The Murder Room (21 page)

America’s Most Wanted
had shown the Nauss episode twice in the past two years, and mentioned Nauss a couple more times, as did other TV shows, including
The Phil Donahue Show
in recent weeks. Marshals had traced down literally hundreds of dead-end tips in California, Montana, Washington State, Texas, Arizona, New Jersey, Delaware, and throughout Pennsylvania. But on November 2, out of the blue, a tipster called and said a man who resembled the Nauss bust on
AMW
lived in Michigan.

“I told them he was in Michigan years ago,” Walter sniffed.

The tip led marshals to Luna Pier, a small town on Lake Erie an hour south of Detroit, and a man who went by the name Richard Ferrer. Nauss, thirty-eight, had taken the alias from the name of a cell mate back in Graterford. He was living a quiet life in Luna Pier with a new wife and three young sons in a ranch house with three picture windows overlooking Lake Erie.

Marshals had pieced together his trail of deception.

The year after his escape, a gentlemanly, charming, solidly built Nauss, then thirty-two, met and married Toni Ruark, thirty-seven, a single mother and government clerk in Detroit. “Rick” introduced himself as a lonely orphan, divorced, an investor, the owner of fourteen lucrative rental properties, who had “moved to Michigan to try to get his life together.” When he told his life story—orphaned with five siblings after his father died in a car accident—his friends in Luna Pier said they felt so bad for him they didn’t press him for details.

Having grown up in an upper-middle-class home in suburban Philadelphia, it was easy for Nauss to shave his heavy biker’s beard, cut his hair short, and fit right into the middle-class town. “Rick Ferrer” was a devoted husband and father, and loved to take his buddies fishing on his twenty-seven-foot boat. The lonely town of 1,500 had only four police officers, who considered him an upstanding citizen.

“When she met him, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven he was so nice,” Toni’s father said. “I liked him, too.”

Though he had no job in Michigan, Rick cultivated the image of an easygoing, successful tradesman around town. He wore his trademark baseball cap, chinos, and long-sleeve flannel shirts (always long-sleeve, no matter what the weather) as he drove his pickup truck with the toolbox he used for repairs on his properties. Occasionally he took trips out of town and came home with rent money of $2,000 or $3,000. He bought a beachfront camp up in Brimley, Michigan, on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, for a vacation home, and started selling off the extra land in lots. Life was good.

At 8 P.M. Tuesday, Halloween Eve, Rick and Toni and the kids were driving home in the Chevy Suburban, still planning for the trick-or-treaters. Toni had fixed the kids’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes, carved pumpkins for the yard, hung a paper ghost in the window, and strewn tiny lighted pumpkins in a tree by the front door. Until the moment carloads of U.S. Marshals, guns drawn, surrounded the Suburban, she had no idea who her husband was.

The marshals handcuffed the docile, solidly built Nauss in front of his children. Then they handcuffed Toni to keep her under control, though she would not be charged. As Toni stood in shock, a state police sergeant pulled down Nauss’s plaid shirt. And there, extending almost from the shoulder to the elbow, was Nauss’s trademark tattoo, an enormous parrot. The parrot was crucial to confirming his identity. “Some of his tattoos had been altered, but not this one,” said Dennis Matulewicz of the U.S. Marshals’ office in Philadelphia. “He had a special fondness for the parrot.”

The parrot told a tale—of leading Pennsylvania’s most violent motorcycle gang, rape, murder, dismemberment, and prison escape—that none of his new family or friends could believe.

Looking at his wife and children, Nauss said, “Sorry. This is it.”

“He’s a changed man,” Toni Ferrer said as her life unraveled. “At least from what they tell me. He never beat me. He never beat the kids.” There was no Richard Ferrer, no investment properties, no rents to collect. A marshal in Detroit said he was a “classic Jekyll and Hyde,” a charmer who killed one woman and fooled another. Toni thought she’d found happiness only to find out she was a cover. “They just wonder when he’s coming back,” she said of her children. “I just told them the truth.”

Large amounts of cash were found in Nauss’s house, along with a number of false IDs. The marshals believed that Nauss had continued to work with his partner Vorhauer, probably in drug manufacture and distribution. The Detroit region was known for nearly two hundred biker gangs that would have helped the escaped fugitives resettle, they said, and surely it was more than coincidence that Luna Pier was only a hundred and ten miles south of Yale, Michigan, where Vorhauer had been operating a methamphetamine lab on a farm before his recapture four years earlier. Nauss was spotted by several witnesses riding a motorcycle near Vorhauer’s farm when the meth lab was busted.

Clamped in leg irons, Nauss was flown to Philadelphia on a chartered marshals jet. Bender returned immediately to Philadelphia, where marshals supervisor Tom Rappone asked him to take the booking photograph, as he had with Vorhauer, who had refused to look at him.

 

Nauss was friendly, amiably putting his hand on Bender’s shoulder. “Hey, you did that bust of me, right?”

“Yeah. How does it feel to be immortalized?” Bender felt completely at ease with the charming killer.

“I wish it was under better circumstances,” Nauss laughed, adding, “Didn’t you also play Vorhauer, my partner, on
AMW
?”

“You saw it?”
AMW
had asked Bender to play the hit man in a reconstruction of the case.

“Yes, but you’re better-looking than him. He’s ugly, isn’t he?”

They both laughed.

Within two days, Nauss was back in maximum-security Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the scene of his dramatic escape, to continue serving his life sentence for the 1977 murder of his girlfriend Elizabeth Ann Landy. A Montgomery County judge gave him a light additional sentence of three and a half to seven years for escape, crediting him with time off for good behavior for his “rehabilitated life” in Michigan. Nauss was separated from his partner, Vorhauer, who was locked up more than a hundred miles away in Huntingdon State Prison in northern Pennsylvania, serving a twenty-to-forty-year term for armed robbery, plus seven years for escape.

Walter’s profile was eerily on the mark.

Nauss had a second car parked in his driveway.

“You got it right, Rich,” Bender said.

It was a Cadillac.

I
t was the second floor of the Customs House, one of those grand stone Depression-era buildings with a lighthouse motif borrowed from the Colossus of Rhodes. The heavy wood door was ajar, and the ASAC was talking about the goose-down jackets from China that came through Philadelphia International Airport. Murray had tipped them off to the scam—the “goose-down” parkas were stuffed with chicken feathers. They confiscated the contraband, made arrests, and locked up the case. Murray was their best informant.

“So I’m thanking him and he asks me, ‘Bill, how much do you stop, really? Give it to me straight.’ Murray was a good guy so I told him, ‘Eh, two percent. Washington says it’s ten percent, but it’s not close.’ ”

It was June 1991. Out on the river low brown air shrouded the tankers, but above was a clear sky in the east with the feel of the sea in it.

“What’s the moral of the story?” the ASAC said. “Six months later we stop a little gold Buddha statue at the airport. We drill a hole in it and heroin spills out—two million dollars’ worth on the street. We work the case through informants in Asia and trace it back to the shipper—it’s Murray. We arrest Murray.”

Fleisher shrugged. “I guess he liked his odds at two percent.”

The agents laughed. The agents were a proud, veteran crew, working big cases all over the world—Operation Steeltrap in San Francisco targeting Japanese steel industry corruption; Operation Florida on smugglers’ money-laundering. They nailed mobster “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, who’d given up Meyer Lansky and went into federal witness protection, where he smuggled Komodo dragons until O’Kane went undercover as a gay entrepreneur dragon buyer and got sixty hours of tape. They raided a Brooklyn warehouse, busting two Colombians and $60 million in cocaine that came in on a Baltimore freighter hidden in the false sides of emollient barrels. “We used the old tire-kick test,” Fleisher quipped to the press. “We got a dull thud instead of a ping.” It was important, dangerous, all-consuming, thrilling work, and the only way to do it was to think that it made a difference. In other words, not to think about it.

“Eh, what are we doing this for, men?” Fleisher asked, waving his pinkie ring.

The ASAC had become a critic of the war in which he was a four-star general, what President George H. W. Bush called the war on drugs. “I’m tired of sending my men undercover—good men with families, friends of mine—wondering if they’ll come home,” he said. “For what? Prohibition didn’t work, and it got more Customs agents killed than at any time in history.

“I’m honored to be in a long line of distinguished federal officers,” he quipped, “such as George Armstrong Custer. This is my last stand.”

The numbers were absurd. Customs had time to inspect only 3 percent of the three million containers arriving annually in the Philadelphia ports alone, and it took eight inspectors all day to open 1,500 boxes in a single container. With its large port and central location on the East Coast, the world’s largest and deadliest Colombian drug cartel had chosen Philadelphia as the perfect hole to stuff crack cocaine through to feed a hungry America. The port was FedEx for smugglers.

Fleisher’s nine drug smuggling agents were also expected to cover a dozen Pittsburgh port terminals on the Ohio, Monongahela, and Allegheny rivers, the ports of Erie, New Jersey, and Delaware, and the Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Wilmington, and Atlantic City airports.

He oversaw his empire from a small rectangular office with an old wood desk, credenza, two visitor’s chairs, thin carpeting, white walls—“standard government bureaucrat,” he said. As if to express his unease, the walls were conspicuously bare. Settling into his crowning federal assignment, he’d hung none of the dozens of awards and commendations from a brilliant career. “I’m not into ego art anymore,” he said with a shrug. Only two framed artifacts hung on the wall—a letter of praise from FBI director William Webster, and a portrait of a man with a wide head and brazenly arrogant eyes, wearing a greatcoat and cravat of nineteenth-century Paris.

When he wasn’t high on the adrenaline of leading his men, he took solace in a routine as predictable as the sun. Every day on his way to lunch he took the stairs to appease his wife and doctor, then drove the government Crown Vic the ten blocks to the oyster house he had patronized for fifty years. He ordered the traditional oyster stew with heavy cream, the same dish he had enjoyed with his father and grandfather at the same table, served by the same waitress he had flirted with when they both were young. The ASAC was a very sentimental man.

The job took a toll on Fleisher. He could not tolerate failing; the stakes were too high. One night, at home, he wrote a Declaration of Independence Against Drugs for children in Philadelphia. If there was anyone worth fighting the drug war for, it was innocent children. His men found the powerful ASAC pensive at his desk. His ruminations turned bleak and philosophical. He had taken to discussing the tender hopes of redemption linking Yahweh, Buddha, Muhammad, and Christ. A paperback copy of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
had replaced his own book on interrogation techniques in his top drawer.

In a sentimental mood, he would open the well-thumbed paperback of
Les Misérables
and discuss the classic nineteenth-century novel of the French Revolution in light of the ongoing debate on whether law enforcement should be punitive or redemptive.

“This is my favorite scene in all literature,” he would say. It was the famous moment when Jean Valjean, the thief who steals to feed his family, is caught by the gendarme stealing a basket of silver from old Bishop Myriel, who had sheltered the ex-con for the night. Valjean is hauled before the bishop for punishment, but the bishop says there has been a mistake, he gave Valjean the basket of silver as a gift but the ex-con forgot the silver candlesticks, which the bishop now hands over to him. The thief is stunned by the force of forgiveness, and the bishop says, “Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money to become an honest man. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

Fleisher could not read the passage without looking up, his eyes wet with tears.

“This is what I want to do with my life. I want to devote my life to what really counts, redeeming the suffering, fighting the battle of good and evil. I want to be a force for good. I want to buy souls.”

N
o woman was so young, blond, and lovely, no feeling so pure, no night so exciting as Tuesday: Polish vodka, pale Eastern European skin, dazzling white light that cleansed the darkness.

If it was Tuesday, it must be Joan.

It was Tuesday evening in the art studio and home of Frank Bender, the Casanova of the Caliper, the Da Vinci of the Dead, the greatest forensic artist who ever lived.

Bender was laughing with unadulterated, adulterous joy. His laughter rang from beneath the floor in the center of the warehouse, from the underground room, the pit. He was five foot eight, slim and muscular, an ex-boxer with a leprechaun’s grin and light hazel eyes of manic intensity. MOM was tattooed on his arm from his days in the Navy, a scar sliced his lip from a beer-bottle fight, and just above his groin was a butterfly tattoo he had displayed in public, dropping his drawers for a comely barkeep.