Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [4]
Miami Beach, Florida—August 5, 1981
In truth, the Miami Beach that Sergeant Matthews set out from to meet with his Hollywood PD counterparts the following Wednesday bore very little resemblance to the high-octane, pretty-peopled playground of today. Nor had it yet become the drug-fueled, money-laundering center of exotic crime mirrored in Miami Vice, where Crockett and Tubbs donned unstructured suits and chased swarthy miscreants in cigarette boats and Ferraris.
There was crime in Miami Beach to be sure, but it was still largely the old-fashioned variety that made its own kind of sense. From the 1930s, mob money had fueled the glittering beachfront resorts where big-name talent performed and movers and shakers cavorted, but much of that was about providing willing customers with what they craved: babes, booze, cards, and dice. Victimless crime, as it used to be called, and hardly a thing that outraged anyone, unless you happened to be standing behind a pulpit on Sunday morning. Besides, by 1981, most of the gambling action had moved on to Las Vegas and other climes, and the Eden Rocs, the Fontainebleaus, and their paler cousins up the Beach were already sliding toward irrelevance.
Residents of Miami Beach, as well as Americans just about anywhere, were aware of a trend toward more disturbing crimes. Truman Capote’s depiction of the senseless 1959 murders of a Kansas farm family in his landmark In Cold Blood had opened the eyes of a nation to the possibility that dim-witted losers or small-time grifters might morph into homicidal maniacs at a moment’s notice. Ten years later would come the stunning Manson Family murders in Los Angeles.
In the wake of the Clutter and Tate/LaBianca killings had come a number of ghouls to command the headlines, including David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977, killing six persons and wounding seven more in a series of shootings that he said were ordered by a demon who possessed his neighbor’s dog. Even more prolific was Ted Bundy, the law student turned killer of coeds and young women, at least thirty of them, including half a dozen in North Florida.
Not only had the nature of evil begun to divorce itself from any semblance of rational explanation, it seemed, but subsequent developments would suggest that the forces of good had lost their power to respond. In 1979, sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Iran, and the mighty U.S.A., for all its bluster, appeared powerless to do anything about it. A vaunted military rescue operation failed miserably, and only the ouster of yet another president, it seemed, was enough to appease the kidnappers—not until 444 days had passed, and Ronald Reagan had replaced Jimmy Carter, were the last fifty-two hostages released.
There were other signs as well that fault lines had begun to split an orderly world. In December of 1980, apparent lunatic Mark David Chapman pumped four bullets into the back of Beatles singer John Lennon—perhaps the most beloved entertainer of his age—as he strolled arm in arm with Yoko Ono outside his Manhattan apartment. Chapman could offer no reason for the killing beyond the voice inside his head that told him, “Do it, do it, do it.”
The attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life by John Hinckley Jr. on the following March seemed positively rational in comparison—at least Hinckley claimed that he wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster. Nor did it compare to the events of May 13, 1981, when would-be Turkish assassin Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II four times as he made an appearance in St. Peter’s Square. Theories abound as to why Ag˘ca did what he did—he has been described as everything from an addled opponent of all things capitalist to an agent of the Russian KGB to a brainwashed operative of a Muslim cabal. But what was certain was that someone had actually fired bullets into the body of the pope of the Catholic Church with the intent to kill.
And yet for all the impact such actions may have had upon