Missing Man (14 page)

Dubai proved to be a bust for his Global Witness investigation of Semion Mogilevich. He tried to figure out how to approach the local police but none of the ways worked. Soon after arriving, he had met for lunch with four men who worked as investigators or security officers for the State Department, the DEA, and other U.S. agencies at a restaurant in the Emirates Towers, a Dubai landmark. Bob spent the meal telling stories about his FBI days chasing Russian gangsters. Afterward, he opened his binder and showed his companions photographs of Mogilevich and other Russian rogues. No one recognized the pictures, and the investigators told him they hadn't heard about any recent arrests by the Dubai police of Russian criminals. They exchanged business cards with Bob and wished him good luck.

The rest of his time in Dubai was spent on other business. The judge in the Bank of Cyprus lawsuit was finally ready to issue a ruling and Bob had started to worry that the law firm involved, Reed Smith, might balk at paying his bill. From Dubai, he emailed a lawyer in New York named John Moscow, whom Bob knew from Moscow's days as a top prosecutor in the office of Manhattan's famed district attorney Robert Morgenthau, and told him he might need his help getting the money.

I've been a good, quiet boy for a year and a half now and am hoping that [they] are men of their words; i.e. if Reed Smith wins, I get paid in full ($108G). If you wouldn't mind following up on this, again, I plan to compensate you for time & expenses involved.

He exchanged emails with some of his children. Dan was still teaching in Japan and wrote his father that he had managed to fix his computer, which was making a strange whirring sound.

Just a quick message to tell u Grandpa Harold would have been proud. I went out and bought a screwdriver set the other day. That night I couldn't sleep and realized I should check out my laptop. So I took it apart, found a giant thing of lint blocking my fan, and removed it. It is dead silent now and it doesn't get hot at the bottom. It was the best thing I've done all week. I might not need a new laptop after all. Anyways, I hope all is well in Dubai.

Bob wrote back.

Hey, boy am I proud of YOU, pal. Ya know the joke I always use with your mother is “how many Jewish guys does it take to screw in a lightbulb? She always answers—one to make the call to someone to do the work. Oh well, congratulations on fixing your laptop. I'm still gonna get you a new one for law school. That's a promise. Love ya, running off right now for an appointment and very proud of Daniel Levinson.

Bob also sent a note to his youngest daughter, Samantha, who was then sixteen. As a young girl, Samantha had been very shy, a little like her mother, and Bob had worked to coax her out of it. She would accompany him on Saturday mornings to the local bagel place. At first she hid behind her father. But he insisted she order, and eventually Samantha, whom Bob nicknamed “Turtle,” started to get over her shyness. She was now a junior at Coral Springs High School and was giving a speech that day during a student government election. Bob offered his encouragement.

Gurlie

Good luck with your speech today. I'll be thinking of you and know you'll do just fine.

I truly enjoyed your “Fellow Turtlonian” e-mail. It was very creative and shows a mind with empathy for our fellow tortoises.

As I said on the phone, please, please do-not-sweat-the-small-stuff—Just do your best and let everything else fall into place.

And also know that your parents love you (despite the green shell and all!)

Love

Father of the silliest turtle in the United States

As he left his hotel, he sent a message to Ira: “Off today for that place. All is set. Best wishes and thanks for all your help in getting this arranged.”

Ira responded: “Bob, so good to have your words. Please get back to me when you can.”

Once at the airport, Bob called Chris. “I'm getting on a plane,” he told her. The flight from Dubai to Kish took about thirty minutes. Upon landing, his plane taxied toward a small terminal building with a large red sign that said
KISH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
. It stopped short of the terminal and Bob, after descending a stairway, boarded a bus for a brief ride. He walked up a short flight of black granite stairs into the building. A large round clock hung in the center of it. The waiting area consisted of about a dozen gray metal chairs. In twenty-four hours or less, he planned to be seated on one. He held his passport and the forged BAT letter ready for inspection by Iranian customs officers. Cleared, he walked out of the terminal and got into a taxi. It headed down a two-lane road divided by a wide median planted with palm trees and passed large, modern hotels resembling the types of places where he usually stayed.

Chris tried to reach him that day, but he had apparently shut off his phone, so she sent him an email with some updates from home. A client had paid a bill and St. John's law school in New York had made a provisional offer of financial aid to Dan if he kept his grades up.

Surprise!

You shut off your phone or it doesn't work.

So here is the fill in.

The check came in the regular mail.

The packet for St. John's also came for Dan. They are offering him $20,000 in tuition renewable each year if he is in the top half of his class. I tried to email him, I told him to call me for details.

Last, but not least, the bar in our shower broke in half and fell down. I hope it can be repaired.

Everything happens when you are gone!

Love, Chris.

The taxi pulled into the driveway of the Maryam hotel. It was a large white baroque-looking building with shuttered floor-to-ceiling windows that had seen better days. A doorman opened the door and Bob walked into an ornate, aging lobby decorated with plants and Persian rugs. A desk clerk greeted him and asked him to sign the reception book.

The following day, Friday, March 9, Ira waited at home, expecting a call or an email from Bob. He wanted to know about his meeting with Dawud and how it had gone. By evening, he'd heard nothing and he started to get anxious. It was early Saturday morning in Dubai, which was eight hours ahead of Washington. Bob should have been back there. Ira wanted to call Chris to see if she had heard anything, but his wife, Betsy, convinced him to wait until morning. Just after 11:00 p.m., Ira sent his friend an email: “Bob, how are you doing?”

Then he went to bed. When he awoke Saturday morning, he went downstairs to check his computer. There wasn't anything there. He sent another email: “Bob, how are you doing?”

It was March 10, 2007, Bob Levinson's fifty-ninth birthday.

 

9

The Missing Man

On Saturday, March 10, in Coral Springs, Chris awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing on her bedside table. She was sure it was Bob. It was his birthday and he always liked the kids to celebrate with him. A big family party to mark the event was planned for the following Saturday at Disney World in Orlando, but Samantha and Douglas would still want to scream “Happy birthday!” into the phone. When Chris picked up the receiver, she heard Ira Silverman's voice. He wanted to know if Bob had called her. When she said no, Ira told Chris that Bob had gone to Iran and that he hadn't heard from him since. Chris sank back in shock. All of Bob's comments—about the side trip, the presents, the back-and forth with the CIA over money—suddenly made sense. He had also been more nervous than she had ever seen him before a trip. Ira told Chris he would call Dave McGee and ask him to alert the FBI.

When Ira reached Dave, the lawyer was speeding west along Interstate 10, heading back to Gulf Breeze after spending Friday night in Tallahassee. Ira laid out the story about Bob, the CIA, and Kish, adding he thought their friend had been kidnapped. It was because of Bob that Dave and Ira knew each other. They had met in the early 1980s, when Bob was with the FBI and Dave was trying to build a drug smuggling case against Robert Vesco, the famous financial swindler who had fled the United States for Cuba after his indictment on fraud charges. Dave had been trying to get information from his superiors at Justice Department headquarters about Vesco, but every request he made ran into some kind of roadblock. When Dave mentioned to Bob he thought that a Justice higher-up had put in a political fix to block his case, the FBI agent told Dave to expect a call from a friend of his named Ira who worked for NBC News. The prosecutor and the newsman struck a deal. When Dave wanted information from the Justice Department about Vesco, he gave his questions to Ira, who contacted his sources in the department, got the answers, and relayed them back to the prosecutor. Dave was never able to bring drug charges against Vesco, but he and Ira had remained friends ever since.

Dave's first call that Saturday morning was to a former Justice Department colleague, Greg Miller, the U.S. attorney in Tallahassee. Dave had stayed at Miller's home the previous evening, and Miller had mentioned in passing that a new prosecutor in his office used to work for the CIA. Dave got his number from Miller and asked the lawyer to alert the CIA that it had a man missing in Iran. He then contacted an FBI agent he knew in Tallahassee and asked him to call a twenty-four-hour crisis center in Washington, D.C., that notifies federal agencies about emergencies involving government employees.

Chris was also making calls. On his way home from Dubai, Bob had planned to stop over in London for several days to meet with clients, and she called the Marriott Heathrow, the hotel where he had a reservation. She was told he hadn't checked in as yet. Then she phoned a neighbor, Ron Jordison, a former DEA agent who sometimes worked with Bob. Jordison knew Bob was going to Dubai and had made a connection for him there, an agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service named Doug Einsel. But he hadn't been aware Bob had left on the trip until two days earlier, on Thursday, when Jordison had called Bob to suggest they go out and grab a bagel at a local place in Coral Springs. Bob laughed and told him he would have to take a rain check because he was in Dubai.

Chris decided for the moment not to say anything to the kids. It was still early and anything was possible. Her husband could be up in the air over the Atlantic or ill somewhere in a hospital. She was fiercely protective of her children and she did whatever she felt she needed to do to shield them. Chris was one of seven kids, and when her father fell ill, she dropped out of college and came home to help out.

Along with Samantha and Doug, who were sixteen and thirteen, two of the older Levinson children were at home that Saturday. Sue, who was thirty, had recently moved back in to save money while she worked at a nearby JetBlue facility training flight attendants. Dave, nineteen, was on spring break from Emory College in Atlanta. Chris did her best to pretend nothing was wrong. But as the day wore on, Sue sensed something was going on. Her mother kept darting in and out of her bedroom. Then, around noon, Chris emerged from her room and announced she was running out for a while to visit the Jordisons.

That's when Sue started to worry about her father. The Levinson children knew their mother usually left home only when she needed to buy groceries, run errands, or shuttle them back and forth from sports or events. Chris wasn't a hermit or a shut-in. But she was an intensely shy and private person, and spontaneously socializing with friends or running over to a neighbor to chat was the kind of thing she rarely did. Once in a while she hosted women from the neighborhood who got together to play bunco, a dice game. For the kids, it was a huge event. They almost never saw their parents entertaining, and suddenly card tables set with bowls of candy would appear in the house. Bob sometimes worried that Chris found being a mother to seven a convenient excuse to avoid social contact. He told friends that when their big nest was finally empty, he was going to take Chris traveling and find other ways to pull her into the world.

Chris didn't go to the Jordisons. Instead, she drove to a local Panera Bread restaurant, where she had arranged to meet Ron Jordison and an FBI agent who was driving up from Bob's old office in Miami. When the agent arrived, Chris told her that Bob had gone to Iran for the CIA. The agent replied that the bureau would start checking airline manifests and alert embassies in the region. She assured Chris the bureau would call her with updates.

While their mother was out, Sue told her brother Dave she was worried their father might be sick or in trouble. She thought Ira might know if something had happened to him, so she and Dave, without telling their younger siblings, snuck upstairs to call him. Sue spoke to Ira for a few moments and then put him on speakerphone so Dave could hear. Ira told them their father wasn't responding to phone calls and that people were looking for him. He didn't mention anything about Iran, but Dave assumed his father was somewhere in the Middle East. Sue then phoned her sister Stephanie, who was living in Tampa. Earlier in the day, Stephanie had called her mother to chitchat and give her the latest update on her infant son, Ryan. Her mother hadn't said anything specific then about her father, though she had mentioned in passing she was starting to worry about his health. At the time, Stephanie hadn't made much of the comment; maybe it was just her mother's attempt to get Stephanie to remind her father to take better care of himself when she saw him at his birthday party at Disney World. As Stephanie listened to Sue, her stomach dropped. She hung up the phone and burst out crying. Her husband, Randy, had left home about twenty minutes earlier for a rare evening out practicing with his garage band. She called him. “You need to come home, something has happened to my dad,” she said.

When Chris arrived back from Panera Bread, she asked Dave to take Samantha and Douglas out for dinner at Chicken Kitchen, a nearby restaurant. Dave did his best to pretend nothing was wrong, and while he was at the restaurant, he got a text message from Sue that put him at ease. After speaking with their mother, she thought their father wasn't missing but had been detained briefly. Her impression proved mistaken. Around 7:00 p.m., after Dave returned home with Samantha and Doug, Chris asked her children to sit together at the dining table. “Your father is missing and I don't know where he is,” she told them. Samantha burst out crying and ran upstairs to her room. Doug sat in his chair looking numb.