If Looks Could Kill (27 page)

Late afternoon was upon western Pennsylvania. It was near 4:30
P.M
. Nighttime in certain parts of the state can be as dark as a cavern, the sky a shadowy purple velvetlike blanket scattered with sparkling white specks. Not that cops worried about working in the dark, but it was much easier to move around a foreign location during the day. Getting the bike and having it shipped back to Ohio for processing was one of the most important reasons for the trip. Patience was an asset now. Forrest and Bonadio probably had a lot of information to offer, but the bike was the catch.

As they all walked toward Russell Forrest’s office exit, en route to the garage, Mike Shaeffer asked Forrest if he, by chance, had any helmets Zaffino might have given him along with the bike.

“Yes, we do,” he said. “They’re in the closet. Let’s go there first.”

Inside the closet, Forrest took out two identical helmets: black-gray-and-white. Then he grabbed a saddlebag he said Zaffino had given him, along with the helmets and bike, saying, “When John rode up here from Ohio, he had these two helmets, the saddlebag and title.”

“That’s it?” Shaeffer asked.

“That’s it. Right, honey?”

Nancy Bonadio nodded.

As they walked out to the garage, Forrest began talking about the problems he and his fiancée had been having with Zaffino over the past several months, and as far back as a year ago. McFarland and Shaeffer were of course eager to hear it all. “It was over the helmets,” Forrest said. “Three weeks ago, John called my fiancée and said he wanted the helmets back. He apparently had a buyer for them. Nancy said she didn’t want to give back anything, since the helmets would probably be sold with the bike.”

“What did Zaffino say to that?”

“John threatened Nancy, saying she wouldn’t get [their son] back.” Zaffino had the boy for the weekend. If she wanted to see her son again, he said, he’d exchange the boy for the helmets. “When Nancy got off the telephone, she came to me and told me what happened.”

Forrest called Zaffino. “You’re not getting the helmets back,” Forrest told Zaffino after a round of yelling and screaming obscenities at each other. “That’s final, John,” he added, hanging up on him.

Forrest told Nancy that if Zaffino called back, asking about the helmets, explain to him that they had sold them.

When they picked up the boy the next time, Zaffino came wandering out toward the car with a cocky look on his face.

“What do you want?” Forrest asked.

Zaffino smiled. “You don’t want to mess with John Zaffino,” he said, talking about himself in the third person. “He’s a
bad
dude. If you cross him”—Zaffino waved his finger in front of Forrest’s face, back and forth—“he’ll get even.” He sounded intimidating, Forrest told them.

Forrest told Shaeffer and McFarland that they could take the helmets and saddlebag. “I’ll help you guys any way possible.” The detectives believed him. He came across sincere, eager to sink Zaffino, who obviously had been a pain in his ass ever since he knew him.

Next to a classic Jaguar—“Nice car,” McFarland said—and an RV, which Forrest owned, there sat the motorcycle, kickstand down, standing erect. Both the PSP and Shaeffer took Polaroid photographs of the bike as it stood like the suspect it had become. They wanted to document how they found it. One of the PSP troopers called into the barracks for the tow truck McFarland had set up before he and Shaeffer left Ohio, so it could come in before dark and tow the bike away. Later, that same truck would return the bike to Akron.

Back at the PSP barracks, McFarland and Shaeffer separated Forrest and Bonadio and began asking questions about John Zaffino. It was an official recorded interview. Neither Forrest nor Bonadio had to concede to the interview, it was up to their own discretion. Both wanted to talk, though. They had nothing to hide. “Their body language and facial expressions,” McFarland later wrote in his notes of the interviews, “were indicative of truthfulness. Their replies to our questions were immediate. They had no idea we were coming when we did and, therefore, could not be prepared for the interviews….”

Forrest was quick to tell stories about Zaffino that painted him as the thug the CAPU thought he was. There was one time just recently, Forrest explained, when he drove to a meeting point in Ohio, a restaurant, to meet Zaffino and pick up Bonadio’s son. When he arrived, Zaffino was there waiting.

“Go into the restaurant,” Forrest heard Zaffino tell his son, “and get yourself a soda.” He handed the boy a few dollars.

After watching his son walk into the store, Zaffino addressed Forrest. “The cops are wanting to talk to me. They left business cards at my place.”

“What’s it about?”

“A homicide.”

Bonadio was in California at the time, visiting a family member. Forrest called her when he got home and told her what Zaffino had said. “What?” Bonadio answered, surprised. “My God, Russell, I’m scared for [my son].”

“I know. I know.”

They had no idea, according to Forrest, that the situation was connected to the motorcycle, or to Jeff Zack.

Sitting, talking to McFarland and Shaeffer, Bonadio was “terrified” and “nervous,” she said. McFarland told her to relax. She wasn’t in any trouble. They just wanted to find out a few things about Zaffino.

After she got comfortable and described parts of her life with Zaffino, Shaeffer asked Bonadio if she knew of any girlfriends Zaffino had. “Since I left him? Oh, boy, yes I do. I don’t know her last name, but her first name is Cindy. That’s what he tells me.”

“Who’s that?”

“He refers to her as ‘Cindy,’ and she owns a well-to-do club or restaurant kind of club…um…and I can’t”—Bonadio paused, trying to recall the memory best she could—“I don’t even know where, but it’s in Ohio, and he says she got a lot of money and she’s probably about my age and he’s been with her for…I would say, a year anyhow.”

“What color hair?”

“Blond.”

“How does she wear it?”

“I don’t know.”

Next they talked about the child Zaffino and Bonadio had together. Bonadio had been married to Zaffino from December 1989 until, she said, “I left him in March of 1995.” There had been some sort of trigger that made Bonadio leave; she said she had run to her sister’s house in Pittsburgh because she “didn’t want John to find” her. The only reason she’d stayed in contact with him was because they had a child together.

Minus the child, it sounded an awful lot like the story Christine Todaro had been telling. Now the CAPU believed John Zaffino terrorized females. That much was clear from what two independent sources were saying.

McFarland wanted to know if Bonadio had ever met Zaffino’s new girlfriend, “the blonde.” Bonadio said she had. Then she said she knew “Cindy” was “married…. And I think her husband is ill, or he’s an older gentleman and…whether it’s her husband’s money or the money that they, you know, made together, per se, in a business.”

“Does she buy [John] things?”

Bonadio answered immediately: “Yes.”

“Like what?”

“She—he actually told me that she bought him the bike.” (Nancy Bonadio would later testify to this statement in court. Additionally, the CAPU recorded these interviews with Bonadio and Forrest.)

“Which bike?”

“This bike.”

McFarland wanted to know how Bonadio knew.

“I was very upset when he told me that he had a bike,” she explained, “because I wasn’t getting child support. So I said, ‘Well, how the heck can you afford a bike if you can’t afford to pay me any child support?’ And he said, ‘Cindy bought it for me.’ He’s been out of work sporadically for the past couple of years and I know that she has given him—he tells me that she’s given him money.”

Not only did Bonadio say that Cynthia purchased the motorcycle for Zaffino, but that she had probably put him up in the well-heeled apartment he had lived in.

Further along into the conversation, McFarland brought up an important point, asking, “Now, when he up and gave you the bike and told you it was for [back child] support, how did you react? Was this out of character for John?”

“I kinda didn’t give him a choice. He wanted to get rid of the bike.”

“What was that? He wanted to get
rid
of the bike?”

“He told me that he
had
to get rid of the bike and he couldn’t take it back to Ohio, and I said, ‘Well, you know what then, I’ll just keep the money.’ I told him you need to get rid of the bike and I need my back child support, so let’s just do a fair trade.”

McFarland and Shaeffer interviewed Bonadio and Forrest for almost two hours, getting everything they could. McFarland had a way with talking to people, making them feel comfortable. Bonadio was crying during portions of her interview, thinking that she and her fiancé were in legal trouble for taking a bike that was, in her words, “used to hurt someone.”

“We’re not going to do that to a person who has helped us,” McFarland promised. He was building a rapport with Bonadio and she began to trust him. “We view our relationship right here as being nothing but complete cooperation and help, OK?”

Shaeffer chimed in, adding, “The…the only way you could be, where you had done something wrong, is if he (Zaffino) would have said, ‘Hey, I robbed a bank and I used this bike.’ OK. Then you know a crime happened.”

“When we part today,” McFarland added, “we want to part in peace and confidence that you did the right thing. Please don’t turn anything inward and fault yourself. You have made no mistakes. Nancy, please believe me on this. You have done nothing wrong.”

“All right.”

As Bonadio and Forrest were about to leave the PSP barracks, Bonadio mentioned how afraid she was that Zaffino would find out she gave the motorcycle to the police. She feared what he’d do once he realized it was gone and the police now had it.

“My son—” she started to say through tears.

McFarland promised they would protect the boy at all costs. Bonadio wasn’t too worried Zaffino would hurt the child, but felt he might take off with him and run if he found out what was going on.

“We’ll do what we can,” Shaeffer added. “It’s important that you keep us informed as to what is going on at all times.”

Bonadio promised she would.

When John Zaffino heard his former wife Christine Todaro say, “…that guy you took out,” he became defiant and angry. As Christine later described it, he “blew a gasket. That’s when you could really see his true personality—when you pissed him off. His true self would emerge.”

In a way, Christine felt she was betraying her ex-husband—that sneaking around, and working, essentially, for the CAPU as a CI was a form of deception on her part. Between June 14 and June 21, Christine recorded five telephone calls with Zaffino. “I felt bad, because there was the potential that John could go to jail forever. But, at the same time, I felt worse for Jeff Zack and his family. I loved John when I married him. I never expected my life to end up the way it did with him.”

During those early weeks leading up to the first recorded conversations, Christine felt “psychotic,” she remembered. “It was weird.” The past year had consumed her, physically and mentally. She had lost at least twenty-five pounds: a frail, anxiety-ridden caricature of herself. She had trouble keeping a job because she couldn’t focus on what she was doing and rarely got a full night’s sleep.

“Chris,” Zaffino said after she mentioned the newspaper article and “that guy you took out”—getting louder with each word—“how
dare
you say that.”

“Well, there’s…there’s cards on my door from the cops.”

“Chris—”

“John,” she said jarringly, right back.

“Were you—”

“Well, what am I supposed to say to Tony?”

“What’s the card say?”

“They’re…they’re business cards.”

“Well, what was in—what’d the paper say?”

“There was a story in there about him,” Christine said, and then explained the story.

“OK, well?”

“What am I supposed to tell Tony? They keep showing up here.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk on the phone about stuff, please. OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Cause, you know…you know they listen.”

For Dave Whiddon, as he listened to the telephone call later on that day, Zaffino’s reaction was significant. “It was John’s reaction when Christine said ‘that guy you took out.’ John didn’t laugh it off and say, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ He told her not to talk about it over the phone.” Why wouldn’t he say, “You’re crazy. I didn’t kill anyone”?

Zaffino continued advising Christine not to talk over the telephone about anything having to do with the murder of Jeff Zack. He was adamant. Concerned. Worried that she was saying too much. As they spoke, he became more annoyed with each response Christine offered. At one point, Zaffino said, “Listen to me. When you start panicking, then you start saying stuff that you don’t even know what you’re saying and get it all screwed up. But see, the thing you got to remember is, they only want to talk to me, that’s what they told you, right?”

“Right,” Christine said, rolling her eyes.

“So what’s, what’s the big deal? They only want to talk to me and they don’t know where I’m at and they think they do.”

“Well, why don’t you go talk to them then? If you’re not worried about it. You know, so they’ll get off me.”

“They’ll get off you. They’ll get off ya. I know they will, and even if they don’t, all you gotta do is say, ‘Hey, f- - - you. Get the f- - - outta here’.”

“I’m not gonna say that.”

“That’s all you gotta say. Why not?”

“Because.”

“Why not? You would say it to somebody else.”

Christine laughed. She couldn’t escape her own personality. Zaffino knew her well. Christine was never one to take any back talk from anybody—especially cops.

“What kind of message did you leave me?” Zaffino asked. “Real descriptive, or what?”

“No.”

Zaffino went on to tell Christine to calm down. “And tell Tony to do the same. Nothing is gonna happen.” He wanted the second set of business cards left on her door by the CAPU and promised he would stop by her apartment in a few hours to pick them up.

Instead, Christine decided to meet Zaffino in the parking lot of a strip mall in Fairlawn, just east of Akron, a few miles from the Tangier. When she hung up, Christine was frazzled. So she called Vince Felber. “He wants me to meet him, I’m scared.”

“Relax,” Felber told her. “Let me get back to you after I get some things together.”

The CAPU took Zaffino seriously. Christine couldn’t say enough about how dangerous a face-to-face meeting with Zaffino was now. So Whiddon got every available detective he could find, along with members of the SWAT team, and set up surveillance at the strip mall, where they were scheduled to meet. They decided Christine would meet them first at another location, where they would hide a listening device on the floor of her car. With any luck, this would be the first and last time she would have to lie to Zaffino and try to entice him into admitting his role in Jeff Zack’s murder.

“Never, under any circumstances, get into his vehicle,” Felber warned Christine as her car was fitted with the device.

“OK.”

A while later, Zaffino pulled up to Christine as she sat in the mall parking lot. Then he got into her car and immediately went into a rant. She could tell he was screaming mad by the look on his face. “What the f- - - do you think you’re doing? Don’t ever say that on the phone again. Are you f- - - - - - crazy? You’re going to send me to jail.”

“Calm down, John.”

“I didn’t do anything. They really can’t do anything to me. But still, don’t
ever
say
anything
like that
ever
again on the phone. I mean it.”

“What do you want me to do, John?”

“What if they’re recording our conversations, for crissakes. Are you f- - - - - - crazy?”

What have I gotten myself into?
Christine thought.
Oh, my God.

Nothing of substance came out of the first meeting; however, the conversation proved to detectives—and Christine, for that matter—that Zaffino was now more paranoid than he had perhaps ever been. The fact that Christine was mentioning him in reference to Zack’s murder only heightened his fear that she was beginning to protect herself. In fact, Zaffino was so concerned the cops were listening to his cell phone calls that he used two cell phones, Christine explained: one to roll his calls over to the other, thinking that forwarding his calls to the second number would block the CAPU’s recording and tracing abilities. Christine laughed to herself at the prospect. She had worked in telecommunications for the better part of her adult life and knew it didn’t matter. “It showed me, really,” she said later, “how stupid he actually was.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Zaffino said as he got out of her car. “Remember what the f- - - I said.”

“Bye, John.”