person, a private citizen. She could say whatever she wanted. But Becerra was a member of law enforcement and was under a code of silence, and he happily violated it.
He didn’t have to do it. He would always have been the trooper who caught the initial informant. He was the one who said, “Can we look at this again?” It was a great contribution to the investigation.
At that point, I could have said, “Thanks for the tip, Joe, now get back in your squad car and patrol the highway.” But I didn’t. I decided to let him stay on the team. I brought him into the center of an intelligent, well-honed, long-term prosecutorial investigation. Why wasn’t that enough? He repaid that generosity by stabbing me, the team, and the office in the back.
He wanted to be at the center of the action. I had heard that Hollywood Joe was a Lothario among the secretaries. But when he started hanging around my front office, I was uncomfortable. I then found out why. He started dating the woman in charge of my schedule who was working with Ro.
I’d locked horns with this type of man as a young female assistant DA, when I was one of the few. I’d run into cops and witnesses who, upon meeting me, would say, “I want to talk to a man, not a woman.” But all that changed when I became DA. I became accustomed to being treated with the respect I’d earned. After the leak, Joe seemed uncomfortable being admonished by a woman.
I thought to myself, He’d listen to a man, though. I picked up the phon
e and called the state police superintendent, Jim McMahon, Joe’s boss. I explained the situation and said, “Jim, I don’t want this guy running his mouth ever again about this case. Now Durst has been identified as a suspect.” In the coming weeks, I would need to mitigate that in the press. I said in a dozen interviews, “I’m not ruling him in as a suspect and I’m not ruling him out. I don’t know. When I believe he’s a suspect, I’ll tell you.”
Superintendent McMahon, too, was concerned about what Becerra had done. Troopers were like marines, trained weapons who took orders and didn’t speak unless spoken to. There was a loose cannon in his ranks.
“You want him off the case?” asked McMahon.
I thought for a moment but said, “No.” I knew he might have insight that could be valuable one day. I’d keep my enemy close, but I had to get a muzzle on him. “But I do want some people monitoring him.”
McMahon agreed, and he assigned two more high-level troopers to my office above Joe to watch him and keep him in line. In effect, he inserted two layers over Becerra: Eddie Lloyd and Domenic Chimento.
Hollywood Joe has no one to blame but himself.
FOR BETTER OR WORSE, the story was out and I had to deal with the consequences. Durst had lawyered up and gone off the grid. By now, Susan knew we were coming. We continued to monitor Durst’s bank accounts and saw that, on November 21, he sent Berman another check for twenty-five thousand dollars. My investigators started calling witnesses who would be in contact with Susan to find out what she knew.
Chief assistant Frank Donohue died of cancer on December 15. We knew he was sick, but we never thought he would die. He was that tough. Frank was a mentor to me. Because of him I learned chain of command and I ran my office with a quasi-military vibe. Frank taught me that.
Frank’s passing was a huge loss to the office and to me personally. The annual office Christmas party that year was a somber affair. Usually, it was a blowout. Not this year. Frank was gone. No one really wanted to be there. But we showed up anyway and tried to comfort one another.
I was sitting at one of the tables when the person next to me excused himself. Joe Becerra saw an opening and quickly took the empty chair next to me. I was annoyed, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it.
I said, “Hey, Joey. How are you?”
After his usual perfunctory compliment on my appearance, he said, “Judge, there’s someone who wants to talk to you outside of the office.”
My bodyguards made eye contact with me. They read me like a book and were at the ready to haul him away as soon as I gave them an indication.
I said, “Who?”
He said, “Michael Kennedy.”
Michael Kennedy was a lawyer retained by the Durst family trust. Fans of The Jinx will remember him as the man who pleaded with Robert to turn himself in after he’d jumped bail in Texas, saying, “Robert, please come home. You have loved ones who care about you here in New York.” More like the Dursts wanted to find him so they could kill him themselves.
Hollywood Joe Becerra wanted to worm his way back into my good graces by connecting me with him? “Why would I want to meet with Michael Kennedy?”
“Well, he wants to talk to you. He wants to have a meeting. So, I could arrange it for you somewhere out of the office . . .”
Becerra was trying to make himself important again. There was no reason for me to meet with Kennedy.
“Joey, why are you bringing this to me?” I asked. Any discussion should always go through the team, through the investigators and the lawyers, to be discussed, analyzed, and then brought to me for my information and input. How was it that he was even in contact with a Durst lawyer? Why was a member of the investigative team talking to Kennedy? Why would a trooper be engaging in any conversations with an attorney at all?
“I thought you’d want to . . .”
He thought I’d forgive him for what he’d done if he screwed things up even more?
I thought to myself, Do I let this guy even know what I’m thinking? I knew there was no way, but should I tell him? I did.
The answer was no. He sat there, crestfallen, with a painted-on smile. I turned around and talked to the person on my other side. He didn’t know what to do next. He probably got up and went looking for another female to boost his ego.
Becerra had a reputation for jumping in front of every camera he saw. He threw a monkey wrench into my case for a turn in the spotlight. He tried to blame someone else for his mistake. And he was still trying to be my friend?
Unbelievable.
As difficult as the holidays were for me that year, they were a lot worse for Susan Berman.
Thank God I didn’t have friends like Robert Durst.
SIX |
| GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
In 1982, Susan Berman was living on Beekman Place, partying at Elaine’s and Studio 54, basking in her newfound fame as the author of Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family, her just-published memoir. The book—about growing up as the only daughter of David Berman, aka “Davie the Jew,” a ’40s and ’50s gangster who murdered and kidnapped at Bugsy Siegel’s behest—was a hit. Reportedly, she got $350,000 for the movie rights.
Good for her. Berman’s life thus far hadn’t been easy. One year after her father died (ironically, nonviolently, on the operating table), when she was twelve, her depressive, often institutionalized mother committed suicide by swallowing a handful of pills. Despite losing both parents young, Berman scratched out a life for herself. She graduated from UCLA (where she met Robert in the late 1960s) and got her masters in journalism from Berkeley. As legend has it, Susan and Robert became fast friends, sniffing out immediately that they shared a childhood of wealth, privilege, tragedy, mental illness, and, no doubt, extreme loneliness.
In 1983, after the original investigation was closed and Berman’s role as Durst family spokesperson was done, she left New York and moved across the country to California. No one can say for sure, but I wonder if one of the reasons Berman moved was to put some distance between herself and the NYPD. She and Robert stayed in touch. When Susan married a younger man named Mister Margulies at the Bel-Air Hotel in June 1984, Robert gave away the bride. The marriage lasted a year. Margulies died of a heroin overdose a year later.
Tragedy clung to this woman. When Susan Berman hit my radar in 2000 and I read about her history, I found her to be an interesting character. Her once-promising journalism and publishing career had crumbled. She had no children of her own, although the son and daughter, Sareb and Mella, of her ex-boyfriend Paul Kaufman preferred to stay with her when she and their father broke up. She couldn’t get any of her screenwriting projects off the ground. Apparently, she was a hypochondriac, an extreme neurotic, and desperately broke.
When Susan reached out to Robert to get that first twenty-five-thousand-dollar check in March 2000 to buy a new car, she had a hard time locating her supposed best friend. We had a tough time locating him, too. Robert was a hard man to find, intentionally. He had homes in Connecticut, New Orleans, Houston, and Trinidad, a quiet town in Northern California. Since he quit the Durst Organization in 1994, he’d been buying houses and floating between them, slipping on and off the grid. The man didn’t like to be pinned down. Postleak, in November 2000, Durst turned himself into the invisible man (actually, he was the invisible woman). We had no idea where he was.
But we knew where Susan was. Susan had moved several times during her fifteen years in Los Angeles. We had previous addresses for her in West Hollywood and Brentwood, and her current location at 1527 Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. We were putting out feelers to confirm our information and smooth the way for our guys to go to Los Angeles to talk to her. And then the leak happened. Fucking Becerra.
We believed Susan Berman knew a lot more than she’d said publicly about Kathie’s movements on the night in question, and, quite possibly, Kathie’s current whereabouts. She certainly knew a lot about Robert’s actions and his state of mind. After Kathie’s disappearance, Sus
an was the only friend he spoke to for weeks. She’d been his filter. The team had spent the better part of a year compiling enough evidence to shake the foundation of his house of lies. Susan Berman spoon-fed selective narratives to the media about Kathie that they ran with, and the NYPD picked up on. Irrespective of what Susan had done, my goal was to solve Kathie’s case. If she helped me do that, I could forgive all of her transgressions.
In late December 2000, we were ready. John O’Donnell called the LAPD and told them we would be coming out to talk to Susan. In advance of the trip, he asked if the LAPD could drive by her house to make sure she was still there. We suspected she might have rabbited, too, given the Becerra leak. No surprise Robert Durst had written her a second check for twenty-five thousand dollars around Thanksgiving, certainly enough money to allow her to run and hide from us. It was reasonable to assume that the two of them were in touch by phone. If we could find her, we could find him. Susan was probably nervous. Given her personality, I bet she was chewing her nails off, one by one. In The Jinx, Robert confirmed that she thought the police were coming when he told Jarecki that Susan said the LAPD had reached out to her. I have never known that to be the case. Susan had kept her mouth shut in ’82, but she had been on Easy Street at the time. She’d seen eighteen years of rough road since then.
Could Robert still trust her?
On January 5, 2000, Clem Patti and John O’Donnell came into my office.
“I’ve got good news,” said Clem. “And bad news.”
I groaned. “What’s the good news?”
“We found Susan Berman.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“She’s dead.”
I yelled, “Son of a bitch!”
He Killed Them All Page 10
