Greetings USED KARMA readers! Let us all congratulate publisher Tony Dickey as we triumphantly herald USED KARMA's return to cyberspace. Dark forces have conspired to delay this blessed event, but the forces of light have once again prevailed!
Since we are now into a new year (by the Gregorian calendar, at any rate) one would expect this column to be devoted to my predictions for 1998. However, as I write this in December of 1997 I am simply not in the mood for predictions. (I wasn't in the mood last year, but my friend Steve Dixon prevailed upon me to make more predictions, which appeared during the new moon in Aquarius issue. I can resist anything except temptation.) No, friends, this month I am taking a departure from pontificating on global events in favor of focusing on a strange story that has been unfolding here in my neighborhood in New York City just a block away.
A very strange drama has been unfolding here in Manhattan during the past month. Here is a summary of the information that has appeared in the newspapers and in the local electronic news media, which may or may not be consistent with the actual facts. A local artist and real estate agent named Camden Sylvia, whose age has been reported by the media as 36 and 37, and her artist/actor/art gallery clerk boyfriend Michael Sullivan, whose age has been reported by the news media as 50, 53 and 54, had been living together in a loft apartment at 76 Pearl Street for several years. They paid $300 a month rent for a huge loft space - an amazing bargain by Manhattan standards.
The couple had been having a dispute with their landlord, Bob Rodriguez, about insufficient heat in the apartment - a fairly commonplace Manhattan experience. Bob Rodriguez had owned the building for two years, and ran the locksmith shop located on the ground floor. Before moving his shop to 76 Pearl Street, Mr. Rodriguez had been running his business for thirty years at another location in the same neighborhood. On Friday November 7, 1997 Camden and Michael threatened to withhold the rent if they did not receive heat. Later that day the couple disappeared and have not been seen since.
On Saturday November 14, 1997 the Manhattan police called Robert Rodriguez at his upstate home and asked him to come into police headquarters in Manhattan for questioning in connection with the missing tenants. Rodriguez told his family he was going into Manhattan to talk to the police and took off in his green Honda Passport truck. The next day the Manhattan police called the Rodriguez home saying Mr. Rodriguez was wanted for questioning. The family responded in surprise, saying Mr. Rodriguez had left home the previous evening saying he was going to see the police. Later that evening Mr. Rodriguez' son reported his father to the police as missing.
The police tried to get a search warrant to search the landlord's home, but the Manhattan District Attorney turned down the request due to insufficient evidence to support a warrant. (The Fourth Amendment may be gasping for breath, but it appears to at least be ambulatory in Manhattan.) Then the police tried flying over the landlord's property and bringing bloodhounds to the edges of the property to sniff for bodies, all in the attempt to garner enough evidence to obtain a search warrant. These efforts failed.
Usually in missing persons cases the family of the missing person does everything they can to cooperate with the police. The Rodriguez family refused to cooperate in any way and made it very clear to the police that they wanted to be left alone. This seemed very odd. Then some even more odd things occurred.
Two weeks after his initial disappearance, the elder Rodriguez' truck appeared in a parking lot on West 22nd Street in Manhattan. This location was very near the home of the Mr. Rodriguez's mother. Mrs. Rodriguez was not at home. She was reported to be out of town visiting relatives. Shortly thereafter the Manhattan police received a call from someone purporting to be an attorney representing Mr. Rodriguez. This person said that Mr. Rodriguez was alive and well, so they could call off the search for him. This person also said that Mr. Rodriguez has hired a criminal lawyer well-known for his representation of Mafia figures, and that Mr. Rodriguez would not speak to the police unless they issued a warrant for his arrest. The attorney vowed to produce Mr. Rodriguez if the police had sufficient cause to arrest him. In the meantime, the lawyer made it very clear that Mr. Rodriguez wanted to be left alone.
Then something truly odd emerged. It turns out that Mr. Rodriguez had a business dispute with a former employee in 1991. The employee expected Mr. Rodriguez to make him a partner in the business. This resulted in a heated dispute between the two. Both the former employee and Mr. Rodriguez had been sued by the employee's former employer over allegations of theft of trade secrets in a fire alarm design. The employee disappeared in 1991, leaving behind a wife and children, and has never been seen since. Due to the Rodriguez connection, the Manhattan police have now re-opened the earlier missing person case.
Any speculation that the missing couple had taken off without telling anyone was laid to rest by friends and family. Ms. Sylvia and Mr. Sullivan were not the kind of people who would disappear without telling anyone, nor were they the kind of people who would blow off their jobs for no reason. They certainly were not the kind of people who would spend the Thanksgiving holiday away from their families. Ms. Sylvia was such a compulsive person that all her plants were labeled with their species names. Although I was not personally acquainted with the couple, I had seen them frequently around the neighborhood. In fact, you could set your clocks by their jogging schedule, which they always stuck to precisely.
Landlord-tenant disputes are common in this city, especially in rent-stabilized apartments. In a city where one-floor lofts can command thousands of rent dollars a month, it is understandable why a landlord earning $300 a month in a space that could yield many times that amount with a new tenant would want an old tenant to leave. New York City is rife with stories of landlords doing horrible things to tenants to force them out. Yet the other tenants in the building said that although Bob Rodriguez was usually a bit slow in getting the heat going during the cold season, he did provide adequate heat for the rest of the building. Since the loft shared by Ms. Sylvia and Mr. Sullivan was in the top floor and had skylights and very high ceilings, it was usually colder than the other apartments in the building. One newspaper article described the missing couple as "difficult tenants," but then New York City gets cold in the winter and artists generally need a warm place to work. Since I have had disputes in the past with landlords about heat during cold weather, I find myself not without sympathy for the tenant side of the equation.
The neighborhood residents and the neighborhood merchants are shocked and horrified by this entire affair. Bob Rodriguez is very well-liked in this neighborhood as a nice person and a good businessman. After all, the man has been in the security business for thirty years, so he is a man people trust. I once needed a part for a lock and wasn't sure if what he showed me was the right one, so Bob told me to take the part and either return it if it was the wrong one or pay for it. How many merchants in New York City let people they just met take goods out of the store that haven't been paid for? Bob knew from talking to me that I was an honest person who was well-known in the neighborhood and could be trusted. Many of us are having a difficult time believing that Bob Rodriguez could be involved in something as sordid as kidnapping and possibly something worse, yet his odd behavior does not appear to be consistent with that of an innocent person. Then again, the New York police have such a reputation for racism and brutality that a Cuban immigrant such as Bob Rodriguez may be acting rationally in wanting to avoid them at all costs.
Added to all of this, of course, is the local media circus that has ensued around this bizarre event. Periodically the neighborhood is swarming with news vans all reporting live in front of 76 Pearl Street with the latest innuendo, or rehashing of known facts and elaborating on the lack of new ones. The police are saying there is no evidence of a crime, because no evidence of either kidnapping or murder exists. Then again, we know from watching "N.Y.P.D. Blue" that the Manhattan police often put false information into the news media to manipulate suspects. There has been 24-hour police surveillance in front of the building, and neighboring businesses have been searched for clues.
Needless to say, living a block away from all this has been decidedly Kafkaesque. While all of us in the neighborhood hope and pray that Camden and Michael are alive and well, as time passes the likelihood of this seems extremely bleak. Wherever they are, they are there against their will, for there is no way they would be gone this long without communicating with their friends and family.
But the accompanying media frenzy reads like an advertisement for the neighborhood. This is the financial district, the Wall Street area. The stock market crash of 1987 put some firms out of business completely and caused others to undergo massive layoffs. The result is that entire office buildings were empty down here. Last year the City changed the zoning laws so that several of those empty buildings could be converted into loft apartments. Loft apartments are always at a premium in Manhattan. So now the City and various commercial forces that stand to benefit are trying to sell luxury lofts in the vicinity.
This has had some interesting effects on neighborhood life. A few months ago there was a huge shoot-out at 1 AM outside a bar just a few blocks away. There were about 50 patrol cars and a SWAT team. One would think that an event requiring 50 patrol cars and a SWAT team would get a headline in the local paper and a spot on the evening news, but there was nothing - NOTHING! -- in the local media. After all, when the city fathers are trying to sell expensive, luxury real estate they certainly don't want prospective buyers thinking there is street crime in the neighborhood! The super of a building around the corner told me there have been three break-ins in his building in the past few months, but he has not been able to get an incident report number from the First Precinct. Each time he calls he is told the Precinct has lost the paperwork.
This is particularly interesting in light of all the national publicity saying that the crime rate has gone down dramatically in New York City. It seems to me that our fascistic, humorless mayor is simply playing with the crime statistics by ordering the police not to report crimes. Keep in mind that the media keep repeating that no crime has occurred at 76 Pearl Street. Yet it is evident from plainclothes detectives hanging around the building that this case has progressed beyond local law enforcement involvement. The case of the missing tenants of 76 Pearl Street will not go away from public view, because the media has clamped onto it like a vise. In fact, the news media coverage, employing such words as "charming" and "historic" to describe the block, is using this horrible event to advertise the neighborhood. Since the moneyed forces that control the media also control city government, it is truly sickening to think that the tragic case of Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan is being exploited to serve purely commercial interests. I know that is a truly horrible thing to say, but that's how it looks from here. Please write and let me know how it looks to you.
Copyright 1997 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.
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