The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (5 page)

In the same interview, he casually noted that he had been stabbed outside the same club a week earlier. On that occasion, he’d “only” had one of his nipples sliced off. “It was just a minor stabbing, like these things happen every night of the week,” says Andy Geer, a British promoter for Cage Rage. “He had stab
wounds, bullet wounds. He was a proper from-the-streets kid.”

Three weeks after the stabbing, though covered in zippers of scars, Murray had resumed his training in the gym. But realistically, his promising career was threatened. Particularly as mixed martial arts was becoming gentrified, what promoter would permit a man with such serious injuries to fight again? What if a scar opened during a fight? Murray may have realized as much, and that could have been an incentive to turn to crime.

T
HE THIEVES TOOK
too much money. Had the Securitas gang made off with, say, a few million pounds, it might have been one thing. But the magnitude of the heist was such that overnight it became an international cause célèbre. Even the most staid British newspapers covered the case breathlessly and exhaustively. The surveillance video from the depot was televised nationally and, inevitably, made it online. Hundreds of British policemen were immediately deployed to investigate. Hefty reward money provided an incentive to anyone with any knowledge to come forward. “The gang had no chance,” says Howard Sounes, the British author of a forthcoming book on the heist.

The suspects, though, also did plenty to hasten their demise. Mirroring Murray’s fighting career—disciplined and methodical in MMA; arrogant and unthinking in street brawls—the same thieves who had been smooth and poised in the actual pilferage could scarcely have been sloppier in the aftermath. Some gang members boasted to friends about the heist. One of the vehicles used in the crime was set afire in the middle of a field, attracting attention. The money was poorly hidden.
Oceans 11
quickly devolved into a comedy of errors that recalled the Al Pacino classic
Dog Day Afternoon.
“That’s what happens,” says Bruce Reynolds, the convicted mastermind of Britain’s Great Train Robbery of 1963 and now something of an armchair analyst of British crime. “All the planning goes into the robbery and none goes into what
happens once you have the money.”

Within 48 hours, police had made their first arrest. Acting on a tip, they apprehended Michelle Hogg, a makeup artist and the daughter of a policeman. Police found a quantity of latex they alleged Hogg had used to make prosthetic disguises for the robbers. (Under questioning, Hogg gave a statement saying she was too scared to identify the thieves.) Later that day, police found the van used to hold the Dixons. The next day, acting on another tip, they located a second van used in the robbery. When they looked inside, they found guns, ski masks, bandannas and £1.3 million in cash. Acting on still another tip the following day, police raided the homes of Murray’s pal Lea Rusha, an aspiring mixed martial arts fighter, and Rusha’s friend Jetmir Bucpapa. In Rusha’s bedroom, police found plans of the Securitas depot, and hidden in a nearby garage was £8.6 million in cash.

All told, within 10 days, five people had been charged. Millions of pounds had been recovered. And innumerable additional leads had surfaced. “A gang of misfits and bruisers pulled off the biggest robbery ever with considerable criminal aplomb,” says Sounes. “But they were also stupid. This was a brilliant caper which turned into a farce.”

The fate of the accused was sealed in the fall of 2006 when Hogg “went QE” (Queen’s Evidence), as the Brits say, and testified against her co-conspirators in exchange for her freedom. She explained how she created the disguises so the gang members who posed as police officers couldn’t be accurately identified.

On Jan. 28, 2008, after seven months of trial during which more than 200 witnesses were called, five men—including Rusha, Bucpapa and Hysenaj, the insider—were found guilty for their part in the robbery and sentenced to a total of 140 years in jail. At the sentencing, authorities urged the public to resist romanticizing the caper. Fearing for their lives after giving extensive testimony, the Dixons entered the British equivalent of witness protection. So did Hogg, the makeup artist, who, according to multiple newspaper
accounts, has a £7 million bounty on her head. “This crime was, at heart, a crime of violence,” Nigel Pilkington of the Crown Prosecution Service told reporters. And with more than half the loot still unaccounted for, he vowed to continue to pursue the case. “This is not the end of the matter for these criminals,” he said. “We intend to seize their ill-gotten gains, wherever they may be.”

A
S THE
S
ECURITAS GANG
was being rounded up systematically, Murray apparently did not stand idly by. He left the country, leaving his wife and two children behind. Accompanied by his friend Paul Allen—he of the infamous UFC street brawl—he drove from London to Dover. There, according to Kent police, the two piloted their car onto a ferry headed for France. Murray is believed to have then traveled from France to Amsterdam to Spain, where he and Allen crossed the Strait of Gibraltar by ferry before finally finding sanctuary in Morocco.

If Morocco has historically held a certain exotic allure for Europeans, Murray is believed to have gone there for more practical reasons. Because of his lineage on his father’s side, Murray is considered a Moroccan national. And Morocco has no formal extradition agreement with Great Britain.

By all accounts, Murray lived lavishly in Northern Africa. He, Allen and two other friends from England, Gary Armitage and Mustafa Basar, lived in a villa in Souissi, an upscale district popular with diplomats, in Morocco’s capital city, Rabat. They tooled around town in a Mercedes and spent prodigious amounts of money on clothes, jewelry, electronic equipment and jaunts to Casablanca.

After a few months, Murray reportedly spent close to $1 million on a concrete manor around the corner from a cousin of Morocco’s King, Mohammed VI, outfitting it with an additional £200,000 in upgrades that include marble floors and a fully equipped gym. He also commissioned a giant mural above the hot tub, depicting his victory in his one and only UFC fight. Allen bought a property of
his own nearby.

Shortly after Murray’s arrival in Morocco in March ’06, the Kent police and Scotland Yard officials handling the investigation contacted Moroccan authorities and conveyed their concerns. Likely unbeknownst to Murray, almost from the day he arrived in the country he was under 24-hour surveillance. On June 25, 2006, dozens of Moroccan police sealed off a portion of the Mega Mall in Rabat, where Murray, Allen, Armitage and Basar were shopping. Because some of the suspects were experts in martial arts (and were potentially carrying weapons), the small army of police officers was armed. After a physical struggle, the four men were arrested. A Kent police spokeswoman asserted that Murray was arrested “for offenses linked to the £53 million Securitas raid.”

When the Moroccan police went to Murray’s residence, they found cocaine and marijuana. The four men were charged with drug possession and for violently resisting when police arrested them at the mall, a crime a Moroccan judge termed “beating and humiliating members of the security forces.” They were found guilty and in February 2007 received sentences ranging from four to eight months in prison. Armitage and Basar were released soon after for time served and retuned to the U.K. Allen was extradited by the British government and is currently in a British jail, awaiting trial for his alleged role in the heist.

Murray’s situation was somewhat more complicated. Because of his Moroccan heritage, the U.K.’s extradition request was initially denied. “The British government has been putting a lot of pressure on Morocco,” says Abdellah Benlamhidi Aissaoui, Murray’s lawyer in Morocco. “But Moroccan nationals cannot be extradited [from Morocco]. That is the law, and the law should govern.”

The Moroccan government discussed swapping Murray for Mohamed Karbouzi, a suspected terrorist living in London and sought for questioning in a 2003 Casablanca bombing. But the British government reportedly declined the exchange. Aissaoui says he has also heard that Britain might file a formal request to have Murray tried
for the Securitas heist by Moroccan authorities in Morocco. While the extradition mess is being sorted out, Murray, at the behest of Britain, sits in a jail cell just outside Rabat, a caged cage fighter. “It’s tough for him,” says his lawyer. “He states that he’s innocent. He has not participated in this robbery. He made money from his fights. He doesn’t need to do this.”

If Murray was in fact the ringleader, the Mr. Big, it wouldn’t surprise Reynolds, the Great Train Robber. He compares a heist to sport. “You’re challenging the authority of the state—the challenge is what it’s all about,” says Reynolds, now 76 and living outside London. “[Same as] Jesse James and Pancho Villa.” What about the money? “It’s a benchmark. Everyone wants to beat the record. It’s like [Formula One] drivers want to beat Michael Schumacher’s record.”

Murray isn’t granting interviews these days (his lawyer says that for Murray to speak to SI “is impossible right now”), much less speaking publicly about his guilt or innocence with respect to the heist. But he told a friend this story: After learning about Murray’s saga—the street fights, the stabbing, the Securitas accusation—a London casino wrote him a formal letter explaining that he was no longer welcome at the establishment. That was fine by Murray. He says he wrote a quick note back: “Haven’t you already heard? I hit the jackpot.”

L. J
ON
W
ERTHEIM
is a senior writer at
Sports Illustrated
and the author of six books, including
Blood in the Cage,
which traces the rise of the UFC. He is also a licensed attorney. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Ellie, and two children. Greg Kelly was his editor on this story.

Coda

In the early spring of 2008, I was speaking with the mixed mar
tial arts champion Pat Miletich for a book I was writing on the rise of the UFC. I made a casual reference to Lee Murray, a British cage fighter who had trained with Miletich in Iowa. What ever happened to that guy? “Funny guy, Lee,” Pat said casually. “He supposedly helped orchestrate this big bank heist in England and is now living in Morocco.” My “story alarm” didn’t merely beep; it nearly woke the neighbors.

I pitched this story to my editors at
Sports Illustrated
who, to their eternal credit, encouraged me to pursue it, despite the tangential relation to sport (and marginal sport at that). While Murray declined to be interviewed on advice of his Moroccan counsel, plenty of others were happy to help me piece together the stranger-than-fiction narrative. At this writing, Murray’s alleged coconspirator, Paul (the Enforcer) Allen, having been extradited back to the UK, faces a retrial for involvement in the heist, after his first trial in winter 2009 resulted in the equivalent of a hung jury. Murray remains in jail in Morocco. And only a fraction of the fifty-three million pounds has been recovered.

FROM
Philadelphia
magazine

D
AN
O
PREA’S MOTHER,
Rose, was always fiercely self-reliant. Born in 1923, she grew up at 5th and Oxford. After graduating from Hallahan Catholic Girls’ High School, she married Daniel Oprea Sr., with whom she had a son. When the two divorced after seven years, Rose took it upon herself to enroll in Drexel University, where she studied electrical engineering. She became an engineer with RCA. With her only child, Rose Oprea carved out a happy life. She was not afraid of aloneness.

She and her son remained close—geographically and otherwise—as he grew older, despite the fact that they were opposites of sorts; Rose was bookish and artistic, while Dan, who took a job with the Navy, enjoyed working with his hands. (They shared a common interest in movies, something Rose instilled in her son from a young age.) Dan married and had two sons, to whom Rose was especially devoted. When Dan and his wife Mary Rose tragically lost their 26-year-old son Stephen in 2001, the mother-son bond grew stronger.

In her later years, Rose developed her share of health problems;
she’d had a kidney removed years earlier, she suffered from angina and diverticulitis and a low iron count, and there was some slippage mentally. Dan and Mary Rose worried about her—her continued driving was of particular concern—and tried repeatedly to convince her to let them move in with her in the three-bedroom rancher in Huntingdon Valley that Rose had always said Dan would someday inherit. But Rose, who at 82 kept herself busy painting American Indian–style works and running errands in her Chrysler Concorde, would have none of it. Dan and Mary Rose lived a few miles away, and Dan visited his mother every Saturday, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, changing light bulbs, whatever she needed done. The two spoke on the phone, without fail, every day.

One day in late December 2004, Dan tried to reach his mother. She didn’t answer. He figured she was out rummaging the after-Christmas sales, and wasn’t immediately worried. When it turned six o’clock and they still hadn’t heard from her, Dan and Mary Rose drove to her house. They found her car parked in the driveway. Dan used his key to unlock the front door. Inside, they called out, flipping lights on as they searched. In her bedroom, they discovered Rose lying contorted on the floor. Her dachshund Sparky stood vigil beside her.

At the hospital, doctors determined that Rose had suffered a stroke. She was completely paralyzed on one side, and she was disoriented. She could no longer speak, or write. As the days wore on and her condition stabilized, she regained little of what she’d lost. After two weeks, she was transferred to a nursing home.

The Opreas visited Rose at Luther Woods Convalescent Center as frequently as possible. Though she struggled to communicate, it was clear she was uncomfortable—she tried often to wiggle out of bed—and wished to be home. She once managed to express to her son her worry that she was causing trouble. He told her she was no trouble at all. Late on the night of April 18, 2005, the Opreas rushed to the nursing home after receiving a call that
Rose was deteriorating rapidly. They stood at her bedside, holding her hands, trying their best to comfort her as she lay dying.

Obsession over what happens after death—not just to the soul but also to the physical self—has always been part of the human condition; for as far back as we can discern, human beings have taken steps to care for their dead. But what was once exclusively the province of families—literally, next of kin—has morphed into a $15 billion annual business in America. Society, with the considerable influence of the funeral industry, has come to consider the way a corpse is treated as a direct, final and lasting expression of the quantity and quality of love felt. The Opreas had talked at length about what they wanted done with their bodies after their deaths. All disliked the idea of embalming and burial, and when the Opreas’ son died, they had his body cremated. Dan and his mother had made a pact years earlier, inspired by one of their favorite movies,
Beau Geste,
from 1939; it features a so-called Viking funeral, in which the body is put on a ship, lit on fire, and sent out to sea. Mother and son agreed that when she died, he’d have her cremated, place her ashes on a model ship, set it on fire, and launch it from the Atlantic City beach.

From the nursing home, Mary Rose phoned Charlie Mancini of Mancini Funeral Home, on Somerset Street in South Philadelphia, whom she’d known for years and who’d handled her son’s arrangements. After she hung up, she and Dan said one last good-bye, and left.

Mancini arrived some time later to take possession of Rose Oprea’s body. There was little for him to do but deliver it to the crematorium. There are just four crematoria in the City of Philadelphia, and Mancini always used one called Liberty, which was owned by Louis Garzone and his brother Gerald and their partner, James McCafferty Jr. Arriving at Liberty’s nondescript building in Kensington, Mancini wheeled the body of Rose Oprea inside, where it was to have been cremated following a 24-hour waiting period, in keeping with Pennsylvania law.

Two years later, when a Philadelphia detective showed up on their doorstep, the Opreas would learn what actually happened next: Once Mancini was gone, in the cloak of darkness, a shadowy figure—a man—walked across Somerset Street. He entered the crematorium, placed the body bag containing Rose Oprea’s remains on a gurney, and wheeled it back across the street, to a funeral home that Lou Garzone owned, where the cutters were waiting.

T
HE CUTTERS DROVE DOWN
from New York usually in the morning. They arrived in broad daylight. They went to work on a rusted table in a cramped, fetid, windowless, blood-encrusted embalming room one of them would later liken to the back of a butcher shop.

They slashed off the arms and legs at their joints, and then stripped the bones from them. Bones taken in complete pieces are most valuable, so femurs and other long bones were removed whole. The cutters used power tools to remove spines. They cut out Achilles and other tendons. Occasionally they took hearts. They skinned the bodies, including the faces. It was a blood-soaked, rushed operation. A proper harvesting can take four hours; the cutters could do it in 30 minutes. Appropriately removing a thin layer of skin from the body can itself take more than 30 minutes; the cutters could do it in 60 seconds. They used the same blades, wore the same gloves, cross-contaminated bodies and specimens.

They paid no mind to established protocol for harvesting postmortem tissue, which defines a suitable donor as someone under 65, without infection, serious disease or cancer, preferably felled by accident, heart attack or stroke; harvesting is to be completed within 15 hours of death. At Lou Garzone’s funeral home, bodies routinely sat for days without refrigeration, often in the alleyway. The body of Philadelphia resident Diane Thomas, who died of
metastatic cervical cancer, sat out for 113 hours. Joseph Pace, a 54-year-old widower from Kensington, suffered from sepsis, cancer, HIV and hepatitis C. James Herlihy, a former Naval Yard worker, also had hepatitis C and cancer. The cutters sliced apart 81-year-old Joseph Gibson, who died at the University of Pennsylvania of stomach cancer; his tissue was recovered 92 hours after he died. The eviscerated remains were rolled across the street to the crematorium, with packed towels to prevent a trail of blood. A crematorium employee said the bodies arrived disfigured, often missing limbs. Some were just torsos. The body bags that held them were full of blood. This was how the body of Rose Oprea, too, was cared for.

On forms forwarded to tissue processing companies, the cutters invented virtually everything, creating new identities for the deceased, new death certificates, subtracting decades from their ages (one 89-year-old was said to be 60), inventing next of kin, fabricating doctors, sometimes using, as a grand jury would put it, “special touches”—writing, on one form, that “Lois Glory” traveled to Mexico in 1981. As a result, authorities have been able to identify just 48 of the 244 corpses McCafferty and the Garzones handed over to the cutters; of those 48, nearly half died of cancer, sepsis, HIV or hepatitis. To circumvent compulsory blood tests, the cutters supplied the processing companies with blood from other corpses known to be clean.

A
BOUT THE SAME TIME
that Rose Oprea was hospitalized for her stroke, the 62nd precinct of the New York City police department, in Brooklyn, was notified of a possible case of fraud. A couple—Deborah Johnson and her husband, Robert Nelms—had recently purchased the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home. A man had come to the home wishing to bury his aunt, who had prepaid for her funeral; Johnson could not find the appropriate
documentation, and noticed larger-scale accounting irregularities. The case was assigned to Detective Patricia O’Brien.

O’Brien checked the files at the funeral home, which seemed to corroborate Johnson’s concern. But there was something else, Johnson told O’Brien. The detective accompanied her upstairs, to a hidden room. It was fitted out like an operating room, with hospital-style overhead lights, a hydraulic lift that rose through the ceiling of the embalming room on the floor below, a toilet with tubes into which blood and other bodily fluids were drained, scalpels, knives, saws….

Back at the precinct, O’Brien began Googling addresses from forms Johnson had also shown her: All were for tissue-transplant companies, scattered around the country.

Through records from the George funeral home—many of them obviously fabricated—the investigation spread, from Brooklyn to the city’s other boroughs. O’Brien was joined by members of the NYPD’s prestigious major case squad, who fanned out, interviewing relatives of the deceased. The number of corpses that had been butchered at the funeral home increased first by the dozens and quickly by the hundreds. The police learned that in every case but one, permission hadn’t been granted—hadn’t, in fact, even been sought—for the harvesting of the dead’s skin, bones and tendons. The case seemed to grow more outrageous by the day. Detectives soon discovered that among those eviscerated was 95-year-old
Masterpiece Theatre
host Alistair Cooke, who’d died of lung cancer that had spread to his bones; his daughter, who had sought a cheap, simple cremation at her father’s request, would later speak of “lives torn asunder” by “these desecrations.” The exhumation of an 82-year-old Queens woman who died of brain cancer revealed that most of the bones below her waist had been cut out and replaced with plastic piping. When word of the investigation finally leaked out, a year after O’Brien first arrived at George & Son, the number of unwitting donors had eclipsed 1,000. The city was, to put it mildly, scandalized. “BODY-SNATCHERS!” shrieked the
New
York Daily News,
which broke the story. Not to be outdone, “GHOUL AND THE GANG!” shouted the
Post.

The investigation in New York was building steam, but 90 miles away as the crow flies—or in this case, a sparrow, which was flying, flitting, above the streets of Kensington, searching for a tree or some other place to perch—in Philadelphia, no one at Lou Garzone’s funeral home was aware of that. The sparrow arced down on Somerset Street, over an alleyway beside Garzone’s, where a mound of…something lay on a gurney, covered, oddly, by a large swatch of artificial turf. Later, a cutter would tell the grand jury he distinctly remembered the sparrow perched atop a human body that had been hacked to pieces and covered in fake turf—perhaps Rose Oprea’s, or one of the 243 others dismembered there—then left in the alleyway. The sparrow stood on two toothpick legs. Its head bobbed up and down, like a puppet’s. With its beak, it inspected the gaps between the artificial green blades of turf. Then it stared straight, fluttered its wings once, and flushed.

F
INALLY,
in October 2007, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office announced its own indictments: of Louis Garzone; his brother Gerald; their partner James McCafferty Jr.; the mastermind behind the entire enterprise, physician Michael Mastromarino; and Lee Cruceta, Mastromarino’s right-hand man. At the same time, the D.A. released a highly unusual 104-page report from the grand jury that had spent a year investigating the case. “What we found,” the grand jury wrote, “was appalling.”

It began with Mastromarino, handsome, cleft-chinned, a married father of two, in his early 40s, from tony Fort Lee, New Jersey. He’d worked in Manhattan and New Jersey as an oral surgeon until 2000, when he was forced to surrender his license following a string of Demerol-induced antics at his office: He’d fallen asleep while suturing a patient; he collapsed coming out of a bathroom with his scrub pants down around his ankles; after he left a patient
under general anesthesia on the operating table, a nurse found him on the floor of a bathroom with a needle in his arm. Finally, according to a lawsuit he later settled, he sliced through a nerve in a patient’s jaw, leaving part of her face permanently paralyzed.

Down but not out, Mastromarino regrouped in 2002 by opening Biomedical Tissues Services, or BTS, a cadaver body-parts recovery company; he had knowledge of the business through his experience as a surgeon, since he sometimes transplanted human parts into his patients. While it’s illegal in the U.S. to profit from organ and tissue donation, Mastromarino would exploit a loophole that allows companies to charge for “handling” and “processing” tissue and bone. Mastromarino met Lee Cruceta, a nurse then in his early 30s who was adept with power tools and enjoyed medicine’s similarities to carpentry; he also had experience working for tissue banks. Cruceta was put in charge of field operations, a position that had him overseeing a Dickensian cast of cutters. With very little practical governmental oversight, and with the extraordinary medical need for tissue, Mastromarino operated his body-snatching enterprise with breathtaking ease.

Though it’s the major organs—heart, kidneys, liver—that we think of in cases of transplantation, they represent, in fact, the minority of what’s harvested. Fifty times more often, bones, skin, tendons and other tissues are transplanted in operating rooms, in more than a million procedures annually. Pieces of bone can be used to repair back and spine injuries; bone can be ground into a putty to fill voids from fractures. Cadaver skin not only replaces that of burn victims; it can repair stomach linings eaten away by acid, patch holes in hearts, shore up faulty bladders as slings.