The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (5 page)

But Klatten had other reasons to worry. Her husband, Jan, had opened her phone bills and spotted the numerous calls to Sgarbi’s Swiss cell phone. When she told Sgarbi about the escalating tensions with Jan, rather than sympathy he offered an ultimatum: “You will have to tell your husband you are leaving him for me,” he said. Sgarbi admitted he had nothing to offer financially, but suggested she bring along  290 million, which he could invest in a fund to get them started.

It was then Klatten sensed things had turned ugly. “I had the impression this situation had become a real danger for all of the family,” she told police. A few days later, she called Sgarbi and ended the affair. Furious, he asked her, “Do you have a gun pointed to your head?”

At this point, Sgarbi could have slunk away with his  7 million in 7-Up money. Instead, he upped the ante: On October 16 Klatten received a letter from him that read, “Do you remember, my love, when we met in broad daylight in a Munich hotel room after your holidays?” It was signed, “Your gentle warrior.” Accompanying the letter were several video stills. It was clear to Klatten they were from a video that must have been taken the first time she and Sgarbi had had sex. “I realized,” she later told police, “Mr. Sgarbi had evidently met me only for this reason.”

Klatten broke the news of the affair to her husband and then brought the details of her indiscretion to the police. By then, Sgarbi had laid out his demands. Getting rid of him, he said, would cost “seven times 7-Up.” When Klatten refused to pay, he sent 38 minutes of video footage of them having sex to prove he meant business. He also dropped his demands to “two times 7-Up,” and gave her till January 15, 2008, to deliver the money.

On January 14, on his way to Munich and the biggest windfall of his criminal career, Sgarbi pulled his Mercedes 300SD into a highway rest stop in Austria. As he sat in his car, three Swiss detectives who had been following him appeared at his door and arrested him. That might have been it for the convoluted case of the Swiss gigolo. But Sgarbi wasn’t traveling alone.

One car over, in an Audi Q7 that Italian police say was purchased with  100,000 of Klatten’s money, sat the religious-sect leader Ernano Barretta, a 63-year-old former auto mechanic with dyed-black hair and a fashion sense that favors T-shirts, warm-up jackets, and distressed Diesel jeans. After the detectives approached him, Barretta reportedly persuaded them to let him finish his food before they took him in. Police, alerted to Sgarbi’s grift by Klatten, had been wiretapping Barretta and had recorded him talking about the BMW heiress; they believe he was directing Sgarbi’s frauds or, at the least, helping plot them. After three days, Barretta was released to return home to Italy.

E
RNANO
B
ARRETTA HAD MOVED
to Switzerland to work as a mechanic in the sixties. By the early nineties, he’d remade himself into a
sensitivo
, claiming he could help with spiritual troubles. (He was once convicted of dealing stolen cars.) As Barretta’s flock grew, so did his mythology, which took on an intensely Christian character. He would appear bearing stigmata and would perform faith healings, receiving in return generous offerings from devotees, allegedly their entire life savings in some cases.

Barretta needed someone to look after that money. He met Sgarbi just as the young law-school grad was entering the banking world. Sgarbi, former sect members say, became a devoted follower, playing the roles of accountant and right-hand apostle. Sgarbi often referred to Barretta as “the father who protecteth me” and considered him “the maestro of my life.”

Barretta and his followers became a family to Sgarbi, especially after his first wife left him in 1994, disturbed by his involvement in the sect. Through Barretta, he met Gabriele Franziska Sgarbi, whom he married in 2001 while romancing the Countess du Pasquier-Guebels. After his arrest for defrauding the countess, he took his new bride’s last name, presumably to cover his tracks.

Several of Barretta’s former followers have told the media that Barretta exerted sexual control over the women in his flock. One told the Zurich
Tages-Anzeiger
, “Whenever we had sex, he always told me it was to heal me. He said his sperm was the blood of Jesus Christ, it purifies the soul.” Barretta reportedly convinced Sgarbi that his cons also had the power to purify. “Ernano told Helg that money is a sin,” one former member tells me, “and it was Helg’s duty to relieve rich women of their fortunes and direct the money for good works.”

Sgarbi’s “good works,” say police, funded Barretta as he made a fiefdom of his native village, amassing up to 60 cars, the Rifugio Valle Grande banquet hall, and 40 houses, which he quietly put in the names of sect members. The money came in so fast, police say, Barretta had trouble spending it all. “A cubic meter of money!” he bragged in one wiretapped call after the Klatten score.

In March, 80 Italian police officers raided Barretta’s compound, blew up a safe, and found a hand-scrawled map listing the locations of “good wine” buried on the property. (In a wiretapped call, Barretta had complained that  300,000 buried in a tin can had become moldy.) Using the map, police turned up  1.5 million in crisp bills, at least  1 million of it believed to be money Klatten had given Sgarbi.

When I arrive at his compound in early summer, Barretta announces he is happy to discuss “my love for Helg Sgarbi.” According to police, when Sgarbi and Klatten were carrying on their affair in Room 629 of the Holiday Inn, Barretta was staying in Room 630 next door, possibly taping their liaisons. Barretta does not deny being in the hotel.

“Sgarbi is my friend and will always be my friend,” says Barretta, standing on a back porch overlooking the Gran Sasso mountains in central Italy’s Abruzzo region. “If I travel with him and he has a woman in his room, why am I supposed to know this?” Anyway, he adds, “what kind of woman is Klatten? If she was a real woman, she would be home with her children, not parading around with young men.” At that, Barretta does a pantomime, effeminately prancing across the floor.

Barretta, his wife, and his children face up to 20 years in prison each if convicted. So does Franziska Sgarbi. Gerardo Valone, the Italian prosecutor, maintains that she was integrally involved. After her husband’s arrest, she is heard on a wiretap saying, “If Klatten does not drop her accusations, we must send to the media all the pictures and video to make a problem for her.”

Barretta’s defense attorney, Sabatino Cipriette, says he plans to call Klatten, Monica Sandler, and the wife of the furniture-maker to the stand. “Mr. Sgarbi did not ask for money,” he tells me. “Mrs. Klatten offered it to him because she felt guilty.” Clearly he’s hoping for a plea bargain for his client. “I think Mrs. Klatten is a powerful woman, a strong woman, a nice woman,” he says. “Too much theater is not good for Klatten. Klatten has a story with one man, but too many questions about that story is not good.”

“I
F YOU WANT TO KNOW
about me, my life is all over the Internet. I will never have another company,” Sgarbi tells me at the prison. As he speaks, he looks over at Cristine, the thirty-something German translator I’ve brought to facilitate dealings with the prison guards. Sgarbi starts to ask her mundane personal questions: She worked in Paris? At Microsoft—in what department? What languages does she speak? Where in Germany did she grow up? Oh, her elderly mother is ailing. That’s sad. Has she considered such and such treatment?

It’s striking to see how he works, how all con artists work—digging for information and for intimacy, creating a connection, genuine on one end and dead on the other. His methods are shrewd and calculated, and hardly limited to separating rich women from their fortunes. When Sgarbi and Egon Geis, his attorney, decided he should plead guilty on his first day in court, it was yet another bit of Sgarbi theater and manipulation, meant to elicit sympathy—and leniency.

“We discussed it and weighed it,” Geis tells me in his Frankfurt office. “The judge could have said ‘No, I will hear evidence and Mrs. Klatten will tell her story.’ But this was our strategy—that Mrs. Klatten would be happy not to testify and Mr. Sgarbi would get a lower judgment. He worked with me 100 percent on this. It was a risk, but we said to each other, ‘It just might work.’”

It worked so well that the sentencing panel of three judges and two jurors took only four hours to hand Sgarbi a lenient punishment that allowed him to keep the location of his millions secret. Also hidden are the Klatten sex videos. When I ask Sgarbi about the recordings, he offers a thin, tight smile and shrugs. It’s not inconceivable that, as Franziska indicated on the wiretap, they could surface in Barretta’s and Sgarbi’s wife’s cases.

But Sgarbi is more concerned with telling Cristine of his hardships in prison. “It’s difficult for me here,” he says. “I had business all over the world. I handled technology mergers and a 300-person translation company. Now I have nothing at all.”

Cristine notices Sgarbi playing with his wedding band. “I miss my 3-year-old daughter,” he tells her. “She does not know where I am and cannot see me for six years.” Sgarbi offers a pained wave to another visitor’s young daughter, who is playing on the floor nearby. As Cristine and I prepare to leave she asks Sgarbi if he needs anything. “A few magazines, maybe, and a newspaper,” he says. Cristine says that certainly, she will send him the subscriptions. When we say goodbye, he takes her by the hand and asks her to please write him.

Outside, it’s clear that Cristine is still struck by Sgarbi’s charms. In a sense, being in prison has been good for him—although he’s had to admit to working his con on Klatten, whose reputation has been irreparably tainted, confinement has made him even more unthreatening. “Yes, it’s strange, I know,” Cristine says. “I shouldn’t feel sorry for him, but I do.”

K
EVIN
G
RAY
writes about crime, politics, and foreign affairs. His work has taken him around the globe and into some of the weirder corners of American life. He has written about war in the Congo; sex slave traffickers in Romania; the Hezbollah uprising in Lebanon; and Chiquita-financed death squads in Colombia; as well as American serial killers, white supremacists, suburban swingers, and lesbians under siege in Mississippi. His work has appeared in
The New York Times Magazine, New York, News-week, Details, USA Today,
and
The Washington Post.
He is a former producer at CNN, where he covered business news.

Coda

There are three ways to land the jailhouse interview. Besiege the inmate with cloying letters appealing to his sense of injustice (because everyone in prison is innocent); besiege his lawyer with flattering phone calls (because every lawyer wants to preen in print); or do the prison pop-in. This last is the least palatable and, with some convicts, the most dangerous. I did this once with Kenny Kimes, a ruthless mama’s boy doing life in prison for helping his mother kill an elderly Manhattan woman to gain control of her town house, and facing death row in another slaying. Kenny was not happy with me when I appeared uninvited in his visiting area. But like many pent-up men, he needed to talk. He talked for several hours over two visits. He then tried to convince me to come back for a third. Sensing something creepier than usual in his tone, I balked. Besides, I already had the goods. So instead, Kenny invited a young TV reporter to visit him, then grabbed her around the neck and held her own pencil to her eye, threatening to kill her unless the prison let him see his mommy. The stand-off lasted hours before Kenny finally gave up.

I had never done the pop-in in a foreign country and didn’t know what I risked with the inmate or with the guards. So it was with some hair standing up on the back of my neck that I walked into Munich’s Stadleheim prison for the first and only time to talk to Helg Sgarbi, completely uninvited. I had sent Sgarbi the cloying letters, but had no answer. I had done the J-School write-around reporting and had great material. But my editor didn’t want a great write-around. He wanted Sgarbi. I made sure to visit Sgarbi’s lawyer in Frankfurt first. He offered to sell me an interview with his client, a journalistic no-no. But I managed to take his business card—and used it at the prison to open the gates. Once inside, I didn’t know if they’d shut for good behind me if Sgarbi freaked out. Sgarbi, it turned out, was upset, but more upset that his attorney had spoken to me. That little conflict became a conversational gambit, opening Sgarbi up to dialogue on a point of mutual interest. That visit also educated me on the fine points of his case and turned me into an unlikely insider. And like many imprisoned men, his talk began to flow after a bit.

Sgarbi continues biding his time in Stadleheim. Though he has no contact with his infant daughter or with his wife (whom Italian prosecutors have charged as a coconspirator in his crimes), he has reason to be content. Sgarbi has never revealed the whereabouts of the $10 million he received from scamming Susanne Klatten, the BMW heiress. His reputation may be in tatters, but if he has access to the money, he can start over nicely.

FROM
The New Yorker

I

T
HE FIRE MOVED QUICKLY
through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

Willingham told the Barbees to call the fire department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”

Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”

More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door.

Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”

“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”

While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house, cradling Amber. As she was given CPR, Willingham, who was twenty-three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go into the house,” he said.

Willingham was taken to a hospital, where he was told that Amber—who had actually been found in the master bedroom—had died of smoke inhalation. Kameron and Karmon had been lying on the floor of the children’s bedroom, their bodies severely burned. According to the medical examiner, they, too, died from smoke inhalation.

News of the tragedy, which took place on December 23, 1991, spread through Corsicana. A small city fifty-five miles northeast of Waco, it had once been the center of Texas’s first oil boom, but many of the wells had since dried up, and more than a quarter of the city’s twenty thousand inhabitants had fallen into poverty. Several stores along the main street were shuttered, giving the place the feel of an abandoned outpost.

Willingham and his wife, who was twenty-two years old, had virtually no money. Stacy worked in her brother’s bar, called Some Other Place, and Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, had been caring for the kids. The community took up a collection to help the Willinghams pay for funeral arrangements.

Fire investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze. (Willingham gave authorities permission to search the house: “I know we might not ever know all the answers, but I’d just like to know why my babies were taken from me.”) Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection. He was tall, with a crew cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after graduating from high school, in 1963, he had joined the Navy, serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire—or what he calls “the beast”—for more than twenty years, and had become a certified arson investigator. “You learn that fire talks to you,” he told me.

He was soon joined on the case by one of the state’s leading arson sleuths, a deputy fire marshal named Manuel Vasquez, who has since died. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. In the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” a heroic arson investigator says of fire, “It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling.” Vasquez, who had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it.” Another was “The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter.” He cultivated a Sherlock Holmes–like aura of invincibility. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had ever been mistaken in a case. “If I have, sir, I don’t know,” he responded. “It’s never been pointed out.”

Vasquez and Fogg visited the Willinghams’ house four days after the blaze. Following protocol, they moved from the least burned areas toward the most damaged ones. “It is a systematic method,” Vasquez later testified, adding, “I’m just collecting information…. I have not made any determination. I don’t have any preconceived idea.”

The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a ruin. Upon opening the back door, Vasquez observed that there was just enough space to squeeze past the refrigerator blocking the exit. The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires; a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots. In the kitchen, Vasquez and Fogg discerned only smoke and heat damage—a sign that the fire had not originated there—and so they pushed deeper into the nine-hundred-and-seventy-five-square-foot building. A central corridor led past a utility room and the master bedroom, then past a small living room, on the left, and the children’s bedroom, on the right, ending at the front door, which opened onto the porch. Vasquez tried to take in everything, a process that he compared to entering one’s mother-in-law’s house for the first time: “I have the same curiosity.”

In the utility room, he noticed on the wall pictures of skulls and what he later described as an image of “the Grim Reaper.” Then he turned into the master bedroom, where Amber’s body had been found. Most of the damage there was also from smoke and heat, suggesting that the fire had started farther down the hallway, and he headed that way, stepping over debris and ducking under insulation and wiring that hung down from the exposed ceiling.

As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter, they noticed deep charring along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down, and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped like puddles.

Vasquez’s mood darkened. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway into the children’s bedroom. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which is why investigators refer to them as “pour patterns” or “puddle configurations.”

The fire had burned through layers of carpeting and tile and plywood flooring. Moreover, the metal springs under the children’s beds had turned white—a sign that intense heat had radiated beneath them. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not normal.”

Fogg examined a piece of glass from one of the broken windows. It contained a spiderweb-like pattern—what fire investigators call “crazed glass.” Forensic textbooks had long described the effect as a key indicator that a fire had burned “fast and hot,” meaning that it had been fuelled by a liquid accelerant, causing the glass to fracture.

The men looked again at what appeared to be a distinct burn trailer through the house: it went from the children’s bedroom into the corridor, then turned sharply to the right and proceeded out the front door. To the investigators’ surprise, even the wood under the door’s aluminum threshold was charred. On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door, Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains, which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an accelerant.

The men scanned the walls for soot marks that resembled a “V.” When an object catches on fire, it creates such a pattern, as heat and smoke radiate outward; the bottom of the “V” can therefore point to where a fire began. In the Willingham house, there was a distinct “V” in the main corridor. Examining it and other burn patterns, Vasquez identified three places where fire had originated: in the hallway, in the children’s bedroom, and at the front door. Vasquez later testified that multiple origins pointed to one conclusion: the fire was “intentionally set by human hands.”

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.

The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.

P
OLICE AND FIRE INVESTIGATORS
canvassed the neighborhood, interviewing witnesses. Several, like Father Monaghan, initially portrayed Willingham as devastated by the fire. Yet, over time, an increasing number of witnesses offered damning statements. Diane Barbee said that she had not seen Willingham try to enter the house until after the authorities arrived, as if he were putting on a show. And when the children’s room exploded with flames, she added, he seemed more preoccupied with his car, which he moved down the driveway. Another neighbor reported that when Willingham cried out for his babies he “did not appear to be excited or concerned.” Even Father Monaghan wrote in a statement that, upon further reflection, “things were not as they seemed. I had the feeling that [Willingham] was in complete control.”

The police began to piece together a disturbing profile of Willingham. Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1968, he had been abandoned by his mother when he was a baby. His father, Gene, who had divorced his mother, eventually raised him with his stepmother, Eugenia. Gene, a former U.S. Marine, worked in a salvage yard, and the family lived in a cramped house; at night, they could hear freight trains rattling past on a nearby track. Willingham, who had what the family called the “classic Willingham look”—a handsome face, thick black hair, and dark eyes—struggled in school, and as a teenager began to sniff paint. When he was seventeen, Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services evaluated him, and reported, “He likes ‘girls,’ music, fast cars, sharp trucks, swimming, and hunting, in that order.” Willingham dropped out of high school, and over time was arrested for, among other things, driving under the influence, stealing a bicycle, and shoplifting.

In 1988, he met Stacy, a senior in high school, who also came from a troubled background: when she was four years old, her stepfather had strangled her mother to death during a fight. Stacy and Willingham had a turbulent relationship. Willingham, who was unfaithful, drank too much Jack Daniel’s and sometimes hit Stacy—even when she was pregnant. A neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, “Get up, bitch, and I’ll hit you again.”

On December 31st, the authorities brought Willingham in for questioning. Fogg and Vasquez were present for the interrogation, along with Jimmie Hensley, a police officer who was working his first arson case. Willingham said that Stacy had left the house around 9 a.m. to pick up a Christmas present for the kids, at the Salvation Army. “After she got out of the driveway, I heard the twins cry, so I got up and gave them a bottle,” he said. The children’s room had a safety gate across the doorway, which Amber could climb over but not the twins, and he and Stacy often let the twins nap on the floor after they drank their bottles. Amber was still in bed, Willingham said, so he went back into his room to sleep. “The next thing I remember is hearing ‘Daddy, Daddy,’” he recalled. “The house was already full of smoke.” He said that he got up, felt around the floor for a pair of pants, and put them on. He could no longer hear his daughter’s voice (“I heard that last ‘Daddy, Daddy’ and never heard her again”), and he hollered, “Oh God—Amber, get out of the house! Get out of the house!”