I had been delivered from captivity but was by no means free. The horrors of the kidnapping haunted me and will for the rest of my life. It never goes away. It’s a trauma to cope with and overcome one day at a time. But out of that darkness came something special, something unforeseen. As much as the kidnappers had terrorized me and my family, the men and women who came to our defense brought solace. In their quest to protect us, they helped restore our strength. Some even became an intimate part of our lives—and still are.
The bond started within the first few days after my abduction. FBI Special Agent Joe Conley and Nassau County Det. Sgt. Frank Spinelli had moved into our home, along with FBI Special Agent Margot Dennedy. They brought suitcases with clothes. Or in law enforcement vernacular, they packed a lunch. These were serious people, dedicated to protecting the innocent from predators. They’d put their lives at risk for us. Their specific task was to guard Janet and my children from danger morning, noon, and night. They were the first pillars of a fortress of protection that would last nearly a year.
Margot watched over Janet to great effect, Conley served us well, and Spinelli went out of his way in those early days to support Buddy. He had a job to do, but he also showed compassion for my wounded brother. Spinelli became Buddy’s crutch. He guided and consoled Buddy throughout the ordeal. He was someone Buddy could talk to. At one point, Buddy broke down and cried on Spinelli’s shoulder. He’d buckled under the pressure, but Spinelli kept him strong—that is, strong enough to get me back alive. Janet felt close to him too, and he was kind to me when I finally came home.
As time went on, it became deeply important for Janet and me to stay in touch with our fortress family. We would later become friends with Frank Spinelli and his wife.
As for the others, the bonds began forming in the months ahead.
Two separate but concurrent tracks emerged within the first moments of my debriefing at the FBI’s midtown Manhattan headquarters. Both paths derived from the realization that the kidnappers had gotten away. On the one hand, a full-scale manhunt was underway. The FBI and Nassau County Police Department were committed to bringing the kidnappers to justice (more on that later). That required attention, resources, and manpower. On the other hand, there was an immediate need to secure my family’s safety due to the very real possibility that the Keeper would make good on his threats to kill us if we went to the police. Within hours of my release, our pictures had been splashed across every newspaper and news program in the biggest media market in the country. The Keeper definitely knew Janet and I had crossed his red line.
With such emphasis on catching the kidnappers, I worried that the FBI and NCPD would leave us exposed. No one knew who the kidnappers were, and they’d already proven they could drive to my house, hold a gun to my head, and drive away unmolested. What’s to stop that from happening again? What’s to stop them from harming my wife or taking one of my children? After all, we were a proven source of money.
My concern was always my family. To his everlasting credit, Chief Curran kept his word to protect us. And they never charged me a dime.
After I came home, FBI agents and NCPD detectives guarded us around the clock. I had fallen into a deep depression. Today, we’d call it post-traumatic stress disorder. I was closed-off emotionally and unresponsive. I felt secure knowing officers were there, but I also knew I couldn’t hide in my home forever. As difficult as it was, I decided to try to go back to work after about ten days. It was hard. I couldn’t focus, but it was an important first step. I had to try to live again, even if it meant going through the motions. I don’t know if I could’ve handled it without NCPD Detective Jim Garvey, who accompanied me to and from the office in those early days.
Janet was suffering, too. She looked to Chief Curran for answers. “How do we go on? How do I let my sons play outside or go to school?”
With a firm but caring bottom-line look, Curran raised his brow and told her, “If that’s your attitude, then the only way to feel safe is to be locked up somewhere and never come out. Is that what you want?” She knew he was right, but moving on felt daunting. Janet had made a vow to herself to get me back. Now it was time to make another vow. She had to live again. She could not let herself succumb to fear. She couldn’t let her sons grow up fearful either. The kidnappers terrorized us for a week, but there was no way Janet was going to let them shackle us with fear for the rest of our lives.
Soon, the FBI detail receded, but Nassau County allowed detectives to continue guarding us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. However, I knew that wouldn’t go on forever, so I met with Chief Curran again to discuss a protection plan. He offered four to five permanent plainclothes policemen who would rotate shifts and provide constant security around the clock for the next several months. Then, we’d discuss whether I was comfortable eliminating the night shift in favor of a home alarm system. The plan involved paring down an unprecedented level of security, as needed, over the course of a year.
It was a strange but necessary way to live. If I went to work, an undercover policeman went with me. If Janet went grocery shopping with our children, a plainclothes officer would go with her. If Janet went out, a non-uniformed officer would escort her and another officer would stay at our house with the kids and me. They were all young men, younger than I was. One of the guys didn’t want to be there, and it showed. “This is total nonsense. This is not what I signed up for. Let the detectives do it,” he told the others. He wanted to be back in the field, not guarding some suburban family. But he was the exception.
The others made us feel safe while we recovered emotionally. They were fatherly and open to bonding with our kids. To this day, I feel guilty about not being more emotionally available during that time. I’m so glad the policemen were there.
Sometimes Janet would go bike riding while Marc was in school. She’d strap Michael into a baby seat, and an undercover officer would tag along. When winter came, one of the officers went outside and built a snowman with the boys. Another time, Janet bumped into a friend at a local supermarket. Dennis, her plainclothes escort, stood nearby with his gun visibly bulging from his pocket. Her friend assumed he was her “houseboy.” She later confided in Janet that she assumed it was an interesting new trend in our family.
It wasn’t safe to go out to restaurants or other places unless we had to, so Janet would cook at home, and the officers would eat with us. Lou, who often worked the evening shift, loved to cook. Sometimes he’d make dinner. They wore suits and civilian clothes and were under strict orders to protect us at all times and immediately report anything suspicious. Sometimes the arrangement felt normal. Then we’d be jolted back to reality by the beeps and static chatter on their two-way police radios or the sight of their guns.
These men integrated into our family and became our friends, even though they had a serious job to do. They weren’t there for the fun of it. However, it developed into something special.
That’s not to say there weren’t trying times inside the fortress.
Marc was deeply affected by the occurrence of strange men rotating in and out of our house day and night. He was in second grade, and I wasn’t around much, even when I was home. Janet was a nervous wreck and unable to give Marc unbroken attention. He was so young. Still, kids know when something isn’t right, even if they can’t understand it. Marc intuitively knew something was wrong and that he wasn’t being told the truth.
“Where’s my Dad?” he’d ask. “Why are you here and not my Dad?”
He didn’t understand, and we couldn’t tell him. It put the policemen in a tough spot, too. How were they supposed to respond? “Why are we here? Because your Daddy was kidnapped by anti-Semitic bad guys, and they might come back and hurt your family.” No kid can process that, and no child deserves to have their innocence uprooted. But that was the situation. Marc struggled emotionally at school and regularly saw a therapist. The confusion would boil over into shouting and cries for help. “Why are they in my house? I want them to leave!” he’d yell. Once, Marc grabbed a knife and screamed at one of the officers, “Go away! Get out of here!” It was heartbreaking.
Janet and I saw a counselor as well. I was depressed, ornery, and short. The stress was at times unbearable for both of us. She ended up seeing another counselor on her own.
One of the men who was assigned to us after the first wave of federal agents and local detectives left was Joe Polimine. Joe and Marc got along well. He was a godsend. Joe was a young, working-class Italian from Brooklyn who, like me, had a young child at home. He spent nearly a year of his life with us and remains a close friend and part of our extended family today, more than forty-five years later.
Joe came from a good family and had a lot to live for. Yet, he carried a gun and was ready to throw himself in harm’s way for us at the first sign of trouble. Over the course of that year, he became a close part of our family. He broke bread with us, stood guard while we slept, and even helped change Michael’s diapers. It was a providential relationship that almost didn’t happen.
Joe had grown up with aspirations of being a New York City cop. At eighteen, he took every recruitment test offered by the NYPD and the Port Authority police. Then he heard about a test for the Nassau County Police Department. A friend in the bookkeeping department at his downtown Manhattan job said her boyfriend was taking it.
“Nassau County? Where’s that? Is that somewhere on Long Island?” he asked.
“Yes. And today is the last day,” she said.
Joe told his boss he didn’t feel well before skipping out to find out more about the test. He found the proper office and filed his paperwork with fingers crossed. But that was it. The actual test would come a year later, and by that time Joe was ready. He scored well on the psychological portion and passed his medical evaluation with flying colors, but the agility portion of the test was another story.
Each aspect was designed to weed people out, and there was only one hurdle left for him to cross, literally. The last agility metric required jumping over a rail without knocking it down. It made sense. Police officers run and jump over obstacles with heavy gear on every day in the New York metropolitan area. The test allowed three chances to make it over. The first time Joe tried, he knocked the rail off its posts. Same thing the second time. The third and final time, he bumped the rail again, but it jostled and bounced around on the crossbar brackets until it came to rest safely on the rail posts without hitting the ground.
“You passed,” said the evaluator.
It was meant to be.
Joe promised himself that he’d take the first position offered no matter where it was. Then he received an NYPD offer and an appointment letter from the Nassau County Police Department at almost the same time. He had to choose. He lived in Brooklyn, so being a New York City cop made sense. It was convenient. It was his childhood dream. But before deciding, he took a trip across the Long Island Sound to Great Neck. He’d never been there before, he told me. “And you know what I saw? Trees. Lots and lots of trees. We didn’t have trees in my neighborhood,” he said.
Joe saw our side of life, and soon, I would get to know his.
Joe thought of his young family and chose Nassau County. He became a “footman.” For nearly three years he patrolled the streets of the Sixth Precinct on foot. He’d walk into stores and introduce himself. He shook hands with people standing on corners. He got to know the people in our community. He also made arrests. It was neighborhood policing at its finest.
One day, his inspector called him into his office. “I have an assignment for you, Polimine. We have a security detail up in Kings Point.”
“Kings Point, sir? Don’t they have their own police department?”
The inspector explained the situation. “The Teich family….”
“Sure boss, whatever you need. Whatever they need.”
“You’ll wear civilian clothes. You’ll be with the family at all times. Once you get there, they’ll fill you in,” he said.
It was mid-December when Joe arrived. I was in rough shape and wanted to know exactly who he was. Could I trust him? It would be hard for me to trust anyone for a long time, and there were other reasons to be unsure in those days. Prejudice was rampant, and Jews were no exception. Name calling, stereotypes, discrimination. Sometimes violence. The kidnappers were an extreme example, but casual anti-Semitism was everywhere. I wasn’t going to allow it in my home. Not then, not ever. And definitely not after what I’d been through. Joe later shared that he was aware of such prejudices, and that his experience with us dispelled ugly stereotypes—not that he bought into them.
Similarly, I was determined not to become bitter about being targeted by men who happened to be black. You come to know people as individuals, you get close to them, and you see what they’re really like. Religion and skin color have nothing to do with character.
The first thing that impressed Joe about Janet and me was how young we were. I imagine it was the same for the other policemen. After all the stories he’d heard about the kidnapping, he was floored that I wasn’t an older man—which was interesting, considering Joe was just twenty-four at the time. I didn’t talk to him right away. I was anxious, depressed, and angry. Social graces were the furthest thing from my mind. I could tell he felt bad for me but didn’t know how to react. It was also uncomfortable to meet someone who knows you’ve been abused. There was nothing to talk about.
Over time we got more comfortable. I asked Joe about his job, his family, and where he came from. We got to know each other. He was carpooling from Brooklyn at the time with several other police officers who worked in Nassau County. One car, four cops. They often had to wait for Joe on their return evening trip home. His schedule was different from his footman days. If he was accompanying Janet to an appointment, or if some other security detail issue delayed him, he’d be late. It was causing him problems.
Joe began driving an old beat up car to our house. He was newly married and had a baby around Michael’s age. He also had just bought a modest home. Joe was protecting me, so I decided to do something to protect him. I sold him my used Oldsmobile. He couldn’t believe it.
It was a big brown Oldsmobile Delta 88. Joe sat in the front seat while guarding me, and I knew he liked the car. So I gave him a deal. It freed him up to travel safely and allowed him to use extra money for home heating oil that winter.
Later on, I took Joe and Frank Spinelli to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. I’d been invited by the Army. For some reason they offered to let us drive Army tanks. It was a great time. I was able to laugh a bit. I remember having a moment to take it all in. I had escaped the evil of the tenement closet, and the murderous threats of the Keeper, and now, here I was with these men—driving Army tanks—who would take a bullet to protect my family if they had to. I felt grateful.
The first six months after my release was an unstable time that was balanced with protection and routine. Joe, Bob, Dennis, and Charlie—and John, an alternate officer on standby—would arrive at our house and park in the driveway. They drove their own cars, if they had one, rather than a squad car. The objective was to safeguard our family while we put our lives back together. The police didn’t want us to stand out or to disrupt the neighborhood. The officers worked eight-hour, rotating tours. If Joe’s weekly shift was 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., the following week he’d work 4:00 p.m. to midnight. The week after that, he’d work midnight to 8:00 a.m. and then go back to the daytime tour. The same applied to the other men.
Each time they came to the house, they’d check in on their radios. “Polimine is on. Dennis Delay is off. Copy?” Then they’d receive a briefing from the fellow they were relieving and find out what was—and wasn’t—going on. They’d walk through each room, then around the house, and glance down the street for anything out of place, all while concealing .38-caliber handguns, also known colloquially as the Detective Special. Once they felt the area was secure, they came inside. Janet would have fresh coffee ready and took care of their meals.
The phones remained wiretapped. Only Janet was allowed to answer. If it was a friend, family member, or salesman calling, she could press a button, and the conversation would cease being recorded. If she went somewhere during the day, she’d drive, and the undercover policemen would sit in the passenger seat. In a store or in a parking lot, they’d trail her with a watchful eye and loaded gun. In crowded areas, they’d stick closer to her. It wasn’t uncommon for Joe to pick up Michael as if he were his own child and tell Marc to stay close to him.
“If anything happens to this family, it’s on me. I’m the guy,” Joe said.
He took our safety personally. He tried to be as casual as he could while doing his utmost to protect us. Being a cop was his identity, but being a good cop meant everything. Joe was a good kid who was fearful of living with himself if he failed us. “Polimine, how could you let this happen? Why didn’t you stop it?” He was determined to never face those questions.
At night, the policemen would flick on the television in the den to make it seem like there was activity inside the house. They’d draw the curtains to make sure the glowing screen could be seen from the street. They’d position themselves to see outside without being visible, and they’d watch for headlights. We lived on a cul de sac, so there was no reason to drive on our street unless you lived there or were visiting one of our neighbors, but occasionally cars drove up and down the road looking for an address they couldn’t find. The officers would watch and wait until the cars would drive away without incident. They watched for walkers, but there were few. I was glad to know that for all the precautions there was no evidence of any threat. But I also knew it took less than two minutes to kidnap me.
The policemen were not part of the effort to capture the kidnappers, and they weren’t privy to details of the ongoing investigation. But as time went on, Nassau County Detective Sergeant Dick McGuire would visit our house and speak with me about the case. Margot Dennedy would as well. My father, Joe, adored Margot.
My mother, Mary, died when I was young, and I had another brother. My mother was one of seven brothers and sisters born to Russian-American immigrants in 1904. She contracted rheumatic fever as a child and lived in a weakened state, often needing rest during the day. The ailment would eventually destroy one of her heart valves, which led to her death at age fifty-seven. Today, a routine operation would’ve saved her. Maybe Margot helped fill some of that family void for my father.
Margot was a compelling person, regardless. Like my father and Joe Polimine, she was pure Brooklyn. She was one of just five female FBI agents in the entire Bureau when she first arrived at our house during the week of my abduction. A few years later, Margot became the first female FBI supervisor in history. With such a male-dominated profession, she was once asked if she ever had any problems. Her answer? “None whatsoever. I’m from Brooklyn.”
Getting close with Margot during that time of inner tumult added another unique life companion to our suburban bubble. She was a school teacher who went on to earn a graduate degree in history, only to be offered a secretarial position in corporate America. Margot was dating an attorney at the time who had previously served as an FBI agent himself before starting his own law practice. He encouraged Margot to give the FBI a shot. You can imagine how crazy that might have sounded, given that there were practically no female agents. But one of her former teaching friends also encouraged her after she became the only woman in the Queens District Attorney’s Office. “You should do it,” she told Margot.
Margot applied, was accepted, and ascended the ranks. She’s never said anything negative about her thirty-year FBI experience, although during her early training in Quantico, Virginia, she constantly dealt with situations that were new for everyone. For instance, there were no female facilities, so occasionally a male trainee would stand outside the restroom door to block others from barging in. It was attention she did not seek. One time, an instructor screamed that Margot should toughen up and tried to get her to punch a cinder block wall. She was a pioneer, although she doesn’t think of herself that way.
As these relationships were building inside our fortress of protection, outside an aggressive manhunt for the kidnappers was in full swing.