by R. G. Belsky
“No, I don’t want to go inside.”
“Why not?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Are we going to have this big important conversation you told me about right here on the sidewalk?”
“No, let’s do it in there,” he said.
He pointed to a car—a large black Lincoln Continental—sitting at the curb next to us.
“Your car?”
“Yes.”
It didn’t look like the kind of car Chad Enright would drive. I walked over to it. The windows of the Lincoln were dark and tinted so I couldn’t see inside.
“I’m more comfortable out here,” I said.
“No, this has to be private. Just the two of us. No one else can see us or know about us meeting like this. Please, get in the car.”
I hesitated. This was all making me uncomfortable. But I wasn’t too worried yet. I mean it was daylight now. We were standing there during the morning rush hour on a busy New York City street. Nothing bad could happen to me with all these cars and people around, right?
“Believe me, this will be well worth your time,” Enright said.
I was still trying to decide what to do when the rear door of the car came flying open. A man reached out, grabbed me around the waist, and dragged me into the back seat with him. I looked over to see who had done that. Not Enright. Enright climbed inside the back seat of the Lincoln now, too. But there were three other men in the car.
One behind the wheel.
A second in the back seat who was holding on to me and also had a gun pointed at me now. He was the one who had pulled me off the street and into the car. I recognized him right away. Michael Grasso—Morelli’s top henchman.
And now I saw the third person.
Sitting in the front seat next to the driver.
I recognized him, too.
Victor Morelli.
CHAPTER 31
I TRIED TO quickly take stock of my situation.
I was in a car surrounded by three mobsters and a crooked politician in Enright, who had set me up to be grabbed by them.
Enright was on one side of me in the back seat and Grasso was on the other. Grasso had his gun pointed at me and was still holding on to me. The other two—Morelli and the driver—were turned around and looking at me from the front seat.
My instincts told me that my best chance for survival was to get out of the car, even though the odds were against me being able to do that.
I jerked myself free of Grasso and made a try for the door handle.
But he grabbed me before I could get it open and pulled me back onto the back seat beside him.
“I warned you that first night you came out of the building to leave this alone,” Grasso said in that gravelly voice I’d come to recognize all too well by now. “Then I called you and gave you a second warning. No more warnings. You try anything stupid like you just did there with the door, and you’ll see what I mean. Understand?”
I said I understood. There didn’t seem to be much else I could do at the moment.
“See, I told you I could get her for you,” Enright said, speaking very rapidly. He seemed extremely nervous. “She thinks she’s so smart. She’s so smug. But I outsmarted her. I delivered her to you. Just like you asked me to, Mr. Morelli.”
Morelli glared at me and didn’t say anything for a long time. His contorted face was scary. I remembered all the things I’d heard he’d done to people who crossed him. I never thought he’d come after a journalist for doing a story. That was almost unheard of in the world of mob protocol. But there was a first time for everything. And I was afraid I might be the first here.
Finally, Morelli spoke. But not to me.
“What about the other one?” he asked Enright.
“She’ll be here, too.”
“Are you sure?”
“I called her, just like I called Carlson. Told her I needed to see her right away about everything that had happened. She’ll show up here soon at her office. You can grab her then, same as you did with this one.”
“And she won’t have any security with her?”
“No. Terri’s never needed protection like that.”
“Well, she does today,” Morelli grunted.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They were talking about Terri Hartwell. They were going to kidnap the district attorney. I wasn’t sure what they planned after that, but it sounded like they were going to kill Terri Hartwell. And the fact that they were talking about it in front of me meant they weren’t planning to let me walk out alive to tell the story.
The only thing I could think to do was keep everyone talking in the hopes that something—or someone—could save me.
“You need to reconsider what you’re doing here, Mr. Morelli,” I said, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible under the circumstances. “I’m aware of your reputation. I’m sure you think this is business as usual for you. But it isn’t. Kidnapping a journalist is bad business. A district attorney is even worse. There’s a reason no other mob leader has ever done something like this. If you murder a district attorney, law enforcement will come after you with everything they’ve got. And killing a journalist, any journalist, will put you in the media spotlight like you’ve never been before. You’ll never get away with it.”
“I’ve gotten away with everything else in the past,” Morelli said arrogantly.
“This is different. They’re going to track it back to you. I told my boss and another person at Channel 10 where I was going. To meet Chad Enright. I think Hartwell knows about you and Enright too, based on my last phone conversation with her. She’s probably going to tell someone else, too, where she’s going. Why take that kind of a chance? Why is this so important to you over a couple of buildings?”
Morelli didn’t answer me, but Grasso did. “It’s not just the buildings. Hartwell broke her promise to Mr. Morelli.”
“What promise?”
“When Terri Hartwell started talking about running for mayor, Mr. Morelli helped her with a sizable contribution—an extremely sizable contribution. He got a lot of his friends and associates to make financial contributions to the Hartwell campaign, too. All he asked was a few little favors in return. She agreed, like the last district attorney agreed, to work with us. It was all business, everyone got something out of it.”
I remembered how the previous district attorney had suddenly dropped an investigation into Morelli’s building operations. Now I knew why—he’d gotten a payoff. Terri Hartwell had gotten the same kind of payoff. But then she went after him anyway. Why?
“Not long ago, Mr. Morelli tried to collect one of those favors from Terri Hartwell,” Grasso continued. “But she refused. Said she didn’t know what he was talking about. She threw him out of her office. She disrespected him. And now she’s talking about putting him in jail.”
There was something in all this that didn’t make sense to me. It was the idea that Terri Hartwell took mob money—and then abruptly reneged on the deal. Why would she do that? I had a theory.
“You said Hartwell acted as if she didn’t know what Morelli was talking about,” I said. “Did Morelli or any of you ever talk directly with Hartwell when you were setting this deal up or giving her the campaign money? Or did you meet with someone else about all that? Someone like Chad Enright, here?”
Morelli and Grasso both turned toward Enright now. Enright looked like he was about to be sick. I knew then that I was right.
“Chad has a pretty exorbitant lifestyle,” I said. “Big boat. Vacation house. Fancy cars. Expensive girlfriends. Awfully hard to maintain that on a government official’s salary. So Chad figured out a way to boost his income big-time. He’d take your money on behalf of his boss, Terri Hartwell, in return for supposed favors she was going to do for you. Except he never told her anything about it. He kept the money.”
“Is that right, Chad-boy?” Grasso asked. “Did you double-cross us? Were you playing both sides of the fence?”
Enright started talking, almost incoherently, in an effort to save himself.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “She was going to get rid of me. She was bringing in someone else to do my job once she announced she was running for mayor. She was going to take away my authority. I helped create her career, and now she was going to cast me aside. I had to do something.”
“So, you worked out this deal with Morelli,” I said. “It was perfect for you. You got the money, you got to keep living your lifestyle—and you figured it was payback against Hartwell because of what she was going to do about you. Then, when she went public with everything yesterday and Morelli decided to get rid of her, that was even better. Because if he killed Hartwell for reneging on your deal, then she could never figure out it was you double-dealing all along.”
Enright was sobbing uncontrollably now. I turned away from him to face Morelli in the front seat.
“This changes everything, Mr. Morelli. Don’t you see? Terri Hartwell didn’t cheat you; she didn’t break her word to you. You don’t have to kill her. And Enright here will go to jail once people find out he was on the take. Isn’t that enough for you?”
Everyone waited to hear what Morelli would say. But I could tell from his eyes what the answer would be. They were stone cold. A killer’s eyes.
“Kill all three of them,” he said to Grasso.
Enright started to plead for his life.
I knew we were almost out of time. They were still waiting for Hartwell to show up. When she did, they’d grab her in front of the building like they did with me. I didn’t figure they’d kill us right there. They’d take us somewhere else—away from the DA’s office and the crowds on the streets. I had to get out of the car before that happened.
I decided to try again to open the door and run. If I could make a break for it while Grasso was still focused on Enright, I might have a chance. Not much of a chance, but it was worth a try.
I was about to reach for the door handle when I heard the sirens. Suddenly, a dozen police cars, red lights flashing, squealed up and surrounded us. Armed police got out of the cars. A police loudspeaker from one of them blared: “Get out of the vehicle. Drop your weapons and keep your hands up.”
Morelli and his men hesitated briefly, then calculated the odds, and surrendered meekly.
There were New York City cops, investigators from the district attorney’s office, and then—most surprising of all—Terri Hartwell emerged from one of the cars.
“We’ve had a tail on Enright,” Hartwell told me as the cops led him and Morelli and his men away. “He led us to Morelli first, then here with you. We weren’t sure what was going on inside that car. We were ready to follow if you went anywhere. But then I realized they were waiting for me to show up because of Enright’s ruse. That’s when we decided it was time to make our move.”
I broadcast live from the crime site soon after it was over, standing next to the car where I’d been abducted and reporting the dramatic details of everything that had just happened.
There was a lot of emotions running through me right then. Fear. Relief. Gratitude. And anger, too, that I’d been put in such a dangerous situation. People said those emotions—and especially my fear—came across in my live appearance as I reported the story.
There was a moment when I almost lost it and had to stop talking briefly to regain my composure. A video of that emotional moment wound up going viral on the web. Some people in the newsroom asked me afterward if I’d faked that for the ratings. But it was real. I was shook up pretty badly. Nearly getting killed can do that for you.
The news was filled with lots of follow-ups after that, with us at Channel 10 still in the lead and all the other media trying to play catch-up.
The stunning arrest of Hartwell’s top aide, Chad Enright, was the focus of the first day’s coverage. Plus, the arrest of Victor Morelli and other members of his mob family. There were more details and developments, including the arrest of Thomas Wincott, as a co-conspirator with Morelli in the housing scandal. Other details remained sketchy, and some of them might never be known for sure.
But Enright was talking—desperate to make a deal to shorten his prison time—and the picture he painted confirmed a lot of what I’d already figured out. He’d made a deal with Morelli to take campaign contributions without telling Hartwell. In return, he promised Morelli a free rein on his housing activities without any interference from the DA or other city officials. But, when Morelli finally went to Hartwell directly, she became suspicious and began looking into his properties. She’d already decided to get rid of Enright as her top aide, and she had made that clear to him. So Enright was happy for Morelli to think it was Hartwell who had double-crossed him—and even helped set her up to be killed, partly so his role in this could never be revealed by her.
There was no indication that Thomas Wincott was involved with—or even knew anything—about any plan to murder Hartwell. But he had been making campaign contributions to Enright, too, some on behalf of Morelli, to cover up their illegal housing activities. So he faced corruption charges growing out of the entire investigation.
I still didn’t know how Marty had found out about all this.
But Enright did remember being at Wincott’s townhouse one day to discuss campaign contributions for Hartwell. At some point, when Wincott left the room to talk to his wife, Enright made a call on his cell phone from the Wincott townhouse to Victor Morelli to discuss Terri Hartwell and the protection Morelli thought he was buying from her. All in generalities, he said, and he didn’t think anyone else had heard him.
But Marty lived in that townhouse, too. Maybe he got suspicious about what his son-in-law was doing. Maybe he had a hunch something funny was going on. Maybe he had already been looking into his son-in-law’s housing activities. We would never know for sure now that Marty was dead.
And none of this answered the question I’d started out with—who killed Martin Barlow and why?
Enright insisted he had nothing to do with that, and the authorities believed him. There was no evidence either linking Morelli or any of his people to Marty’s death.
In the end, the murder of Martin Barlow seemed to be just what it appeared at the beginning.
A senseless, random murder in New York City.
PART II
THE NEWS NEVER STOPS
CHAPTER 32
ANY STORY—NO MATTER how sensational—has a short life span in today’s media world. Within a few days, or even hours, another big story has come along to take its place and grab the public’s attention.
The media has always operated like this, even back in the heyday of newspapers. Yesterday’s screaming front-page headline was today’s back-page follow-up story. It got even worse in TV news where there was constant pressure to deliver big ratings—the demand for something new to keep people from switching channels.
And now, in the age of the internet and social media, everything is about instant gratification. We are all looking for that sensational story, that ratings bonanza, that traffic click bait for the web—then we’re quickly on to the next story.
Which is what happened with the Terri Hartwell story.
Eventually all of us—Channel 10 and the rest of the media—moved on.
The big buzz at the moment was bike riding on the streets of New York City. Environmental groups had succeeded in getting the bike lanes dramatically expanded, so there were more people—a lot more—riding bicycles here now. At the same time, taxi and limousine and automobile groups complained about the increased number of bike riders hurting their businesses and making city streets more difficult—and more dangerous—to navigate.
It was true that more and more accidents were happening involving bicycle riders. The worst came when a teenaged girl on a bike and a family of six riding in an SUV collided at a Manhattan intersection—killing the girl as well as all six people in the SUV when it swerved into an oncoming truck in a futile attempt to avoid the biker.
/> Then, in the middle of all this, transit officials announced they were raising fares 25 percent, making the third option of buses or subways even more difficult for people. It was a perfect commuter chaos storm, and we at Channel 10—along with other news outlets in town—milked the story for all it was worth.
There was a big controversy going on about bathrooms in city schools. Activist groups were demanding the city build new “third gender” bathrooms to serve students who didn’t identify with being either male or female. Me, I remember when it was “boys” and “girls” on the doors of school bathrooms. But the world was changing very rapidly. And all of us in the news business had to keep pace with it.
We covered a lot of crime stories, too. There are always crime stories. Murder. Rape. Robberies. Crime was the staple of local TV news everywhere, and we were no exception at Channel 10.
All of this kept me very busy, the way the news always does.
Jack Faron asked me one day about the serial killer story. I told him that I’d made a few inquiries, but I didn’t see anything to move forward on in terms of coming up with a story we could put on the air. He agreed.
“There’s too much other news to cover right here in New York,” I said. “I can’t chase around the country after some wild speculation that might or might not be true. I hate to admit this, but maybe Marty Barlow had gotten a bit crazy in his old age. He got lucky on the Hartwell corruption story. He was right there, even if he didn’t know the details. But this is too much to believe. I think he was desperate to come up with a big scoop—the scoop of a lifetime—because he knew he didn’t have much time left and he felt the news business had passed him by.”
Terri Hartwell met up with me for drinks, as she’d promised. There had been a question after the Hartwell story broke about how it might affect her politically. I mean, her top aide had been taking payoffs from the mob. On the other hand, she had cracked the case, and now it looked like she was finally going to be able to put Victor Morelli behind bars after years of him eluding justice. The latest polls showed her popularity with the voters to be even higher than before. She was still the favorite to become the city’s next mayor.
