Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [135]
Coda
If you’ve ever watched a trial you know the first rule of trying to re-create a crime: events start to break down upon scrutiny. Unless you have a videotape, and sometimes even when you do (Rodney King et al.), you’re never really going to know what happened. And in my limited experience reporting crime stories, the more interviews you do the more it starts to feel like reality is coming unstitched. Even in this case, the case of (as they’re referred to in this story) The Novak 8, when events were widely witnessed and the conspiracy lasted only a matter of hours, facts begin to lose their purchase. Did the lieutenant make off with a bunch of money as charged? Did the first sergeant? Was Matt Novak really the ring-leader, as the army contends, or the fall guy? In any case, pretty much everyone involved in this incident feels they were singularly screwed. Matt Novak especially so.
The last time I saw Matt was via satellite when we were both being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo was being kind of a dick, insinuating that Matt was a quasi-criminal scumbag. It didn’t really help Matt’s worldview, which, as far as I could tell when I spent those wintry days up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin doing the reporting for this piece, wasn’t too rosy to begin with. After we went off the air on Geraldo, I tried to talk to Matt, but the connection was dead. My little flesh-colored earpiece was silent. Later, when 60 Minutes II called me to do a story about Matt (they barely credited my story in theirs, by the way; more on this later) I found out that Matt felt a little screwed over by me, too. And having tried to call him minutes before composing this coda, and being greeted with silence, I cannot report back about what exactly Matt objected to in this piece. Maybe it’s that the story didn’t completely alleviate his sense of being persecuted, which is what I think he’d hoped it would do.
Finally, a mea culpa: I got the idea to do this piece from seeing an interview with Matt in a documentary called Soldiers Pay that the director David O. Russell was working on when I was doing a profile of him for GQ. I promised Tricia Regan, the co-director of the film, that I would mention it in the article, since they’d been generous enough to give me contact information for Matt. And, in the final version of the story that got printed, the name of that film did not appear. And for that crime: I am guilty. Add both the director of Soldiers Pay and me (hey, 60 Minutes II!) to the long list of people who believe the world kind of screws people over.
Denise Grollmus
SEX THIEF
FROM Cleveland Scene
RENEE CLUTCHES A CREASED black-and-white mug shot in the dim light of a suburban diner. The forty-three-year-old strokes her strawberry-blond ponytail as she surveys the scrawny Vietnamese man in the photo.
She nods recognition at his deer-in-the-headlights eyes, flared nostrils, and pursed lips. “He looks just the same,” she says. “But I look pretty much the same too. I guess not much has changed in twenty-five years.”
Now a wife and mother, Renee still remembers the smallest details of the night they first met, though she hasn’t spoken of it in two decades.
It was August 29, 1980. Renee—who talked to Scene on the condition that her last name not be used—was a petite but tomboyish eighteen-year-old working at a McDonald’s in Akron. At 2:00 A.M., she was closing up the restaurant alone.
As she turned off the parking-lot floodlights and walked toward her ’69 Pontiac, a man sneaked up behind her. He held a