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AppendixIV.THE NEIGHBORS,THE HANGERS-ON,AND THE CREEPY WOODS

 
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
Posts: 9273
Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:15 am    Post subject: AppendixIV.THE NEIGHBORS,THE HANGERS-ON,AND THE CREEPY WOODS Reply with quote

from www.washingtoncitypaper.com (fair use)

Washington City Paper
COVER STORY
By Garance Franke-Ruta
July 20-26, 2001

THE NEIGHBORS, THE HANGERS-ON, AND THE CREEPY WOODS

Outtakes from the search for Chandra Levy


"Have you heard about the squeaky bed?

While 13 TV-news cameras train their sights on Democratic California Rep. Gary Condit's condo building on the night of July 10, waiting for the congressman to come home so the police can search his apartment, 15 of Condit's neighbors gather on the stoop of 2611 Adams Mill Road, clutching cigarettes and red plastic cups filled with beer.

Exhausted by the crescendoing media frenzy, recent police interviews, and frequent phone calls from reporters who'd somehow learned even their nicknames, the neighbors plunk themselves on the steps and dish about the press and the problems in their small building.

"The stoop is the roof deck we don't have," explains Troy, a young, goateed fellow with dark hair, about the impromptu gathering. "This experience has brought us all together," adds one of his companions, who, like most of the group, declines to give her name. Building residents carrying briefcases and sacks of groceries arrive and introduce themselves to neighbors they've never met, before joining them for a drink.

Condit's neighbors are a young group. Though it's a condo building, about half the 40-odd residents are renters. One neighbor with long brown hair giggles frequently, revealing braces with each flash of her smile. When the TV cameras turn to her, she titters and holds aloft a hand-lettered sign that says, "HI MOM." The condominium association president, a blonde with a shaggy haircut, waves at the cameras, while a young man sporting heavily tattooed legs and a blond soul patch quips that this is "the new Survivor."

"If someone gets discovered out of this, everyone has to share the proceeds," he jokes to his neighbors.

When the haggard but smiling congressman finally arrives home, around 8:40 p.m., Troy, who lives on the second floor, bounds up the steps to open the door, walks him down the hall toward the elevator, and then returns to shoo reporters away. Around 10 p.m., a torrential downpour forces the party to move inside, whence the neighbors rush out onto a balcony above the building's back entrance to watch the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detectives arriving at 11:15 p.m. to search Condit's place.

Shortly after midnight, three of the neighbors come back out. "I'll rent you my apartment for two weeks," offers one. "You can have all the access you want!"

"What have you got for me?" demands another young man, who earlier suggested that the female reporters should all be topless. Adding to the carnival atmosphere outside Condit's building, the neighbors now appear to be drunk.

The most unexpected revelation of the evening has to do with Condit's squeaky bed. "The walls are thin, and the neighbors below have heard it," one man confides.


The Dumpster

I do not go through Condit's trash. Not that I don't have the opportunity to do so.<

On July 9, I notice a back door ajar at Condit's place. So I open it. It is the building's dumpster. The police are floating a theory this week that Chandra Levy's body might have been disposed of in a dumpster. This dumpster is small, like many in the alleys behind buildings near Condit's apartment. It belongs to Bowie Inc., a private D.C. trash-hauling company that services many of the condo and co-op buildings in Adams Morgan.

I look at the dumpster and decide that this is where I will draw the line. I am a reporter, not a private investigator. I shut the door again-this time securely.

A week of observation has led me to the conclusion that if you offered a TV cameraman the same opportunity, he most likely would open the dumpster and shoot it. If not jump right in.

Here is one verbatim conversation between a cameraman and a Condit neighbor, after the two wrestled over the front door. The neighbor was trying to close the door, and the cameraman was trying to keep it open and enter the building:

Neighbor: "Jackass."

Cameraman: "Punk."

Neighbor: "Bitch."


The Waste Haulers
Charles Wallace is lifting trash bags into the back of his Bowie Inc. dump truck when I catch up with him in the alley between Calvert Street and Adams Mill Road. He hauls Condit's trash, too.

I have a forensic question: Police examined Condit's apartment for clues to a possible crime. But if a crime occurred there, how could anyone have disposed of the body? The dumpster in his building looks too small to hide a body. Maybe if the dumpster were gigantic-like a construction dumpster in a public lot-but there weren't any dumpsters like that in the area. Besides, it doesn't make sense to hide a body in a condo-building dumpster, where neighbors pile their trash neatly and the container is low enough to look into. Surely someone would have noticed something amiss there, or in the surrounding alleys.

Not true, says Wallace. "If they put it in a big black bag, it's possible," he says, gesturing toward a hefty sack he is about to swing into the truck's compressor. "By the time you find out, it be at the dump."

His co-worker, Ricardo Shaw, disagrees. The smell would alert you to something unusual, he says. "Depending on how heavy it is," he adds.

It's a debate the trash haulers have been waging among themselves for some weeks now. Warren, who declines to give his last name, patrols the city as a beat cop for the MPD, working the midnight shift. By day, he empties boxes of bottles and newspapers into the Bowie recycling truck that services Condit's building. And he's sure he'd be able to spot a body in a truck, if ever one came in. "Once they empty it, you'd see if there's a body in there," he says. "The reality is, once you empty it, there's no way you could hide a body, especially an adult body."

The comment infuriates Rudy, an older man who works maintenance for a nearby Calvert Street building. He has dragged his big plastic can out to meet the waste haulers, and he thumps the now-empty tub in anger. "Everybody in the world know you can put a body in there and smash it up," he says. Then he drags his can back behind some fences.

The dump truck's compressor frequently rips through plastic bags while smashing their contents into a foul ooze. That makes Warren confident that he'd notice something. "If you missed it on the way in," he says, "when you undumped it, you'd see the blood on the truck."
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Joined: 13 Sep 2002
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Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Building
The condo building at 2611 Adams Mill Road consists of 34 inexpensive one- and two-bedroom apartments. Condit lives on the fourth floor, in a tiny, 660-square-foot one-bedroom with an assessed value of $115,500. Comparable apartments in posher Adams Morgan buildings-such as the Wyoming-routinely go for $200,000 or more, and one-bedrooms for sale in Levy's downtown D.C. building hit the market at up to $140,000.

Adams Morgan locals are baffled by Condit's choice of residence in the capital. "It's the biggest neighborhood gossip," says union organizer and Adams Morgan resident Julie Eisenberg. "First, it's, like, 'He can't live in this building.' We were laughing at that. We expect a congressman to live in the Ontario." Gen. Douglas MacArthur used to live in the Ontario, just a few blocks from 2611 Adams Mill Road, and the building remains a genteel residence to this day.

But some prominent people have lived in 2611 in the past, says Ganzie Dent, a UPS man who has hauled packages to the four-story building's residents for the last 14 years. Rory Kennedy, the youngest of Robert Kennedy's 11 children, was one. "Ted-her uncle-sent her a package before she got married," recalls Dent. Otherwise, he says, "It's usually a quiet building. People keep to themselves."

And few stay as long as Condit, who has used the building as his primary D.C. residence since joining Congress, in 1989. "The turnover rate, I'd say, is about every three years," says Dent. "People in these condos don't really stay very long. They come and go."

"I don't know why he's living in this lousy neighborhood anyway," says an older female Adams Morgan resident sporting a yellow baseball cap, teal shirt, and purple windbreaker. "I guess he wanted to be obscure....I was here when these apartments were new. They're little, rinky-dinky rooms."

Neighbor Steve lives across Adams Mill Road from Condit and stops to tell me that the blinds on Condit's apartment, which faces the street, were always drawn, day and night, even before the whole Chandra Levy thing. "He's living in what's essentially a bachelor pad," says Steve. "It seems kind of fishy."

The postal carrier who has delivered Condit's mail for the past four years says he gets nothing unusual. No motorcycle magazines. No copies of Soldier of Fortune. Just the usual "miscellaneous regular bills," plus Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. And, of course, the Victoria's Secret catalog. "All the men 'round here get that," she says.

One thing Condit doesn't seem to get any more is the New York Times, notes Eva Medina, who has lived on the first floor of his building for 12 years. Medina used to trip over it every morning on the stoop and bring it inside for the congressman, but she hasn't seen it in weeks. And she used to see him get picked up every morning for work, too, in a white van. "Now for three, four months, no see New York Times. I don't know if he's living there," she says. "I don't see for long time. I don't know where he is."


The Pack
On July 6, CNN becomes the first network to establish a daylong stakeout at the Condit residence. Rae Smith, Sarah Ruth, and Elizabeth Zossa are on the scene, part of the 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. encampment. "We're waiting for the police raid," says Ruth. "We're going to have exclusive photos when that happens."

They're in for a wait. Condit's attorney, Abbe Lowell, will not make his public offer to open the congressman's apartment to a police search for another three days.

The three women discuss the case. They sit on portable chairs, enjoying a perfect summer day.

"What do you think about this whole theory about there being a serial killer?" asks Ruth. "I don't like that theory."

"Me either," says Smith, looking up from The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision by James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy.

They trade war stories and discuss moments when they felt vulnerable on the street: a man who grabbed a friend's briefcase while she was getting into her car, some creepy guy following Smith out of a nightclub.

Two CNN cameras are on the scene, but other than that, the sidewalk is clear.

"Monica was truly a national phenomenon," Smith explains. "This is more for people interested in politics."

"National Enquirer was here, and Inside Edition," says Ruth. "That tells you the level we're working on."

By July 9, the media pack is in full howl-and broadly mainstream. At Lowell's press conference outside the offices of his Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm-right next to the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame and Museum-I count 11 TV cameras, four still cameras, nine microphones, and three boom mikes. Smith is at the front of the pack, reading Don't Sweat the Small Stuff until the show begins and Lowell announces Condit's next chess move.

A reporter asks whether Condit would be willing to give police a DNA sample. It's not part of Lowell's original offer, but he concedes it's possible.

The media horde scatters within minutes of Lowell's return to his office. Some of the crews head across town, to stake out Levy family attorney Billy Martin outside CNN on 1st Street NE, where he is appearing on Larry King Live. Thirteen men juggle nine cameras. One female reporter waits off to the side of the pack.

"We're taking this up to Monica level," declares one network news cameraman. "Every day, it keeps getting worse and worse."

"We don't need any more information," says his producer. "We have all we need to keep going for a month. All we need is more pictures."


The Building, Redux
Brian Post points to an unusual depression in the mulch outside Condit's apartment building. Could this be the clue thousands of journalists-not to mention the police-have been searching for? Post, a landscaper and president of Star Nurseries, has noticed a number of suspicious changes in the small patch of land his company cares for outside the building.

"I had a mandeville here, a tropical vine," he says, pointing to the ground. "Somebody took that, and about half a dozen flowers, out of here. I don't know who took them, because they don't live when you uproot them."

Post stands up and wipes the sweat from his face and shaved head. He points to three other indentations where he planted hostas earlier in the summer. A variegated liriope is also missing.

But maybe the real suspect is standing before me. When there are no suspects, everyone is a suspect. Even someone just reporting garden-variety plant theft.

"The lady missing, we did the Newport condos, too," says Post, referring to Levy's apartment building, at 1260 21st St. NW. "That's where she was residing, but I don't think we ever seen her."

Nearly every person who came into contact with or had a tangential connection to Levy has by now been interviewed by police. These are the more than 100 people Condit attorney Lowell keeps referring to in his impassioned pleas for the media to focus on parties other than his client. Condit's neighbors. Levy's neighbors. His staff. Her co-workers. His ex-girlfriends. Her friends. Some have been interviewed multiple times, had their criminal records pulled, been subjected to the media glare. No one has been declared a suspect. Many more besides Condit have been treated as one.
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The National Zoo's business entrance intersects with Adams Mill Road two blocks from Condit's apartment. Two roads head in different directions. A sign posted over the fenced-off road to the left reads: "U.S. Property. Speed Limit 15. No Trespassing." I take that road.

I'm not sure where it goes. It runs along the edge of the community garden of Walter C. Pierce Community Park. Thick, ivy-encrusted woods lie to the right. The community garden, in a ravine thick with corn and obscured from above by overgrown fences, rises to my left. The leaves rustle. The underbrush shivers and crackles with the sound of twigs snapping. Something is moving through the brush. And no one can see me walking here. Not that anyone's looking.

"Dangerous for pedestrians," Bob Hoage, spokesperson for the National Zoo, calls the road. Only service vehicles use it. The rest of the time, it's empty. And kind of creepy.

Nearby Rock Creek Park is filled with lonely roads like this.

I keep walking, past barbed-wire fences that separate the National Zoo from Rock Creek Park, until I see the glistening brown of Rock Creek and enter the pure woods, where the underbrush is thinner. Below me, I spy the jogging path that borders the creek. This is where Levy used to take walks. Thousands of female runners in the District have done loops up and down this trail. From P Street in Dupont Circle up toward the zoo, or west, deeper into the park. You can take paths from here all the way to the Klingle Mansion, a site police say Levy looked up on the Internet the last day before she went missing.

I stick to the main road, which ends at the Amazonia exhibit of the National Zoo.

Levy is no more here than she is at Condit's place up the street. If she is swimming with the fishes, it is not with the black doradids or giant pacu fish in Amazonia. The tiny monkeys on the second floor of the exhibit have nothing to add but high-pitched chirrups.

I look, but Levy is not hiding in the brown pelican tank. Nor is she with the California sea lions. And there's nothing visible in the Mexican wolf exhibit, not even a wolf. "It could be camouflaged or sleeping," a passing woman explains to her child. "It's mighty hot out here."

Then again, if Levy were hidden away on the grounds of the National Zoo, the police might not know it. "There have been no MPD dogs here sniffing for the body of Chandra Levy on the 163 acres of the National Zoo," says Hoage.

(A week after my short walk, the MPD sends police recruits to conduct a grid search of Rock Creek Park. As of press time, a police search of abandoned properties in Northwest D.C. had yet to bear fruit. The zoo remains unsearched.)


The Congressional Office
A news photographer snaps my picture as I enter Condit's suite in the Rayburn House Office Building. "It's the hair that got them," the receptionist says, looking at my long brown hair. Not nearly as curly as Levy's, but in the same family of ungovernable mop. The receptionist watches a small, ceiling-mounted television, tuned to a Fox News report on Condit.

A row of medallions on the back wall of the reception area bears the seals of the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard. A trophy case sports a plaque congratulating Condit for protecting America's children from "unfunded mandates."

A pretty blonde leads three representatives of the Hillman Cheese Co. from a meeting room to the front door.

The receptionist refers all questions-from what legislation Condit is working on these days to how the staff is holding up-to Marina Ein, Condit's high-powered public relations representative.

Ein returns calls but begs off from questions about the 18th District's legislative business. "I'd love to talk to you about that," she says. "But today I'm too busy dealing with questions about the lie-detector test to talk."

Three flags hang limp outside Condit's office. The Stars and Stripes. The flag of the State of California. And a black POW/MIA banner that reads "You are not forgotten."
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Interns
Politiki on "Dollar Bud Night" looks like a scene from Sex and the City. Except that the tanned sexpots in tight pants and revealing halter tops look young and fresh-rather than hard and jaded-as they flip straightened, highlighted hair behind pearl-adorned ears. The cheap beer lures a crowd of young congressional staffers and interns to the Capitol Hill bar on Thursday evenings.

But start asking questions about Chandra Levy and the interns sound as if they were trying out for Crossfire. Or maybe CNN's stab at catching 20-something viewers on Saturday night, Take 5. Kate Guerra, a 21-year-old intern with the Republican National Committee, says she's "intrigued" by the Chandra Levy story. But she doesn't think Condit had a role in Levy's disappearance. "It's too obvious. It would come back to him." Her drinking partner for the evening, 21-year-old Nancy Kate Ryder, a Senate intern from Memphis with bared shoulders and long brown hair, disagrees. "He had a part in it."

Shannon Stafford and Caroline Hoenk, also both 21, can't agree, either. They intern at Empower America, Hoenk working directly with Reagan-administration Education Secretary and moralist William Bennett. Condit may have had something to do with Levy's disappearance, says Hoenk, but "only in the respect that she may have been in a poor mental state."

"I disagree," says Stafford. "I don't think he got rid of her, but I think he knows more-just because it took so long for him to admit his relationship. I think he may know more than he's telling."

They do agree that Condit probably won't resign. "The people in his District still seem to support him," notes Hoenk. That doesn't mean she thinks it's right. "I don't believe you can separate your personal and public life so much. The two spheres overlap. Especially with Dr. Bennett-because he deals with a lot of social issues, he constantly wants to know, 'What was today's [Chandra Levy] news?'"

Few of the interns and junior staffers interviewed, most of whom are Republicans, think Condit should resign. But it's only July 12, four days before Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), will call on him to do so. Says one young staffer, explaining his reluctance to speak up: "I'm young. I have a long life ahead of me. I don't want to say anything now that could catch up with me."

Bob Kearley, a 23-year-old fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee-which may fund Condit's likely GOP challenger-is less hesitant to condemn the straying representative. "I think he's really taking advantage of people that age and with that sense of inferiority," he muses. "It was really amazing to see how much attention a person like him can get. It gives interns a bad name."

"Welcome to real life," says his drinking companion, who declines to give his name. "That's why a lot of representatives prefer to have male staffers."

Condit's Neighborhood Bar
Up until the Condit-Levy brouhaha, the biggest issue on Adams Mill Road was rumble strips installed to slow traffic on the curvy thoroughfare. Pro- and anti-rumble-strip coalitions formed. They argued with each other on the street and shouted friendly insults at each other across tables at the Adams Mill Bar and Grill, near the corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road.

On July 10, Andrew Miscuk, an advisory neighborhood commissioner for the area, holds his regular Tuesday office hours at the bar. "I've gotten more complaints over the past two weeks because of press crews than probably any other issue," he says of the double-parked satellite-transmission trucks. "They go out there-they park their vehicles wherever they want."

The crush of media-and the week of constant shots of Condit's front door-has attracted hordes of gawkers and curiosity seekers. A blond woman wearing a Washington Sports Club athletic bra and shorts jogs by the Condit apartment each night, stopping to get the latest. One evening, she completes her run by eating a large order of McDonald's french fries, a diet Coke, and a box of animal crackers from a paper bag she's laid out on the sidewalk. "Are they going to drag the Potomac?" she asks, to no one in particular.

Some neighbors find her presence disconcerting-Levy was last seen canceling her membership at the Washington Sports Club. The jogger has swung by on other nights, too, muttering to herself and talking to cameramen for hours. "My gut instinct tells me he's relatively, relatively, relatively guilty," she says of Condit.

Pat Carr and Gina Greyeyes have come all the way from their hotel in Dupont Circle to take pictures. In town for the American Federation of Teachers meeting, Carr hails from Tuba City, Ariz., and Greyeyes from Dennehotso, Ariz., on the Navajo reservation. "We're just here taking in some of the historic and current sites of the Capitol," says Carr. The story is having a strong impact back on the reservation, he explains: "Nobody's herding sheep anymore. They used to run in to watch Days of Our Lives at 2:30; now they watch the news." John Johnson, a pastor from St. Louis, also stops by for a photo. "Everybody think he's a rat," he says of Condit. "It's dominating the news in the Midwest."

Even the "FReepers" are getting into the act. Kristinn Taylor, with the Web site www.freerepublic.com-a conservative forum widely involved in Clinton-era conspiracy mongering-also comes by to take a picture for the site.

Meanwhile, many in Adams Morgan remain convinced that Levy is nowhere in their neighborhood. "She's either where she wants to be, or they have yet to find the body," says Miscuk, who has watched police canvas the area several times since May.

Opinions such as Miscuk's are unlikely to dissuade the gawkers any time soon. "It's like a Columbo episode right now," says Taylor. "I keep waiting for [MPD Executive Assistant Chief Terrance] Gainer to say, 'Congressman, just one more thing.'" CP
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