59 Hours Page 2

  If only seven-year-old Jesse James Hollywood had known while he fingered the seams for his next fastball that he was thirteen years away from becoming the youngest person ever to appear on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, a seventy-thousand-dollar price tag placed on his capture.

  Chapter 4

  The Feud

  THE ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD AND Ben’s feud took place in San Diego around February 2000. A friend of Ben’s owed Hollywood money. Ben went with Hollywood to collect. Hollywood wasn’t going to do his own dirty work. Plus, Ben looked the part of someone not to be messed with. He had a shaved head and intimidating tattoos.

  They drove Hollywood’s black Mercedes-Benz and brought along a baseball bat and a roll of duct tape.

  When they arrived in San Diego, Ben set up a scheme with the friend who owed Hollywood. His friend would bring a dealer who specialized in selling Ecstasy. They would stage a robbery. Ben would “rob” the dealer and tell his friend “to say you got jacked.” Ben told his friend that it was better to owe your other friend money than Hollywood. Maybe he was alluding to the fact that owing money to Hollywood came with much more dire consequences. No argument there.

  His friend had owed Hollywood two thousand dollars. In lieu of cash, Ben had those two hundred pills from the staged robbery. To incentivize the opportunity, Ben told Hollywood he’d move them, essentially taking on the friend’s debt. Ben figured he would come out with four thousand dollars, making two grand for himself after Hollywood’s cut, which would have totaled the original debt that he was owed. But Ben only sold six hundred dollars’ worth at a party. An hour later, people were coming up to him complaining the E wasn’t working. He went back to Jesse’s house and gave him the six hundred dollars. He added an extra two hundred dollars from what he made working at his father’s company as a machinist.

  Ben asked Hollywood what he wanted to do now. Hollywood wasn’t happy. He put the remaining twelve-hundred-dollar debt on Ben.

  Ben couldn’t believe Hollywood would get angry over it. After all, the two had grown close during the previous year, lifting weights together daily. Ben had even lived with Hollywood beginning sometime in November 1999 and ending sometime in February 2000. And now? Ben didn’t think Hollywood was this heartless. He didn’t understand what was happening.

  What was happening was that this twelve-hundred-dollar debt would fester over the next six months. It was less about the money, and more about the point that Ben never attempted to pay Hollywood back. Hollywood felt that Ben had been purposely avoiding him.

  Ben believed Hollywood was also hurt by the fact that he stopped selling and hanging with him. He was done with the days of dealing under Hollywood, which included being fronted weed on consignment. Ben had realigned his focus. He was now working every day from six a.m. until two thirty p.m. for his father.

  That didn’t mean Hollywood was done with him. In April 2000—some two months after Ben and Hollywood’s relationship officially soured—Hollywood walked into BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse on Canoga near Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. Ben’s fiancée, Eliza, who was a server, ended up waiting on Hollywood. Hollywood saw his window to project his frustration. He decided not to the pay the check, instead leaving Ben’s fiancée a note reading “Just take this off Ben’s debt.” Ben’s fiancée had to cover the fifty-dollar tab.

  After seeing her ring, Hollywood figured out they were engaged. He couldn’t believe Ben had money to buy her a ring but not pay him back. He told Eliza that Ben had been “ducking me.”

  This set Ben off. The two would go back and forth with phone threats. Ben called Hollywood after the restaurant incident. He called him a little punk and said that Hollywood wasn’t getting a dime out of him. In turn, Hollywood would have William Skidmore leave voice mails at two thirty in the morning.

  The taunting escalated beyond words. Ben remembered that Hollywood owned a thirty-five-thousand-dollar Honda. He had payback in mind and reported Hollywood for committing insurance fraud after the car was chopped and sold for parts. Ben had been with Hollywood when he purchased the insurance, so he knew the insurance company.

  Ben had had enough when he was driving home one night and saw Hollywood and Ryan Hoyt waiting out front of his apartment. He kept on driving with no idea how Hollywood had learned his address. Ben delivered one last voice mail to Hollywood. “I know where you live, too, buddy, so you make the first move.” Ben wasn’t afraid of Hollywood’s inner circle. “They’re just a bunch of punks that can’t fight worth a lick.”

  Hollywood’s alleged fear gave way to anger after Ben broke his front windows. Skidmore was asleep in the back guest room. They heard a crash and ran out the front door as a car took off. The neighbor across the street said, “Hey, did you guys see that? I think it was a white BMW.” They knew it could only be one person.

  Skidmore immediately called Ben. He told Ben that Hollywood wanted him to fight Ben. Ben declined, then told Skidmore his problem was with Hollywood, that he didn’t have a problem with Skidmore. Skidmore—in his loyalty to Hollywood—fired back, “You do now.”

  Skidmore handed the phone to Hollywood. Ben had already hung up. Two twenty-year-olds amped on adrenaline and ego would now exchange more than just insults.

  This couldn’t be worked out amicably. Hollywood had a reputation to maintain. He couldn’t be disrespected. What would other dealers or his clientele think if he didn’t strike back? Hollywood had to make an example out of anyone who tried to undermine him. He also couldn’t leave a blemish on the Hollywood name.

  Hollywood had borrowed the white van from John Roberts, a family friend, who had old Mafia ties from his Chicago days. Hollywood had already been in the process of using it to move out of his place while he looked for something new and private. He didn’t like people knowing where he lived anymore.

  After his windows were broken, Hollywood was fed up with Ben Markowitz, and forty-eight hours later, as his anger simmered, the decision was made. “Let’s go find him,” was Hollywood’s order.

  Chapter 5

  A Brother’s Influence

  NICK WASN’T JUST A SAVANT when it came to remembering his lines for Shakespeare. He also was astute at picking up on Ben’s brooding, rebellious, and sometimes volatile demeanor—no matter how nuanced. This rebellion found its way into Nick, transmitted not only during times they spent together, but heightened even more by his older brother’s absence. Ben had already done time in juvenile hall, probation camp, and county jail for crimes ranging from assault with a deadly weapon to grand theft auto. On one occasion, when he was sixteen years old, he split open a man’s head with brass knuckles.

  Ben’s influence would induce both praise and resentment from Nick. And at fifteen, this was a potentially dangerous crossroads. To his father, Ben was “a cat with nine lives.”

  Nick yearned to emulate his brother. He wanted to pull off Ben’s “urban legend” status. It filtered into him. There was no stopping it. Nick would even grow annoyed if anyone referred to them as half brothers.

  Ben Markowitz had chosen a nickname, Bugsy, after the 1930s front-page mobster Bugsy Siegel. He had a seething that couldn’t be contained—an unwound coil of ink and anger, no pause button to press. He was Jewish but flaunted white supremacist tattoos.

  Ben would disappear for periods of time, sometimes up to six months, after confrontations with his father. After one confrontation, he arrived home covered in tattoos from his shoulder blades down to his ankles. These were visual scars to rebel against the suffering he felt from his parents’ divorce.

  Benjamin split his time between his parents’ homes. His stepmother, Susan Markowitz, would take Ben in whenever there was friction with his biological mother. Susan believed that Ben didn’t always feel loved.

  By eleven, he was slashing tires and crashing a family friend’s car he had decided to take out for a joyride. He was placed on Ritalin and later enrolled in tae kwon do—anything to tame the anger and redirect that seething. He was
“jumped in” to a local gang before he hit puberty. This meant he was intentionally allowing himself to be beaten up by current gang members as initiation into the gang. The beating could sometimes last up to sixty seconds or whatever that particular gang decided.

  By twelve, he had stolen a car. By thirteen, Susan witnessed him being handed a gun by a friend.

  It wasn’t just the skinhead and wifebeater motif. Benjamin had a demeanor that jumped from zero to fury, just begging for some unsuspecting soul to look at him wrong.

  At times he would resent Nicholas, seven years younger. Nicholas represented what Ben had never had—a stable family.

  Ben wouldn’t bow to anyone—including Hollywood. However, it was his misplaced anger that would jump-start new trauma. At twenty-two years old, he was burning bridges like Bugsy Siegel. However, unlike the charismatic mobster, the contract wouldn’t be on his life, but his innocent brother’s.

  * * *

  Nick was now caught up in something in which he had no control. Up to this point, the most worrisome thing on his mind had been the conversation he was dreading with his parents about last night.

  “Last night” meant “Saturday night,” when Nicholas went out with some friends to CityWalk. CityWalk was a part of Universal Studios theme park, filled with restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and electric billboards that rivaled the Vegas Strip. When the rides closed, the nightlife for teens began.

  Nick’s curfew was midnight, but he came home at eleven thirty, which surprised his father, Jeff, who wasn’t used to Nick coming home early. As Nick walked in the door, Jeff and Susan were right there. As soon as they saw him, they knew there was something wrong—they could see it in his face. His eyes were droopy, and he was chawing with his mouth. Jeff asked, “What’s going on? Why are you home so early?” Nick responded, “Oh, it didn’t go so well.”

  Susan Markowitz knew her son’s behavior. He was high on some type of drug. For Susan, it was a delicate balancing job. How much freedom versus how much discipline? In the past, when she had suspicions about Nick’s behavior, she would go through his pockets and drawers, occasionally reading his letters.

  That night Nick was wearing a pair of baggy pants with a large pocket in the back. Jeff Markowitz noticed something bulging in the pocket and asked his son what he was carrying. Nick covered up the bulge and told his father it was nothing.

  Jeff and Susan confronted him because they wanted to know what was going on. As they approached, Nick ran out of the house. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Nick to leave. He’d usually show later in the evening. Other times he would head to his brother’s place for a breather, as Ben diagnosed it. In the past, Ben would play mediator between Nick and his parents, then drive Nick home the next day. Jeff and Susan figured he was just going to his brother’s for another overnight trip. Unbeknownst to Jeff and Susan, Ben had already left for Arizona to work for his uncle.

  Forty-five minutes later, Nick walked back inside. Susan met him with a hug and a kiss. Nick lied, saying that he hated when his parents wanted to talk to him about his smoking. But they knew it wasn’t a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Nick was trying to soften the consequences or save himself from a late-night lecture.

  Susan made him a bowl of cereal—one of his favorite late-night snacks—and decided their talk could wait until the morning.

  In the morning, Jeff headed out to his usual Sunday tennis match. When he returned, Susan was busy preparing breakfast. “I guess we have a job ahead of us,” Jeff mentioned before asking if she would wake Nick. But when she went to his room, he wasn’t there. Susan thought, How could he just leave us again without telling us?

  Jeff also had wanted to get to the bottom of things that morning. “That’s when it started. That’s when the hell started.”

  * * *

  When Jeff mentioned getting to the bottom of things, it wasn’t just about what had occurred the previous night, August 5. No, something had been growing within Nick for some time.

  Jeff Markowitz had hoped that Nicholas—who, after his thirteenth birthday, wanted to be called Nick—could see the damage Ben was causing to himself and to others. It was futile. Jeff thought that all Nick could see was “some slight amount of glory. You fall for the tough guy, he’s Captain Hero.”

  Nick had also been arrested during the school year for possession of marijuana. Although it was only residue found in a small Ziploc, it culminated in his getting arrested, fingerprinted, and suspended. Nick tried to talk his way out of being held responsible, saying he was just holding it for a friend. Susan didn’t buy his reason. “That’s like a girl saying, ‘These aren’t my birth control pills. I’m just holding them for a girlfriend.’ ”

  Previously, Ritalin had also been in Nick’s possession. Ben had had a prescription since he was twelve. Nick had it for recreation. At their 1999 New Year’s Eve party, the whole family knew Nick was on something. Ben confronted him, trying to protect him from the lifestyle he was leading. By that time, the damage was done. Nick “already had a taste for it.”

  Nick would tell Ben he’d been into fights. But Ben knew he was just trying to be cool in front of his older brother.

  Nick did grow up faster because of what Ben was going through. In a journal Nick shared with Susan, he wrote, I hope Ben changes from what he used to do because sometimes he hung out with the wrong crowd. This was before Nick started romanticizing Ben’s life—or experimenting with it. Gateway actions, instead of drugs. “It made Nick more aware of things he probably would not have thought about if it wasn’t in his space or household,” Susan recalled. She also believed Nick thought she was being too hard on Ben.

  Susan wanted to protect Nick from Ben’s negative influence. Every time she tried, “he got more defensive.”

  Nick would perform poorly in school, then receive a letter from his absent brother encouraging his effort to do better. Ben didn’t hang out with Nick, but not because he didn’t want to. He wasn’t allowed to, a consequence of being incarcerated at Camp Miller—a probation camp—at the time.

  According to Susan, Ben would write how “he’s going to come back and be the ‘great brother’ he’s supposed to be” and to “ ‘listen to Mom and Dad because they’re right.’ ”

  Susan believed “it was such a conflict . . . and sad that when one kid ends up getting in trouble, the whole family is trying to cope. And when you’re young, it’s harder because you’re having to go to school. . . . At that age, you think, ‘Oh, he’s a tough guy [Ben], I can be a tough guy, too. Maybe that’s cool.’ ” Could this have simply been Nick dramatizing the unwanted attention? After all, he was an actor. “He was somebody you could put in front of an audience of people and he would be able to make everyone laugh.”

  Nick could have been misinterpreting a loving and concerned mother as a strict disciplinarian. “There were no problems at home except for trying to protect Nick from Ben. And Nick thought that was a problem.”

  Susan had no idea that Ben had given Nick thirty Valium pills on the Friday before Nick’s kidnapping. That was the same Friday Ben would unleash whatever was brewing underneath and bust out Hollywood’s windows.

  Two days later, on August 6, Nick avoided that conversation with his parents about the pills and possibly fingering Ben as his supplier. He would also leave home for the very last time. And walk right into the hands of Jesse James Hollywood.

  Chapter 6

  911

  PAULINE MAHONEY WAS DRIVING HER Cadillac with her two children, ages six and nine, along with a friend of theirs, also nine. She was coming from church and approaching the stop sign where she normally made a right to go to her house, a block away. As she was approaching the stop sign, she saw a scuffle occurring on the sidewalk across the street. As she drove closer, she saw that “these boys were beating up another boy.” Hollywood had Nick pinned against the tree. Skidmore was called out for backup. Pauline thought the beating went on for thirty seconds. There was no way for Nick to protect him
self.

  Pauline was between fifty and a hundred feet away. She slowly approached at five miles per hour. She watched as they threw Nick into the van. The van took off but had left Hollywood behind. They stopped for Hollywood to jump back inside.

  She squared her rearview to see if the van was going to follow her. For a second, it seemed like it would. Then, as she made a right turn, the van with Nick continued on.

  She didn’t have a cell phone on her, so she couldn’t immediately call 911. Instead she enlisted her boys to help her remember the license number. She was saying the license plate out loud and “kept repeating it over and over.”

  It was a little before one p.m. Finally, at home, she called 911.

  Pauline wasn’t the only witness to Nick’s abduction.

  Her call was followed by one from Rosalia de la Cruz Gitau, a UCLA grad student. She saw the beating but thought the boy was being “jumped in” to a gang. Just like Ben Markowitz had been jumped in, Rosalia thought this teen was intentionally allowing himself to be beaten up as initiation. But this wasn’t sixty seconds to earn the street’s respect of a lifetime.

  The irony? As much as being jumped in propagandized a false sense of respect, Nick would have been luckier if that were the case. No, this wasn’t a gang initiation. It was a repercussion. Collateral damage. Skidmore horse-collared him by the shirt and picked him up.

  However, no law enforcement would come for Nick. Two different emergency dispatchers coded the incident incorrectly.

  The first dispatcher coded the first call as an assault, not a kidnapping in progress. For whatever reason, the arriving officers on the scene were apparently slow in their response time. They patrolled around Taxco Trails but never pursued it any further once their search came up empty, even though Pauline told the dispatcher the van was “heading east on Ingomar.” They failed to even take Pauline Mahoney’s written statement.