Authors: David Samuels
It was at the Ski Expo that Dr. Alaia, then one of Southern California’s leading
joint-replacement specialists, met Joe Zolene, who was William Barron Hilton’s lawyer and had a ranch out in Aspen, a fast-growing ski town where property was becoming unaffordable for the casual skier. Zolene had enough clout to get a Swiss group to put in the towers for the chair-lift in the summer of 1972, and to raise an additional $6 million, which was not quite enough to realize his dream of turning Telluride into the next Aspen. “He said, ‘Listen, I’m flying up next week, why don’t you join me?’ “ Dr. Alaia remembered. “So I did, and one thing led to another, I bought a couple of his condos, and became good friends, and. . . .” His voice trailed off.
It is obvious that Dr. Alaia has been a sucker all his life for other men’s schemes—the
joke being that being a sucker has made him rich. As a kid growing up in New Rochelle, he used to ski down the hill in front of his house and on the local golf course on a pair of old skis with bear-trap bindings that his parents gave him for his birthday when he was seventeen. After
putting his skis away during medical school, he got hooked again while doing his residency in orthopedics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “Every time I was off, I would race up to Vermont, ski for the weekend,” he remembered. He would drive two hundred
miles up to ski Killington or Bromley or his favorite, Mount Snow. For a while, he considered buying a condo up at Mammoth Lakes. When he saw Telluride, he was hooked.
“There were no traffic lights, no chain franchises and all that,” he remembered. “I was
reading about the Yellowstone Club in Wyoming—that’s supposed to be a private ski area for
multimillionaires,” he explained. “And I kept thinking, ‘Boy, I’d like to meet one of them and tell him, you know, I don’t know if you’re a loner or a hermit or whatever, you really ought to come here, because this is a true private ski area.’”
In the early 1970s, a large banner hung over Colorado Avenue, the main drag in
downtown Telluride, that neatly summarized the mixed attitudes of the hippies towards the
suckers. Decorated in psychedelic lettering designed to catch the attention of even the most zonked-out stoner, the banner read, “Don’t Hassle the Turkeys.” The hippies were happy to have the skiers in town because skiers meant cash. At the same time, they looked down their noses at the future condo owners like Dr. Alaia. He bought a place in town, and Zolene took him under his wing. He sold him a few more condos, and gave him lifetime ski passes for his children, Mark and Maria.
“Joe Zolene used to talk about Mountain Village, and I used to think, well, that’s not the
name of the town. He’s just thinking that there’s gonna be a mountain village here! He
envisioned that,” he added, shaking his head with the wonder that one man could imagine an
entire town in his head. It was Zolene who first envisioned building a new town on top of the mountain, and connecting the new town to the mining area below by a gondola. When he went
broke and lost the ski area in 1978, Dr. Alaia bought the great man’s ranch, which he later sold at a large profit.
As Dr. Alaia told me the story of Telluride, Susan busied herself with clearing the
remains of our tuna fish sandwiches. “He refinishes cabinets and does flooring work,” she added in, over the sound of running water, as Dr. Alaia stared at the expanse of blinding white snow outside his sliding door. “Just give him a book that shows him how, and he’s got the intellect to do it.”
“The only reason I don’t own a table saw is because I’m a surgeon,” Dr. Alaia abruptly
interjected, in the off-kilter style to which I am beginning to become accustomed. “I have had to fix too many guys who’ve lopped off things with a table saw. Also, I had to retire from surgery because of narcolepsy.” I don’t mean to give him a strange look, but I do. “I enjoyed working with wood,” he added, before finally bringing the conversation back around to James Hogue. “So there was a camaraderie between me and him. Because the kid is a master carpenter.”
Susan rolled her eyes again. “I haven’t sat down and looked at the DSM, but he probably
fits the criteria for an antisocial personality disorder,” she said. It is a conversation they have had many times before. I asked Dr. Alaia if, to the best of his knowledge, Hogue had any actual training or certification as a carpenter. He shook his head, then gave me a quizzical look. “He probably got some formal training when he was in jail, for all I know,” he answered, quite
reasonably.
The arrangement between the absentminded mark and the metaphysically oriented con
man might have gone on for years, but reality finally intervened. When Hogue was on the run, he began sending Dr. Alaia e-mails requesting payment for back wages. The police gave Alaia a
program that would allow them to track the e-mails, which became less pleasant as time went on.
“Dear Lou, Here is my itemized listing of work with the Tramontana project, over 116
weeks. I am sure that I missed a lot, and always underestimated when not certain. I think that this is a pretty fair assessment, and it is much lower than I previously thought,” the first letter began.
For thirty hours of “site visits” and another forty hours of meetings, eighty hours of
“interior design,” including a trip to Denver to look at tile, and over two hundred hours of itemized phone calls, Hogue asked for a bit over $12,000, which seemed fair enough. He asked that the money be wired to account #13848748 at the Citibank branch at 757 Madison Avenue in New York. By the time Hogue added a postscript to his letter, the strain was palpable: “Of
course, I could really use the payment ASAP, molto urgente, as I am trying to protect my assets as much as possible. Please keep me posted. Thanks, Jim.”
A letter sent a few days later, on Friday, January 13, 2006, appeared to be written by a
person operating under heavy strain.
“Dear Lou,” the letter began.
Best not to bother with FedEx and just wire to Citibank. I can’t imagine trying to figure
mileage for anything more distant than yesterday; I don’t think that I can remember what I had for breakfast then.
The letter continues:
Two maintenance notes for K4; the central floor outlet in the living room seems to have
gone dead and resetting the breaker doesn’t work. The wireless will probably have to be moved to another power source. Also, the lights in the master tub seem to be burning out at an alarming rate; the last one survived only a few weeks. Maybe there is a surge, or just a randomly
short-lived bulb. My bet is that there is something wrong with the wiring.
Take care, Jim
III. William Purdy
Exiting Dr. Alaia’s condo, I was dazzled by the sunstruck whiteness of the Mountain
Village slopes and the bouncy reggae music pumping from outdoor speakers. I took my cell
phone out of my pocket and called Sheriff Bill Masters at the San Miguel County jail, and asked if I could speak to Hogue. It is a request I have made before, on the phone and also in writing.
Masters is an upbeat, plainspoken person. “We’ve discussed the matter with Mr. Hogue and he’s refusing to speak to you,” Masters said, in his cheerful way
I took the gondola down 1,250 feet to Telluride, and walked through the snow until I
reached the corner of West Galena and North Oak, where I met a handyman named William
Purdy, who was Hogue’s next-door neighbor. I will be able to find the house where he is
working, he said, because his truck will be parked in the driveway, and because no one is home at any of the other houses on the block. Purdy reminds me of a character in a Robert Mitchum movie from the 1950s—not Mitchum himself, but a secondary character, a wannabe tough guy
with a bad upbringing who steals a horse or forces a girl and then gets shot or beat up by Robert Mitchum in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. He was wearing a white T-shirt, his black hair was slicked back on his head with a Brylcreem-like substance, and he was talking on a silver Razr flip phone—a modern addition to the picture. A dusty bison head sat on the floor behind him, below a reproduction of a Chamonix Mont-Blanc ski poster from the 1920s.
“Tell me some basic stuff, like how old you are,” I asked him. He stared at me for a
moment, taking my measure.
“I’m forty-five. Right now,” he answered, staring me right in the eye. The Mitchum look
is part of his act. Purdy wouldn’t hurt a fly. He is the town gossip, a role he plays for kicks in a low-key, vaguely sinister way His daughter, who won’t tell me how old she is but appears to be about ten, has apparently invented a fever in order to skip school. She sits in a chair in the living room, watching a movie on her father’s laptop. They moved out here together in 1995. Before coming to Telluride, Purdy worked at Mount Baldy, a small mountain town outside Los Angeles where he shoveled snow. “It’s a little box-canyon town that I loved, but I had a dispute with the ski area where I worked, and so I kind of ran away,” he offered. “I went up to Canada, up the Pacific Coast, and then I came here. It’s like Mount Baldy with money. There was always a
cash-flow problem in Mount Baldy. There was never enough snow”
“You went to England!” his daughter exclaimed.
Purdy shrugged. “I saw the beauty and I said, rich people are gonna have to buy their way
into beauty, because the world’s getting more congested,” he explained.
“When did you move out near Jim?” I asked him.
“Actually, Jim moved up near me,” Purdy said. His daughter was getting bored.
“Can I watch my show?” she asked.
“Someday you’re going to remember that your dad told a long story to a strange man who
was wearing a sweatshirt with a big black dog on it,” I told her. Purdy nodded.
“Baby, this is why you were sick today,” he explained. I asked him why he moved up
near San Bernardo.
“It was right in the middle of my plow route. I’m not into the Telluride beauty crap. I’m
into bread and butter, okay?”
I wonder whether he might occasionally be moved by the sunlight on the mountains, or
the stars at night. He shook his head no, and then only relents a bit. “I think it’s nice that I can make good money living here. But I could give a rat’s ass about natural beauty,” he insisted.
His daughter looked up from her video screen. “He likes his job a lot,” she said. Purdy
nodded. “I like my job a lot,” he agreed. I asked him what kind of people are attracted to
beautiful places.
“People who have a dark side,” he said. His daughter laughed at something on her screen.
Purdy warmed to his subject. As he spoke, I began to see him less as a character from a
black-and-white movie and more like a real person, whose demons might be real. The way
William Purdy deals with his demons is by making jokes.
“When our dark side owns us, maybe we look outside of ourselves to deal with it, you
know,” he said. James Hogue was swallowed by his dark side a long time ago. “I got into this bizarre conversation with him one time on a hiking trail,” he remembered. Hogue’s weirdness reminds him of his father, who was a civil engineer. “I asked him, ‘Do you have your bachelor’s in civil engineering?’ And he said, ‘No, my master’s.’”
The conversation was weird not only because Hogue was lying about being an engineer
but also because he was stealing electricity from Purdy’s house, a fact that he had discovered when he came home early from a trip and found Hogue running a heavy yellow extension cord
from the outside of Purdy’s house into the workshop he kept on the first floor. “Right outside his window are forty amps of plugs. So he’d plug in,” Purdy recalled. “And I go, ‘What are you
doing?’ And he said, ‘It’s there! I am short on power. It’s there. I just need a little more power.’
He had his landlord, Mark, convinced that he was involved with a lady back east, and that he was a custom woodworker and that he built fancy wood boxes,” he sighed.
“He’s a liar,” William Purdy’s daughter said.
Her father thought about what she said for a few seconds before answering, “Well, he
never did a thing.”
“He went to jail,” his daughter said.
Purdy nodded. “Another funny thing about him was he used to carry gas cans around on
top of his truck,” he said. It was common knowledge in town that Hogue would siphon gas from people’s cars, which was a special inconvenience to his victims in the winter.
“He loved to steal from the people he was closest to,” Purdy said. “I knew he’d gone
through my house, gone through my stuff. But he didn’t steal from me, other than the power and the gasoline. He would do these pilgrimages to somewhere, and he would pack everything. He
was fully loaded. So maybe he was giving offerings to somebody. You know, maybe he had
some other life where he was a hero. He lived in the cold. He never heated the house. He was superior about living in the cold. He would burn a fire now and again, and I found out later that he was water-dripping. It keeps the pipes from freezing.”
When I asked Purdy to explain Hogue’s behavior, he had a ready answer.
“I think he got off on manipulating people,” he said.
I suggested that Hogue enjoyed being a made-up person, a fictional character. He wanted
to become unreal.
“I think he really got excited about the fact that people trusted him, and that he was
violating that trust,” Purdy explained. In the backyard of his house, where I have already been twice, without Purdy’s knowledge, I noticed a number of snowplows as well as a school bus and a taxicab. He makes money by letting them park there, he offered, registering the fact that I have been prowling around his yard. The thing is, he continued, that Jim wanted to get caught.
“He did?” his daughter asked. No longer interested in her movie, she has pulled up a
chair. She is used to being taken seriously by her father.