A Quiet Vendetta

Hartmann met his baptism of fire. Luca Visceglia had been an insider, one of the few Federal investigators that spoke directly with the crime family members when they came in for questioning. Ray transcribed interviews, he boxed tapes, he checked inventories of evidence, he filed photos and videotapes, and learned a great deal about what these people had done and why they had done it. Fascinated by the underlying causes of such actions he studied Stone and Deluca’s Investigating Crimes, Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation by Charles and Gregory O’Hara, and Geberth’s Practical Homicide Investigation. When Visceglia was made Deputy Investigative Director for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Organized Crime he was asked to select his own staff. He selected Ray Hartmann, and Ray made himself indispensable. Ironically, though the stress of his work would be the thing that finally drove him and his wife apart, it was in amidst the madness of one of those cases that he met Carol Hill Wiley. Summer of 1989, stationed at the New York District Attorney’s Office, Visceglia, Hartmann, and the three others who made up their team, were asked to undertake a refiling of all materials relating to the triple murder of Stefano Giovannetti, Matteo Cagnotto and Claudio Rossi. Giovannetti, Cagnotto and Rossi were themselves soldiers for an arm of the Genovese family. They had worked beneath Alessandro Vaccorini, one of Peter Gotti’s right-hand men, and under his direction they had carried out at least seventeen known murders between them. They lived together, worked together, and were together in a Lincoln Towncar leaving the outskirts of Brooklyn when tirespikes had brought their vehicle to a shuddering halt. From the verge behind the fence at the side of the highway, witnesses had given varied reports of between four and nine men levelling semi-automatic rifles at the car and turning it into a spaghetti strainer. The driver and his three passengers were blended into mystery meat. The monochrome photographs of the murder scene could in no way have done justice to the actuality of what crime scene investigators found when they closed off the highway and went down there.

Carol Hill Wiley, a twenty-two-year-old New Yorker, brunette, petite, a wicked sense of humor, green eyes, drop-dead-gorgeous smile, had been on assignment under the aegis of the New York State Supreme Court’s training program for legal interns and secretaries. She had majored in law herself, had set her heart on a private practice by the time she was thirty, and would have pursued that goal paramount to all else had she not had that same heart stolen by the seemingly reserved and yet somehow strangely fascinating Ray Hartmann. Hartmann, as far as Carol could see, was serviceably handsome, five-foot ten or eleven, sandy-colored hair and blue eyes, with a kind of wasted look about him that told of surviving regardless of something bad. Pressed together by duty and obligation, many were the nights that she and Ray Hartmann had stayed late in the dimly-lit office on the corner of Adams and Tillary in Brooklyn Heights, right there in the shadow of the Supreme Court building itself. Afternoons they took to walking down to Cadman Plaza to eat their lunch, and there – the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges to their right, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to their left – they got to talking. It was outside the NYC Transit Museum that Ray Hartmann first kissed Carol Hill Wiley. It was a cold Tuesday in the latter half of December 1989. They were married on 10 February 1990. They moved to an apartment near Lindsay Park in Williamsburg, and there they stayed until Carol got pregnant. Two weeks into her second trimester they moved across the East River and bought a two-bedroomed apartment in a three-storey walk-up in Stuyvesant Town. Despite the lengthy journey each day, back and forth across the Williamsburg Bridge, Ray and Carol Hartmann found some small compensation in the fact that her simple request to be assigned to Luca Visceglia’s unit was approved. At least they could travel together, work together, go home together.

It stayed that way until Jessica was born, and then Carol decided, without pressure or persuasion, that she would be happier spending her days as a mother rather than examining photographs of dismembered, burned, drowned, decapitated bodies. Money was adequate though not extravagant, and money, lack of, could never have been cited as a contributory factor in the dissolution of the Hartmanns’ marriage. Rather, perhaps more accurately, it was a combination of factors on both sides. For Carol, having left the employ of the District Attorney’s Office, there was a gradual disassociation from the work that she had done. She began forgetting the way in which the sounds and images and words could haunt your thoughts irrespective of your location. Ray went in to work and dealt with these matters every single day, and it was not hard to become embroiled in the darkness that such work generated. Carol’s days were spent looking after Jessica, a remarkably bright and enthusiastic child, and as soon as Ray walked back through the front door she would want to regale him with the many miracles she had witnessed in their daughter that day. Ray, oblivious to the world everyone else inhabited, would often be distracted, curt, brusque and inadequately interested. He started to drink, just that swift half-inch of scotch to smooth off the edges when he came home, the single drink before dinner, and then it became an inch of scotch and a can of beer with his meal, and then sometimes he would shut himself in the den and watch TV, a six-pack on the floor by his feet.

In July of 1996 he shouted at his five-year-old daughter. Wanting to show dad her painting she repeatedly knocked on the door of the den, and Ray – suffering from a migraine which was not surrendering to either Excedrin or Michelob – tore the door open and screamed at the top of his voice: What in fuck’s name do you want for Christ’s sake?

Jessica, shattered, crying, completely unaware of what she might have done to prompt such a reaction, ran to her mother. Carol said nothing. Not a word. Within fifteen minutes she had packed some overnight things into a holdall and left the house.

Ray Hartmann fell into the abyss; the abyss populated by all drunks where self-abnegation, self-pity, self- recrimination, self-loathing and crying are the only footholds marking the way back out. The expression on Carol’s face had been as startling and sudden as an epinephrine injection, and it made Ray Hartmann look seriously at what he was becoming. He was becoming someone even he didn’t like, and that was the worst kind of person of all.

Carol and Jess came back three days later. It was another seven months before Ray Hartmann raised his voice again. This time Carol and Jess went upstate to Carol’s mother’s place and stayed a week. Ray went to an AA meeting. He began the Twelve Steps. He realized he was perfectly capable of being a scumbag of the lowest order, in fact perfectly capable of becoming the bacteria on the amoeba on the scumbag in question, and he didn’t drink again for nigh on a year.

The incident that precipitated the separation of Carol and Ray Hartmann occurred five weeks before her actual departure in December of 2002. Ray had worked late, as was ordinarily the case when a particular investigation was being prepared for the Attorney General’s Office. He and Visceglia had secured an inside line on one of the defendant’s former girlfriends and she had agreed to testify. She was neither a drug-user, ex-felon, or prostitute, nor an employee of any legal, judicial, police or intelligence agency. She was a star, a perfect and exemplary witness. She could place the defendant in a particular location at a particular time. The simplicity of this was that he would go down. A stream of fabricated alibis could be undone with her words. She was a woman of substance, a good speaker, and she wasn’t afraid.

The evening before Ray Hartmann and Luca Visceglia were to present her as-yet-unsworn affidavit to the Grand Jury, an affidavit that would have earned her federal protection, she was found in a motel room off Hunters Point Avenue near the Calvary Cemetery. This woman, thirty-seven years of age, a respectable background, a good education, who never touched a reefer in her life, had overdosed on cocaine. She was found naked, one hand and one foot bound to the frame of the bed, her mouth gagged, a selection of sex aids scattered across the mattress, and a butt plug in her ass. Once a rape kit had been done there was evidence that she had engaged in vaginal and anal intercourse with at least three different men. The three men were located through their DNA and hair samples. All three were interrogated separately. All three gave exactly the same story. They were male prostitutes, they had all been called and given a motel room address, they had all been promised a thousand dollars if they appeared at a particular time on a particular day. There they would find a woman gagged and tied to the bed. She would have a pillowcase over her face. It was her wish that they fuck her, all three of them one after the other, first in the regular way and then in the ass. She wanted to be slapped around a bit, she wanted them to call her a whore and a bitch, other such things, and once they were done they should leave her exactly where they found her. The money would be in the bedside table drawer. These guys were rent-boys. These guys had seen and done worse every day for most of their adult lives. This was New York. They did what they were asked to do, they took their money, and then they left. No questions asked, no answers required. Whoever had staged this ‘party’ must then have come in and administered the lethal dose of cocaine. There was nothing to suggest that the victim had not administered it herself, after all she had one hand free and could quite easily have scooped a handful out of the clip-top baggie of coke that was right there on the pillow beside her. In fact, there was evidence of cocaine on her hand, under her nails, around her mouth and nostrils. It could have been done. It