“Time to go,” the Keeper said to me.
He launched into the room and unlatched the padlocks binding me to the metal-frame bed. It had been hours since he announced he was leaving, and in typical fashion he barged in without notice. As he jostled the chains around my legs, I couldn’t help thinking about the photograph he made me write on earlier in the day. They will let me go…. I didn’t know if he got the ransom or not, but removing the chains for the first time meant we were going somewhere. The question was, where?
He sat me upright on the edge of the bed with handcuffs and taped glasses on. He began preparing our exit and tidied the room. Without much impetus, he said, “It’s over,” and that he was taking me to call Janet.
“Thank God,” I said with a sigh.
He stopped. “What? What did you say?!”
I’d triggered the intimidation game. I braced for impact. “What. Did. You. Say?!!” he repeated louder. I didn’t answer.
“No! You don’t thank God. You thank the black righteous man!”
He was indignant. Had I learned nothing from him? He was in charge, not God. That was the message.
The Keeper then left the room and returned with a bag of supplies. I felt them drop beside me. He pushed my head back coldly. “Hold still and keep your eyes shut,” he commanded, removing the darkened glasses. He started smearing thick liquid all over my face. It had a pungent, familiar smell. It was shoe polish. Shoe polish? Then he stuck two large Band-Aids over my eyes and put the dark glasses back on. “Get up,” he said, grabbing my arm.
That whole evening I had heard banging in the other room. They were hammering nails into what sounded like a wooden box. My coffin? I heard them using what sounded like tinfoil. Unrolling strips, ripping them across a serrated edge on the box, then wrinkling and crumpling the strips into place.
The Keeper unlocked the handcuffs. “Don’t be stupid,” he warned. “Arms out.” He slung my dingy suit jacket on me. Then he put the overcoat I’d worn a week earlier on me. It was a clumsy process. Then he guided me out of the room with one hand on the back of my neck, the other on my shoulder. I hadn’t walked in a week. Blood rushed down my aching legs.
The Keeper marched me out of the one-room prison and into the next room. “Sit down,” he said. He pushed me down while I tried to find the seat. It felt like another bed, except lower to the floor. The Keeper spoke a few words in a foreign language. I assumed he was talking to Umfudisi. Then he spoke in English.
“We thought about killing you,” the Keeper said.
“We thought a lot about it. But I stuck my neck out for you. I convinced them that there are other ways to reach the same end. We don’t have to kill you. That’s why you’re not permanently immobilized right now,” he said. “What would that prove? It’s more important for you to go back and teach others about poor people. You need to tell your people not to keep all the money. You need to give that money to black charities. You need to teach your children right. And we’re gonna check up on you. We know who you are. We know your names. We’re gonna make sure you’re giving your money to charity. You don’t need all that money. This is a good lesson for you.”
I didn’t dare say a word. Let him have his stupid moment, I thought. Don’t do anything to provoke his insanity. The Keeper claimed he was doing me a favor. And even though I deserved the ultimate punishment, he let me live as a testament to his wisdom and righteousness. He then gave me a shot of scotch. It was supposed to seal our understanding.
The Keeper grabbed my arm and jerked me upright. “Here, use this like a blind man,” he said, handing me a long wooden broomstick. It was some kind of a makeshift cane. “Tap it. Let me see you tap it around,” he said. I knew the routine. He wanted me to be convincing. My life depended on playing along.
We walked out of the tenement apartment, turned to the right, and went down some steps. Then a few more paces, a landing, and down several more steps. It was the reverse of how we came in a week earlier. The Keeper put a hat on my head before we stepped outside. He pulled it low. We walked together to a nearby car. He opened the door, grabbed my arm, and bore some of my weight as I got in. He pressed down on my head with his other hand, so as not to bang it on the roof. I grabbed the window for support. He put me in the front seat. I remembered the gasoline can. My gut flipped. Then the Keeper put wax in my ears, but he didn’t do it very well, because I could still hear. With a turn of the key, he sparked the engine, put the car in gear, and we took off. Where are we going? Was he lying again?
It was just the two of us. He didn’t say anything until about twenty minutes later when we stopped at a toll. I don’t know if it was the same toll as before, but it was unmanned. I’m sure he planned it that way. The Keeper dropped a coin in the machine, but he dropped the other coin on the ground by mistake. “Keep your head down! Don’t move. Look at the floor.” He was frazzled. He opened the door and looked around but couldn’t find the coin. The last thing he wanted was to call attention to the car. It was almost 11 p.m. If the Keeper blocked the toll lane much longer, horns would start blaring. Blowing through the toll wasn’t an option either; it could attract a cop. He started rummaging around looking for another quarter while growing increasingly upset. Was he going to lose $750,000 over twenty-five cents? I heard him open a zippered bag and fumble through it. He found a coin and made sure to drop it in the machine correctly. In his agitated state, the Keeper projected his anxieties onto me.
“You wanna know the reason why we took you?” he said. He turned from the road toward me as he spoke over the rev of the engine and past the jiggered ear plugs. “Because you have disregard for poor people.”
“Now I tried to talk to you,” he continued. “But you wouldn’t listen to me. I tried to talk to you, but you were always busy, and you would never listen. I’m talking to you, Jack Teich of Acme Steel.”
I didn’t know where he was going with his rant. It made no sense. Just more angry rambling. Was he psyching himself up for a dramatic finish? The thought was chilling. He wasn’t really talking to me so much as to himself. He spoke to me as if I were a symbol of all that was wrong in his warped worldview. Speaking to me meant speaking to everyone like me. Yet, he never even pronounced my name properly. He’d say, “Jack Tarsh.”
“You, Jack Tarsh of Acme Steel, you would never listen. I tried to talk to you, but you would never listen to me. You were always too busy. But I’m not busy. I’m not busy now. I took time out for you, and I made you take some time away. You needed it. You had to take the time away,” he said.
The Keeper then began to name every member of my family. My father, my brothers, my in-laws…everybody. He knew the names and ages of my children. He recited every phone number, address, vehicle, and birthday that we discussed during my closet interrogations. He knew odd facts and minor tidbits, and he wanted me to know that he wasn’t reading the information. He’d committed it all to memory.
“You know I’m not reading this because I’m driving the car. Your information is all up here,” he said, a reference to his psychotic brain. “If anything ever comes out that only you would know—something we talked about, something that happened, anything that could only come from your mouth—then you know I can find you. And you know, I know what to do.”
He didn’t say what he’d do, but the intimation was that he’d kill me, or someone close to me, as a punishment for talking. He told me several more times over the next twenty to twenty-five minutes that he hoped I’d learned from my abduction. We slowed down. He pulled off on what must have been a side street and drove at an idle speed for a minute or two before making a U-turn. Then he stopped the car.
“When you get out of the car, turn to the right. Walk ten steps and you’ll be next to a phone booth. Count to fifty. Then call Buddy. He’ll be at your house. I told him that you would be dropped off,” he said.
I pawed the air for the door handle. “Wait!” he said before I opened it. “It’s later than I told Buddy. So if he called the authorities, then you tell him to call them back and tell them to forget about it. That everything is fine. Understand?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Now get out.”
As I climbed out I thought of his shiny pistol from my driveway. “One, two, three…” I counted, half-expecting a bullet to the back of my head. But it never came. The car began pulling away, the engine noise getting quieter and quieter. I waited until I couldn’t hear it anymore, then took off the darkened glasses and coverings from my eyes. Where am I? I threw off the hat and dropped the makeshift cane. There was no phone booth. He lied. But he was gone. And I was alive.
With shoe polish slathered on my face, I surveyed the foreign terrain. Not sure where to go, I walked to a nearby gas station for help. It was empty. I was alone and frantic, an easy target. Fast-walking along the street, I came upon a building with parked cars all around. The Jade East Motel.
Stumbling inside, I spotted a phone near the lobby entrance. My fingers trembled as I tried to dial the number to my house. My breathing was rapid and heaving. The phone rang several times. Janet finally answered the phone, surrounded by law enforcement.
“Janet, it’s Jack. I’m alive. I’m at the Jade East Motel. Get here as fast as you can! Tell Buddy he dropped me off late. Tell him—”
“Jack! It’s ok,” she interrupted. “It’s ok. It’s all taken care of. Just stay there. Don’t leave.”
The FBI was able to trace the number, and agents were already on the way. The Jade East Motel was on Conduit Avenue, a service road off the Belt Parkway near John F. Kennedy International Airport. I exited the front entrance to the street and stood waiting. Within minutes a car approached. Three men were inside.
“Jack?” the driver asked from his open window.
“Yes.”
“FBI. You’re all right. You’re safe now.”
It took a second for those words to register. But when they seeped in, they hit hard. A spasm of short breaths bubbled up from within my chest, and I broke down and wept. I was going home.
* * *
It was around 11:40 p.m. I was safely inside Agent John Westhoff’s unmarked car as more than two dozen FBI and police vehicles carrying more than sixty agents and detectives descended on the motel. They proceeded in a coordinated fashion, as if the kidnappers might still be there. It was an impressive display.
Agent Westhoff later described the experience as having picked up a “disheveled, dirty man” outside an airport motel. He and at least one other team were assigned to patrol the Kennedy Airport area and were in the vicinity of the motel at the time of my release. It was heartbreaking to know how close they came to the Keeper himself and that he slipped past them. Others almost certainly passed the Keeper going the opposite direction on the way to the Jade East.
It was naïve to think they would take me straight home. Instead, I was whisked away to the FBI’s midtown Manhattan headquarters for a lengthy debriefing. Janet was simultaneously en route from Kings Point.
I arrived exhausted, unshaven, filthy, and too distraught to speak. I was shrouded in the same brown suit—now soiled—I wore the morning I went to work one week ago, unaware of the fate that would befall me. I will never forget entering the FBI headquarters—another moment frozen in my mind. As I shuffled my bedraggled body into the giant room filled with gray government desks, the entire room and scores of FBI agents and employees all stopped, stood up, and stared at me, as if someone had hit a pause button. Two agents, one on each arm, propped me up as we bee-lined to Assistant Director John Malone’s office on the other side of the building.
A doctor performed a thorough physical. He asked if I’d been drugged. I don’t know if that was routine or because I was so despondent. “Did they inject you with anything? Any pills? Any unusual substances? What about in your food? Do you have any medical conditions?” the doctor asked.
Then the law enforcement questioning began. “What happened, Jack? Start from the beginning. How many were there? Get any names? Tell us about them. What did they want? Why you, Jack? Did they say why they picked you? What can you tell us about where they’re going? Tell us everything, Jack. We want every detail.”
They pushed and pushed. I felt so debilitated. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t get the ball rolling. I was too tired. It was all too fresh, and I was too scared. Sure, I was safe there, but what about in a month? Or in a year when they’d all forget about me? They kept pushing until I mustered enough energy to say, “Unless you assure me that my family is safe, I have no interest in talking.”
I needed their buy-in. They wanted the kidnappers. Good. But are we still in this together or not? I looked at Edward Curran. He was Chief of Detectives for the Nassau County Police Department. With him was Chief Inspector Owens and Deputy Inspector Danny Guido, both of the NCPD. Guido would prove to be the brightest law enforcement mind I’d ever encountered. FBI agent Fred Behrends was the interviewer. He did most of the questioning while the others listened and scribbled notes.
“I’m not talking unless you can assure me my family will be safe,” I said. “I have too much at stake.”
Curran conferred with Owens and Guido for a moment. Then he said, “Jack, I assure you. Your family will be protected.”
They gave me their word. I trusted them. And they kept their word.
After thirty minutes of struggling to relive the week-long nightmare, one hellish detail at a time, there was a knock at the door. An aide peered in. “Jack, someone is here to see you.” The law men looked at each other, got up, and left. In came my beautiful, precious Janet. As soon as I laid eyes on her, my body went limp. Tears overtook me. She wept as we embraced as one. We made it. We survived. She smelled like love and home. Her hair was sweet and smooth. She wore green slacks and a flowered blouse. Our eyes met and spoke the words we couldn’t say. I marveled at how this petite, thirty-year-old woman who mothered my children could willingly thrust herself into the jaws of evil to save me. She brought me a sandwich with a cold beer and a complete change of clothes. “Why did you take so long to answer the phone when I called?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say. Janet smiled and answered so sweetly, “So they could trace the call for us to find you and get you home.”
When we were ready, I called for the questioners to return. I was breathing much easier. The catharsis in Janet’s arms was everything I needed to continue.
Another thirty minutes passed before the next interruption. Buddy had arrived. It was good to see him. “Thank you, Buddy.” The FBI steered him and Janet into a separate room, eager to debrief them about the ransom payment they delivered earlier Tuesday night. It was now two hours into Wednesday morning, November 20.
The press had arrived. John Malone, assistant director of the FBI and head of the New York field office, convened a news conference slightly past 2 a.m. The media knew about the case and had been waiting patiently for days. My abduction was an enormous story. It had all the elements of a stirring news saga that could reach into the homes of millions of New Yorkers and deliver headlines for years to come. The media was hungry and wanted to be fed.
Malone, flanked by Curran, told reporters that a $750,000 ransom had been paid to my kidnappers at 8:30 p.m. and that I was released at 11:20 p.m. near JFK airport. Malone announced that I was in “pretty good shape” and had not been “grossly mistreated” despite being chained in a closet and to a bed for a week. He relayed that I had undergone a medical evaluation and would not be transported to a hospital at that time. In an effort to alleviate the potential for the juiciest part of the event from spinning out of control, Curran added that there was no evidence that the kidnapping had “political overtones,” but he also stated that their investigation was not ruling out the possibility at that time. Additionally, he said the kidnappers were still at large.
“Our job is half done. We have the victim home safely,” Curran said.
The kidnapping especially resonated within our Long Island community. Not just because we lived there, but because that’s where the story broke—although the intrepid journalist never received his full glory. Gene Batzer of the Long Island Press had learned of my kidnapping about twenty-four hours after it happened. Rather than break the biggest story ever to hit Great Neck, he chose to sit on the scoop of his career to protect me and my family.
The first ransom call had just transpired, and Batzer was at the Nassau County police headquarters in Mineola working on another story. Six members of a single family had been shot in Amityville, and all hell was breaking lose at the station. While working his police sources for information, an officer said something off-the-record about another tragedy. “A kidnapping,” the officer said. “Kidnapping?” That’s all he said. It was too dangerous for the victim to say anything more at that time, he explained. A half-dozen phone calls later, however, and Batzer put it together: a North Shore steel executive had been abducted from his home and held for ransom.
But instead of rushing to print and cashing in, Batzer and his editors called Chief Curran to say that the Press would not publish “the Teich abduction” exclusive if it would put me and my family at risk. Curran was skeptical. He’d been burned in the past. In 1956, a four-week-old baby boy named Peter Weinberger had been abducted from a carriage on the front steps of the Weinberger home. The child’s decomposed body was later found in some weeds beside a road. The police never had a chance to help negotiate Weinberger’s release, and some in the law enforcement community speculated that the media uproar spooked the baby’s kidnapper. A man named Angelo Lamarca, thirty-one, was eventually arrested. He confessed and was executed in 1957.
Batzer and the Press adhered to the agreement—to the determent of the paper’s notoriety and sales—with Curran offering to keep them in the loop. As other metropolitan area newspapers, television networks, and radio stations caught on, the police, with the endorsement of the FBI, promised to alert them of any breaks in the case as well if they would remain silent until I was freed—or dead. All but one Manhattan-based tabloid cooperated. Janet had not only requested to keep the story quiet, but out of an abundance of caution she asked the FBI and NCPD to wait until I was released before pursuing the kidnappers. It was Bureau policy to apprise a victim’s family of these options in a kidnapping situation and then to follow their wishes.
Janet was first to emerge from the interview sessions. Mine continued until 4:50 a.m. It was time to go. She left shaken to the core. The questioning had the effect of conveying how dangerous the ransom payment had been and how vulnerable she was. It was also made clear that the kidnappers had gotten away, and our family was still at risk.
Buffered by FBI agents and police detectives, we faced a gaggle of determined reporters and cameramen all shouting and jockeying for position. “How do you feel, Jack? Tell us about the kidnappers!” “Why’d they pick you, Jack?” “How does it feel to be free?” “Can you comment?” I’ve got nothing against the media. They were doing their jobs. But it’s oppressive for people who don’t want the attention. As we were escorted through the gauntlet, Curran whispered something to Janet and pointed. She stopped. Our bodyguards allowed an opening as she approached an individual reporter with an extended hand. It was Gene Batzer.
“We’d never have him back if it weren’t for your help and the help of these outstanding men,” she said, fighting back tears. He nodded and asked for an interview. She politely declined. “I still have my family to think of.”
Days later, Batzer would write of the experience: “For the first time in my life I knew that I held the fate of a man’s life in my hands…A journalism professor had always told me to be responsible. He said it was the most important thing for a reporter to be. Freedom of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution, but possibly endangering a man’s life for expression of that freedom at this moment seemed ludicrous…. The days of frustration experienced in holding back the story came out on the typewriter, and I breathed easier. And most importantly, a man’s life had been saved.”
I peered through the crowd and approached Batzer myself.
“I want to thank you for your humanity and your cooperation in holding back the release of the story. The kidnappers had their ears to the radio.”
It was true. The Keeper was very surprised at the lack of news coverage. He thought the media wasn’t saying anything to protect my elderly father. “He might’ve collapsed at hearing the news,” he said.
News articles with two-inch headlines hit every major paper across the greater New York City area that morning. A particular photo of Janet circulated across the spectrum. She looked terribly unhappy, although she was elated that we were together again. Janet believed the kidnappers were going to kill her during the payoff. They threatened to kill everyone in our family if she went to the police.
“I thought my picture might be in the newspaper after I was dead, so I didn’t want to look happy,” she told me.
Janet had to help me walk out of there. A police escort took us to a nearby hotel to sleep for a few hours before taking us home. They knew the press would be waiting at our house.
* * *
We arrived at my home about noon. The police had cordoned off our street, but the news media was gathered around our yard. Janet and I had no desire to speak with anyone. However, my father did. He was contacted by a separate reporter from the Long Island Press who inquired about how the ransom money was raised. My father said that managers at Bankers Trust were very helpful and that we had “mortgaged everything” to get the money. He also thanked the paper for not publishing the story until I was safe. “It was a wonderful thing to do,” he said.
The next day he was interviewed again. “I have not seen Jack, but I talked with him on the phone last night for a minute,” he said. “Yesterday was my birthday. I got him back on my birthday.”
My father, Joe, and I were close. I was twenty-one years old when my mother died, and I lived with him until I married Janet. He never remarried and lived alone. After the incident, I couldn’t bring myself to see him right away. It was too upsetting. I knew he was happy I was back. I felt so guilty about it. How could I not see him? But he didn’t come see me, either. It was too emotional for him, too.
I finally pulled it together and visited him at 9 a.m. the next morning. We lived in the same town. His house was an eclectic ultra-modern home built in the 1940s. Inside the front door was a large foyer with a long railing upstairs overlooking the ground floor. I let myself in. He wasn’t down yet. When he heard me, he came to the upstairs banister fresh out of the shower and wearing a bathrobe. Our eyes locked. Without saying a word, he began bawling. I was his youngest child. In all my years I’d never seen him cry. He was a tough, street smart man from a much harder time. He was self-made, a fighter. But he had no control over what happened. His outpouring of emotion rattled me. I couldn’t stay for long. It was too upsetting.