“Fuck you!”
Whaaa? They were hollering at him. Jeez, they were pissed off. In fact, they hated his guts. Hell of a thing for a crusader who says he wore his first wire at age 18, in 1959, to expose racist hiring practices in segregated Baltimore.
“Sleazeball,” they were hissing behind his back. On the air and in print, there were anti-Abramovitz screeds. A reporter on the local CBS affiliate, which carries Abramovitz's tabloid-TV show, Hard Copy, sniffed righteously that though he was reporting on Abramovitz's most recent scoop, he wouldn't run the actual footage. Ethical reasons, you know.
Even in the streets of jaded Gotham, they were reviling Rafael. On a crosstown bus, I overheard an elderly woman harrumph to a friend as they perused the headlines concerning the alleged suicide attempt of 18-year-old Amy Fisher, A.K.A. the Long Island Lolita, a.k.a. the Teen Fatal-Attraction Shooter: “That TV reporter. He made that poor twisted girl try to kill herself. Disgusting man.”
Ladies, ladies. Rafael Abramovitz would like you to know that he's a nice guy, really. Fifty-two-year-old father of two grown daughters. Kinda rough around the edges (beard, cowboy boots, jeans). Prone to finishing his sentences with impatient scat-chat: “Baddaboo, baddabee.” Gave up his ponytail a while back but not his commitment to justice. “I'm just trying to document things I've heard,” Abramovitz says, a trifle sadly. “Then when I get the smoking gun, everybody acts like you've changed the odor in the room.”
So what stinks? The sulfurous reek of the Amy Tapes—what Abramovitz calls “the Truth about Amy.” Twelve hours before her demure plea bargain for putting a bullet in the head of one Mary Jo Buttafuoco, wife of her alleged lover Joey “She musta been obsessed with me” Buttafuoco, Amy Fisher was videotaped unawares in the Future Physique gym. There, she exchanged sweet nothings with her current amour, gym part-owner Paul Makely.
On this tape, which Abramovitz “obtained” through unspecified reportorial derring-do, young Amy, who moonlighted from high school as a beeper-wearing prostitute, does not play your standard sackcloth-and-ashes penitent. Amy says she wants a Ferrari. Money. Her name in the press. Sex in prison. The little dickens even makes a playful lunge at Makely's crotch.
I ask Abramovitz what he felt when he watched the tape for the first time. “It was as if a curtain had parted and you saw into a darkness that is chilling. Chilling,” he answers. He talks in the same tab-speak that lards his Hard Copy segments. “I brought in the storytelling technique,” he explains. ”You wouldn't say 'A woman was murdered.' You'd say, “Early one morning, on the last day of her life, so-and-so walked down to play with her dogs. . . The sun was shining. . . . Baddaboo, baddabee.'”
Citing a longtime fascination with what he calls “the human condition,” he says “nobody in the universe was more shocked than Rafael Abramovitz” upon seeing Amy's performance. Understand, he's talked to people who make Jeffrey Dahmer look like Dondi—folks who flay for fun. But how deep was his shock? There are some in the Fourth Estate who would love to “obtain” a tape of the conversation ejaculations that occurred as Abramovitz and Hard Copy Executive Producer Peter Brennan hunched over a video monitor, assessing their prize.
Brennan is credited with inventing tabloid TV, in 1986, when he created A Current Affair (ACA) for Fox, hiring fellow Aussie Steve Dunleavy as his on-camera talent. (Dunleavy's the guy who let the little spitfire in the William Kennedy Smith case punch and bite him in front of the cameras—after he produced nude snapshots of her honoring the proud manhood of an ex-boyfriend.) Dunleavy and Abramovitz worked together on ACA and Fox's The Reporters. And even though they're now on rival shows (Dunleavy stuck with ACA), they and Brennan are very tight. Abramovitz said that he and Brennan watched the tape together within hours of its being made.
Cozying up to the First Amendment, Abramovitz won't say how the tape was made, by whom, at whose instigation or for how much. And that's what everyone seems so ticked about&8212;that Makely must have been paid to set up Fisher. There is outrage that a reporter might have engineered this tender trap. Long Island beat reporters, who have covered the bejesus out of this story without the benefit of a checkbook, told me Makely had always made it clear he'd tumble for money.
“I've done it without money many a time,” Abramovitz counters, launching into a Geraldo-like narrative (how this Jewish reporter, “with this face and this name,” journeyed “at gunpoint” into the very heart of Aryan darkness to interview some white-supremacist loonies). He's sick of all this blather about money. What about Amy's spin doctors? He's not going to be defense attorney Eric Naiburg's lackey or Buttafuoco's front man or Amy's apologist.
“I feel totally clean in this!”
Suddenly, we're on the mat—a real mongoose-and-cobra show. “Write what you want, I don't give a shit!” He's fed up. ”The moral dilemma here is presented by people who feel scooped,” Abramovitz says. “I'm one of the few people who know the truth, and I'm willing to live with the conjecture.”
Nonetheless, all this ignominy smarts. (”Hey, I'm a sensitive guy.”) He's upset that news descriptions of him have glossed over his journalistic chops—the years spent bearding gangsters in their Vegas dens for NBC's White Paper, the prestigious DuPont Award for a 1984 documentary on Alzheimer's disease.
“It's so unfair,” he grumps. On a day he finds out that rival ACA is going with a segment claiming Amy was planning to hatchet Mary Jo's children, Abramovitz admits to being a tad depressed. Calling from L.A., where Hard Copy is produced, he says he may never work again after this mess. He looked out into that crowd of snarling reporters at his press conference and thought, Oh, my God, they just don't understand anymore. They think I'm the enemy.
He figures something's screwy when reporters side with the confessed perp. “Who we setting up, the pope? She's a crim! You put a bullet in a woman's head, you're fair game. Amy Fisher took herself out of the realm of privacy and into the public domain. The fact that she wanted to make money out of it made her fair game.”
Honest, it pissed him off, this little loose cannon out on $2 million bail, “jazzing around town” in her car, seeing her man, talking trash, ordering big Italian meals with her “hick attorney,” while her victim was slurping baby food, owing to a paralyzed esophagus. Says Abramovitz, “Something got twisted as to what the crime was, who Amy was, who the victim was.”
Clearly, that perspective has gotten out of whack. Her fellow inmates have written to her, concerned about her weight. Is she eating okay? p“I told her I felt she was a victim,” said pen pal Daniel Wakefield, who is serving time for the rape of a local teen.
Ironically, what fanned the Amy-as-victim flames was Abramovitz's ancillary scoop. This was an audio recording of Fisher alleging unspecified abuse by her father and wondering aloud why her mother did nothing to stop it, why her parents ever had her. Sad Amy, bad Amy, live at five. It was all too much. Men had sold her out again. According to Naiburg, a former vibrating-be salesman, Fisher tried to kill herself after watching Hard Copy, by swallowing tranquilizers. This brought her some time in a psychiatric facility.
“Bullshit!” Abromovitz is honking now. He insists that the alleged attempt didn't come until after Naiburg had a conversation about the damning tape with the district attorney. He also insists that long before the tape was made and aired, Naiburg had tried to peddle his client for a cool million. There had never been any talk about getting Amy psychiatric help—just a deal to cover the cost of her bail. ”[Naiburg] made a tasteless remark about Italians and Jews, and then he offered her to me,” Abramovitz says. “He called the bail bondsman because he didn't even know how much money it was gonna cost. And I said to him, 'Nobody reputable is going to do it, call The National Enquirer.'”
Says Naiburg, “Mr. Abramovitz was somebody I gave the courtesy of letting come in and talk to me. There was no way I was ever going to do business with him.” Naiburg says Abramovitz was never on the “serious player” list, culled from the twenty o thirty production companies, networks and individuals he interviewed while trying to sell “exclusive rights” to Fisher's story. He does agree that Abramovitz has a talent for arousing passions: “I'm standing here with a calm voice, but inside my gut there is a fire burning right now.”
Such agita, on so many shifting fronts. Naiburg's client was out of jail, and getting herself into all this taped trouble, courtesy of KLM Productions, a hastily formed corporation that put up $60,000 toward Fisher's bail and paid her parents an additional $20,000 for the movie rights. KLM then sold the story to NBC. Stephen Sleeman, the grinning geek who helped Amy stake out hte Buttafuoco hom in exchange for $600 and a blow job, got $50,000 from NBC for a movie deal. Sleeman also appeared on ACA, describing how he'd ferried Amy to Home Depot to buy the little hatchet she said she needed to make hash of the Buttafuoco tots. (“I sez to her, 'You're crazy.'”) On-camera, Sleeman has the acuity of a turnip. But these days, stooge pay is damn good.
The payoffs continued to mount. Tri-Star anted up $300,000 for the Buttafuoco's cooperation on a movie for CBS: People reporter Maria Eftimiades is reported to have made a quarter-million on a quickie paperback and fees from NBC. Makely got an additional $21,000 from NBC. Estimates of the fee Abramovitz will not admit to paying Makely have run from $10,000 to $50,000.
This ain't chump change. And the size of the paychecks and the headlines make this chorus of Fourth Estate indignation ring hollow. To use Raf-speak, “The lid is off and the stench is everywhere.” Even if Abramovitz did set up and finance the whole sordid affair—and for all we know, he was running the camera—is that worse than what NBC did? Cutting a deal with the slimeball who says he staked out the Buttafuocos for sex and money, knowing that Fisher planned to plug a mother of two? And if legit newspapers condemned Abramovitz's methods, why did they print the entire transcript of his tapes?
For local news stations, for the TV and print tabs, even for national news shows, amy Fisher has been the little engine that could, pulling in readers and viewers, starring in countless “next up” news teases. No accounts ignored Abramovitz's Amy Tapes. Their message was obviously considered newsworthy. Group expiation seemed to come through the sport of beating up on the messenger. It's an age-old conundrum: If we're going to pillory the hookers, shouldn't we censure the johns?
Nobody made such a fuss when Abramovitz nailed his first big one, as a producer of ACA, in 1986: a home video of “Preppie Murderer” Robert Chambers playfully re-enacting his crime. He was seen twisting the head off a doll in the company of scantily clad young women&8212;some of whom had been friends with Jennifer Levin, the woman Chambers had admitted killing. Abramovitz insists that the Manhattan D.A. could have had that tape before Chamber's sentencing. He insists that while prosecutors may not pay money for that sort of thing, they do have subpoena power. What the D.A.'s office doesn't have, Abramovitz says, is a certain faith in the big brass balls of True Evil. “You know how I found the tape?” he asks. “I was dumb enough to believe it existed.”
While the rest of the press corps sat in the courtroom during the Chambers trial reading The Bonfire of the Vanities, then just out, Abramovitz was nosing around after rumors he'd heard about a Chambers party tape. “I walked into the defense attorney's office and said “I hear there's a videotape of your man doing coke,'” he recalls. “He says, 'Nonsense, it's reefer.' Trying to have a composed face, I said to myself, There is a tape! Then the chase began.”
He can't go into details, of course. Amendment Numero Uno. He will say the search involved trips out of New York and intense negotiations. In the interest of justice, he says, he hopes to heck Chamber's parole board saw his scoop.
Talk at length to Abramovitz, watch his oeuvre on tape, and it's clear he isn't overly impressed with the prosecutorial sector. This may stem from his time on the other side of the courtroom. He interrupted his journalistic career to work as a defense attorney, in the early Eighties. He tried criminal cases, mostly murders. “I picked my cases carefully, and I walked them,” he says. But the job made him wake up in a cold sweat at night. And it got him used to being openly loathed, day after day.
“You would walk into a murder trial, wearing cowboy boots, baddaboo. Everybody in the room would detest you—the prosecutor, the court officer. I would get up in front of a jury and say, 'Listen, you got no choice. I'm his lawyer. You don't like me, don't take it out on him. There's going to be a pregnant woman here I'm going to be ruthless with because I have to get the truth. If you don't think you can deal with that, please go sit on another jury.'”
He says his practice ended up “in the toilet” financially because of a huge police-brutality case in federal court—one in which he claims he won a $1.25 million verdict for the victims but was unable to collect. During the long trial, his office went to hell. And so it was that in 1986, he walked into Brennan's office, looking for work on this new “tabloid” show.
“Tabloid story” is a bad rap, he says, and reels off some tab plots from the classics: “Richard II, III, the Henrys, Romeo and Juliet. . . .” His favorite? “Oedipus Rex. There's incest, patricide, maiming self-mutilation, suicide. Nobody ever said Sophocles was sleazy.”
By this, our third conversation, Raf is sounding decidedly upbeat. He's got two more Amy segments in the can, the sun in shining, he's ready to rock, baddaboo. He's a reporter, dammit. “The truth? They can lock it up in Fort Knox. Lock it up in the basement of the White House with Fawn Hall's underwear. But you know something? I'm gonna get there.”
He spends so much time in the sewer&8212;doesn't it get to him sometimes? Nope. From time to time, Abramovitz says, he has these “revelations” on the job. He credits the “Witch of Matamoros” with making him think, really think, about the nature of evil. (You remember: She's the college student who sidelined as a drug czaress and black-arts priestess in Mexico and was caught sacrificing American tourists.) Before Abramovitz talked his way into prison to see her, he did his usual thing—made himself look at the crime-scene photos.
“They liked to kill people and butcher them,” he says of the witch's cult. “They had peeled off the face of one of their victims. You could still see the expression, but it was flat, two-dimensional.”
Next thing you know, he's in prison, staring at this 24-year-old woman, thinking how helpful it would be if there were a mark of Cain. “Suddenly, I got this revelation about evil,” he recalls. “If it exists, it's something that you only know in the act of perpetrating it. Or in suffering crime.”
He's not about to do either. But he just can't leave it alone. “the only reason I keep talking to people like that is I think that's where everything in life gets crystalized—in the horror of existence.”
Doubtless Sophocles would agree. And Joseph Conrad. And the Nielsen ratings. And maybe Peter Brennan, who has been on spin patrol, calling his pal Abramovitz “an investigative journalist in the finest tradition of Edward R. Murrow.”
The day before Abramovitz and I have our last chat, a man murdered four people in the Watkins Glen, New York, government office that collected his child-support payments. He then killed himself. Abramovitz says he's been lying in bed thinking about it half the night. One of the guy's victims was there by chance, filling in for someone. Just 28, the mother of two. Hell of a thing. Movie-of-the-week stuff. By force of habit, Abramovitz finds himself talking through a lead-in: “A woman gets up, gets her children ready for school, gets ready for work. She kisses those babies good-bye. . .” Badda-BOO!