Con artist, p.17
Con/Artist, page 17
For another hour, the cops went over everything again, while I sat there like a zombie sure that they were going to find my secret room. Somehow, though, they didn’t. Somehow, the secret room passed the test. This time, when they were done, the cops finished loading up the trucks, locked them up, and rumbled off. Then, Helton told me it was time to go. He told me I could change my clothes because I wouldn’t want to be in the lockup dressed in flimsy little gym shorts. I changed, then he took me outside, handcuffed me, and put me in a cop car.
I was still in shock, but I couldn’t believe they hadn’t found my secret room. As I sat in the back of the car waiting for them to take off, little by little a realization dawned on me. Maybe, just maybe, I had a chance. I kept thinking of Winston Churchill and his glimmer of hope in the darkest hours, and I started to grin.
My cheerful mood didn’t last long. Because my condo was fifty feet within the limits of Los Angeles County, when I asked them where I was going, the answer was LA County Jail—downtown—and that was worse than prison. I am not a tough guy or a violent criminal. When I found out I was going there, I was genuinely scared, worried what might happen to me. As we drove to jail over an hour away, the cops joked and talked about how the inmates would love a tasty little morsel like me.
When we got to jail, they took me in to get processed. They frisked me and took the only things I had brought, a ring my mother had given me and my house key. Helton asked me how much I thought bail should be. I offered up $10,000 and miraculously he agreed. I don’t know why he asked or why he was being so nice, but I was worried. I thought they were going to put me in with hardened criminals, and in fact they did. They stuck me in a group cell with ten other guys who looked like correctional regulars. They were jacked, tattooed, teardrop-on-the-face-type gangbangers.
When they saw it was DA investigators who brought me in, the prisoners were impressed. They asked me what I had done. But I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to sit in the corner and not say anything to anyone. I was so nervous and wired and worn out that I could have killed for a cigarette. One of the guys had snuck some in; I don’t know how or where on his body and I didn’t really want to know. I asked him if he would please give me one. He didn’t even move, like he didn’t hear me and like I didn’t even exist. I might as well have been a chair. It didn’t matter; I had disappeared into my own thoughts. All I could think of was how I was going to make bail, and how I was going to get back home and empty out that secret room.
twenty
AFTERMATH
(1989)
Before they tossed me in the cell, the cops had given me my one phone call. It was after midnight and I didn’t know who to call, so I got in touch with Pandora, an old girlfriend who lived in the desert, one of the few people I could count on to handle things. I pleaded with her to bail me out as soon as she could because the jail was such a shithole that I didn’t want to stay a second longer than was necessary. That night, she put up her house, the only thing she had, and even got a bail bondsman in Upland so I wouldn’t have to go out to the desert to pay it off. I think she must have realized that I was about to enter a world of hurt and that a million problems were about to rain down on my head.
My night in the cell was miserable. After everybody settled down, I found a steel bench and slid under it to block the blinding light from the overhead bulbs. You can imagine what the floor of an LA County Jail cell is like, but that’s where I stowed myself, hiding out and trying to sleep for a few minutes. It was futile. Mentally, I was very fucked up, overwhelmed, and my mind was racing in circles. I thought about everything that I would have to do. I thought about finding an attorney and mounting my defense and I thought about how I was going pay for it all. I knew I didn’t have enough money and I knew I would have to sell the cars and the condo that I had just finished the day before.
I was overwhelmed with anxiety, desperately craving a cigarette to ease my mind. I was worried about Ed Daniels, a friend who had showed up at my condo while Mike was building the secret room. He loved to talk and I thought he would be telling everybody in town about it just to feel important. I was concerned about how much it would upset my daughter and I was getting more and more anxious about all the complicated tasks that lay ahead of me. My mind was going round and round like a hamster on a wheel, driven by fear and doubt. In all, I think I slept maybe twenty or thirty minutes the whole night.
Early the next morning, one of the guards rousted me at the bars, yelling, “Tetro, your bond posted.” I got out of there as fast as I could. They gave me back the ring that my mother had given me as a baby and my house key, and then they let me out on the curb in front of the jail. Suddenly, the whole world had changed. The night before, I had gone in as a high roller; this morning, I came out as a bum on the street. I didn’t have my wallet, I didn’t have a dime for a payphone, and I didn’t even have the cigarette I desperately needed. As I walked out into the sunlight, I thought about asking somebody for one, but as I saw the people in suits going to work, I thought they wouldn’t even talk to me. Now I was like a leper.
I went to a payphone on the shattered sidewalk by the side of the jail. The only other number I could remember was Marguerite’s. I hated to bother her, but I had no other choice. I even had to call her collect. When I reached Marguerite, she was distraught. The cops had been to her house and raided her and Christine too. Marguerite and I had grown up together. She was always there for me and I knew I could count on her, but I was sorry that I had brought them into it.
Upland is an hour from downtown LA and all I could do was wait for her, hanging out on the sidewalk, dying for a smoke. I was walking around in circles, the rage welling up inside me from being tired and anxious and wanting a cigarette so badly. When you’re a heavy smoker, the urge for a cigarette under stress can hardly be described. It was like a homicidal rage.
As I was standing around, I saw Gary Helton pull up in his car. He rolled the window down and tried to console me. He said, almost apologetically, “I know what you’re going through.” Helton had been very decent with me, but I was so angry that I started screaming at him, “No, you don’t know. Why the fuck did you go to my ex-wife’s house? Why the fuck would you question my daughter?” I had all this pent-up frustration that I unloaded on him. Helton must have been an understanding guy because he just let it slide; he let me walk away and then he just drove off calmly.
When Marguerite finally showed up, she was with Christine and both of them had worried looks on their faces. I think the first thing I said was, “Marguerite, I have to buy a pack of cigarettes.” It was early, both of them must have rushed to the car to come pick me up; they were dressed in pajamas and bathrobes and had come so quickly that neither one had remembered to bring a purse. I never swore in front of my daughter, but I was so pissed off and frustrated that I shouted, “Goddamn it!”
The whole drive home I was raging inside, so wrapped up in the anxiety and stress that I could barely think straight. I was complaining and bitching and moaning about what had happened to me. And I was mad, unquenchably mad about Sawicki and how everything had come down to him ratting on me. I was venting about how I was going to have to sell my condo and my cars. I was really unhinged. I have never been violent in my life, but I was uncontrollably mad at how messed up everything had become.
When we got home, I let myself in and surveyed the damage for the first time in the cold light of day. The place had been ransacked. When they saw it, Marguerite and Christine gasped out loud. I told Marguerite how much I appreciated what she did. I told her how sorry I was and that I would thank her properly someday but that I wasn’t in any state to do it now. I got some money and I asked her if she would please, please go buy me a pack of cigarettes while I walked around the house looking over the damage and picking things up.
Everywhere, carpet was ripped, padding torn out, clothes thrown all over, closets and kitchen drawers emptied onto the floor. There were big, greasy stains on my white carpet where the cops had dropped their pizza and laughed about it the night before. The stuffing was pulled out of the sofa. The wallpaper was ripped off in long, curled scrolls.
In the living room, I saw that the cops had torn my Radio Shack bug detector off the phone and taped it to one of the light fixtures. They left it hanging there like a noose dangling in the air, just to fuck with me. The cops thought it was hilarious, but I had to chuckle to myself. Twenty-five guys had searched my place for seven hours and, still, they couldn’t find an eight-by-twelve room in a little condo. I mean, my place was not exactly Hearst Castle.
As I waited for Marguerite and Christine to come back, I went into my den and moved the sofa back up against the wall and laid down. I was exhausted, but I was so wired that I couldn’t shut my eyes. I kept getting up and pacing around. When they finally came back with cigarettes, I tore open the pack like a wild animal. I have never wanted a cigarette more or enjoyed it as much in my life. As I took long, deep inhalations, the nicotine hit my brain cells, and finally I started to calm down. I smoked the cigarette down to a nub and stubbed it out. Then I smoked another. Then, I hugged Christine and Marguerite and I told them I would be OK. A minute later they left and I fell asleep, for hours, like a dead man.
When I woke up in the late afternoon, things seemed clearer, calmer, and I started to think a little more rationally. I didn’t want to talk to anybody or do anything. I just laid around and tried putting my place back together a little bit. That night, I took the phone off the hook and went to sleep early.
First thing in the morning, I called George Porter and set up an appointment. George had represented me when the cops had busted me and Jimmy Montini for doing coke and when my girlfriend had “shot” Bob Raynes with her finger. He knew that I wasn’t a drug dealer and he knew what my real job was, so he knew what I was up against. He was glad I hadn’t said a thing and he told me to continue not saying anything to anyone. Then he asked me to come down right away so that we could talk about it all in person.
On the way to George’s, I stopped at a mini-mart to get another pack of cigarettes. I paid with a $5 bill and asked for a bunch of quarters so I could make a call at the payphone. I dialed Laura’s number and it rang and rang and rang. I didn’t want to leave a message, so I just hung up. I knew that she was laying low, but the fact that she didn’t even answer the phone really bothered me.
When I got to George’s, he asked me a lot of procedural questions like whether they had read me my rights (they had), whether they had a warrant (they did), if I had invited them in (I hadn’t, but I couldn’t prove it), and if they had confiscated my stuff (they sure as hell did). As a defense attorney, George had a legendary track record, but he didn’t paint a rosy picture for me. He told me that I was probably going to do time and that we would have our work cut out for us if I didn’t want to spend a decade in jail.
As I was leaving the office, George told me I would need to get ready for what lay ahead. He advised me to cut all the bullshit out of my life and focus on my defense. On the way home, I stopped again to call Laura. Again, the phone rang and rang and rang, but there was still no answer. It began to gnaw at me.
When I got home, I called Jack, my trainer, and told him I wouldn’t be seeing him for a while. I called the wallpaperers and had them come back out. I called a carpet guy to put down new pads and tack the carpet back as well as he could. I paid them a couple hundred dollars I had stashed in my nightstand. Then I called a realtor and told him I was going to have to sell my condo. I even called Joey Marcena and told him to contact a friend who had once expressed interest in my Rolls. If he was serious, I would sell it to him at a discount. Now that I had regained my composure, I felt like a general, marshaling my forces and getting ready for impending battle.
At this point, nobody knew what had happened to me. Aside from Marguerite and Christine, I think I maybe told Vincent and my brother Don, who didn’t seem too concerned. To everyone else, things were normal and nothing had happened. For the next few days, anytime I drove past the mini-mart, I stopped to call Laura, pumping quarters into the payphone and slamming it down when there was no answer. It started to feel pointless and humiliating, all this calling and calling with no answer.
In Upland I used to get together with a bunch of friends for coffee and we’d sit around and bullshit. I figured it would be good to be around friends, so I went to meet up with them. I hadn’t intended to say anything, but when I got there, one of the guys told me he had noticed a little blurb in the LA Times about my arrest. It was just a short article about the bust in Claremont and didn’t seem that sensational. I was surprised that it was news at all. Even my friends didn’t seem to make too big a deal of it. I think we just talked about it for maybe thirty seconds before moving on. It wasn’t much of an article, but they quoted one of the owners from the gallery where Sawicki had sold my Yamagatas. He said something about me being a big-time art forger and talked about the artists I did.
That was all the DA, Ira Reiner, needed to hear. The next day, he called a big press conference where he announced the bust and took questions from the media. Maybe he had stars in his eyes or maybe he wanted to run for office, but he played it up. I hadn’t even thought about me being in the news, but in front of the microphones, Reiner said I was the “largest forger of artworks in the United States” and talked about the amount of money that had been involved, all the art they had confiscated, and even my white Lamborghini and matching Rolls.
The press went wild. By the time the six o’clock news rolled around, it was a circus. You would have thought they’d found the Lindbergh baby. Every network, every local station, every cable news network like CNN and the BBC announced the story with big headlines and breathless coverage about an epidemic of art forgery and the kingpin at the center of it. In the end, it was like a feeding frenzy.
What really shocked me, though, was that every single story seemed to end with the same line: “Authorities say they are still searching for the studio where Tetro paints.” I knew that it wasn’t a coincidence. The DA had put the line out to the news media hoping that someone would come forward to rat me out. That part worried me. I wasn’t so concerned about my studio near the Peach. I didn’t use it much anymore and there wasn’t anything incriminating in it anyway, but the secret room would have definitely put me behind bars.
Once the news programs aired, the phone started ringing off the hook. Every friend and acquaintance I had ever known called me. People I knew from the Peach, people I knew from the desert, and people I knew from around town. They didn’t really care about talking to me, mostly they just wanted to gossip and feel like they knew what was going on. And then, the press started calling. Over and over and over. I didn’t want to talk about anything, so after a few calls, I just took the phone off the hook and went to bed.
The next day, I was making coffee when the German magazine Stern showed up at my door. They asked me stupid questions, like who I was dating and who I wanted to play me in the movie version of my life. I told them to leave me alone and shut the door in their faces. I didn’t have time to waste on them. I had to talk business with George Porter and I had to make calls about the cars and condo.
I made my calls, and then as soon as I hung up, the phone started ringing again. I thought it might be about the car, but it was Mike Beam, my carpenter. Unlike everybody else who just wanted to gossip, he asked if there was anything he could do to help me. I didn’t want to say anything on the phone, but I asked him if he could come over the next day with his pickup truck and if he could bring his laborer, Felix, with him. I was going to gut the secret room and get everything out of there before anybody had a chance to find it. I hung up and immediately called Christine to ask her if she could come over too.
The next day, when she showed up, I asked her to take the Lamborghini out and drive it around for an hour and a half. I needed to move it out of the garage, but on the street, it would have attracted too much attention. Chris knew that it was important and she knew not to ask questions. I didn’t want to involve her and the less she knew the better. She took off, driving twenty-five miles an hour, and circled around Claremont, stopping for a solid three seconds at every stop sign and making sure her turn signal was on when she wanted to change lanes.
A few minutes after Christine drove off, Mike showed up with Felix. They backed the truck into my garage and in about thirty minutes we gutted the secret room. We were practically running up and down the stairs carrying stacks of Dalís and Chagalls and Mirós, loose, along with certificates and typewriters and paper and pads and pigments, and stuffed them into the bed of the truck without even putting them in boxes. The garage was partway open, and I could see neighbors peeking through the curtains. I was sure that the cops were going to grab us or that neighbors would tip them off, but somehow, they didn’t. By the time Christine came back, everything was done and Mike was gone. He took off so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to thank him. He drove straight home, and he and Felix stashed everything in his attic in a flash.
I drove over to the mini-mart and tried to call Laura one last time. This time instead of ringing and ringing, I got a message that the phone had been disconnected. I knew it shouldn’t have mattered and that it all made sense, but it really hit me hard. I didn’t have any illusions about Laura, but I had no idea what had happened to my painting, and I couldn’t help feeling that I had gotten played. It brought me back down to earth.
At another time, it might have really thrown me for a loop, but now, I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for myself. My first court date was coming in less than a week and I needed to get my shit together if I didn’t want to spend the upcoming decade in a jail cell.
