Never Let Them See You Cry (3 page)

Once a wife and mother, she was now alone. European born, she had no brothers and sisters. “Hitler killed them,” she told me. She had come to this country and married. Her only son had eagerly counted the days until he was old enough to join the navy. He was killed in 1945. Her husband, a Brooklyn carpenter, died a year later, in 1946.

On Saturday, she had promised the hotel manager that she would pay the rent on Monday. She did not. Her Social Security check had failed to arrive. Miami Beach Police Lieutenant George Morgan tried to intervene, but the landlord refused to let her live out her $150 security deposit because she had violated her lease by failing to pay on time.

I confronted the hotel manager. The man was not exactly all heart. “I don't want this kind of customer in my hotel,” he said. “She doesn't want to pay the rent.”

I asked if he planned to return her deposit. “Talk to my lawyers,” he said.

Sympathetic police had taken Mrs. Goldberg to another South Beach hotel Friday night. But she left on Saturday because kosher dietary rules, to which she had adhered all her life, were not observed there. At her other hotel, she had fixed her own meals in her room.

Unwilling to leave her on the street with nowhere to go, Morgan and officers Dennis Ward and Patricia Evans spent hours trying to comfort Mrs. Goldberg, negotiate with the man who had evicted her and work out a solution to her problems. They did so, at least temporarily. The Jewish Family and Children's Service agreed to pay for her weekend at a kosher hotel. Annie Lefkowitz, owner of the Granada Hotel, said Mrs. Goldberg would be welcome.

But Rose Goldberg still wept. Dennis Ward, a husky Irish rookie whose father and uncle were also cops, tried to stop her tears. “You'll have a nice bed and a room. You can take a nap. And you'll have three kosher meals a day,” he promised.

“I'm ashamed to go like this.” She stared down at her red house slippers. “I gave away my best clothes because I never go anywhere.”

“You look fine,” said Officer Evans, holding her hand.

Saturday night Rose Goldberg rested in a room at the Granada. Sunday morning, Mother's Day, her story was in
The Herald
.

For me, the anticipation mounted, like Christmas morning, waiting for the newspaper to hit front lawns. What would the good readers do? They never let me down. It is almost as though we share a secret conspiracy.

Rose Goldberg was remembered on Mother's Day—for the first time since 1946. Well-wishers kept the telephone at the Granada busy all day. Someone brought flowers. Someone else brought perfume. Strangers came to visit. A Lincoln Road shopkeeper sent two dresses.

Sunday afternoon she dined on vegetable soup, stuffed cabbage and roast chicken, marble cake and tea.

For me, best Mother's Day I ever had.

How can you
not
do this job? It may not always be fun, but when it works, it works.

Only the dead have no troubles
.

—L
EONARD
L
OUIS
L
EVINSON

People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Maybe it is too many soap operas, too much testosterone or the need for attention. Other people never look for misfortune, pain or woe, but it finds them just the same. Age is no barrier. Nobody, it seems, is ever too young or too old to step into trouble big time.

Take soft-spoken and grandmotherly Lilly Pender, age sixty-three.

“I'm a nervous person,” she told me. That news came as no surprise. We were discussing a job-related incident. Hired as a security guard to protect a county garbage dump, she had used her .38-caliber revolver to kill a Boy Scout leader who had tried to discard unauthorized items.

Why armed guards must patrol Miami garbage dumps is another story.

Buster McCrae, sixty-nine, collected Social Security and cooked, cleaned and cared for his blind wife. He too worked as a security guard. He got in trouble for killing a fourteen-year-old avocado thief.

Some people take their jobs too seriously.

Following those cases, and others, the state took over security-guard licensing and instituted training including a one-hour program on “When to Use a Gun.”

On the short side of the generation gap is Miami's youngest murder suspect, age two and a half. He looked like a fine little boy to me, though perhaps a bit hyper. Strikingly handsome, he was bright-eyed and big for his age. When I came to visit he was clad in T-shirt and shorts, with red, white and blue socks and shoes, racing about his mother's immaculate apartment with a toy truck, shouting “Vroom, vroom!” He cried, “Night-night, night-night,” flung a blanket onto the floor and flopped down. Seconds later he was darting about in a new game. His favorite television show was
The Incredible Hulk
. He loved talking to strangers and vigorously waved “bye-bye” when I left.

He had battered a twenty-two-month-old playmate to death, police said, pounded his head on the floor, then slammed a heavy glass vase over his skull.

“He's not mean,” his mother said. “He's a little rough.”

Her thirty-eight-pound son pushed the smaller boy down several times, she said, so she separated them, then left the room. She later found her son straddling the victim, brandishing a large glass flower vase over the baby's battered head, saying: “Bad boy, bad boy…”

Police bought it. So did her best friend, the mother of the dead toddler. A working mother, she had left her only child in this woman's care. “I'm not angry,” the bereaved mother said. “They were good babies, both of them. Sometimes they were buddy-buddy, kissy-kissy, and the next minute they were fighting or fussing over a toy. He is two and a half years old—I don't think he did it deliberately. He's a good boy. I love him.”

The child had too limited a vocabulary to dispute the case against him. “He doesn't realize what happened,” said a homicide detective, father of a small boy himself. “How can you expect a two-and-a-half-year-old to know he wasted another kid? He's a pleasant little boy—a little tornado, but he's pleasant. It's a very sad, sad case.”

Prosecutors refused to charge the tot with a crime but did instruct the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to “determine if the child is delinquent.”

Psychiatrists called the tot the youngest perpetrator of murderous violence they had yet encountered. One urged that he be evaluated in terms of impulse control and tested by a pediatric neurologist.

“Most two-and-a-half-year-olds do not murder other children or hit them over the head with flower pots with such force or violence,” a doctor said. “I'm sure something is going on with this kid. His level of aggression is excessive, with poor controls.”

Right the first time: Most two-and-a-half-year-olds do not murder other children. This one didn't either.

He was framed.

Police acknowledged eighteen days later that the tot was innocent and announced they had a new suspect.

It was not hard to figure out who that was.

“They think I did it,” his mother told me. “You have to ask the police why.”

I did. They had become aware of the similar death of another child, an eighteen-month-old boy, left in the same woman's care five years earlier. She claimed that the child's fatal injuries were caused by a fall. No one else could take the blame. Her son had not been born yet

Miami Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez studied both cases and found it likely that the same person was responsible for both deaths.

There was not enough evidence to arrest the mother. She did submit to a lie-detector test administered by internationally known polygraph expert Warren Holmes. His conclusion: “This woman has got no business baby-sitting.”

The news clearing the toddler was a relief. That left a five-year-old as Dade County's most dangerous child.

The smiling youngster deliberately pushed a three-year-old playmate five floors to his death off a Miami Beach bayfront condominium.

Police thought the fatal plunge was a tragic accident, but when they talked to the five-year-old he readily confessed. His six-year-old cousin corroborated his story, saying that the boy had returned to the family apartment and confided that he had just shoved the other child off an outside stairwell.

The boy shocked detectives. “He doesn't think he did anything wrong,” Detective Robert Davis told me.

“He said he pushed him. He watched him fall. He heard him scream when he hit the ground and then he went for help. It's horrendous. He doesn't show any remorse. He was smiling when he was telling the story.”

The husky seventy-pound preschooler wolfed two slices of pizza, a garlic roll and a banana after his confession.

Children without conscience can be frightening and deadly creatures. A seven-year-old with a fatal fascination for fire touched off a blaze in which a young woman and her baby perished. He put a match to alcohol because he liked the blue color of the flames.

Or take the curly-haired seventh grader, caught behind the wheel of a stolen Miami Beach Water Department car. The boy lived acro
ss the street from police headquarters and had stolen enough equipment to outfit a small law-enforcement agency of his own. “I wish he'd leave us alone,” whined a detective. “We have so little equipment as it is.”

The boy took three guns, all expensive Magnums, 398 rounds of ammunition, hollow-point bullets, several boxes of .38-caliber cartridges, a hand computer, half a dozen walkie-talkies worth one thousand dollars each, five electronic beepers with battery chargers, cylinders of Mace, sets of handcuffs, nightsticks and other gear.

“I've been to court three times, and I always get out,” the thirteen-year-old bragged.

“He's nervous,” the boy's mother told me tearfully. He did not look or sound nervous to me. “Take me to Youth Hall,” he razzed a detective. “I'll get out I always do.”

His favorite pastime was hurling big rocks through the front door at headquarters, trying to hit the desk sergeant.

The boy broke into the city water department on a Saturday night, snipped a chain with cable cutters, pried a gate and a padlock hasp, removed five jalousies, broke into the office, and stole four walkie-talkies and the keys to a Plymouth. Before driving away, he rewired the gate so the crime would go unnoticed until Monday. A city employee, however, discovered the thefts at one
A.M
. on Sunday. A policeman spotted the deftly camouflaged car parked on a South Beach street at ten
A.M
. The thief had spray-painted over the city seals on the doors and replaced the city tag with a stolen license plate.

Cops staking out the vehicle saw a small figure with a walkie-talkie climb into the front seat and drive off. The youngster had to push the seat all the way forward in order to peer over the steering wheel. He swore someone had sent him for the car. Police assumed an adult was involved and asked him to hand up the guilty man. He led the cops to a park and pointed out a startled stranger.

The boy, who carried a pilfered police badge in his pocket, had actually stolen the car to escape the city and an upcoming date in Juvenile Court.

So many stories involving the very young and very old are unutterably sad. How do you forget the shabbily dressed gray-haired grandmother who tried to rob a Miami Beach bank by threatening to explode a “bomb” in her handbag? The tattered purse held no bomb—or money—just a pair of spectacles and some crumpled tissues. She said she was starving.

Domestic violence or love gone wrong is sad at any age, but for some seniors it is a tragic conclusion to otherwise unblemished lives. A Miami man's first marriage endured for sixty-two years. His second ended after six days when he beat his petite bride to death with a claw hammer. She was seventy-six. He was ninety.

The bridegroom, a great-grandfather of ten, was charged with murder. The arrest was his first. The fatal argument erupted over the honeymoon cruise. Suitcases stood by the door. She wanted to go; he had second thoughts.

When a sixty-nine-year-old woman savagely beat her eighty-nine-year-old husband to death, the murder weapon was a urine bottle. They had been married for forty-eight years.

One couple was married in Brooklyn in 1920. Sixty-three years later, in Miami Beach, he beat her to death after a vicious argument. “I wouldn't wish her on my worst enemy,” he told police.

One is never too old to be among America's most wanted. Old people are rugged and resourceful, the toughest desperados, especially when they feel they have nothing to lose. In gunfights, Miami police have killed an eighty-three-year-old great-grandfather with a pacemaker, and a seventy-nine-year-old man in bib overalls. Both fired at police first.

Joseph Thomas still eludes police. He is eighty-five and wanted for murder.

He accused Sadie Sheffield of being unfaithful and ended their twenty-eight-year relationship with a bullet. Sadie was seventy-three. The romance was always stormy. “They feuded most of the time,” Miami Homicide Detective Louise Vasquez said. “They never got along.”

After a bitter argument over his suspicion that she was seeing another man, Thomas went to his apartment, came back with a gun and shot Sheffield in the face. “He just walked out, got in his car and took off with the tires spinning,” Louise said.

The case did not seem like a tough one. In such homicides, the shooter usually shows up shortly, conscience-stricken and full of remorse. Not this one.

When Joseph Thomas raced away in his old and faded green car, it was July 1978. He was seventy-two. The search for Joseph Thomas has stretched into one of Miami's longest man-hunts.

Norman David Mayer, sixty-six, did not die like a typical Miami Beach senior citizen. He did not die like anyone you and I ever knew.

He worked as a handyman at a beach hotel and wore a pig-tail held by a rubber band, a baseball cap over his balding pate and flowered Hawaiian shirts with yellow trousers.

Norman David Mayer had a cause. He was the founder—and total membership—of an organization called “Number One Priority.” He had been arrested twice for handing out leaflets on college campuses. He sold death's-head emblems urging “As an Act of Sanity Ban Nuclear Weapons … Or Have a Nice Doomsday.” A tireless antinuclear activist, he waged a one-man ten-year crusade to ban the bomb.

Nobody listened.

Mayer bought a used Ford step-van and converted it into a rolling bomb shelter, reinforced by steel and stocked with dried food and an anti-radiation suit. When the world blew up he wanted to be the one to see how it looked afterward.

Before leaving Miami Beach for the last time, Norman David Mayer told his only close friend, an auto repair shop owner who had known him for thirty-three years, that he would not be back. “It's over now. There's nothing more to be said. I've had enough.”

The aging activist called later, bragging that he had distributed five thousand leaflets in Washington, some on the steps of the Capitol. For thirty-five days, he protested in front of the White House from eleven
A.M
. to six
P.M
. He told people that he had been arrested twelve times for his cause.

Still, no one listened. “You have to do something,” he declared.

So he did. On his last day he donned a dark blue jumpsuit and a black Darth Vader-style helmet with a visor. He raced his van up to the east face of the Washington Monument at 9:15
A.M
. and threatened to blow it up with one thousand pounds of dynamite unless his demands were met.

Everybody listened now.

He insisted that every governmental agency and private organization join a national dialogue on the dangers of nuclear war. He refused to negotiate with a team of FBI agents and police.

We heard about the threat at
The Miami Herald
, and I got a local tip that the man holding the Washington Monument hostage might be Norman David Mayer. The FBI was dubious, doubting that the terrorist in the taut standoff could be a senior citizen. The cool, quick militant in the dark helmet appeared to be about thirty years old, but an FBI spokesman conceded, “We don't know who he is.” He suggested that more than one person might be inside the van.

The owner of the Miami Beach hotel where Mayer had worked flew to Washington at FBI request, to help negotiate. He was too late. At about 8:30
P.M
., after a tense ten-hour siege, Norman David Mayer decided to drive away.

The barrage of police gunfire that killed him overturned the van at the foot of the Washington Monument

There was no one else inside—and no dynamite. Only Norman David Mayer, age sixty-six, and his leaflets.

He had a cause.

If Wayman Neal had a cause, nobody knew what it was. He did, however, have a nasty habit.