My Stolen Son Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - CAUGHT

  CHAPTER 2 - A DREAM IS BORN

  CHAPTER 3 - BROTHERLY BOND

  CHAPTER 4 - PUSH AND PULL

  CHAPTER 5 - THE OPENING ACT

  CHAPTER 6 - LATE FOR BREAKFAST

  CHAPTER 7 - KIDNAPPED

  CHAPTER 8 - THE SEARCH BEGINS

  CHAPTER 9 - GET RID OF THE EVIDENCE

  CHAPTER 10 - PLEASE, GOD, THERE’S BEEN A MISTAKE

  CHAPTER 11 - ALL I DID WAS KILL HIM

  CHAPTER 12 - THE FUGITIVE

  CHAPTER 13 - HUNTING

  CHAPTER 14 - THE WORST OF ALL CASES

  CHAPTER 15 - CROSSROADS

  CHAPTER 16 - ALPHA DOG

  CHAPTER 17 - HOLLYWOOD’S ENDING

  CHAPTER 18 - SON RISE, SON SET

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

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  MY STOLEN SON

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the authors

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley mass-market edition / September 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Markowitz and Jenna Glatzer.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-44301-9

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  To my son,

  I am so sorry.

  —Mom

  CHAPTER 1

  CAUGHT

  Well, it wasn’t a Mercedes, but it would have to do. He was driving a 1976 Volkswagen Beetle and moving from apartment to apartment near Rio de Janeiro. Gone were the days at the Bellagio in Las Vegas and the model girlfriend who’d tattooed his name on her lower back. He’d met an older woman named Marcia Reis and latched onto her because he saw her as his ticket to freedom.

  He’d told Marcia that he was in some kind of trouble in the United States and that’s why he had moved to Brazil, but he probably hadn’t mentioned that the trouble was that he orchestrated the execution of an innocent fifteen-year-old boy. His documentation said his name was Michael Costa Giroux, and he claimed to have been born in Rio de Janeiro, to Canadian and Brazilian parents. People around him thought that seemed a bit odd, because Giroux certainly didn’t look like a native, and his Portuguese was barely passable.

  The truth was that Giroux was an American who had been on the run since August of 2000, when he was twenty years old. After a stint in Canada, where he decided it was just too cold, he chose Brazil because he liked the movie Blame It on Rio. By now, in 2005, he was living with Marcia in a modest apartment in Saquarema, a little fishing village known for attracting surfers.

  Neighbors there didn’t like him much. He drank a lot, and when he drank, he picked fights. Aside from that, Giroux didn’t speak much to anyone—a quick “Good day” at the bar, maybe. The neighbors did notice that the couple would sometimes host barbeques with out-of-town guests, and that Giroux would often jog along the beach with his two pit bulls. He sometimes taught private English classes or picked up side money as a dog walker, and he worked out with weights that he kept on the front patio.

  His domestic squabbles with Marcia were loud enough for people to hear, too. But Giroux wasn’t in this for love. He had hooked up with the thirty-five-year-old woman because he had heard about the tale of Ronnie Biggs, a British man who participated in the Great Train Robbery of 1963. After he was convicted, Biggs broke out of prison and hid out in Brazil, where he was able to avoid being extradited back to his country because he fathered a Brazilian child with his girlfriend. Brazil does not extradite criminals who have Brazilian children.

  Giroux thought this was the perfect plan, so he set out to find a woman who’d carry his child—and thus, his insurance policy that would keep him from serving any jail time if he were ever found. The child would help him get away with murder.

  He found what he wanted at a singles bar.

  “He said he was studying; he had come to Brazil to study,” Marcia Reis would later say. “When I met him, I thought he was very young. I thought he was a little lost. He had had a lot to drink.”

  But, she says, he was good to her—kissing her hands and feet, getting her everything she wanted—and that was enough to make her overlook whatever “dark secret” he had.

  Meanwhile, Giroux’s father stayed back in California, helping to keep detectives off his son’s trail. Having money helped, and his father had plenty of it, thanks to a flourishing drug-dealing business. He was a major marijuana supplier, and possibly dealt in other illegal substances as well. Through the years, he had gained many friends willing to do just about anything for him and his family—and in places where he didn’t already have friends, he could always buy some.

  It had been a long time since father and son had seen each other, but Giroux’s father still helped to take care of him, reportedly managing to get him twelve hundred dollars each month for living expenses even though the boy was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list and surely they both knew that the family was being closely watched.

  Maybe they had just let their guard down a little after almost five years. A long-lost American cousin was flying to Brazil and was going to meet Giroux and his girlfriend at an outdoor mall. Marcia was pregnant now and happily showing off her belly. The two of them had just taken seats at a table on the beach, waiting for their guest to arrive.

  As his cousin approached, Giroux walked over to her with his arms outstretched to g
ive her a hug . . . and instead, he found himself fitted with handcuffs.

  It wasn’t his cousin. Apparently he didn’t know her well enough to recognize her, and he simply assumed that the woman walking toward him must be his cousin. Instead, it was plainclothes federal police agent Kelly Bernardo, who had just been given the signal to move in.

  Bernardo’s team was close behind her. It looked like Giroux might have tried to run, except that he was in flip-flops and was clearly outnumbered. As the agents grabbed him and led him away toward their waiting car, Giroux’s girlfriend screamed out, “Kidnapping! Kidnapping!”

  Her screams summoned the military police from their kiosk across the street, and they drew their guns at the Interpol agents. The screaming and the violent standoff was enough to send people running, but the Interpol agents managed to stuff Giroux into their car and drive away.

  Minutes later, his girlfriend calmly walked down the strip and bought herself a cookie and a soda. She didn’t seem concerned; she had almost certainly already been briefed by her boyfriend on what to do when he got caught. A few phone calls and this problem would all go away.

  At the police station, it was soon confirmed that Giroux’s real name was not Michael Costa Giroux. His documentation was fake, though he spent two hours sticking to his story and insisting loudly that there must’ve been some kind of mistake.

  But it was no mistake. Fingerprints confirmed that “Michael Costa Giroux” was actually Jesse James Hollywood, the youngest person ever on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list. And yes, “Jesse James Hollywood” was really the name his parents gave him, named after an uncle but with a sense of homage to the outlaw. While he’d been on the run, he’d occasionally also used the pseudonym Sean Michaels, a black porn star of more than six hundred movies who sells “male performance enhancers,” creams, sex tips, and a replica of his own genitals online. He was not going to get away with any other false identities here, though. Hollywood was unquestionably caught, putting an end to the five-year international manhunt.

  In the Brazilian police precinct, he screamed in Portuguese at the officers about how they were violating his rights and how angry his father would be. Then he demanded a drink of water. They threw it at him, soaking his shirt and hitting him in the nose. No one was amused by this mini-thug’s arrogance.

  Back in the United States, on the same day of Hollywood’s arrest, his fifty-year-old father, Jack Hollywood, was also being arrested, on charges of manufacturing the date-rape drug GHB. It was no random coincidence that the two were arrested on the same day; detectives had carefully timed it to ensure that Jack Hollywood would be unavailable to bribe anyone when he found out his son was arrested in Brazil.

  Despite Marcia Reis calling out, “No! This can’t be! I have a son with him!” as agents drove Hollywood away from the outdoor mall, the tactic didn’t work in his favor the way it had for the train robber, for one simple reason: the train robber had had a valid passport, while Jesse James Hollywood was in the country illegally. Brazilian authorities didn’t worry about whether or not to extradite him; all they had to do was deport him as an illegal immigrant. He had no right to be in the country in the first place.

  So Brazilian officials turned the fugitive over to the U.S. FBI, and on March 8, 2005, Hollywood was on an airplane headed to Los Angeles International Airport. Because it was a deportation case instead of an extradition, officers were not allowed to be armed, nor to handcuff him—so they improvised, tying his arms behind his back with rope and covering it with a sweatshirt so as not to scare the other passengers. When he needed to use the bathroom, the officers had to cut the rope off him with nail clippers.

  The plane stopped on the tarmac so the officers could stuff Hollywood into the elevator meant for the food cart. Agents were waiting to catch him and arrest him at the bottom of the elevator, and the media—who had been alerted that he was going to be on this flight—was confused when he never stepped off the plane.

  In transit to the jail, Hollywood said nothing except, “My dad is going to be mad you guys got me like this.”

  Because he had not yet been read his rights, detectives couldn’t question him—but they could hope for him to talk on his own, so they talked to each other about things they thought might rile him.

  The Michael Jackson molestation trial had just begun, and one detective turned to another and said, “Isn’t it amazing that Michael Jackson took top newspaper headline over Jesse James?”

  That was all it took to get him agitated. For the rest of the ride, Hollywood talked, mostly bragging about how he evaded capture for so long. At no point did he take any responsibility for what he’d done or show any remorse. Instead, he said things like, “This is bullshit. I wouldn’t even be here if my name weren’t Jesse James Hollywood.” Then he went on and on about all the ways he had been wronged in life.

  At the Santa Barbara County Jail, Hollywood was booked and kept in solitary confinement.

  I fell to my knees when I heard the news. It had been so long since I had cried, really cried. It had been a long time since I had allowed myself to feel much of anything. But now I cried at the senselessness of it all, at the finality, at the selfishness and stupidity that had torn apart my family.

  Jesse James Hollywood killed my only child.

  CHAPTER 2

  A DREAM IS BORN

  It seemed like I had spent many years searching for a child to call my own. I was twenty-five when I had him—no old spinster, sure, but it had seemed like an unbearable wait to finally find the right man and the right time.

  When I did find the right guy, well, it wasn’t quite the typical love story. Not only did I meet the man of my dreams in a bar, but we met on Screw Night.

  One fine weekend in 1982, a staff member at a local San Fernando Valley bar handed each woman a plastic nut and each man a plastic screw as they walked through the door. The objective was to walk around trying to find your match. As if the excuse to walk around making innuendos toward the opposite sex wasn’t enough reward, you could also win a cash prize if you found the first winning match.

  “Would you like to see if we match?” I asked one man, walking over to his bar stool. I’d like to tell you we were the perfect fit, but we weren’t. “Too tight,” I said, and was about to walk away when he asked my name.

  “Susan,” I told him.

  He reached out and shook my hand and told me his name was Jeff. Little shock waves ran through our hands. His eyes were so gentle.

  “May I have your phone number, Susan?” he asked. “I’m good with numbers. If you tell it to me, I won’t forget it.”

  I already had two failed marriages under my belt. The first was a drummer who wanted to live off the land. I married him when I was seventeen, and we were divorced in nine months. Then, when I was nineteen, I fell in love with a much older man who had full custody of his three children. Their ages ran close to my own, but they didn’t hold that against me. They were great kids, and he was a great father and husband. There was just one problem: I longed for a baby of my own so much it ached. When we first got together, that’s what he said he wanted, too, but when it came down to it, he changed his mind. He was through having kids, he decided.

  But I wasn’t. All I really wanted in life was to be somebody’s mom. The need for a baby of my own was so strong that there was nothing I could do to convince myself otherwise. In four hours, I packed up four years’ worth of life and memories and took off—a decision that still leaves me with a lot of guilt. Those kids didn’t deserve to have another woman walk out on them. But I just hadn’t known what else to do.

  And now, as I stood before this man in this bar, something told me that maybe the third time would be the charm, after all.

  I gave him my number and went on my way. A few hours later, I was startled awake by the phone. It was 3 a.m. And it was Jeff.

  “Jeff? It’s late,” I said. “Call me another time.”

  I went back to sleep with a grin. He
had felt it, too.

  Like me, Jeff was recently separated. He had two children from his first marriage: Leah and Ben. Leah was six and Ben was four at the time of their split, and they were adorable. Unlike my ex, however, Jeff didn’t have custody: he saw the kids every other weekend. In between, we shopped for Jeff’s new bachelor pad and cruised on the high seas in his thirty-six-foot sailboat at Marina del Rey. He was my knight in a shining red Audi. Courting was wonderful, and time disappeared like cotton candy in my mouth.

  Jeff worked in his family’s business, an aerospace machine shop. He was a hard worker and usually worked late hours. I admired his work ethic and loved the way he treated me with kindness and affection.

  A little more than a year after our first date, my dream came true: we found out I was pregnant. It was unplanned but unconditionally wanted by both of us. Sure, it was a little out of order, but we had both been disillusioned about marriage—the idea of a wedding wasn’t high on our priority lists. The idea of a baby, though? Nothing else mattered. I felt like my life, my real life, had just begun.

  I ran over to my sister’s house to share the news. She already had two children, and both times she gave birth, it filled me with such a sense of longing. Of course I was happy for her, but I was also impatiently waiting for my own happy news. And now it was here. As she opened her door, I exclaimed, “I am pregnant!” We hugged, she and I, with baby in the middle. It was finally my turn.

  Jeff and I moved into an apartment together during my pregnancy. I kept a journal with details about every little movement I felt. He had hiccups for the first time on June 21; he kicked me in the ribs for the first time on June 25 . . .