King 7
Lut. George McGreevey was a year short of retiring when I met him in his office at the Totowa police station.
A thin balding man now, McGreevey looked on the Zarra 1967 arrest as the highlight of career, even if Zarra was later acquitted of criminal wrong-doing.
McGreevey's grey eyes glowed when he greeted me in his office, and he pumped my hand well enough to raise water.
"I'm glad you could find time for me," I said and sat, noticing the accumulation of framed photographs and newspaper accounts out of the local weekly newspaper decorating his walls. Most dealt with little more than park openings or color stories about driving tips for back to school, but he seemed as proud of them as he might have awards.
"No, no, it's my pleasure," he assured me, sitting himself not behind his desk, but in the chair beside it, folding his long legs as this was a ordinary chat, not an interview for another murder investigation. "It has been a long time since I've had a chance to talk about that day. Frankly, my fellow officers from that time are sick of me talking about it, and the younger people don't understand what a thrill it was to be part of such a series of events."
"You do understand I'm just looking to fill in some of the details leading up to the most recent shooting?" I said.
"Oh, yes," he said, sounding and looking like an overly enthusiastic puppy.
Apparently, he saw his playing a part in this investigation as a suitable bookend for his long boring career, one that started with murder and ended with murder, in which he could have an impact. I envisioned him telling both stories again and again to his grand kids as he had his fellow troopers over the years.
"Now, just to keep everything straight, let me tell you what I learned from the files and then you can correct any inaccuracies, okay?" I said.
McGreevey nodded and said, "go head."
"The series of shootings that set everything in motion occurred during Thanksgiving week 1967."
"That's right."
"And the investigation was still ongoing for some time afterwards."
"I don't believe it was ever formerly closed," McGreevey agreed.
"But sometime -- I guess late January early February 1968, you saw the suspected getaway car speeding down Union Boulevard out of Paterson."
"I saw a car speeding," McGreevey corrected. "I was on routine patrol on Totowa Avenue, and happened to be at the light when the car ran coming out of Paterson and into Totowa."
"According to your log from that night you then gave chase."
"I turned through the light and followed the car," McGreevey said. "I wasn't exactly chasing it as trying to keep up with it long enough to get an id so I could call ahead to Little Falls to intercept. I didn't think I could catch the car before it crossed out of jurisdiction."
"But you caught up long enough to make out that it was a gold colored GTO?"
"Yes."
"At what point did you realize you were following a vehicle that was possibly involved in a homicide."
"To tell you the truth, I didn't. But Phil Donnelly, the deck sergeant did and informed me of the fact. He also advised me that he was notifying the State Police barracks and the FBI, and that I should maintain visual sight of the vehicle until advised differently."
"At which point, the car turned off?"
"The car turned onto Route 80 west."
"Was the driver aware of your pursuit?"
"I don't know." McGreevey said. "That's the odd part of it. He was traveling fast, but wasn't driving in a way that made me think he was trying to lose me. I had my lights and siren on, so he must have known I was behind him. But he didn't speed up or veer away in any sign of panic."
"So you turned onto Route 80 as well?"
"Yes."
"And followed him?"
"All the way through Wayne, through Pine Brook, and into an area near Parsippany, at which point he stopped."
"He stopped? Why?"
"He apparently ran out of gas and rolled over to the side of the highway."
"What did you do?"
"I pulled up behind him and waited for other units to arrive."
"And then?"
"We surrounded the GTO with our cars, and then we got out. There were officers from four or five municipalities as well as the state police. We approached the car with our weapons out, ordering the driver to exit the car."
"Did he?"
"Not at that time."
"What was he doing?"
"From what we could see he just sat there in the driver's seat. He seemed to be shaking. I thought this might be the result of drugs, but when we yanked open the door, we found him inside sobbing."
"Found whom? Zarra?"
"Yes."
"Did he say anything?"
"He seemed to be moaning about someone, asking `why did he have to die?' and repeated this even as we snatched him out and slammed him against the car to cuff him."
"He didn't put up a fight?"
"He didn't even acknowledge us," McGreevey said. "He just kept on moaning. Even after we got him into the back of my car. And even after we got him back to the station and locked him up."
"What happened then?"
"We waited for the order to bring him down to the Passaic County Jail, which we did a few hours later."
"Was that the end of it?"
"Except what I read in the newspapers, how he was connected to that Fetterland character, and how his testimony proved Fetterland hadn't died in the leap off the falls. Do you suppose Fetterland survived this last leap?"
"No," I said. "He didn't survive."
McGreevey actually seemed disappointed.
***********
Martin, the assistant prosecutor who conducted most of the interviews with Zarra during that period, filled in the next piece during a telephone re-interview.
"The whole Totowa thing had nothing to do with Fetterland or the murders," he said.
"But Zarra was clearly upset about something."
"Indeed, and it took us a long time to get it out of him or anything else until we did."
"So what was he so upset about?"
"Apparently, his family got news earlier that day that his uncle, Charles Grimes, had been classified Killed in Action as the result of combat in Vietnam. The boy -- it seems -- looked up to the man as a father. The GTO was registered to Charles, and the boy -- suffering from the news -- decided to take the car out. It was a lucky thing for us he did."
"I don't understand."
"Zarra apparently used the car to help Fetterland with the crime."
"That much I gathered already."
"But he borrowed it from Charles while Charles was off in service. After all the shooting, apparently the boy decided to park the car and not move it again. The car could have sat in the family driveway for a year or for an eternity and we would have had no clue as to what happened with Fetterland. But once Zarra took it onto the road and we got to interview him, we learned enough to know Fetterland survived the leap from the Falls."
"But it didn't help you convict Fetterland?"
"No," Martin admitted. "He remained too slippery for us to the end. Perhaps he's part of the reason I retired early. I couldn't handle the growing corruption that allowed people like him to thrive."
"He's not thriving now."
"No, but Zarra may have to pay the price for doing the town's dirty work."
"Possibly," I admitted.
************
Doug Finn was considered in his prime the meanest guard in the Passaic County Correctional Facility. He never did anything illegal, or if he had he never got caught. Yet in most instances, he didn't have to.
"I always went right to the legal limit when I punished somebody," he told me during an interview at his home in the hills of West Paterson. "Sometimes I didn't have to punish a guy at all. I just let the place do it."
Finn was a huge man with a thick gray beard and eyes that scared me as I talked to him. The knuckles of both hands had a misshapen look that only came from excess misuse.
"There plenty of things you could do to punish people in that place," he said. "If a man gave you lip, you put him in the wrong cell for a few hours. After that, he'd behave. People also had accidents all the time. Sick call was full with people that broke bones for no clear reasons."
Finn claimed he had to be as mean as he was, citing records of the jail's population.
"Our jail was nearly as tough as a state prison," he said. "Even though people didn't spend more than a year with us, we had plenty of people there that were waiting trial or sentencing to other places. Those folks knew they weren't getting out from behind bars for a long time and wanted someone to take it out on. Sometimes, we provided them with someone as punishment."
"Is that what you did with Zarra?" I asked.
A blush rose to the face under the beard, and the eyes grew harder.
"I never tried to punish that boy," he said.
"But you put him in the wrong cell block?"
"That wasn't anybody's fault. We didn't have a lot of room in those days. His family should have bailed him out right away. Once we knew he had to stay overnight, we couldn't keep him in the bullpen any more. We moved him upstairs."
Zarra must have been scared after having spending most of his life passing outside the county jail whose front sat right out on Main Street as if intentionally situated to warn potential criminals of their possible fate.
Several cell mates from that time, who had since gone onto bigger and better things at the state facility in Rahway, said they could not forget Zarra for a number of reasons. Several remembered him sitting in a corner with his back pressed against the wall.
"Some of the nastier people in our block wanted to spoof him," Angelo Fantozzi told me, a gray-haired man at 58 who had spent nearly all his life since 18 behind bars. "He just looked so vulnerable. The fact is the guards wanted us to have him. They got bored when things went too easy, and new they could throw something in like this boy and have a good time watching us feast. The harder guys started in right away, hooting at the boy, telling him we were going to screw him up the ass once the lights went low."
Perhaps Finn didn't seek to hurt the boy, but several other guards who stood duty the first night, said they expected to see the boy "bleeding from every orifice" by morning. Many of the guards stood against the wall outside the bars, grinning in their anticipation of the events about to transpire.
"You have to understand," said Robert Valente, a jail guard then, who was later convicted of manslaughter after a bar fight and settled into working for Continental Can Company until it closed in January 1987. He was still collecting unemployment when I interviewed him. "We saw them all as animals anyway, most of whom would never pay for the crimes they committed or never got caught for the more serious offenses. What happened to them in the jail cell was only just."
"You're telling me letting that boy get fucked was just?"
"To us, he was a murderer."
"As it turned out later, he wasn't convicted of anything."
"I know. Which is why I'm glad things took the turn they did in the cell."
"But you didn't know what would happen that night?"
"No. We thought we did. We figured we would pretend not to hear his screaming when the pigs started to poke him."
"That'll teach him to not want to come back" one guard actually mumbled at the time, as another asked if Zarra had brought any Preparation H. "You're going to need it tomorrow morning."
And the prisoners filed passed at first, just taking stock of what they had, no need to move too quickly when they had all night, and could approach him any time they wanted and take whatever they wanted from him. What could he do to stop them when the cops wouldn't?
"What's your name, boy?" one of them asked.
"Maxwell," he said.
"He looks awfully fresh," another said, making a move to poke at Maxwell's stomach with the tip of his finger, as if poking a loaf of bread to see if it was done. "I would sure like to..."
That man's sentence ended with a scream as Zarra pinned back the man's hand to his own wrist.
"Let go! Let go!" the man howled, as others clamored at the bars, calling for action from the guards.
"I'll let you go when you leave me alone," Zarra said in a low voice only the man could hear. "My Uncle Charlie taught me how to cause a lot of pain without actually causing damage. Are you going to quit bothering me?"
"Nobody's bothering you! Let go!"
Zarra released the man's wrist and the figure staggered away, cradling his wounded limb, spoiling the humorous mood of the cell block as others began to eye him warily.
"People got angry because this kid wasn't what we expected," Fantozi said. "Some of them complained to the guards, who wanted to know what the matter was. I remember the wounded man pointing at the boy and yelling, 'he tried to break my arm.'
"`The boy?' one guard asked, staring at the man, then at the boy, shaking his head as he laughed. `You'll have to come up with something better than that, Jenks.'"
The guards vanished, eyeing Zarra with the same vicious humor as they had earlier, leaving the mouse in this den of lions. But no lion made an immediate move to take advantage of Zarra now, all aware that this mouse had claws and teeth, and was possibly a rat.
They would wait. They had the whole night and Zarra had to sleep sometime. Then they would make their move.
Zarra, however, did not go to sleep. Young enough and scared enough, he sat up all night.
Perhaps he waited for his family to come rescue him, believing this would only take a few hours and all he had to do is keep his eyes open until the guards called him to leave.
Only the guards never called. And the cut-throats eased closer again, impatient with their own plan, each licking his lips as if hungry to get close.
One leaped at Zarra all of a sudden, and Zarra, leaped aside, grabbing the man by the hand and elbow so that the forward momentum carried the prisoner head first into the wall.
Another jumped at Zarra from behind, but as the huge arms closed around him, Zarra slipped under them, elbowing the man's balls as he ducked to one side. Both men fell moaning. A third swung at Zarra's face as he rose from his crouch, a fist bearing down on Zarra's face that did not reach its target, diverted by Zarra's forearm as Zarra struck the man's throat with a kick. Gurgling sounded around this man's moan, and he followed his two predecessors in their retreat.
It did not end there.
The prisoners came again and again, this time in multiples, believing they could overcome this odd fish with pure numbers. They came two at a time, and two wounded men made their retreat together. They came three at a time, and they retreated, too. And then they came four at a time, and those, too, Maxwell drove back with a series of kicks or diverted blows.
But their attacks tested Zarra. Each time they came, they retreated more seriously injured than those who had previously attacked -- Zarra's control waning as he grew weary. He hit hard, and cared little about the injuries he inflicted, a sin his uncle would have scolded him for. Prisoners with make-shift knives found their wrists broken and their knives clattering on the floor. In the morning, the line of injured men outside the nurse's office ran the whole length of the hall, none of them with an adequate explanation as to how they had gotten hurt.
Even among those failing to seek medical attention, many piled from their bunks holding hands and eyes and arms, guards scratching their heads at the carnage and awed by the appearance of the weary but unscathed Zarra.
***********
But daylight must have only brought the additional realization that no one had not come to bail him out.
By 1987, most of the family members had moved out of the Paterson area, and only one responded to my calls, a grumpy, rude man living alone in a cabin in North Carolina. When I told him I wanted to ask him some questions about his nephew the man only moaned.
"That dead beat? What do you want to know?"
"Why no one came to bail him out of jail when he got into trouble twenty years ago."
"Because we thought a few days in jail would teach him a lesson, that's why," the man growled. "My brother Charlie spoiled the shit out of that brat, taking him here and there, teaching him this and that, making the boy think he could get through life as an artist rather than working for a living like the rest of us. We argued with Charlie all the time over that, telling him that when the boy's parents died, we inherited a responsibility to make sure he could survive. Charlie taught the boy how to fight, but he also put the bug in his head that he could live as an artist. An artist! What a crock. We had heard reports of the boy hanging out with the wrong people and even told Charlie. But Charlie only laughed at us and said boys have to learn things the hard way sometimes, but that Maxwell was basically good at heart. When Charlie went into service, the boy got even wilder. We couldn't keep a hold of him. We would punish him, and he would disappear for days at a time. We knew he was headed for no good unless we did something. When news came about Charlie's death, the boy went over the top. It was no surprise that he got arrested like he did. We just didn't realize he had been involved with a murder."
"So you let him sit in jail for three days?"
"We figured it might work," Grimes said. "Nothing we did worked."
"Are you aware of the trouble your nephew is in now?" I asked.
"You mean about the shooting at the Falls?"
"Yes."
"I saw something about in on the news."
"Do you have any thoughts about it?"
"Sure," the man said. "I'm thinking we should have left him in the jail for a few more days."
***********
Before the second day was half way through, the scoundrels and rats, pigs and foxes, edging near him again, waiting for him to weaken, despite a long night of fighting him.
"The boy has to sleep sometime," one of them whispered. "And we'll get to him then."
Even during the day, with his hand closed around the bars and the sunlight warming his face through the windows, he dared not close his eyes. The guards eyed him. The prisoners eyed him. The molted pigeons who landed on the window ledge eyed him, too.
"Don't you think of sleeping now, you fool," all seemed to say. "Don't you close your eyes for a moment."
At one point, Zarra requested a phone call. The guards refused.
"But I'm entitled to a call."
"One call. And you already made it."
"Please."
"You want trouble, you just keep nagging me, boy."
So the first day slipped away into the second night, and once more the wolves and vultures tested him, coming at him in twos and threes, to test his strength, to wear him down, and again each went away holding injured parts of their anatomy, bones broken, noses bleeding, eyes made purple, and again, the guards stared at these victims in utter disbelief as the veterans of this night's campaign filed into the infirmary in the morning, seeking aid and comfort Maxwell could not seek.
But this night had worn him badly. He could not maintain the pace, and many of the injuries he'd inflicted came because he'd lost his edge of control. He nodded over the breakfast table, men around him snorting their approval, he snored over lunch, and by supper, he could barely keep his head from falling into the soup.
"You look exhausted, boy," the black man across the supper table said, laughing -- a face that turned out to be Red Ball's
"You? How did you get here?"
"The same way you did," Red Ball said, "in handcuffs. Your friend's antics spoiled a lot of opportunities for me, and certainly stripped me of numerous protections. Thus, I'm forced to take another vacation."
Without the crimson light and darkness, Red Ball's face revealed a history of the street, providing a twisted and gnarled portrait of his life, full of scars and winkles of anguish, and his bald head glistened with sweat under the Florent lights.
"You're won't survive this night," Red Ball said.
"I'm all right," Zarra grunted, his head nearly falling from his hands as he pulled himself back from leaning on his elbows.
"You were fine," the black man said.
"I can take care of myself!"
"Can you?"
"You want me to prove my point?"
"Don't threaten me, boy," the black man said. "You aren't good enough to threaten me. You're young. You're quick. But your style is raw and you make mistakes."
"You know karate?"
"It's not my school, but I'm proficient in it," the man said. "I only have one degree black belt in that style."
"What do you want from me?" Maxwell asked.
"You," the black man said. "I want you to be my wife tonight."
"No."
"I can make you."
"You'd have to."
"Friend," the black man said, leaning over the table slightly, though not enough to draw a word of warning from the guards. "Even if you weren't tired, you couldn't beat me. You don't have years enough of practice to even come close. Maybe someday, not now. And now is all you've got. If you don't come to my bunk tonight, you'll be dead in the morning. I won't have to fight you. The rats'll tear you limb from limb, and the vultures will have their way with you -- doing a lot worse than I'd ever do."
"No. Leave me alone."
Zarra apparently spoke loud enough for one of the guards to take notice.
"Do you have a problem, buddy?" the guard asked, pressing the tip of his small black night stick into the space between Zarra's shoulder blades.
"No."
"Then let's not have any shouting, okay?" the guard said, and then walked away.
The shaven-headed black mean leaned across the table again.
"Well, friend?" he asked with one of his agonizing smiled. "You come with me now and I'll protect you. No one messes with me in this place."
"Go away," Zarra hissed. "I don't need you and I certainly don't want to be your wife."
Twenty-four hours later, the records show bail was posted and Zarra's released ordered. His signature for his possessions was somewhat wobbly, but and witnesses said he stumbled a lot leaving. But he left on his own two feet.
This was the last police record of him for the next twenty years.
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