Authors: Robert Kolker
Pressured out by his superiors, Hackett took a job in Riverhead, Long Island, as director of emergency services at Central Suffolk Hospital. In 2000, in his mid-forties, Hackett had another health emergency: chest pains that turned out to be the effects of a congenital heart problem. To regulate his heartbeat, he had a pacemaker and cardioverter defibrillator implanted that effectively forced his retirement as an EMT.
Back at Oak Beach, with ample time on his hands, Hackett made it seem like he was always on call, driving around the neighborhood with a flashing red light affixed to his truck, monitoring the police scanner and rushing out whenever the speaker blurped out anything about a jumper on the Wantagh or a disabled vehicle on Ocean Parkway. As one of the only medical men in the neighborhood, he once was called upon to reattach a neighbor’s finger and treated a few others with chest pains or heart trouble. But as he had in his career, Hackett earned a reputation in the neighborhood for telling stories. He declared that the enormous kitchen island in his cottage on Larboard Court doubled as an examination table. He’d say he had a background in law enforcement. According to one neighbor, when Hackett heard that a certain teenager had smoked pot, he took him aside and said he worked for the DEA. He seemed almost too eager to resolve any given crisis, no matter how small. According to another neighbor, he heard about a bad case of poison ivy and showed up to offer the afflicted boy a syringe with a steroid, provoking the fury of the boy’s father.
In Oak Beach, Hackett seemed determined to be a very big fish in a very small pond. But as polarizing as he might have seemed to some, he fit in well among those in charge of the association. The Hacketts embraced the communal barrier-island life, celebrating every Fourth of July with a neighborhood picnic, and they used the Reverend Long’s old community center for “heritage” meetings—a historical-appreciation club spearheaded by the doctor’s wife. They mourned when Frank Brennan, a jovial six-foot-seven senior vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, leaving his wife, Barbara, a widow. They mourned again when old-timers Michael Newman and Don Hendricks died. Their homes all sat near one another off the Bayou, the road in the center of Oak Beach—near the Suffolk County cop, John Bunkhard, and Charlie Entenmann, the pastry king, and Connie Plaissay, the Park Avenue florist. At night, with the waves lapping the tombstone jetties along the beach, they all could go back in time—experiencing, however briefly, that sense of grace and purpose.
The gate could do only so much. The rest of Long Island was becoming a Gothic fun-house mirror of suburban living, an early adopter of the coming decade’s reality-show excess. Right across the Great South Bay was Massapequa, home of Amy Fisher, whose shooting of the wife of her boyfriend, Joey Buttafuoco, served as the starting gun for Long Island’s long, low hustle toward tabloid infamy. Twenty miles away from Oak Beach was Mineola, where the body of a twenty-two-year-old prostitute named Tiffany Bresciani was discovered in 1993 in the back of a pickup truck. She was one of sixteen women killed by Long Island’s most notorious serial killer, Joel Rifkin. Thirty miles away, the body of a twenty-eight-year-old prostitute named Kelly Sue Bunting was found in a trash bin in Melville in 1995; she was one of the five confirmed victims of the area’s other great serial killer, Robert Shulman. More recently, fifty miles away, four bodies were discovered in Manorville, including that of a twenty-year-old prostitute named Jessica Taylor, whose head and hands had been cut off. The Manorville killer was never found.
As the people of Oak Beach tried to preserve their way of life, changes were coming from within, where the money was. As much as the rest of Long Island, Oak Beach benefited from the great real estate boom of the nineties. People whose parents paid six thousand dollars for a cottage thirty years earlier had become paper millionaires. The increased value of the land meant more turnovers, more development, more tear-downs, more renovations, more curb cuts, more bathrooms, more screened-in porches, more swimming pools—and potentially, fewer sand dunes. The only entity able to stop a leaseholder’s plans to remake his old bungalow into a twenty-first-century dream home was the Oak Island Beach Association.
After a century, the board remained the center of the neighborhood’s money and power, collecting dues from each household and setting rules. How people felt about the way that power was used often depended on how friendly they were with the members of the board. The most active board members were the Hacketts and their friends; Gus Coletti became board president in the nineties after Connie Plaissay. But in a village that was smaller than Mayberry, where everyone was supposed to take care of their neighbors, people now looked at each other with suspicion. Who on the board was building a garage without the right approval? Who was running a business out of their house when the bylaws strictly prohibited that? Which board members were being employed by that business on the side? Were any of those people being paid with association dues? Who was getting two thousand dollars a month from the association for landscaping work, then paying a landscaper five hundred to do it? Then it got more personal: Which board members were out late without their spouses and seen together in parked cars, doing more than talking about driveway permits and sand dunes?
The whispers escalated to open conflict in 2004, when the father from Oak Beach’s charming fish story—Joe Scalise, Sr.—and his family were almost driven out of Oak Beach by the association. The Scalises lived in a cul-de-sac on the west end of Oak Beach, down the road a quarter mile or so from the Hacketts and the Cannings and the Brennans, next door to Frank Solina, who wanted to put in a swimming pool without a permit. Frank’s good friend was the president of the board at the time, Gus Coletti, who did not object. Neither did the Scalise family until Frank bulldozed a sand dune that Joe liked. When Joe contacted the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it was war.
Solina persuaded Coletti to initiate eviction proceedings against the elder Joe Scalise and his son. For the first time that anyone could remember, a special meeting was called of the entire voting population of Oak Beach. The Scalises stood accused—by Coletti and Solina—of trimming some trees on association property and putting a snow fence on the beach. The seventy-two homeowners were asked to participate in a simple up-down vote: Should the Scalise family stay, or should they go? To some, it seemed ridiculous. “I said to Frank, ‘You know this is never gonna happen,’ ” remembers one neighbor, Bruce Anderson. “He said, ‘Oh, no, Gus told me he’s gonna get rid of them, and he’s got a list of other people he’ll evict next.’ And I said to myself, ‘Aw, geez, maybe I’ll be on the list!’ ”
When the vote didn’t go the way Solina liked—twenty-one to nineteen against evicting the Scalises—Gus counted three absentee ballots and declared victory anyway. The Scalises hired a lawyer, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees later, the courts stopped the eviction on the grounds that the bylaws stated that members had to be present to vote. The judge issued an order for the association to treat the Scalises as members in good standing. A year later, the association, still controlled by Coletti, sued the Scalises again for cutting down trees. That suit was also dismissed. Since then, the Scalise family harbored a grudge against those who ran the association and their friends. They despised Gus Coletti, Frank Solina, and everyone on the board, including Dr. Peter Hackett.
Nearly everyone agreed that the feud had polluted the culture of Oak Beach. The ugliness of the outside world had made it past the gate, so it seemed almost like an afterthought, or a foregone conclusion, when Joe Brewer arrived on the Fairway, taking up residence in his mother’s aging two-story Cape three doors down from the Colettis. Brewer was no scrappy South Shore survivor. He was an inland “lawn guyland” guy, unctuous and cloying and classless. The Brewer family owned a lot of real estate in central Long Island—apartments, a strip mall, some homes—and Joe, neighbors said, was the family’s Fredo. In his mid-forties, paunchy, and unemployed, Brewer once worked on Wall Street but hadn’t seemed to work at all in years. His mother’s place at Oak Beach became Brewer’s to do with as he pleased. The inside was a wreck—piles of junk everywhere, not an inch of floor exposed, nothing ever thrown away, and a pervasive smell of cat. Brewer had a young daughter but wasn’t married, and neither the girl nor her mother ever came to Oak Beach. On his way in and out of the house, he always waved to neighbors, smiling broadly and often chuckling at some private joke.
Brewer was not active in the association, but he was no misanthrope. He was the kind of guy who would recognize a neighbor at the supermarket in Babylon and come up and shake hands, animated and hyper, his long monologues punctuated with laughter. Like Hackett, he considered himself a
macher,
though Brewer could be cruder. To a few people, men he may have wanted to impress, he would confide that the house in Oak Beach was a party pit for him and his friends, “a place where you can do whatever you wanted to do.” These weren’t
Animal House
bacchanals; they were small affairs with a handful of guys and a woman hired for the occasion. Not that he ever needed to pay for sex, he’d say. As he cheerfully reassured one neighbor, laughing all the way, “I’ve had rock-star success with women.”
Alex Diaz had kissed Shannan good night on Friday evening at about ten, after their movie in Jersey City. He spent the next day thinking she would be home soon. She never returned, and by Sunday, Alex was concerned enough to try calling. He didn’t even get a ring; her phone was shut off.
He wasn’t sure what to do. He knew her driver’s name, Michael Pak, but didn’t have a number for him—or anyone in Shannan’s family, for that matter. Finally, he rifled through Shannan’s drawers and found a torn piece of paper with some numbers.
He first called Michael, who seemed surprised. “She’s not home with you?”
Alex was furious; he was her driver, how could he lose her? Michael told Alex what had happened: how she didn’t want to come to the car, how she was irrational, how she said he and the client were trying to kill her, how she ran. Michael said he just couldn’t find her.
Alex couldn’t understand. Nothing Michael was saying sounded like Shannan. Even when she was high, she didn’t act like that. Together, they Googled and found six nearby hospitals and four police stations. Using three-way calling, they dialed them all, supplying her name, her description, her alias. No one had seen her.
Alex asked Michael to connect him with the john. Michael called. A man answered. “What happened to her?” Michael asked.
Joe Brewer laughed. “Oh, man! That’s
your
job.
You
should know where she’s at.”
Alex spoke up. “I’m the boyfriend. What happened?”
Brewer was defensive. “I tried to hold her. I tried to tell her to calm down. But she took off.”
“Why didn’t you try to bring her to the car?”
“She wouldn’t,” Brewer said. “And then she just took off, really scared.”
It didn’t sound right to Alex. Michael said she’d been there for three hours already. What would set her off after all that time?
That night, at about eleven-thirty, Alex drove to Oak Beach, the first of three trips he would make in the next week. He was so nervous, he brought a gun, a little .25 he’d had for years. As he passed under one bridge, he felt a weird vibe: Getting thrown out of a car along this road could kill somebody.
Brewer came out to meet him at the gate. He looked like he’d been home all day—pants unbuttoned, dirty white T-shirt, stubble. Brewer tried to level with him. “Look, man, she came to my house. We were having a conversation. All of a sudden, I felt uncomfortable with the conversation.”
They talked for what felt like a half hour. Brewer kept wanting Alex to follow him through the gate—“Come to my house and search it,” he said—but Alex didn’t want to. He was worried about what might be waiting for him on the other side.
“You know, I’m gonna call the police,” Alex said.
“Okay,” Brewer said. “I got nothing to hide.”
“I’m going to go to the police station,” Alex said. “Do you know where it is? Can you take me there?”
“All right,” Brewer said. “Follow me.”
Together, Alex and Brewer tried to file a report. Alex remembers the Suffolk County police officers having a hard time concealing their laughter. “She ran away? She’ll probably come back to your house. Check your house—maybe she’s there now.” When Alex said he was from Jersey City, they told him to file a report there.
When Alex got home, he could barely sleep. The next day, he drove back, a photo of Shannan in hand, ready to knock on doors. He made it to the Oak Beach gate at about noon; a neighbor stopped him and asked him to wait. A moment later, a truck pulled up the drive and came to a stop. Out stepped a portly middle-aged man with a pasty complexion. Alex noticed his limp and his prosthetic leg. He lumbered over with surprising speed. The man had an easy smile and bright eyes. He reached out his hand and introduced himself as Dr. Peter Hackett.
The doctor listened intently to Alex, even writing down some of what he said in a little notebook. He told Alex he knew nothing about what had happened to Shannan. But he said, “We’re gonna help you out with the case. I used to work with the police. We’re gonna call them. We’ll have this whole place searched.” Sure enough, later that day, helicopters were sighted above Oak Beach. They found nothing—hardly a surprise to Alex, since she had been gone for two days.
That night Alex filed a missing-persons report for Shannan in Jersey City, listing all her distinguishing marks: a tattoo of cherries on her left wrist, a scorpion tattooed on her back. He also told them Shannan was bipolar and was known to use cocaine, pot, and prescription drugs. A few days later—either the fifth or the sixth, he can’t remember—Alex came back to Oak Beach a third time, this time with Michael. Shannan’s sisters and Mari were supposed to meet them but backed out at the last minute, concerned that residents might call the police.