by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
He told me once or twice that his mother was very beautiful but he never described her to me in detail or anything. And he told me he knew a beautiful lady named Jinty Money-Coutts and he said that when I got out, if I had no place to stay, I could maybe stay there with her in London.
He told me he had a very small family and that his father had died when he was younger—or something like that. I think he said died but maybe he told me his father just didn’t want to see him anymore. But mostly we talked about what the correctional officers were up to—whether this guy dilly-dallies all day or that guy bullshits around or not.
Sometimes he did drawings—rough sketches with crayons. And some pastels—pictures of sailboats and rivers and docks. But one day he just tore them all up.
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
I drove out to Rikers Island to see him. We just talked in a room, at a table. He didn’t talk about stabbing his grandmother. We just talked about old times. I mean, that’s all I had to talk to him about. To me, he looked just like he’d always looked—very handsome. I always thought he was wonderfully handsome.
Look, I’d known him when he was little, and I never again expect to know anyone who killed anybody. I wondered when I went there what the hell I was doing—I mean, there was probably some sort of curiosity and vanity involved in my going to see him. I felt ashamed afterward, because I felt that I’d exploited him. I remember we said goodbye as if we would meet again—it was like we were at Schrafft’s.
James Reeve
Broadmoor was a sort of retreat, really, wasn’t it? He was safe there. My God, when he was in that hellhole in America he must have looked back on Broadmoor as nirvana.
Martin J. Siegel
I was relieved as Tony Baekeland’s lawyer in November of 1980. I turned his entire file over to his new lawyer, Ronnie Arrick. I was very surprised when Tony hired him because Tony and I had had a very good attorney-client relationship and there really hadn’t been any problem. But apparently a friend of his at Rikers recommended him to Tony. Now, I know Arrick is a very fine and competent attorney—he’s also a very nice guy. Who can explain why people want to go into this coffee shop as opposed to that coffee shop?
Ronald Arrick
The first time I met Tony Baekeland was in November when I think Siegel was canned. Anyway, I took over the defense. My job was to represent him on the entire criminal matter all the way through trial and to try to work it out to his entire advantage. His grandmother was not withdrawing the charges. The D.A. was not withdrawing the charges. I was also involved in long-distance dealing with certain facilities in England, because his only defense was a psychiatric defense.
My hope was to get him placed in what I gather his grandmother thought he should be in when she had him brought back here—a hospital. I wanted to have him found not guilty by reason of insanity, and I discussed this with him as about the only thing that could be done.
He had access to funds—I think it was a combination of trust and cash available. He would give in a written request to his trustees, U.S. Trust, sort of like a check facsimile, and they would issue the funds.
John Murray
Since Tony had money, he was wary of who would know his business by the way he was acting: Would it show on him? Would people abuse him for it? Would they try to get it from him too quickly?
Tony was very well liked as far as I could see. He had a calm nature, you know, but he had a very rude temper. He had a thing about if he couldn’t get his way he would more or less say shove off, you know—kiss it goodbye.
Dr. Helene Weiss
He was very volatile and I’m sure after a while he had some trouble with other inmates. I know he had some transient episodes. On December 11th he was switched over to our Mental Health Center.
John Rakis
The Mental Health Center has single cells and a higher complement of officers than anywhere else at Rikers Island.
Natalie Robins
I wanted to see Tony’s cell. Captain Earl Tulon, who was to be my prison guide, met me in the visitors’ parking lot on the Queens side of the island and drove me in a big Cadillac across the narrow bridge that is the only access to Rikers Island. He pointed out the various buildings to me as we took the exact route Tony Baekeland’s blue prison bus had taken. My first impression of the island was that of a bleak but tidy campus. School again, for Broadmoor Special Hospital had had the same effect on me at first sight. The difference is that here there seemed to be miles and miles of barbed wire, and once you began to follow it you couldn’t take your eyes off it.
We went inside a building called the Anna M. Kross Center where the reception area had a strong antiseptic smell. Here I received a visitor’s badge and my briefcase and shoulder bag were thoroughly searched by a correction officer. I then had to walk through a metal detector. Now I had officially arrived at Rikers Island.
We went down a very long corridor whose walls, surprisingly, were decorated with red-yellow-green-blue rainbows interspersed with large orange and purple triangles. Then we entered an older part of the building where the walls were bare. This area housed the Mental Health Center.
Here we were joined by a staff psychologist, J. Victor Benson—everyone called him “Benson” or “Vic.” He escorted us into Lower Three Quad. On the left was an area that reminded me of a classroom in a run-down elementary school: plastic chairs piled up on one side, two or three tables scattered around—one next to a wall. “That’s the table where I used to sit and talk to Tony. It’s even in the same place,” Vic Benson told me.
Then I was taken to the cells, a series of tiny single rooms, with doors that have small squares cut out, covered with metal bars. Tony’s old cell was at the end of a corridor on the left. Most cells don’t have windows, but his had one; it was covered with wire mesh embedded in the glass and looked out on a dirt lot that had one or two patches of crabgrass and weeds.
The current inmate-in-residence was in court, I was told. There was a thick gray wool blanket on the bed. Vic Benson said the bed was in the exact same spot as when Tony was there. Two pairs of underwear were hanging to dry on a metal shelf, and a dirty pair of socks and shoes were on the floor. There was some red-ink graffiti on the walls: Somebody loves somebody. I don’t remember what the names were, but Vic Benson said they weren’t there when Tony was in the cell.
Custodial Medical Information Form, Prison Health Services, New York City Department of Health, December 11, 1980
MENTAL HEALTH
Name: Baekeland, Antony
Suicide Potential: No evidence
Depression: Mild
Assaultive Potential: No evidence
Violence Potential: No evidence
Medication: Thorazine
J. Victor Benson
As a psychologist at the Mental Health Center, I got to know Tony quite intimately when he was detained on my quad. When I found out about his family background, I did some research on it. Tony himself didn’t take much pride in his background, and in fact when he spoke of it, and the wealth, it was all quite casually.
Some of the things he told me sounded like delusional material. It wasn’t, though. He told me quite blandly about murdering his mother. He mentioned that his relationship with his father was strained because of his homosexuality—he said his mother had been dissatisfied with his sexual orientation, too. The only good thing he said about his father concerned a trip they both took up to Yonkers once to visit his great-grandfather’s lab. It was a pleasant memory, that trip to the lab.
At the time Tony was here we had a relatively quiet quad, although emotions are easily aroused because the inmates live so closely together. Some inmates have to be kept off balance—separated, you know, so they don’t get into fights and so on. There’s also constant cell movement. They want to go to the law library, then they want to go to the barber shop—in this unit the barber shop comes to them.
The commissary is a very big thing—that’s the supply of niceties that th
e inmates have. They deposit money in their commissary accounts and once a week they submit an order. The most popular items are cigarettes, and candy and cookies—because so many are drug addicts, they love the sweets. If you’re in the general population here, you can go directly to the commissary and pick up your order, but if you’re in a mental observation unit like Tony was, they deliver the commissary to you.
Tony was very generous with many of the inmates. He was supporting them—well, not exactly supporting them, but he was very generous with commissary. He maintained friendships in that fashion. That’s one of the methods he used in cementing his friendships. He ordered huge amounts of commissary. But nobody could challenge that because he always had the money.
You know, all during the day on this quad the correction officers have to make repeated security inspections—check the keys, the locks, check the bars, the gates, the shower room, the windows, the screens, the walls, the dayroom, utility closet, the lighting, the cell walls which they could cut through because they’re only made of tile. They’re supposed to be impregnable but they are not—an inmate could chip away at the tiles and remove them a few at a time until they had a hole for escape. Also check the vents, because inmates have a habit of storing things there, like jail booze, which they’re very clever in fermenting. Check the slop sinks. Check the toilet bowls.
It’s a very noisy place, sometimes it gets to be unbearable—the telephone ringing, the inmates wanting to make telephone calls. They can’t receive calls, but they can arrange through Social Services to make calls and have an extended conversation, either local or long-distance.
Note from File on Antony Baekeland
Tony Baekeland and a friend of his in prison have been calling Nina Daly repeatedly and abusively. We can’t prevent Tony from telephoning his grandmother since she seems to acquiesce and won’t tell the police; but he can be advised to cut it out.
John Murray
I spoke to his grandmother when Tony called her. They were not harassing phone calls. That must have been someone else. I don’t know who that could have been. I asked her not to press charges on Tony, and I also spoke to her about reducing the charges, and she told me that she definitely, invariably would.
One time she got mad and I said, “Whoa, slow down, slow down, I didn’t know all that about Tony. Could you tell me that a little bit slower?” And she said, “I’ll slow down,” and then she said Tony’s gay and this and that, and I said, “I know about it.”
3
DECEMBER 17, 1980–JANUARY 14, 1981
John Murray
Tony was madly in love with me. He asked me a couple of times if I would come to his cell at night, but I told him I couldn’t do it. Of course I could, I could go to anybody’s cell that I wanted to. I told it to him like this—I said, “Well, Tony, I have a lot of work,” because work was the only thing I could do to excuse me not responding, since I’m not gay, you know. I was working—in the receiving room. I wasn’t working as a mopper or something like that.
The receiving room is where you go when you come back from court or from anywhere or if you’re just getting in from the street. They strip you on a table and search you, then they tell you to put your clothes back on. I was sleeping down there and I was working out down there with weights. I had priority there. But the first time I went there I was treated like one of the savage slaves they have. You know, everyone is pretty much a slave there.
Tony wanted me to be with him wherever he was, that was the main thing. He wanted someone to be his friend, to more or less straighten him out. I was concentrating on his money, and I was also concentrating on his family case. We got a letter from Broadmoor Hospital in England saying that he’d have to see a few more doctors to say whether he was competent to stand trial or not.
J. Victor Benson
They used to call John Murray “Big John” in the receiving room, where he was working on the house gang or paint gang, which is made up of the sentenced inmates who have specific work assignments while they’re doing their time. They call it “city time,” which is a year or less.
There was something going on between Murray and Baekeland, although Murray wasn’t a true homosexual. But in jail some inmates will do anything.
John Rakis
Most of these guys are welfare kids from welfare families and have no qualms about taking money from someone. It’s just part of their nature. Once when there was a plane crash on Rikers, a lot of the inmates came and helped with the rescue efforts and most of them wound up getting reduced sentences or were allowed to leave altogether because of the heroics they showed. But later we discovered that they went and looked in the newspaper and found out the names of some of the survivors and wrote them letters or called them up, if they could get the phone numbers, and tried to extort money from them. They’d say, “Hey, I saved your life—don’t you think you owe me something?” To them this was just a normal way of life.
John Murray
Tony gave away money for protection and also just to be friendly. He did it for both reasons.
Ronald Arrick
He did give away some funds. Primarily it was to relatives of people he knew in prison who treated him like family, who brought him things, like clothes, books. Mothers of prisoners primarily. Because his own mother was not around. It was not protection money that he was giving out.
John Murray
He never gave away money in front of me, except once. He gave away something like fifteen hundred dollars in a check, to some kid, I don’t remember his name. He lent people their bail money, money for clothes, money for drugs, stuff like that. He lent other people money just so they could have money. He was lending out around three thousand dollars a person. Really. He gave away something like forty-two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five dollars. I seen that number written down on a piece of paper that he had.
Also, you gotta remember Tony fooled around with guys—we both know that. He was fooling around with whoever was around. He wasn’t giving them cash money, but he was giving them stuff like for commissary, or he’d promise them cash money later, just for being in a relationship with him.
Word got around Rikers that he had money, so people were always coming up to him and saying, you know, “Can I borrow?” or “Could I have?” In other words, “Please may I?” You know. They’d get how much they could.
I told him many times not to do it anymore, but he kept on doing it. And then what really got me mad was when he tried to offer me money. See, ’cause I didn’t want money. I was his friend.
He was afraid of some people, and other people he just wanted to make sure he got along with because he liked them rather enough, you know. But the dangerous people, the ones who carried a shank, formed an organization and lived off Tony. Nobody ever tried to stop it. I was the only one who tried. Once, this guy wanted money and Tony wouldn’t give it to him. I heard about it in the receiving room and I was on my way over to help get the guy off Tony’s back. By the time I got there, a couple of the guys Tony had been giving money to rebelled against the new guy and said, like, “Hey, man, bug out, get out of here,” and they got rid of him. If I had had to take care of him, the C.O. probably would have let me fight him—and I would have won. I’d beat him up whether he had a shank or not.
Injury to Inmate Report, Department of Correction, City of New York, January 11, 1981
At approx. 12:30 p.m. Antony Baekeland got involved in a fist fight with inmate Jose Perez. This occurred in Upper Three dayroom. Inmate Baekeland was treated and examined in L4 Clinic by Dr. C. Park (psychiatrist). No apparent injuries.
Juan Martinez
There was a couple of people—we used to hang around together, like a little crowd, you know? I was in for five years. I was on the first page in a big newspaper when I got busted. You know, with a big picture, and a big smile on me.
Tony was a good friend of mine. We were together ever since he got in jail—we were like brothers. He told me all about his fami
ly. Things like that.
He was giving money out like crazy, you know? He gave money to Eddie Cruz, who’s in the street now—he was in for burglary. And Jackie Monroe, who’s doing eight years upstate now. Tony sent quite a bit of money to Jackie’s wife.
John Murray
He gave a really big check to this one guy with a mustache and a beard and long, shaggy hair. He was kind of young-looking and he was white, Spanish. He was in the quad. He had just got there. He borrowed a pair of shoes from Tony. Then there was another guy Tony was also helping out—Michael something. He gave him, I think, a big check to use when he got out on the street. The guy was going to use it for his mother’s house.
John Rakis
If an inmate had a check and gave it to a relative of his and said you can deposit this and draw on it, there would be no way for prison officials to track down that sort of extortion.
Howard Nabor
I was the warden at the Anna M. Kross Center when Tony Baekeland was there, and I think the money he gave out there he gave out to win friends more than anything else. I mean, you don’t give out checks for protection—if the inmates are running a protection racket they’ll take all the guy’s commissary or have his mother or his wife or somebody deposit cash in their account. Anybody can send cash to an inmate—all they got to do is just mail it to his name in an envelope and it goes. But a check is going to nail them right to the wall. All the guy has to do is go to the D.A. or the Department of Correction and say, “I’m being forced to pay protection,” and they say, “Can you prove it?” and he shows them the check. The inmates aren’t that stupid.
So one of the things we usually check on is the commissary. Our cashiers monitor that closely and if they see one inmate getting an exceptionally large amount of money from the same two or three people—and I don’t mean his mother or his girlfriend or his aunt Mary—then we know he’s either doing one of two things. He’s running a racket bullying people, right? Or else he’s selling something, he’s selling drugs or himself—he could be a homosexual selling his own body. If some inmate was running a game on Tony Baekeland, he wouldn’t be doing it with checks, because he wouldn’t want anybody to know about it.
