Richard Hammer - Deadly Secrets: A True Crime Anthology

Deadly Secrets

A True Crime Anthology

Richard Hammer

CONTENTS

About the Author

Richard Hammer is the author of more than twenty fiction and nonfiction books, as well as numerous short stories, articles, and essays for major publications worldwide. He has won two Edgar Awards for Best Fact Crime, for The Vatican Connection (1982) and The CBS Murders (1987), and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley (1971). Both the New York Times and the Washington Post named One Morning in the War (1970) and The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley one of the ten best books of the respective years in which they were published. Hammers first book, Between Life and Death (1969), explored the case that led to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland and its repercussions. He wrote and narrated the Academy Awardwinning documentary Interviews with My-Lai Veterans (1970), and has been involved in many TV films and motion pictures. Before becoming a full-time freelance writer, he wrote for the New York Times and its Week in Review section, where he covered the war in Vietnam, the civil rights struggle, and most other major stories of the times. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, Hammer attended Mount Hermon School, earned degrees from Syracuse University and Trinity College, and did postgraduate work at Columbia University. He and his wife currently reside in New York City.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The CBS Murders Copyright 1987 by Richard Hammer and John Richard Wales

Beyond Obsession Copyright 1992 by Richard Hammer

The Vatican Connection Copyright 1982 by Richard Hammer

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5228-3

This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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The CBS Murders

A True Account of Greed and Violence in New Yorks Diamond District

For

Jerome Perles

PART ONE

MURDER

April 12, 1982

Easter Monday. An ordinary day in Manhattan. The sudden, unexpected spring blizzard that had howled across the city the previous week, leaving in its wake more than a foot of snow and a paralyzed metropolis, was now no more than an unpleasant memory. A few days of warm sun and temperatures well up into the fifties had turned the pristine mountainous drifts into shrinking mounds of gray slush and then into raging rivers of filthy water. With the start of the new workweek and continued bright weather, the rivers had dried and vanished, and the city was warm and pleasant with spring.

In Midtown North, as in other police precincts, it was business as usual this day after the holiday. A polyglot precinct is Midtown North, microcosm of the public picture of New York. It stretches from the Hudson River piers and the decrepit West Side Highway east to the soaring towers and exclusive shops that line Fifth Avenue, from just above the sleaze of Times Square north to the fringes of the glittering mecca of culture in Lincoln Center. Within these boundaries lies the communications capital of North America, the editorial offices and the headquarters of the television network giants, where the decisions are made about what Americans will read and watch. The tastes, trends, and desires of Americaindeed, of much of the worldin a hundred different areas are debated and dictated in the skyscraper offices of the multinational corporations that compete for air and ground space along the canyonlike avenues. Through a hundred small, dingy yet impregnably armored offices along one short block of West Forty-seventh Street pass enough gold and diamonds every day to make an ancient Indian mogul feel deprived and to bring delight and riches to the South African mine owners.

That is one face of Midtown North. There is another, a dozen others. For every steel and glass tower there are twenty shabby, ill-repaired lofts housing hundreds of small businesses just barely keeping afloat. For every department store and specialty shop, there are fifty hole-in-the-wall cigar stores, pawnshops, bookie joints, and seedy discount outlets peddling merchandise that seems to evaporate into dust on first use. For every luxury hotel luring out-of-town tourists and business conventions, there are a dozen flophouses and welfare shelters. For every cooperative and condominium and high-priced rental apartment catering to the rich, there are a hundred tenements. For every first-run cinema palace there are five porno movie houses, peep shows, and live-sex-act establishments. For every successful businessman, there are ten shady operators skirting the edges of legitimacy, often with an outward face of respectability. For every tourist and honest citizen wandering through the area or working in it, there is a pimp and his hookers, a pusher and his junkies, to say nothing of the thieves, petty and grand, the hoodlums, organized and unorganized, and all the rest.