Authors: Joe McGinniss
Rob
FRANCIS XAVIER SHEA GREW UP IN THE BOROUGH OF
Queens in New York City. After graduating in 1965 from Rice High School on 124th Street in Harlem, where the Congregation of Christian Brothers taught him discipline the old-fashioned way—with paddles and leather straps—he joined the U.S. Marines. Parris Island was almost a vacation after four years at Rice.
He spent a year in Vietnam with the First Marine Aircraft Wing, stationed outside Danang. Then he became a New York City policeman. Over the next thirteen years, he received sixty-seven department medals, including the Medal of Valor, the department’s third-highest commendation, awarded “for acts of outstanding personal bravery intelligently performed in the line of duty at imminent personal hazard to life under circumstances evincing a disregard of personal consequences.” In Frank’s case, this involved a Sunday-morning shootout with two Jamaican drug dealers on Sutter Avenue in Brooklyn in April 1977. As Frank and his partner approached their parked car, one of the dealers fired a shot that hit Frank’s partner in the leg. Frank returned fire with a shotgun. One of the dealers survived, one did not.
Frank wound up as a homicide detective, working out of the Seventy-fifth Precinct in the East New York section of Brooklyn. One night in 1986, shortly after midnight, he and his partner, the late Larry Daniels, were rushing to Baptist Medical Center on Linden Boulevard to interview four shooting victims in the emergency room. At the intersection of Sutter and Euclid, they were broadsided by a car driven by a woman speeding to the hospital with her baby, who was having a seizure. Frank was injured badly enough to take early disability retirement.
He founded a private investigation firm named Alpha Group in 1996, with headquarters in Farmingdale, Long Island. Alpha Group was a full-service, high-tech agency. They did internal corporate investigations, corporate security assessments, computer data retrieval, installation (and removal) of electronic surveillance devices, and vehicle tracking by GPS. By 2003, Alpha was doing a lot of international work. Frank was becoming as familiar with the streets of Istanbul, Mumbai, and Mexico City as he’d once been with Francis Lewis Boulevard.
He had just returned from Hong Kong on June 4, 2003, when Rob Kissel called him. Had Rob called twenty-four hours earlier, they could have met face to face. Rob said Frank had been recommended to him by a corporate lawyer familiar with Alpha’s work. But then Rob stopped.
“What is it we can help you with?” Frank asked.
“This is personal,” Rob said. “It doesn’t involve Merrill Lynch.”
“I understand.”
“It’s, ah, it’s actually kind of a delicate matter. It’s something—look, it’s a little bit awkward to talk about, but it’s a matter involving my wife.”
“Are you talking about what we refer to as matrimonial work?”
“Yes, yes, exactly. It’s…she…I’m not sure about this, but I think she may be in the early stages of…of…”
“A relationship?”
“Yes. Sorry. I don’t normally have such a hard time expressing myself, but this situation is…well, embarrassing.”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed with me, Mr. Kissel.”
“Rob. Please call me Rob. What I want to ask about is, well…is there some way you could sort of keep an eye on her, and on this guy? His name is Mike Del Priore.”
“Surveillance. Yes, we can do that.”
“Right, surveillance. You know, I can’t believe I’m actually having this conversation.”
“The first call is the hardest, Rob. But believe me, this is nothing out of the ordinary. Can you tell me why you’ve become suspicious of your wife?”
“Well, I did something I probably shouldn’t have done. I installed a spyware program on her laptop. Are you familiar with spyware?”
“What did you use, Spector Pro and eBlaster?”
“Yes, exactly. How did you know that?”
“I figured a guy like you, Rob, investment banker, you’d want the best.”
“She’s been e-mailing this guy. He’s a stereo guy. About a week ago, he installed some home theater equipment in our house in Vermont. She’s been writing to him ever since. And I don’t like the tone of what I’m reading. I want to know if she’s seeing him.”
“I can put a man on her, Rob. Let’s say for a week?”
“I…I guess so. I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Look, I’d better think about this. Can I call you tomorrow?”
“You can call me anytime. Let me give you my home number and my cell.”
Frank Shea didn’t know whether he’d hear from Rob Kissel again or not. Some people called back, some didn’t. It wasn’t as if Frank was eager to run a surveillance. He didn’t like matrimonial work. For the most part, Alpha operated at a higher level and on a larger stage. But Robert Kissel was with Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong. Frank already had clients in Hong Kong and wouldn’t mind adding Merrill Lynch to the list. Corporate security for the Hong Kong offices of a multinational like Merrill would be a tasty cherry to pick. He’d seen it happen before: do some personal work for a corporate executive and wind up with the whole corporation.
Rob did call back the next day. All traces of hesitancy were gone. Crisply and authoritatively, he said he wanted to initiate the surveillance immediately. The fee of $12,500 per week, plus expenses, did not faze him.
Forty-eight hours later, at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 7, investigator Rocco Gatta, a former Nassau County policeman and, like Frank Shea, an ex-marine, was sitting in a Ford Taurus parked in the driveway of the unoccupied house adjacent to the Kissel home at 702 Stone House Road in Stratton Mountain, Vermont. A hard rain was falling and fog was starting to form. Nonetheless, when a blue Chevy van pulled into the Kissel driveway an hour later, Gatta could see clearly that it bore New Hampshire license plate 910-153.
He called Frank Shea with the number. Twenty minutes later, Frank called back to say that the van was registered to Michael Del Priore, thirty-nine, of Ferncroft Drive, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. The van was still there five hours later when Gatta returned to his sixty-nine-dollar-per-night room at the Stratton Mountain Village Inn, eight miles away.
Nancy
On the day of the installation, Nancy spent a lot of time in the living room, talking to Michael Del Priore while he worked. He wore a tight sleeveless T-shirt. He had big shoulders, big biceps, strong pecs. By the time he was finished, she’d learned that he had two teenaged sons from a first marriage and a five-year-old daughter from his second, which was ending in an exceptionally nasty divorce.
His wife had accused him of inappropriate physical contact with the daughter, and until recently he’d only been able to see her under supervision. But that was behind him, he said, and now he saw her, unsupervised, every other weekend.
In the living room, the children were wrestling over the new remote. They wanted to get rid of the high-definition National Geographic channel and find some cartoons to watch on the just-installed fifty-eight-inch Panasonic plasma TV. The rain had tapered to a drizzle and pockets of mist were forming on the hillside above the house.
“So you’re finished. Does that mean I’m not going to see you anymore?”
“I guess not until your husband buys something else.”
The children had found
SpongeBob SquarePants
on Nickelodeon. They were playing with the volume control on the remote, seeing how loud it would go. Connie appeared from the back of the house to quiet them down.
“Let me know how to reach you,” Nancy said. “I’m sure I’ll have some questions about this stuff.”
“Just call the store and leave a message. I’ll get back to you right away.”
“No. I want to know how to reach you directly. Give me your cell phone number. And your number at home. Why not give me your e-mail address, too?”
Del Priore offered Nancy his warmest smile. “You know, maybe—oh, I shouldn’t ask you that,” he said.
Nancy offered her dazzling smile in return. “Of course you should. What is it?”
“I just thought maybe—see, my daughter gets a little lonely just with me and she doesn’t know any kids in my neighborhood. I was thinking maybe sometime I could bring her over here to play with your kids.”
“Of course you can.” Nancy gave him her devilish smile. “As long as you stay, too.”
“Sure. I’d stay.”
“Then it’s a date. I’ll e-mail you and we’ll figure out the best day. Probably a weekend, because you’re working. You can come in late afternoon and stay for supper.”
And so at 5:00 p.m. Saturday, June 7, in a downpour, Michael Del Priore—accompanied by his five-year-old daughter Amity—made his first nonworking visit to the home of Rob and Nancy Kissel. He didn’t notice Rocco Gatta sitting in the Taurus in the driveway of the house next door.
Amity was introduced to Isabel, Zoe, and Ethan and they all went off to watch television. The picture on the new Panasonic was bright and sharp. Nancy fed them corn dogs on sticks, potato chips, and ice cream. Amity was delighted. Usually her father made her eat a salad with her dinner.
Nancy found talking to Michael—from the start, she always called him Michael, never Mike—very different from talking to Rob. For one thing, she could control the conversation. With Rob, conversation, like everything else, had turned into a contest that could have only one winner. Michael didn’t seem like much of a talker, but she liked the sound of his voice. She also liked the trace of southern accent he’d brought back with him from his seven years in Alabama and Arkansas. But what she liked most was the look in his eyes that said he knew he was more than just a poor man in a rich woman’s house.
They went into the recreation room with the kids to play darts. Michael stood behind Nancy as she aimed at the board. He put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t ask him to remove them.
Michael and Amity left at 10:30 p.m. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Rocco Gatta had already gone back to his motel. Nancy walked out to the driveway with Michael.
“Do you know what I did?” she said. “I did the craziest thing. I’ve always wanted a tattoo. My uptight husband, of course, has strictly forbidden me to get one. He thinks I’d look like a biker chick instead of the perfect little banker’s wife. I told him I wanted one for my birthday in April. Instead, he gave me a Mercedes. But I decided this week, fuck him. My FedEx man has a tattoo so I asked him where he’d got it. He told me from Blackbear Tattoo in West Brattleboro. I made an appointment for two o’clock next Friday. Only now—and I know this sounds silly—now I’m a little nervous about it.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. It’s just—I’ve never even been
near
a tattoo parlor, and…I mean, I know it’s not like a drug den, I know there’s not going to be a bunch of Hells Angels waiting around to grab me and drag me into the back, but—would you come with me?”
“To get a tattoo?”
“To get
my
tattoo.” She had a cocky little look in her eye. “Unless you think we should have matching tattoos.”
“Yeah, I could go with you.”
For a moment he thought she was going to stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the cheek. Instead, she tossed him another radiant smile, accompanied by a wave good-bye. “See you Friday,” she said. “Be here by noon.”
“Yes ma’am.”
They both laughed.
“She’s pretty nice,” Amity said as they drove away. “Do you like her, Daddy?”
“Yeah,” Michael replied slowly. “I think I do.”
Rob
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, ROCCO GATTA FOLLOWED
Nancy everywhere she went: to the Crossgates Mall in Albany; to the Stratton Mountain School, where she dropped off and picked up Isabel and Zoe; and to Manchester, Vermont, forty minutes away, where she shopped at a store called the Jelly Mill.
The Jelly Mill advertised “gifts for every interest in a festive atmosphere highlighted by a 1914 nickelodeon…fine collectibles, toiletries, essential oils, candles in every shape and color, bubbling garden fountains, cards, and some of the most appealing sculptural pieces you’ll ever see.” It was somewhat downscale by Nancy’s standards, but after all, she was in Vermont, not Hong Kong.
Gatta captured her on video as she entered the store, but he did not follow her inside. With his dark glasses and a face that looked as if it had been carved, none too skillfully, out of granite, Rocco Gatta was not the sort of guy who would have blended easily into the background at the Jelly Mill. He just followed her back to Stratton.
Nancy was getting more and more nervous about her tattoo. Although she’d been planning to meet Del Priore Friday morning, she invited him for supper on Thursday, telling him his duty would be to prevent her from chickening out. Rocco Gatta noted his arrival at 5:45 p.m. and his departure at 10:30. Two confirmed sightings seemed enough. Gatta returned to New York the next morning and compiled his report. Frank Shea called Rob that night, which was Saturday morning in Hong Kong.
“I’ll fax you the full report early next week,” he said, “but here’s the headline: she is definitely seeing Del Priore. He was over there twice, and not during regular business hours. He was there last Saturday for several hours in the evening and again last night. He didn’t stay overnight.”
Rob received the news calmly. He thanked Frank for a job well done. He said they should try to get together socially the next time he came to New York. Then he called Bryna O’Shea.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but I think Nancy’s fucking the stereo boy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The way she’s been acting,” he said. “I started to wonder. I started thinking there might be something going on. So I hired a private detective to surveil her.”
“You did
what
?”
“I know it sounds melodramatic. But this fellow came highly recommended. Very experienced, very upscale. He’s in New York.”
“You’ve been having her followed?”
“Only for a week. It just ended.”
“Wasn’t that a little extreme?”
“I need to know what’s going on, Bryna. And I can’t trust Nancy to tell me. It’s now clear I can’t trust Nancy at all.”
“Wait, Rob. Let’s take it from the top. What’s this about a stereo boy?”
“The guy who just installed our new home theater at the house. He’s been back. Twice. After the installation was finished.”
“Maybe there’s a problem. Maybe the wiring?”
“There’s a problem, Bryna, but it’s not with the system. He comes over at dinnertime and he stays until late at night. Do you get what I’m saying? He’s still there after the kids have gone to bed. He’s there after Connie’s gone to bed. He’s there with Nancy, just the two of them.”
“Have you asked her about him?”
“What good would that do? She’ll only lie. Besides, I just found out. The detective just called me. Bryna, she’s having an affair.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ll tell you something else. They’ve been sending e-mails back and forth. I’ve been reading them.”
“How have you been doing
that
?”
“Spyware. I hooked it up to her computer when I was up there in May. I know it’s wrong, but what was I going to do? I’m in Hong Kong and she’s balling some blue-collar asshole up there and I need to know what’s happening.”
“Are you sure that’s what’s happening?”
“I don’t have any videos of the two of them in bed together, but these e-mails are much too friendly and cute. And now I know for a fact that she’s seen him at least twice. In the house. At night. Bryna, don’t be naïve.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things, Rob, but never naïve. Okay, suppose it is true? What are you going to do about it?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“Ask her what the hell is going on.”
“But I can’t, don’t you see? I can’t tell her I put spyware on her computer. I can’t tell her I’ve been having her watched and followed.”
“Why not?”
“Because that would be the end of everything. If she finds out about that, the marriage is over.”
“Which you don’t want?”
“Of course I don’t. You know what I want. I want things back the way they used to be. I don’t even know why they went so wrong.”
“Well, you’ve got two choices, Rob: either confront her or don’t. But just sitting there tearing yourself up about it isn’t going to do anybody any good.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I’m overreacting.”
“I didn’t say it was nothing. It doesn’t sound like nothing. But I’ll say this, Rob: before you do anything drastic, you’d better be absolutely sure you know what’s happening. No guesswork. No assumptions.”
“You’re right. I need hard evidence. In the meantime, I’m going out of my fucking mind.”
Nancy
It was raining on Friday, June 13. It seemed as if it had rained every day since the end of April. The ground was saturated. Seeds drowned. Farmers moaned. People made jokes about how maybe they should start planting rice.
As Rocco Gatta headed back to New York, Michael and Nancy were driving down Route 30 to Brattleboro in the rain. She drove. She wanted to be in control. She’d upgraded her rental car from a Ford Explorer to a Lincoln Navigator. There was also a Corvette in the garage, but she thought a Corvette would attract too much attention in Brattleboro.
They wound their way down Stratton Mountain to Jamaica, which had a population of about one thousand, and on to Townshend, which also had a population of about one thousand (plus the longest covered bridge in Vermont), and through Newfane, which had a population of about fifteen hundred. Fewer people lived in the thirty-five-mile area between Stratton Mountain and Brattleboro than lived in a single tower of a Hong Kong housing estate.
They talked about music. She liked the Backstreet Boys. He liked Rascal Flatts. They both liked Brian McKnight. They talked about movies. Her favorite movie of all time was
Bonnie and Clyde
. Her recent favorite was
Unfaithful
with Diane Lane. Michael hadn’t seen it. She told him he should.
“Do you know what kind of tattoo you want?”
“I want the Chinese characters for the years my three kids were born.”
“I don’t think they do Chinese at Blackbear.”
“They’ll do whatever I tell them to do.”
Brattleboro was a river town. Like Rutland and Bennington and Bellows Falls, it was nitty and gritty, a brick and mortar town that smelled of fresh tar and fast food, not maple syrup. There were postcards of Brattleboro, population twelve thousand, but nobody bought them.
Once, it had been a thriving railroad and mill town. Even in 2003, down by the river—in the section that the locals called the Brat—many of the abandoned factories and shut-down hotels were still standing. Rudyard Kipling had lived there a hundred years earlier, but by 2003 the only writers to be found were in the Brattleboro Retreat, a drug and alcohol rehab center that had become the town’s biggest employer.
Still, remnants of a counterculture remained. Sixties hippies who wanted to renounce bourgeois values but who hadn’t quite been ready to live on a farm had settled in Brattleboro. Echoes of their music, faint whiffs of pot smoke, and some of their offspring survived. The Blackbear Tattoo and Jewelry Company served their needs.
It was not quite as easy as Nancy had expected to find the right designs for her tattoos. She’d brought a drawing of the Chinese characters she wanted, but she and the tattooist had to spend an hour on the Internet before she was sure they had it right.
“Don’t fuck it up,” she told the tattooist. “I’m not going through this again.”
Michael waited patiently, easing himself into his new role as Nancy’s escort.
She was excited when it was over. Three tattoos—Chinese characters, each about the size of a quarter—adorned her bare left shoulder.
“Wait until my uptight husband sees these,” she said. “He’ll totally freak out.”
“Do you really think he won’t like them?” Michael asked.
Nancy laughed. “If you knew him, you wouldn’t be asking that question. He doesn’t like anything I do unless it’s something he’s told me to do. But a tattoo? It’ll be like I’d acted in a porno film. You don’t understand, Michael. You couldn’t understand, which is one reason why I like you so much. My husband is all about appearances. All that matters is how it looks, not what it is. But fuck him. Let’s go into town and take a walk and then we’ll find someplace where I can buy you dinner. I don’t want to go home yet. I’m having too much fun.”
It was only a five-minute drive from Blackbear to the center of the Brat. The rain had stopped, leaving the air heavy and the sidewalks wet. Nancy was so delighted by her tattoo—or by the fact that she’d finally shown the courage to get it—that she almost broke into a trot.
They wound up at the Riverview Café on Bridge Street and got a table by the window.
“That’s where I live,” Michael said, pointing across the river at New Hampshire. “Five miles that way.”
“Do you want to show me your house?” Nancy asked.
“No, ma’am. I’d be embarrassed to after being in yours. It’s a mobile home.”
“You’ll show it to me. Not tonight, but soon.”
Nancy ordered a shot of tequila before dinner. “I don’t drink much,” she said, “but it seems like a girl with a tattoo ought to drink a shot of tequila.”
She seemed about to call him Clyde and to tell him to call her Bonnie. Michael, who didn’t drink or smoke or swear, ordered a root beer.
After dinner Nancy had a Jägermeister, a seventy-proof herbal liqueur. She was giggling by the time she finished it and she told Michael he’d better drive back to Stratton. She gave him the car keys as they walked across the parking lot.
But before he could put the key in the ignition, she started to cry. She put her face in her hands and she cried. She put her hands by her sides and she shook her head back and forth and she cried. She bawled. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She cried and she cried and she cried.
Michael always kept close track of time. So he knew she cried for twenty-two minutes as he sat next to her, saying nothing.
Finally, she looked at him.
“Don’t you see how conflicted I am? For years, I’ve had to pretend. I’ve had to act like the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect woman in the perfect marriage. But it’s all been bullshit. You’re the first man who’s ever accepted me as I am, without judging. I have such strong feelings for you, Michael, but I don’t know what to do.”
One of Michael’s attributes was that when he didn’t know what to say he said nothing.
“My marriage…my husband…oh my God, Michael, you have no idea what a hell it is. You can’t know what it’s like to live with someone you’re afraid of. Someone who cuts you to pieces with every word.”
He listened.
“It’s the money, it’s the kids, it’s this and it’s that and it’s everything. Everything I do is wrong. Everything I say. It’s how I dress. It’s how I talk. It’s how I look. He hates it all. He cuts me down to nothing. I’m living in hell and nobody knows it and I can’t tell anyone because I’m afraid.”
She put her face back in her hands and cried again. She cried for another twelve minutes. Fog from the river spread slowly across the parking lot. She stopped crying. As soon as she stopped crying, she fell asleep. Michael drove back to Stratton. He drove with one hand. His other hand was on Nancy’s leg. When she finally woke up, sniffling, she didn’t move her leg away. Instead, she put her hand on his and left it there all the way home.
She had weekend plans with the children and couldn’t see him. But on Monday she disconnected a few wires behind the television and said she needed him to come to the house to fix it. He came the next day, Tuesday, June 17, in late afternoon.
She’d finally finished the renovation. Her goal, she had written to Bryna O’Shea after a long e-mail silence, was to make the house “all me. I want the kind of comfort that’s healing to my soul and inner spirit…my private retreat…an environment of solitude. Each time I walk through the door I want to be greeted with warmth and love.” Nowhere was her vision more fully realized than in the guest room. She named it the “Blue Room.” The walls were painted blue, the bedspread and sheets and pillowcases were blue, the nightstands and the armchair were blue. She called it “a place of extra comfort…to find rest…and bring peace.”
She brought Michael to the Blue Room after he’d finished reconnecting the wires. It was there that they became lovers. It was “a perfect place to share with the man I was falling in love with,” she wrote in a computer journal she updated intermittently. And it seemed even more perfect when Michael told her that his favorite color was blue.