And Never Let Her Go (55 page)

Tom considered his choices of a surrogate lover and thought of Tom Shopa. A longtime friend, Shopa was tall and handsome, and he was divorced. The two Toms had gone to school together at Archmere. Shopa was a C.P.A., and he had written to him soon after he was arrested, a kind and concerned letter. On the last Sunday in March, Shopa and another old friend accompanied Tom's daughter Katie to Gander Hill for visiting hours.

Tom knew that Shopa lived only a few houses down Delaware Avenue from Debby, and he asked him to intercede with her. “He wanted me to find out if she still loved him, and why she wasn't writing to him,” Shopa would recall. “And if she wasn't going to continue writing to him, would she return the letters that he sent her?”

Following Tom's instructions, Shopa called Debby and asked her if she still loved Tom. “She said, ‘I love him very much,' and used the word ‘soulmate' in describing their relationship,” Shopa recounted.

Shopa reported that information in another visit to Tom, and explained that Debby could not write to him because of an addendum to an agreement with the state. Nor could she return his letters, because they had been turned over to the state as evidence.

Tom said that he was concerned about Debby—she needed a shoulder to cry on, and he wasn't able to be there for her. And then he asked his old friend for a bizarre favor. “He felt,” Shopa said with embarrassment, “that she was
needy,
and he wanted me to take care of her, to kind of be there to help her, to be strong for her . . . and—and—also to have—a physical relationship with her, to sleep with her.”

Shopa was shocked. Never in a million years had he expected his old friend to suggest something like that. He was too appalled, in fact, to say much at the time. But the idea was upsetting and inappropriate. Why would Tom ask him to do such a thing?

Tom apparently didn't hear the shock in Shopa's voice. Two days later, on March 31, he reached out from his cell with his pen once more. This time his target was, perhaps, the most vulnerable of all. He wrote an eight-page letter to fifteen-year-old Steve Williams, Debby's son.

Ever since September 1995, Steve had come to think a lot of Tom. Tom had been a great pal. His arrest and the publicity surrounding it had been hard for Steve. Tom's letter to him was written in a warm, man-to-man style and it was totally confusing, designed to open barely healed emotional wounds. Tom assured Steve he would be out of prison by Thanksgiving, “for sure,” and that he
planned to take Debby to Provence and Tuscany for a month or two. He spoke of his daughters, Christy, Katie, Jenny, and Alex, mentioned the boys they were dating and the trips they were taking—to Jamaica, Boca Raton, and Disney World.

And then Tom moved smoothly into what his life in Gander Hill was like. “Besides the pain of being separated from my kids,” he wrote, “I suffer from being held in solitary confinement—supposedly for my own protection, although I know that's bullshit and it's part of a plan to break me.”

From there, Tom went on to an intimate discussion of his long affair with Steve's mother. “I should have listened to your mother many years ago when she urged me to follow my heart and not hide our relationship or limit it to certain times. . . . At the very least, I would not now be in this predicament.”

Writing, still, to a fifteen-year-old boy, Tom held back little. “Your Mom has made nothing but bad decisions since January 28th which have hurt me more than anything I've ever experienced. I'll let her tell you if you want to know and she wants to tell you. Despite the tragic choices she has made—which I mostly blame on others—I cannot stop loving her.”

Tom told Steve he blamed his father and his mother's “unethical lawyer” for frightening and confusing Debby. He assured Steve that he loved him like a son, and had since he was a baby for a “special reason.”

(Tom was
not
Steve's father, it that's what he was implying, and there was absolute scientific proof of that fact, but perhaps he thought such a suggestion would strengthen his hold over Debby.)

He asked the boy to be stronger than his mother had been and to keep his letter private. And then Tom got around to what probably was the main reason for the letter.

First, give your mom a long, hard hug, tell her it's from me and that I love her, miss her, and need her very much. Second, tell her I am 1000% certain
your
phones are not tapped unless she gave them permission, and that I'd still like to call on
your
line. I need the number. Third, tell her to be extremely nice to Tom Shopa because he has what she needs and can be trusted to be very private and is definitely interested in helping her take care of it but is too shy to ask—so she'll have to ask him.

Tom ended his letter to Steve by wishing him a true love and soul mate, “as I found your mom.”

Fortunately, Steve didn't read the letter, beyond scanning it and seeing that it looked very long and complicated. Nor did Debby. It ended up in the growing stack of Tom's correspondence in the prosecutors' file.

F
OR
all of his fascination, obsession, and fixation on the psychology of women, Tom saw their world through weirdly slanted lenses. He loved to talk about the private parts of their lives and their bodies; he remembered the details of their menstrual cycles, their problems with PMS and even their ovulation patterns in a way that was faintly creepy. And yet he had not a clue about how a woman's mind worked. But how could he have thought that supplying Debby with a surrogate sexual partner—a man with whom she had no emotional connection beyond friendship—would make her contented and serene, and grateful to him? His bland assumptions had horrified Shopa, but Capano had taken his silence for assent.

And thus encouraged, he had written to a teenage boy about his mother in unmistakably suggestive terms and had asked him, in effect, to be a pimp for her, telling his mother to be “extremely nice” to Shopa.

Before Debby stopped writing to him, Tom had asked her for Steve's telephone number often. And he had been particularly insistent about wanting her daughter, Victoria's, phone number and address at college. “What if there was an emergency?” he asked Debby. “What if I couldn't get in touch with you?”

“I never wanted him to have Victoria's address or phone number,” Debby recalled. “I couldn't imagine any emergency where he'd need that. Later, I was awfully glad he didn't have it.”

W
HEN
his crude ploy to win Debby back with surrogate seduction failed, Tom set out on another scheme. If he could not be sure that she was part of his team, then he would have to make certain that she didn't play for the opposition.

Tom's new neighbor in Cell 2 was a cocaine dealer, Wilfredo “Tito” Rosa. Rosa's operation in the Wilmington area had been extensive, and he was looking at thirty years in prison for his part in a ring that had sold seventy pounds of the addictive white powder in two years.

The month after Tom was jailed, Rosa had been moved into the cell next to Tom's. Thus, their “friendship” extended further back than Tom's and Nick Perillo's. Rosa wrote to Colm Connolly and said that he and Tom had once managed to talk to each other three
or four hours a day by using the slots at the bottom of their cell doors or the window-yard technique.

In December of 1997, Rosa told the prosecutors that Tom had been seething over his brother Gerry's betrayal. They whiled away the hours in the 1-F pod kidding about what Tom could arrange to have done to his enemies. Rosa told Connolly that
he
was the first on Tom's hit list. Tom wanted Connolly “‘taken care of.' I told him no way,” Rosa confided. “No federal prosecutors!

“We were kidding about having Gerry whacked,” Rosa said. “But then it got serious. He wanted me to look into what the cost and what the details were about having Gerry killed.”

Surely, he couldn't have been serious. A brother was a brother. But according to Tito Rosa, Tom
was
serious. Through their talks, he learned that Rosa was worried about how he was going to pay off the mortgage on his house down in Townsend while he was in prison in Smyrna, only a few miles away. He had $95,000 owing on it, and his wife and baby wouldn't have any place to live if he lost it. If Rosa helped him kill Gerry, Tom assured him, he would pay off his mortgage as well as any expenses connected with a hit man.

Rosa told Connolly that he never intended making good on the hit on Gerry, but he planned to take the money. Then he was going to snitch on Tom to the state and hope for a reduced sentence. But Rosa didn't go down to Smyrna; at the end of December, he was sent instead to the federal penitentiary in Fairton, New Jersey.

Nevertheless, Rosa said he had managed to stay in touch with Tom through his wife, Lilia.* Tom wrote to Lilia and she forwarded his letters to her husband. And it worked in reverse, too. Reportedly, Rosa sent Tom a picture of Lilia and their baby. Rosa said he'd done other errands for Tom; he was only one of many inmates whose phone privileges Tom had taken over. After he was moved out of Gander Hill, Rosa said, he'd called Tom's relatives to check on him around the time of the bail hearing, and everything seemed fine.

And then he heard that Tom had been denied bail and was still sitting in prison. In March 1998, Rosa was moved back to Gander Hill on another matter and into the 1-F pod. And although he was housed several cells away from Tom, they had managed to communicate fifteen or twenty minutes a day by standing near each other's windows during yard time.

By March, Tom's rage at his little brother was no longer uppermost in his mind. Connolly already knew about the burglary plot he'd set up with Nick Perillo—but now Rosa told Connolly that Tom was willing to go further than that to punish Debby. “He was
afraid that she was gonna break,” Rosa said, “because the federal government was poking around, asking her questions.”

When Rosa was moved into the cell next to Tom's, they resumed their hours-long discussions of what could be done to be sure that Debby didn't cooperate any further with the prosecutors. It galled Tom to think that the woman he had once controlled completely should now be in a position to pose such a threat to him.

There was no solution, really, but to have her killed. When Rosa seemed receptive, Tom slipped him some pictures of Debby and gave him her address on Delaware Avenue. He explained—as he had to Perillo—that her house was almost invisible behind tall hedges and that a fence separated it from the neighbors on either side.

“There was a good possibility,” Rosa told Connolly, “that someone could just walk up to her door like a flower delivery guy and just whack her.”

It seemed not to have occurred to Tom that he was dealing with men who were exceptionally con-wise. He was vastly underrating Colm Connolly and Ferris Wharton; he was barely aware of Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert. And he was certainly unaware that his jailhouse confidants were talking to his prosecutors.

Tom listened with interest when Rosa told him that he believed his brother-in-law Jorge would be willing to murder Debby if the price was right. They decided it would be safer to talk in code. Debby would be referred to as “tuna,” and instead of saying “kill” or “murder,” they would say “black.”

Writing in Spanish, Rosa actually sent a letter to Jorge using the code words. He told his brother-in-law to ask no questions, but simply to rewrite the contents in his own handwriting so Tom wouldn't recognize the real author, mail it to Lilia to send on to Tom. Then in order to assure Tom that the conspiracy to murder was moving ahead, Jorge was to go take photographs of Debby's house, which were to be sent to Rosa at Gander Hill.

All in good time, Rosa showed Tom the photos of the house that had been so familiar to him for many years. He was apparently convinced that it was only a matter of time before the hit on Debby was accomplished.

Rosa's letter to Jorge had mentioned a “blackened tuna,” in Spanish. “Does that mean a dead Deborah MacIntyre?” Connolly asked him.

“Right.” He nodded. “[The lady] being dead.”

The investigators found Jorge, who turned over a copy of the letter that discussed a murder and the photographs of Debby's
house. They told Rosa to limit his conversations with Tom to the discussion of the plot to kill his ex-lover. But Tom wasn't satisfied with that; he evidently felt the plan was going so smoothly that he told Rosa he wanted to add a hit on Gerry to the contract.

On June 9, 1998, Debby and Tom Bergstrom had a meeting with the prosecution team. Every time she thought she had absorbed the worst pain their revelations brought, she was wrong. But these men whom she had resented deeply because she thought they were persecuting the man she loved had now become friends. The scales had fallen from her eyes, and like it or not, she had long since realized that Tom didn't love her and had, perhaps, never loved her. But this day brought such ugly revelations that her conscious mind quite literally refused to listen to them.

Just as she and Tom Bergstrom were about to leave the June meeting, Connolly said something to her about a murder plot. “I heard it,” Debby remembered, “but I didn't hear it. It went over my head. In the middle of the night, his words came back and I started to think about it and thought that couldn't be what he'd said.”

She called Bergstrom the next day, and when he returned her call, he told her that it was apparently true. Tom had been trying to have her killed.

“Oh, my God,” Debby gasped. The only thing she thought about was her children, Steve and Victoria. Moreover, the press had found out about Tom's murder plot and it would probably be all over Wilmington soon. She had to get to them and tell them before they read about it in the papers. “I got in the car and went looking for them,” she said. “Victoria was working a block from the federal building and she would have to walk by the reporters. I found them both in time—and I guess it's funny now, but they saw the look on my face and each of them blurted, ‘What's the matter? Did I do something wrong?' ”