Read Now I Know Online

Authors: Dan Lewis

Now I Know (7 page)

LUNCH AND A MURDER
THE REAL COLD CASE INVESTIGATORS

Prime-time television has trained us to believe that murder cases are investigated by multiple, highly experienced homicide detectives with access to seemingly endless resources. At their disposal are things such as high-level scientific testing labs able to extract fingerprints and/or DNA from seemingly nothing; machines that can take even the grainiest closed-circuit camera image and give us a perfect depiction of a suspect’s full face; and other tools bound only by the show writers’ imaginations. Reality, especially for small-town police departments, is very different. Many murders—often brutal ones that are given the full attention of local law enforcement—remain unsolved.

What can police departments like these do? Call Batman? Hardly. But they can call the Vidocq Society.

Founded in 1990, this group of forensic professionals—psychologists and prosecutors, homicide detectives and FBI profilers, scientists and coroners—gathers for lunch monthly in Philadelphia, hoping to give a cold case a fresh lead. The Society is named after Eugène François Vidocq, a French criminal turned vigilante crime fighter—a man who was perhaps the first private detective, and is regarded as the father of modern criminology. It was founded by three men—all of different backgrounds—who met during the course of crime-solving endeavors. Bill Fleisher is the most ordinary of the bunch—an FBI agent. Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist, is one of the forefathers of modern criminal profiling. Finally, the Vidocq Society counts among its cofounders the late Frank Bender, a self-taught sculptor with a particular knack for creating reproductions of people’s heads using only their skulls and photos of what they once looked like.

The Society began on a lark. The three had corresponded over the years but only first met, face-to-face, in May 1989. As expected, they began to talk shop, discussing the mysteries they were working on, informally collaborating and helping each other. One suggested that the trio make it a regular event; another suggested inviting other colleagues from across the law enforcement world. According to
The Telegraph
, they sent out twenty-eight invitations expecting only a reply or two. They received twenty-six acceptances, and with that, the Vidocq Society was born.

Each month, the Vidocq Society—at the Society’s expense (they pay for travel out of the group’s $100/year membership dues)—invites a law enforcement officer to present a cold case over lunch. Two specific requirements apply: The unsolved death has to be at least two years old, and the alleged victim mustn’t have been involved in criminal activity such as dealing drugs or prostitution.

To date, they’ve had some success, helping to solve a handful of crimes over the years, including a 2005 double homicide that made it into the TV show
America’s Most Wanted
. And in at least one case—the death of Huey Cox of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991—the Society managed to free a wrongfully accused man by demonstrating that the suspect police had charged with the crime was innocent of it.

BONUS FACT

In 1996, the Vidocq Society made an appearance in a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery, a joint version of the children’s novels. The Vidocq story was written by long-time Nancy Drew author Carolyn Keene. Keene—and for that matter, Hardy Boys author Franklin W. Dixon—don’t exist, and never have. Both authors are collective pseudonyms, used as a way for the publisher (the Stratemeyer Syndicate originally) to maintain a team of writers (and produce a high volume of books) under a consistent brand.

THE PASSION OF THE MONEY-LAUNDERING EXTORTIONIST
THE OFFICIAL MOVIE OF THE WAR ON DRUGS?

In 2004, Mel Gibson released
The Passion of the Christ
, the controversial movie that he directed and produced. The movie grossed over $600 million at the box office. On May 10, 2012, a man named Jorge Vazquez pleaded guilty to money laundering and extortion. In September, he’d be sentenced to seven years in prison. And as part of the plea deal, the U.S. government received 10 percent of the potential profits from the sequel to
The Passion of the Christ
.

Really.

The Passion of the Christ
was written by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald, a previously unknown writer. Fitzgerald did not make a lot of money off the film—in a lawsuit he later filed against Gibson, he claimed that he was led to believe that the film would be a small-budget film, leading him to take a relatively small payday for the script—and took a loan to fund future projects. When he defaulted on the loan, he sold his rights to the script he was working on, a sequel to
Passion
called
Mary, Mother of Christ
. The company that bought those rights was owned in part by a San Antonio man named Arturo Madrigal.

Back to Vazquez. When criminals plead guilty to a crime, they need to tell the court what they did wrong; this is called an “allocution.” In Vazquez’s allocution, he admitted that he and others kidnapped Madrigal’s brother in Mexico in an effort to get Madrigal to sign over his rights to the screenplay to
Mary
, which Madrigal did. (Vazquez claimed that Madrigal owed him money and said he was looking for leverage to get his debt repaid.) Vazquez then turned around and sold the script to a production company, receiving $1 million up front and a 10-percent stake in the movie’s profits.

According to
MySanAntonio.com
, the plea agreement came with a strange price—the government demanded that Vazquez give up his 10-percent cut of future earnings, with that money going into the Feds’ bank account.

Why the government believed that Vazquez had the right to give them those proceeds, is, at best, unclear, given that it was incarcerating Vazquez in part for his method of acquiring the rights. Certainly, Madrigal disagreed that Vazquez had any ownership of the screenplay. On the day Vazquez plead guilty, Madrigal sued Vazquez in an effort to reverse the latter’s sale of the script.

BONUS FACT

In recent years, a common Christmastime “prank” sprang up in the United States—thieves began stealing baby Jesus dolls from nativity scenes around the country. According to the Awl, from 2011 to 2012 there were well over 2,000 reports of such thefts. For many, it’s no laughing matter. In 2012, the
New York Post
reported that police treated one theft from a Brooklyn church as a hate crime. That same year, according to the
Los Angeles Times,
a Florida church, tired of having its baby Jesus statue stolen, outfitted their new one with a GPS device to catch a future thief.

STOLEN SMILE
THE INCREDIBLE HEIST OF THE MONA LISA

On August 21, 1911, the
Mona Lisa
—Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece—was stolen off the wall of the Louvre, leaving bare the four iron pegs on which it hung. The thief, later identified as then-Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, hid in a closet on Saturday, knowing that the museum would be closed the next day. He emerged from his hiding place on August 21, took the
Mona Lisa
off the wall, discarded its nearly 200 pounds of security devices and decorative frames, and carried the painting under his smock. He walked out the door and into freedom—until, twenty-eight months later, he tried to sell it, and was instead nabbed by the authorities.

Peruggia’s motivations, however, are almost certainly not those of the standard art thief, that is, he was not looking to simply (to understate the feat) fence the masterpiece and become an overnight millionaire. Rather, Peruggia was either a nationalist ideologue looking to reclaim the artwork on behalf of his native Italy, or, perhaps, a rube to a master criminal in the making.

The former theory is straightforward: Peruggia, an Italian by birth, allegedly believed that the Italian da Vinci’s work could only be properly displayed in Italy—so he stole it to fix that “problem.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Peruggia simply used this excuse—successfully, it turned out—to limit his jail time once caught. (Tried in Italy, he served seven months, with
Time
implying that his patriotic motives played into his short amount of time behind bars.) Some reasons not to believe Peruggia include the fact that he attempted to sell the painting (for the equivalent of $100,000) and not merely donate it; that he waited more than two years to move it; that he returned to France after his release; and that he was at least loosely affiliated with another criminal syndicate of art counterfeiters.

It is the art counterfeiters’ story that suggests that Peruggia’s motives were less honorable than patriotism.

An Argentine con man named Eduardo de Valfierno allegedly was behind the theft. In 1914, after the theft and recovery of the
Mona Lisa
, but before Peruggia was brought to trial, Valfierno told his story to an American journalist named Karl Decker after extracting a promise that Decker would not publish the story until after Valfierno’s death. Decker agreed. This is the only source for Valfierno’s account.

Valfierno’s “business” was in faux masterpieces. He commissioned artists to create realistic-looking copies of famous works of art and sold them to collectors around the world, claiming the works were original. To buttress his claims of authenticity, he passed off other forgeries—documents from the museums in which the originals hung, stating that the originals had been stolen and, to avoid embarrassment, the museums instead quietly displayed replicas. Unfortunately for Valfierno, one such collector bragged about one of his purchases, leading to press coverage of the (faked) theft—and almost exposing Valfierno’s fraud. So Valfierno decided to take no further chances.

As the story goes, Valfierno hired Peruggia and others to steal the
Mona Lisa
—but not before he commissioned the creation of six counterfeits and made sure they were distributed around the United States. (Valfierno surmised that it would be easy to get through customs before the theft but nearly impossible afterward.) Once the media took up the story of the theft itself, Valfierno was able to sell the six fake paintings without much trouble—and without much risk, as the purchasers, now knowingly buying stolen property, had no real recourse if they ever caught on to the swindle. With the real
Mona Lisa
in Valfierno’s possession, he also had the luxury of knowing that the Louvre would never get back the original, making it unlikely at best that the purchasers of the fakes would catch on, anyway. Of course, this part of the scheme did not go according to plan.

Valfierno claims that Peruggia was well compensated for his role, but that the thief gambled the money away. Peruggia’s solution? He knew where Valfierno kept the true
Mona Lisa
, so he simply did what he had done a year or two earlier. He stole it. Again.

BONUS FACT

The
Mona Lisa
is not painted on canvas, but on three pieces of wood roughly an inch and a half thick.

UNVANDALISM
VANDALS WHO SAVE ART FROM ITSELF

Originally a church, the Panthéon is now a mausoleum in Paris. Building started in 1758 and was completed in 1790. It is the final resting place of Voltaire, Louis Braille, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Marie Curie, and others. Modeled after the building of the same name in Rome, it contains large columns, a dome, and—of unique relevance to the following discussion—a clock. The clock, a relic from the 1800s, stopped chiming in the 1960s when rust overtook its gears, bringing it to a halt.

All that changed in 2006. That year, after an eight-month restoration project, the clock was fixed. But its repair was not due to some public works project nor funded by some fabulously wealthy patron of the arts—at least not outwardly. It was done, surreptitiously, by a group of underground art restorers, cultural preservation advocates, and, perhaps, criminals. The group, which is still around, is called Urban eXperiment, or UX for short.

The history of the UX is murky, but according to Wired, its beginnings stem from a theft three decades ago. A group of teenagers managed to steal a set of maps detailing the series of tunnels running beneath much of Paris—tunnels that provide clandestine access to many Parisian landmarks. Rumor has it that some of these teenagers ended up starting UX, and the maps have become a key way for these pseudo-criminals to avoid detection during repair jobs.

In 2005, a subset of UX called Untergunther used the maps to enter the Panthéon in hopes of restoring the clock in question. Then, they created a secret workshop in the landmark, in a room just below the dome, and got to work. For eight months and at the expense of $10,000 in member-donated monies (their time was uncompensated), the group secretly toiled to repair the long-broken clock. They avoided guards without much effort; the floor where they set up shop was rarely frequented, even by security personnel. They even grew a small vegetable garden on the terrace outside their makeshift workshop.

When they completed the restoration, a new challenge arose. The clock was in working order but needed the Panthéon’s staff to maintain it—which, unfortunately, would require telling the staff that the clock had been fixed. This proved incredibly difficult and came at a price, as recounted by
Wired
:

They notified the director, Bernard Jeannot, by phone, then offered to elaborate in person. Four of them came—two men and two women, including Kunstmann and the restoration group’s leader, a woman in her forties who works as a photographer—and were startled when Jeannot refused to believe their story. They were even more shocked when, after they showed him their workshop (“I think I need to sit down,” he murmured), the administration later decided to sue UX, at one point seeking up to a year of jail time and 48,300 euros in damages. Jeannot’s then-deputy, Pascal Monnet, is now the Panthéon’s director, and he has gone so far as to hire a clockmaker to restore the clock to its previous condition by resabotaging it. But the clockmaker refused to do more than disengage a part—the escape wheel, the very part that had been sabotaged the first time. UX slipped in shortly thereafter to take the wheel into its own possession, for safekeeping, in the hope that someday a more enlightened administration will welcome its return.

Other books

ACougarsDesire by Marisa Chenery
Kill Your Friends by John Niven
Doublecrossed by Susan X Meagher
Threshold by Caitlin R Kiernan
The Millionaire by Victoria Purman
Ghost Flower by Michele Jaffe
The Kellys of Kelvingrove by Margaret Thomson Davis
Worn Masks by Phyllis Carito


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024