Standing there, handcuffed and blinded, a hand thrust down into my breast pocket.
“Shut up,” he said, though I hadn’t said anything. It was the passenger—the man I would come to think of as my “Keeper.” His fingers frittered about, grasping for whatever he could find. He moved to the next outside pocket on my raincoat, and then the next. He was methodical, systematic. He searched the inside pockets, top to bottom. Then my suit jacket. Then pants. There would be no mistakes.
I tried to stand still but flinched as he jarred me off balance with each probing pocket grab. He vacuumed my pockets of everything—money, a pen, my tie, an eyeglass case, my Seiko watch, and two uncashed paychecks.
“Oh, so you treat yourself pretty good, don’t you,” he said while riffling the $1,200 folded in my money clip. I didn’t even try to explain that the cash was for an upcoming family vacation we were planning, because we rarely used a credit card.
Once he had everything, it sounded like he walked into another room. I could hear him walking, then fiddling with what I guessed was a canvas bag. I heard the zooot of the zipper and his hands rubbing around the inside of the bag making that distinct canvas sound. I could hear him moving around and shifting things.
“I’ve got something else in store for you,” he said.
What the hell does that mean? I thought.
Had he lied about letting me go twenty minutes after robbing me? Or was there now a sudden change of plans? On some level I knew the answer—things were about to get a lot worse.
The room then filled with the rattle of metal chains.
What’s happening?! I thought, now fearing the worst.
A pile dropped in front of me and crashed with a metallic thud. I felt something being wrapped around my ankle. A padlock clicked shut. The Keeper then snaked the chain over and around my other ankle. Back and forth, in and out, up my legs. Another padlock clicked. I braced myself and tried to remain still like a statue. The last thing I wanted was to trigger a violent reaction.
He grabbed my arm and guided me across the room. My chains clattered and clanked as my bound legs shuffled forward. My head bumped something small that started jingling. A metal hanger? My kidnapper moved it away and pushed me to the ground.
“Sit down on the floor,” he commanded.
My hands were still cuffed. Another chain clacked as it was run through what must have been an eye hook bored into the foot of a closet. A closet—that would be my new prison cell. It was a tight, three-sided space that was too small and cramped to be much else.
“Lie down on your back,” he said, using his foot to push me to the floor.
I laid there blind, exposed, and resting supine with my head facing the ceiling. He then went to work. I crossed my arms over my body in case he decided to unleash a flurry of punches or kicks.
He then roped another chain around my neck before securing it to the eye hook on the closet wall. Click, another padlock.
Why is this happening?! Why all this for a simple robbery? Why me?
“I see your credit is good all over town,” he said. “We still got more in store for you.”
His fingers clawed and dug into the putty covering my eyes. Once off, darkness. That’s strange, I thought. Then I remembered it was nighttime, and the lights in the room must’ve been off. I couldn’t see anything, but I could smell the gasoline from the car on his gloves.
The next thing I felt was a thick adhesive bandage being wound around my head. Then he gagged me. I was terrified of suffocating. I tried to calm my racing heart; triggering a coughing episode could induce a panic attack or choking.
He left the room.
I’m not going to make it…Don’t think that! STOP! I told myself.
He reentered the room a few minutes later and removed the gag. A rare moment of relief. But then I realized the reason why he took the gag out of my mouth. He didn’t do it for me. He did it for the interrogation.
* * *
“What’s your wife’s name? How many children do you have? What are their names? How old are they? How many brothers do you have? What are their names? How old are they? Where do they live? What are their phone numbers?”
The Keeper wanted to know everything.
“Here,” he said. “Drink.” He pushed a straw into my mouth as I slurped a few gulps of lukewarm water. He then launched into another withering barrage of questions.
I felt torn. This person, this demented criminal had no business knowing anything about my family. I would never put my family in harm’s way, but I had to comply. I had no choice. I had to tell him what he wanted to hear. I had to survive—for the family. An outright refusal to answer could be met with swift punishment.
I rattled off names, ages, addresses, and phone numbers as best I could, thinking a subtle mistake here or there, like a seven instead of an eight within a ten-digit phone number, would go unnoticed. I skipped details about my brother, Buddy, as I recited a litany of identifying facts about other people and things. “He lives in the City,” I said, and just moved on. I didn’t tell his address and assumed my captor didn’t notice. But he knew. He later told me exactly what Buddy’s address was.
“What kind of cars do you have? What kinds of cars do your brothers have? Where do you vacation? Do you have maids? A butler? How much is the mortgage on your house? What kind of mortgage is it?”
He asked if I owned stocks. “What kind? How much are they worth?”
The questions were so thorough, they seemed ridiculous at times.
“Do you own any antiques? What kind? How much are they worth? Tell me about them. How about artwork? Do you own any artwork? What kind? How much?”
Antiques? Seriously? What street thug thinks about stealing art and antiques? But the answer was, yes. I kept some art in my home and in my office.
I answered the questions the best I could, minimizing details wherever possible. If the information was obvious, such as the type of cars in my driveway, I told him everything I knew. But when I guessed he couldn’t know a full answer, I tried to divulge as little as possible. It was a dangerous game. Like a skilled attorney, he asked several questions whose answers he already knew. He was testing me. The quality and granularity of his inquisition made one thing crystal clear: he knew a lot more about me than he let on.
“How much do you get paid?” he asked.
He knew the answer. He had already taken my paychecks.
“Seven hundred dollars net, twelve hundred dollars gross,” I said.
“And two paychecks? You pay yourself well!” he said in a half-mock, half-scold.
“How much money do you have in your bank account?” he asked.
“Um, I have five thousand dollars at the Banker’s Trust Company,” I said.
“What other money do you take out of the company?” he said. “How much?”
The company?
“What do you guys make at your company?”
“Steel doors,” I said.
“Steel doors?” He thought that was funny. He didn’t laugh, but it amused him.
“How many people?” he asked.
“Um, there’s about a hundred people on the payroll,” I answered.
“What about profits? What are the profits? How much is your machinery worth? Are you going to expand?”
“We’ll spend about twenty thousand dollars on machinery by year’s end,” I told him. “It’s hard to know profits right now.”
“It’s a union shop. We pay union wages,” I volunteered.
“Union?” he said. He seemed surprised.
“How many buildings do you own or rent? Would your wife call the police if you didn’t come home?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“What would you get from your brother?” he asked.
“What?”
“What are your in-laws worth?” he said.
“I don’t know. They’re working people,” I said.
“Working people,” he muttered before getting up and leaving the room.
I lay in the blackness straining to listen. Then the thought came zooming at me again like a bullet train: there is no way you’re getting out of here alive. A searing image as if from a horror film began forming in my mind. Me in the closet…the Keeper standing beside it…the head of a match dragging along a strike plate…the Keeper tossing the lit match into the closet….me writhing and screaming as my corpse is engulfed in flames.
Shaking the macabre image from my mind proved futile. Throughout my captivity, the grisly scene of being cremated alive replayed itself as if on a feedback loop.
The sound of shuffling feet snapped my mind to attention.
“What do you mean that they’re working people?” the Keeper barked as he reentered the room.
He was back in interrogation mode.
“Who’s the strongest and who’s the weakest of your brothers?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He asked about my brother’s wife. “How much control does Lois have over Buddy? Can he make decisions without her?”
“Um, I suppose. Yeah, sure.”
My nerves were frazzled. The physical, emotional, and psychological stress was building to a breaking point. I was starting to crack.
“Take whatever you want. Please! Don’t drag this out anymore,” I blurted out in between questions. Bad move.
“Don’t tell me what to do! Don’t you EVER tell me what to do! I tell you! Got it? I tell you! You don’t tell me anything! Don’t you ever tell me ANYTHING!”
He stormed out of the room.
I’d messed up. Bad.
* * *
The Keeper came back a short time later.
“You’re going to make a tape,” he announced.
It was late. Even though I was traumatized and barely hanging on, he wasn’t tired in the least. He was just getting warmed up. He came to the closet and knelt down next to me.
“You’re going to say exactly what I tell you to say. And it better be convincing. Understand? You’ll never see your family again if it’s not convincing, I promise you that,” he said.
I had no reason not to believe him.
He held a small microphone to my lips and told me what to say and how to say it. He wanted money. That was the bottom line.
He was getting frustrated with me, clicking a tape recorder button on and off. “You’re too nervous,” he said. “You’re not convincing. Don’t make it sound like we have a gun to your head.”
I started over, but it wasn’t working.
“Run it again!” he said.
He put the microphone in my cuffed hand. “You hold it,” he said. It was small, plastic, and connected by a wire back to the tape recorder. There was an on/off switch on the mic. He told me to flip it up or down to pause the tape and start recording again, but I had trouble remembering if up or down was on or vice versa. He kept getting more upset. He would also stop the tape intermittently and press me for more information. It was too much.
He drilled down for details about Janet. Then Buddy’s wife. Then a new round of questions: “Who’s stronger, your wife or Buddy’s wife? Who’s weaker? Who gets excited? Who do you think we should contact?”
I tried to keep up.
Finally, it was over.
“Ok, we’ll go with that.”
My head slunk limp. He left the room again. He was done with me, for now.
* * *
The next morning, the Kings Point police insisted that Janet go to our bank to see if I’d withdrawn any money. If I had, it would lend credence to their theory that I’d skipped town with our neighbor, Ellen. Absurd. They had other theories: I had gotten drunk and stayed out all night; I’d taken a train, it was delayed, and I never called. Janet knew it was all bunk. To my delight, I later found out that she took them only to our local bank and nowhere near where we kept our main accounts. They weren’t serious; involving them deeper into our affairs at that point was only inviting unnecessary distractions.
Once they saw there had been no withdrawals, the Kings Point police took her a little more seriously, but they had no plan. Sure, the situation was odd. Nothing like this had ever happened in our town, but they still treated Janet like a clueless housewife. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Janet hadn’t slept. She was desperate and irritated that the police weren’t listening to her. She wanted them to believe her. She knew me. My love for her and our sons was absolute. She needed help. Somehow, she had the wherewithal to think of my old friend, Jed Orenstein. Jed and I had known each other since we were young kids; our families were friends. He knew me very well, and he was now an assistant district attorney. He confirmed Janet’s innermost beliefs, that I would never simply not come home without a word.
Jed immediately called Nassau County Police Chief Ed Curran. “Ed, I have known the family and Jack Teich since he was four years old, and this is totally out of character for Jack. There is something very wrong here.” NCPD police officers and detectives soon showed up at our house by the carload. The cavalry had arrived.
The Nassau detectives launched their own interrogation. They, too, wanted to know everything, but from Janet. At one point, she volunteered that I might have been killed and was perhaps floating in a nearby neighbor’s pool. There had been much gossip in the neighborhood that a particular gentleman who lived there was involved with the mafia. I’ve never had anything to do with something like that, and it makes no sense looking back, but desperation is a funny thing. It was a frantic attempt to ensure that no stone was left unturned—or pool unsearched.
Janet was friendly with the man’s wife, Jan. Our sons played together. The police questioned him and, of course, he knew nothing of my disappearance. A senior detective then demanded to see my car. Janet informed him it hadn’t moved since the previous night and that the Kings Point police had already searched it inside and outside for clues. Saying the same things over and over again was irksome.
“Look, my husband left for work in the morning, and he always comes home, give or take, around 7:00 p.m.”
She was double-stepping to keep up with the detective as he traversed across the yard. “We looked in Jack’s car already,” Janet repeated.
He stopped and stared into her eyes. “Missus Teich, I’m not leaving here until I’ve popped open that trunk,” he said.
The subtext of his words hit her like a truck. These men had seen things no one ever should. They had committed their lives to confronting human depravity so the rest of us could live in peace. They are the wall between the civilized and criminal worlds. Those worlds now intersected at the trunk of my car.
Janet’s heart was in her throat. Oh no…oh no…please…this can’t be how this ends, she thought. She sucked in a deep breath. The detective slid the key into the lock, twisted it to the right, and popped open the trunk.
No bloodied corpse. Nothing.
Janet exhaled and got back to work. By now, the house was filled with uniformed police officers and plain-clothes detectives. They stayed well into the evening. They continued searching the neighborhood and woods behind our house. They looked carefully for anything that might provide a lead. Wet, trampled leaves soon covered the kitchen floor, an odd visual account of the many people coming in and out of our home that painful evening. A tape recorder was set up in the kitchen. Little did they know how soon it would be needed.
* * *
Back in the closet, I had to relieve myself. The Keeper plunked a plastic pail outside my closet that popped with a hollow plastic sound as it hit the floor. It was lined with a plastic bag. He placed it close enough that I could pull it towards me with the slack in my chains.
“Do your business in there,” said the Keeper.
My hands remained cuffed, and my legs and neck were still chained to the closet walls, but there was just enough slack to wiggle into a strained kneel. It was a filthy process.
Later, the Keeper brought cans of juice and snacks and put them next to the foul bucket.
The interrogation resumed.
“How do Janet and Lois get along? Who should go with Buddy to drop the money?”
“Janet,” I said. “She’ll know what to do.”
“If your kids got hurt, would Janet get hysterical?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes. She would,” I said, trembling.
“What about your father? How much would he give for you?”
“He’s very sick,” I said. Please, please leave my father in peace.
“Does your father take vacations? How can he afford vacations? Is he on Social Security? What about income-producing properties? Does he have any? What about you, do you have any? How many? How much can you get for them?”
He was so curious about how we made money, but it didn’t seem specific to us. He genuinely didn’t know how to make a lot of money. He was curious, but it was all wrong.
The Keeper showed a renewed interest in our family business.
“What’s your sales volume?” he asked.
“About six million dollars gross,” I answered—an understatement.
“I can explain how it works,” I offered gingerly. He didn’t say anything. I took a deep breath and started on about inflation and growth, that sales revenue isn’t liquid cash in the bank that can be withdrawn at any time. “There are expenses and taxes and other obligations involved in running a business,” I said.
He interrupted me with his own strange teaching about real estate. A few minutes in and it dawned on me that I had left a real estate report in my jacket pocket that I had forgotten about. He must have read it cover-to-cover. He was eager to talk about it. I was surprised how much he understood. He was bright, I’ll give him that. The report was an opinion written by an attorney from a real estate investment group I was involved in. It was fairly complicated, so the Keeper asked a lot of questions.
“I see you’re looking to buy a foreclosure deal in California,” he said.
“Yes. My share is small, just a ten-thousand-dollar interest,” I told him.
He thought I was making money, but as I explained, almost the entire investment was a complete loss. I was losing money on it. It was the truth.
“Jew slumlords,” he said under his breath.
“Your money is going overseas to buy food for poor people,” he said in a non-sequitur.
“Come again?” I said.
“Are you in the J.D.L [Jewish Defense League]?” he asked. “How much do you and your family give to the JDL?”
My stomach churned with uneasiness. “I don’t understand,” I responded. I got the impression he might be involved with a Palestinian movement of some kind.
“How much money do you give to the JDL?!” he repeated, insisting that the Jews were going to kill Arafat. He was obsessed.
Yasser Arafat, or Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was a Palestinian political leader who had been the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization since 1969. Arafat was an avowed enemy of Israel who died several decades later in old age. None of that stuff had anything to do with me. I was a Jewish family guy who worked in Brooklyn and lived on Long Island.
“How much money did you give to the JDL?” he asked again. “You’re going to kill Arafat. You watch,” he said.
I stopped responding. He was satisfied just to humiliate me. Then he dropped two cellophane bags of salted peanuts next to my head and left the room.
Later, he came back again. He couldn’t resist. He wanted to know more about my family business, although it was less theoretical this time and more fact-finding.
“How many bank accounts do you have at your company?” he asked.
“Two,” I told him. “One is a general account, and one is a payroll account.”
“How much money do you keep in the accounts?”
“Fifty thousand, total,” I said.
He left the room again and didn’t return. Not for a long time. I laid on the floor, bound in darkness, and thought of home.
* * *
That night, our home telephone rang at 9:13 p.m. A detective told Janet earlier that if I was alive, someone might call and that they should be ready. It was a blunt thing to say to a young mother, but it was one of many precautionary statements made that day as the law enforcement world moved in and enveloped our white picket fence existence.
As instructed, Janet waited a few rings before picking up so the detectives could begin recording the call. She hovered over the telephone and waited for a signal. A detective nodded toward her. “Ok, go,” he said.
Janet picked up.
“Hello”
“Janet?” a male voice said.
“Yes?” she said, hesitantly.
“Jack is safe, and he’s alive. If you want to see him again…seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We will call you tomorrow.”
She waived frantically to the detectives.
“Wait! What?!” she said.
The detectives inched toward her, leaning in ears first.
“You will be called tomorrow. Seven hundred and fifty thousand,” the voice said. Then, dial tone.
She was in shock. She panned the room and stared at the men in her house, telephone still in hand, mouth agape. “He hung up,” she said.
Was that real? Am I in a movie? This doesn’t happen to people like us, Janet thought.
It was a ransom call. The first one. It didn’t surprise the detectives or the FBI agents who had now joined the effort to find me. The required sum, however, did surprise them. It was one of the largest ransom demands ever in the United States up to that time. The mystery of my disappearance had been solved. I wasn’t out drinking, and there was no promiscuous affair with some neighbor. I’d been kidnapped.
John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in Italy a year earlier and held for $17 million. Patty Hearst was kidnapped months earlier by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a violent militant group. Two armed men took the 19-year-old Hearst from her apartment in Berkeley, California, and demanded millions for her return. She was later convicted of bank robbery and using a gun during a crime. In 2001, she was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
The gravity of my kidnapping—a Long Island businessman—was also sinking in for the Nassau County detectives and FBI agents. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars—the equivalent of $4 million today. The logistics of coming up with that kind of money, let alone delivering it and planning and executing necessary law enforcement operations, would be immense.
The ransom call brought a flood of emotions for Janet. The brutal cruelty of twenty-six hours of fear and panic, not knowing where I was and what was happening to me was absolute terror. Hearing that I was alive brought relief and vindication that I hadn’t run off with the neighbor’s wife. That horrific twenty-six-hour wait had gifted us something valuable though…the recorded call. Had they called much earlier, the recorder would not have been in place. Trying to comprehend it all made her lightheaded.
Feeling alone and not knowing what to do, Janet called Buddy, my oldest brother. He came to the house to comfort her with his wife, Lois. My middle brother, Edwin, also came over, as did Janet’s parents, Arnold and Sylvia Rosenberg. They all rushed to console her. Next came my father, Joseph, the patriarch, then my uncle Harvey, my aunt Helen, and their daughter, Marlene. It was an outpouring of family love and support.
But Janet had no intention of sitting shiva—a Jewish ritual for mourning the death of a loved one. She believed in her heart that I would come back. Her resolve still amazes me. The ransom call was devastating, but the caller said I was alive. She wouldn’t allow herself to think otherwise. It was the only way not to fall apart. I was alive, at least for now. The kidnapper wanted money. As far as Janet was concerned, it was up to her to make the exchange and get me back. Her mind was made up: her husband was coming home.
Janet refused to cry in front of anyone, whether family or police. If she started, she thought she might not be able to stop. I need to stay strong for the payoff, she told herself. In her mind she envisioned the moment when we would be reunited. In her own unique way, Janet was determined not to be a basket case for my return, feeling it would devastate me to see her like that. Instead, her tears fell in private that night as she held our sleeping two-year-old son, Michael, tight in her arms.
The detectives stayed throughout the night, as did the FBI. Unsure if there would be another call, Janet slept in her clothes to be ready at a moment’s notice for whatever came next.