Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [88]
Todd Parsons, the manager at Billy’s, takes him aside, asks him to leave. “‘You don’t want to do this,’” Parsons remembers Jack saying. “‘You don’t want to put me out of here. I’ll kill you and your family for this. I’ve got enough money now to where I can have y’all killed and nobody would ever know.’” Parsons, twenty-eight, who has a wife and two young kids, takes this rather personally. He tells Jack he can either go now or talk to the law. Jack swings. Parsons puts him out. The cops come and charge Jack with assault; according to a police report, a security-camera tape backs it all up.
Jack, meanwhile, is still driving the Navigator. A couple of weeks after the Billy’s incident, he leaves $100,000 in a bank bag in the Navigator in his driveway, and naturally, someone takes it. The cops are getting sick of telling Jack to put his money in the bank. They’ve been spending half their time either writing him up or hunting down his loot. Jack installs security cameras overlooking his front porch (bare but for brass planters full of cigarette butts) and over the driveway and garage (silver Rolls, an Escalade, a muscle car missing a wheel or two).
So Jack’s starting to become everybody’s favorite joke, but while they’re laughing they’re also crying, because it seems unfair that God or whoever had handed a life-altering sum of money to a guy who not only already had plenty but who leaves it lying around like trash.
Eight days after the $100,000 goes missing, the state police report finding Jack slumped over the wheel on the side of I-64, not far from the Pink Pony. They wake him up and give him some DUI tests. He fails the follow-the-finger, the walk-and-turn, then he blows nearly twice the legal limit on the Breathalyzer. It’s 5:30 in the afternoon.
But this snowball’s still rolling. Weeks later, someone breaks into Jack’s office and swipes $2,000. That same afternoon, Jack gets sued. The plaintiff is Charity Fortner, a young floor attendant at Tri-State Racetrack & Gaming Center, a greyhound track and slots casino down the road from the Pink Pony. Jack is a regular in the High Rollers Room, where the bet limit is $5. Charity’s job is to change out the empty coin hoppers. Jack was gambling one day alongside a “lady friend,” and when Charity bent to refill the hopper, Jack grabbed her ponytail and shoved her head toward his crotch. So alleges her suit. Fortner declines to comment, but her lawyer, Scott Segal, says, “The fact of the matter is, if someone doesn’t take on men who act this way, it becomes acceptable conduct. Will it be an easier verdict to collect [because he’s rich]? I hope it will be. But the way the man’s behaving, he may lose every last cent before this case is over. He might as well be throwing it in the river.”
It didn’t take long for Jack to lose some more dough. Two days after the lawsuit is filed, another $85,000 disappears from the Navigator, again from Jack’s driveway. The new security cameras record a man and a woman calmly taking the stash before driving off in a van. The cops begin the hunt for a whole new batch of missing money. Jack tells a local TV news crew: “I’m ready to kill somebody.” The feeling is now rather mutual. “There’s been a lot of unfortunate things,” says Raymond Peak, the soft-spoken mayor of Hurricane, where Jack scored his lucky ticket. “Carrying around so much money entices people to want to rob him. People think he’s nuts. As a public official, it makes it difficult to condone. But it’s his money. I guess he can do what he wants.”
BY NOW THERE’S NO TELLING how many people are embroiled in the seamier side of Jack Whittaker’s good fortune. This fall, a dead guy was found in one of Jack’s houses. His body was discovered around the time police were investigating a burglary of the house by two other men, one of whom committed the crime in drag. The dead guy had been a friend of Brandi’s, but apparently