Island of the Damned (9 page)

Before
long, passing visitors find the locals recounting tales of their island’s dark history. A favourite is how, in 1936, workmen demolishing the prison buildings unexpectedly uncovered vestiges of an apartment, in the old south cell blocks. It was used by Tammany Boss Tweed during his incarceration in 1874 following his trial on 220 counts of fraud and embezzlement. Although the windows of the old cells were supposed to be tall and narrow, the men found blocked-in remains of a huge window measuring six by eight feet which had offered Tweed a panoramic view of New York, the city he had looted for decades. By the end of the 19th Century, Tweed’s apartment was bricked up.

The
footprints remained.

If you enjoyed
Island of the Damned
you may be interested in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
by Alix Kirsta, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Manhattan Murder Mystery
by Alix Kirsta

Part One

The Vanishing

June 5
th
1998 dawned clear and sunny in New York City. Even for a Sunday, Manhattan was unusually quiet. The night before, as part of the Independence Day celebrations, New Yorkers had joined crowds of visitors to watch the annual firework extravaganza on the East River; many went on to celebrate in the city’s bars until the early hours.. Elsewhere, people attended parties late into the night. Among them, two women, fashion designer Elva Shkreli and her friend Carole Hansen, a writer and fashion researcher, had been guests at a dinner party at a friend’s large mansion on East 65
th
Street, returning home shortly before 1 a.m. The morning after however, neither woman was in festive spirit. It had been a strange, unnerving evening. Elva Shkreli woke at dawn, too on edge to stay in bed. In New Jersey, Carole Hanson was also up early, her mind preoccupied by events of the previous night. Both women were concerned for the wellbeing of their hostess, Irene Silverman, who had struck them both as being troubled and unusually anxious. Just after midday, Shkreli decided it was late enough to call Silverman, a late riser, to thank her again for dinner and make sure she was alright. She let the phone ring half a dozen times, then hung up. If Irene didn’t answer by the sixth ring she must be out. With phones in every room in the house, she always answered promptly. Carole Hansen, who dialled Silverman’s number about 12.30, also got no answer and thought Irene was perhaps sleeping in. In the next few hours, until after lunchtime, both women became increasingly worried and kept dialling their friend’s number repeatedly. But the phone just rang. And rang.

At about 4pm that Sunday afternoon, one of Irene Silverman’s housekeepers, Aricella Rodriguez, the only member of her staff who was on duty that day at 20 East 65
th
Street, realised she had not seen her employer since 11 o’clock that morning. At that time, Silverman, still in dressing gown and slippers, had come out of her ground floor office and asked Aricella to take the dog for a walk and then attend to several other chores. The rest of Silverman’s staff had been given the weekend off for the Independence Day holiday. Five hours later, realising that the mansion was eerily quiet with no sign anywhere of Mrs Silverman, Aricella became uneasy. At 5pm she phoned Mengistu “Mengi” Melesse, Silverman’s Ethiopian caretaker and Jeff Feig, a local Manhattan estate agent who helped Silverman organise the lettings of several luxury apartments in her house. Neither Feig nor Melesse, who was attending an Ethiopian soccer tournament in Atlanta, his first holiday in six years, had heard any word from their employer. However, both men were sufficiently concerned to phone the police.

It was a quiet weekend down at the 19
th
precinct, and it didn’t take long for the NYPD’s missing persons unit to respond. One of the precinct’s senior officers, Inspector Joe Reznick was put in charge of the case. “Irene Silverman was classified not only as a missing person but as so-called special category because although fit and active, she was 82 years old” recalled Inspector Reznick. “Special category cases immediately kick off a big neighbourhood search, and a check of all the city’s hospitals. If that doesn’t lead anywhere, we search the missing person’s home and set up temporary headquarters on or near the premises.” Although 5
th
July was a bright and clear, and darkness did not fall until after 9pm, Inspector Reznick and his officers found no leads to Irene Silverman’s possible whereabouts. The only potentially ominous sign was a trace of blood on the pavement outside her home: forensic scientists eventually found this to be of animal origin, and not human blood. No one among her neighbours on East 65
th
Street, off Madison Avenue with its designer boutiques, art galleries and gourmet restaurants, had seen or heard anything of her that weekend. Nor could police question Silverman’s tenants who lived in rented apartments in her house. Everyone had gone away for the Independence Day holiday. “After nightfall that day, we began interviewing people who had last talked to her or had seen her, including her housekeeper Aricella. We contacted police in other areas, including New Jersey. By Monday evening we had exhausted all initial procedures” recalled Resnick. “By then we knew we had a problem”.

How much of a problem would emerge several days later. A painstaking search of several city morgues, various garbage dumps and landfill sites in Staten Island as well as a recycling centre in the Hunt’s Point area of the Bronx yielded no further evidence. Although several body parts, a human arm and a human leg, were found among medical waste in the Bronx, when these were sent to the City Medical Examiner, tests showed that neither limb could have belonged to the missing woman.

The disappearance of Irene Silverman made headlines in Tuesday’s
New York Times
, followed by front page reports in the
Daily News
and
New York Post
. The city was gripped, not least by a sense of fear that perhaps a kidnapper was on the prowl, targeting well to do New Yorkers and holding them hostage, or worse. On Monday July 6
th
, the NYPD set up a roadblock and cordoned off the pavement in front of Irene Silverman’s house. Nearby, Central Park and adjacent streets were swarming with police, while press and TV crews converged on the area. Reznick’s men were forced to admit they had so far drawn a blank. His men had found several sketches of a young man in Irene Silverman’s office, apparently drawn by her and said to be, according to her housekeeper, impressions of Manny Guerrin, a tenant who was renting the ground floor apartment at the back of the house. However, like all the other tenants, Guerrin was nowhere to be found. In his apartment, everything was tidy: all that was left lying around was a bundle of discarded large plastic bags and a tangled ball of duct tape: these came from a New York branch of Tru-Value hardware stores. According to Silverman’s housekeeper this was left by the tenant since it was a brand none of the staff ever bought. Fearing the worst, Reznick sent out several NYPD loudspeaker vans to patrol the Upper East Side blaring announcements and calling on eyewitnesses to come forward.

When news of Irene Silverman’s disappearance first hit the headlines, few of her friends took the report seriously. A wealthy, well connected widow, surrounded by influential friends and trusted staff, she seemed decades younger than her 82 years. Once a professional ballet dancer, she remained fit and in complete possession of her faculties, living a socially active life in one of Manhattan’s most exclusive neighbourhoods in a $10 million mansion which was a landmark and had been featured in glossy architectural and interior design magazines. “What harm could possibly come to Irene Silverman” said one of her bemused friends, publishing executive Bob Jakoubek when he heard the news. “ For years she did not even go out of the house unless accompanied by a friend or an employee. This wasn’t someone like you or I. This was a lady from such a protected environment that I, and all my friends, would unhesitatingly say she is the last person to come to harm. I just didn’t believe something could happen to her”.

That was a view shared by most people who knew her. Over the years, many New Yorkers, especially around Madison Avenue, either knew or knew of the gregarious and petite red-head whose outré lifestyle made her one of the more prominent personalities in this largely genteel area of the city. Her 19
th
century house, with its imposing carved limestone façade, menacing gargoyle, heavy wrought iron door and impenetrable security, conveyed the grandeur of a vanished age. A home like this would be the ultimate bastion against New York’s dangers and unwelcome intrusions. Or so it seemed.

As the mystery deepened, locals asked one another whether Irene Silverman had not simply acted on a whim, to change her life, move abroad and live out the rest of her days in more exotic surroundings and sunnier climes . Why not? She was wealthy, relished adventure and had no children or immediate family. Some believed that for her secretly to escape New York for some tropical paradise was not all that out of character. Colourful stories about this eccentric woman, part wealthy socialite, part zany Bohemian had made the rounds of Manhattan for decades. Most of them were true. Like the chilled half-bottles of Dom Perignon she always carried in her bag, ready to share with friends she was visiting. And the Renoir (or was it a fake?) which hung in her bathroom. Or the fact that she would only handle pristine, unused 100 dollar notes, and sent her caretaker, Mengi Melesse, to cash her tenants’ cheques at a nearby branch of the Bank of New York, with instructions to return only with crisp new currency. She had a keen financial instinct and an eye for investment. It was rumoured, correctly, that despite the millions she had inherited from her late husband Samuel Silverman, a leading real estate broker, after his death in 1980 she began investing in gold, which at the time was rising in value. A close friend, her former Columbia University history teacher, Professor James Shenton, remembered her travelling to Switzerland with a million dollars. When she returned, Shenton asked her what she had bought there. “She called four of her staff who returned after a few minutes between them carrying twenty 2lb bars of gold. Irene said to me: ‘Gold is the last resort. And you can take it anywhere with you’”.

Many in her circle also admired her determination, when she reached 59, having had only minimal primary education, to enrol as a mature student at Columbia University. There she excelled in American history studies and treated classmates and teachers to fine French cheeses and wine or lavishly catered afternoon teas. Her
joie de vivre
led to extravagant gestures that could verge on the outrageous, as James Shenton discovered. At a reception in his honour at Columbia University to mark his acceptance of the prestigious John Jay Award, he was given a standing reception led by an ermine-swathed Irene Silverman and ten handsome muscle men rented as her “escorts” for the evening. It was what James Shenton described as “this raunchy quality” that made Silverman’s hackles rise at being called a “wealthy socialite” with its connotations of idle, bored Upper East Side matrons who lunch. “Lots of people think I’m very rich – and I am. But I have always worked, and look where I began” she used to tell friends. “I’m a tough broad, a child of the depression. I had to be self-supporting from the age of sixteen”.

The story of Irene Silverman’s rise from the fleshpots of New Orleans, via Radio City Music Hall’s
corps de ballet
to an Upper East Side dream mansion seems like the script of a Broadway show. Born Irene Zambelli in New Orleans to an immigrant Greek seamstress and an Italian fishmonger – he was distantly related to Carlotta Zambelli, star of the Paris Opera Ballet – as a child she learned ballet and accompanied her father on his daily drunken trawls of the jazz bars and whorehouses in the French Quarter. In that louche environment she soon became street smart, developing a sharp wit and an unerring nose for trouble. Years later she confessed: “It was clear to me, even then, that I could always make a living as a stylish but tough madam.”

But her mother had other ideas. When Zambelli abandoned his wife and daughter in 1933, she brought Irene to New York, taking jobs as a dressmaker while Irene pursued a career as a dancer. At that time, Michel Fokine, the legendary dancer and choreographer from Serge Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes
, had opened a ballet school in a large brownstone house owned by him and his wife, known to all as “Fokina”, on the corner of Riverside Drive and West 72
nd
Street. Although Mrs Zambelli could not afford the fees for Irene’s classes, the maestro agreed to let her sew costumes for the Fokines’ public dance recitals in return for Irene’s free ballet tuition. In 1934, Irene joined Radio City Music Hall which featured the only resident ballet company at the time in New York. The artistic director then was up and coming director, Vincente Minelli, who went on to direct major Hollywood movies and marry Judy Garland. Always insistent that she was purely a classical dancer and only shared the bill with the famous “Rockettes” chorus line, Irene earned $36 a week for four daily performances, 365 days a year. Together with her mother’s weekly $28 seamstress’s salary from various fashion houses, their earnings were barely enough to cover their food and the rent of a walk-up, cold water tenement apartment located beneath a brothel in Hell’s Kitchen. Despite her poverty however, Irene had no qualms about turning down the offer of a job from another supremo of the late Diaghilev’s company, Leonide Massine, to join his
Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo
for a European tour. Massine, with the innate meanness for which he was legendary, refused to pay her mother’s fare to accompany the tour, and Irene would not go abroad without her. Besides, it was becoming clear that being a ballet dancer in New York was seen as sufficiently glamorous and classy to open other doors. She was wooed by many wealthy stage door Johnnies including the Arctic explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd. In 1941 she married Sam Silverman, a banker who later became one of America’s most successful and wealthiest mortgage brokers.

Entertaining the rich and powerful, furnishing and running her homes in Paris, Athens, Honolulu and Manhattan was a role she carried off with regal style and confidence. Sam provided the security Irene craved. And she thrived on the variety of their life together. Visitors to their elegant Paris flat, adjoining the Theatre Louis Jouvet, used to comment on the fact that you could clearly hear the actors speaking their lines and the applause through the drawing room wall. Irene was fond of telling guests that she knew many of the artists and liked to think of her flat as their “home from home” where they would pop up for a cup of coffee and a chat in between rehearsals. When Sam died in 1980, leaving Irene his fortune, she sought greater informality, saw less of starchy financier friends and cultivated a more Bohemian circle. Her dinner parties at East 65
th
Street were just as likely to be held in the large basement kitchen as in the formal dining room. There you might find yourself sitting next to one of the Rothschilds, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation or the Metropolitan Museum as well as mixing with fashion designers, Greek Orthodox priests, Silverman’s butcher or carpenter as well as a sprinkling of academics, writers, pop singers – even a British aristocrat or two. Sam may have taken the girl out of show business, but not show business out of the girl. “These gatherings were a colourful improvised theatre over which Irene presided, revelling in the intrigue and drama of it all” recalled George Frangos, Dean at the State University of New York Health Centre, whose father, a Greek Orthodox priest had become close friends with Irene’s Greek born mother, who lived in the mansion.