I've thought a lot about how to do this. I still haven't come up with a fine, linear way to present it. My case is very convoluted and complex. Not the legal aspect, that's rather simple, but the story leading up to it and the twists and turns that ensued. I'll present it as best I can and hope you can follow along. Some may seem dry at first. But like learning a new language, you need to know basic vocabulary and grammar before it all starts to make sense. I have to explain the players and the background for the latter part to seem as incredible as I promise it will.
We have to start somewhere and so we begin at the beginning. With Fred - that is Fred Sawyers. I had been chatting on AOL since about 1995-96. At some point in 1997 I met a great guy who lived in New Hampshire. He was about 24, good looking based on his pictures and lots of fun to talk to. I no longer remember his name. I would not know it until much later but this was Fred Sawyers (a lonely, sad sack, down and out wretch in Indianapolis). He used a different name and didn't live in NH but it was Fred. We chatted for a few weeks and became friends. He introduced me to his older brother who was also on-line (also Fred). His brother was a state trooper, he said. From chatting with them they both seemed like very caring, loving guys. They told me separately that the younger brother would bottom for his brother and some of his brother's police friends. I had never encountered incest except in jokes about Appalachia. This was the first time I had spoken to someone who engaged in it.
We must have chatted for probably 2 months when the older brother told me that the younger one had been badly beaten. The story was very convoluted and had something to do with someone he had arrested previously seeking revenge. The younger brother was in a Worcester, MA hospital. I told him I wanted to drive up. I went to school in Worcester and knew that hospital well. He convinced me not to come. I called the hospital and asked for a room number, I wanted to send flowers. They said they had no record of the name I was calling about. The older brother told me they had to put his brother under an assumed name because the perp hadn't been caught and might come back for him. The next day the older brother told me that his younger brother had died of his injuries. At first, I felt awful. I really liked this guy and although we hadn't met I had real feelings for him, if that is possible on-line. Then slowly - I know I'm an idiot - this all didn't seem to piece together. Little clues that the brothers were the same person started to materialize. Then I felt really pissed off that someone would do something like this, although he continued to deny it. I blocked their screenames and that was that.
Fred wasn't done with me though. I was too good to be true, having been this gullible for so long. He then created another persona and contacted me to chat. He was now a married man in Virginia (he would end up being about a dozen other people). It was this man in Virginia who told me he had a lover on the side named Fred. He said I should chat with him sometime and that he was moving shortly to the mid-west.
{NOTE: Any use of the word 'met' in connection with these Internet discussions means encountered on-line not met in person.}
Up until the moment I met this man in Virginia, I had never thought about sex with children, never discussed it, or knew anyone who did. I was never abused as a child and didn't know anyone who had been. It was Fred, posing as this married man who told me that he was having sex with his son and that he included Fred, his lover.
Frankly, I was a deeply repressed homosexual and the topic of sex, any sex - especially taboo sex - was very titillating to me. I wasn't hard up for sex. I started late in life but I had by that point slept with many men. But I was very, very deep in the closet and never discussed sex or my sexuality with anyone I actually knew. Over the next 3-4 years I started chatting regularly with Fred. I would come to learn much later that he played a few different parts - different screenames - to help foster my voyeuristic curiosity into the lives of people who engage in child sex and incest.
Fred was the most pathetic person I had ever met. He would tell me I was his only friend. He said he had been badly abused, physically and sexually, as a child by his stepfather. He had a meager existence. A low-paying job as a clerk, a shithole apartment, and no social life. I don't know why now or then, but I felt very sorry for him. I can't explain it to myself so I can't explain it to you. I sent him some money on a few occasions because he told me he was near eviction. I also sent him some gifts - one of which was a VCR paid for with company funds. But in all that time and even now, I have never met Fred. Seems utterly crazy to take such an interest, show so much attention, to someone you've never met. I know. Crazy.
In early 2000 I had decided I had had enough of Fred. The lurid chats and his constant need for my attention on-line were getting to me . I sent him an e-mail telling him I was canceling my AOL account. I told him it was due to a lack of time to spend on-line and had nothing to do with him. I wished him well. A few days later a box arrived at my home with some meager possessions and a suicide note. Fred explained that he was killing himself because without me as his friend he had nothing to live for. Anyone of you would have tossed the box and put it out of your mind as the workings of a deeply disturbed person. And rightly so. For whatever reason I freaked. I believed everything Fred had told me up till this point and I firmly believed I was the cause of his death. I thought my actions harsh and selfish. I felt horrible. {I retain to this day a certain gullibility. I can't see a reason why on a personal level people would lie so elaborately so I tend to believe them. In business, it's another story. But in day to day interaction with people I've never understood the point of doing it, so I don't expect it.}
I immediately reactivated my AOL account and sent him an e-mail. His account was still active. A few days later I received a response telling me that he had tried to kill himself and was now in a hospital. I felt truly awful. He made me promise not to disappear from his life again and I reluctantly agreed. Prior and subsequent to that episode Fred and I talked a lot about sex. All kinds of sex including with children. As time went on we talked about sex less and less to the point that it wasn't mentioned in the final days that we spoke. I spoke of my life and he spoke of his. As time went on we spoke infrequently. At no time ever did we trade pictures. Fred sent me dozens of pictures of himself but never anything illegal. At no time did I ever send him a real picture of me. With the exception of one guy in NYC, I had never sent a real picture of myself to anyone on-line during all those years. I was consumed with the notion of being outed. I had told Fred I worked as a VP for a company, and later when I went to HDC, I got a job running a real estate company. At no time did I ever mention Rudy Giuliani or HDC. In my mind it would have been personal and professional suicide to chat as freely as I was and reveal what I did and whom I knew. I will be borne out on this statement later.
Cut to spring 2001. During the prior year and half Fred had tried to kill himself again, was confined to a mental institution, found a new, still pathetic job, developed leukemia and started a fledgling on-line business, or so he told me. At this point I had pretty much had enough. I had started to doubt some of his claims (I know you would have disbelieved him from the start), but even so, I was just simply tired of being this guy's sole link to the world. The one thing that hadn't changed according to him was that he still had no friends (with one exception I'll get to later). He told me his cancer support group had chipped in and purchased a ticket for him to visit NYC, the place he wanted to see most in the world. He wanted to stay with me. I blew up and told him I had enough. He was manipulating me and I was done. That was the last time we chatted. He sent me dozens of pleading e-mails over the next 8 months begging me to talk to him again. I resolved not to answer a single one. And I didn't. Now, had I canceled my AOL account that spring or even just changed my screename I would never have been investigated, indicted or gone to prison. The great error happened at that moment. But I was lazy and had that screename invested in all my accounts, banking on-line, billpay and many other things. It would have been a major hassle to change it. My guess is Fred would have given up once he came across a removed e-mail address. But time has a way of festering peoples hostilities. And if one is deeply disturbed the consequences even more unpredictable.
I had decided that although I could have stayed on as President of HDC in the Bloomberg Administration, I would leave HDC. The day before my interview with the transition committee on Dec. 18th I had an epiphany. It suddenly dawned on me that I wasn't a civil servant and I had come into government to work for and serve Rudy Giuliani. I didn't particularly admire Mike Bloomberg or the team he was assembling. Sitting at my desk I said to Luke Cusack, "Why am I staying?" My goal was to turn HDC around from the moribund state I had found it in and put it back on a path to financing significant amounts of housing. I had done that. So I called the head of the committee, Alan Weiner, and told him I was withdrawing. Passage of time leads people to think I left HDC because of the investigation. There was no investigation in mid-December of 2001.
I
announced I would leave on Feb. 1st. Most people aren't aware that
Rudy and Tony Carbonetti had gotten an agreement from Bloomberg to keep
certain Giuliani Administration appointees. There was a mad scramble
in those final days to get on, what we all called, the "Must Hire
List." My name was in the top five of that list so there's no question
i would have been retained. Bloomberg was not doing anything back then
to piss off Rudy.
A few weeks before I left HDC I received an e-mail from Fred. It said, in very angry terms, that he was going to tell everyone I was gay (true), that we had discussed sex with children (true) and that we had traded child pornography (not true). He blamed me for ruining his life and that he wasn't going to allow himself to be discarded like this. He was going to make me pay. At first I didn't get what this was about. Why the angry e-mail out the the blue and why make up the trading of pictures? Why now?
The full answer didn't come till much later. He sent this at the behest of Tom Robbins, Village Voice reporter. At first I ignored it. But I was, as ever, completely terrified of anyone finding out I was gay. I thought the best thing to do was threaten Fred with prosecution. I wrote him back and said I had spoken to a lawyer (which I hadn't) and that this was harassment and blackmail for my attention. Blackmail doesn't have to be for money. Robbins had put him up to this and helped him write it in order to confirm that Fred knew me. Unbeknownst to me at that moment Fred had sought out a reporter to tell his story to. He found the one reporter who hated me and my family more than any other, Tom Robbins.
I'll conclude Part 1 here. The next part will detail the chats that appeared in the Village Voice, how Fred and Tom Robbins worked as a team to create those chats to appear as though they were from me, how those fabricated chats were used by the Government as evidence (until it was revealed that they were concocted), how the prosecutor protects Fred to this very day and how the betrayal by my father begins in earnest with the hiring of my first attorney.
Stick around I promise this only gets more intriguing.
This is great reading. It reminds me of Armistead Maupin, one of my favorite authors. I can't wait untill part II.
Posted by: cowleyrobin | February 11, 2009 at 03:45 PM