How Andrew Crispo Got Away With Murder

“I’ll tell you a whole story,” LeGeros says when he calls me the night after Christmas. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and has worked a few odd jobs — exporting luxury cars, day trading — but his passion is substance-abuse counseling, for which he is certified.

LeGeros speaks in a brash New York accent, everything a hard, plain fact. “My brain fucking snapped,” he says of pulling the trigger, twice, and shooting Vesti. “It clicked. I can remember his voice.” After, he and Crispo set the body on fire.

“As an older person looking at this, there was absolutely no reason, no need for things to go so far,” LeGeros says. At 64, his memory “is like jump cuts, like really bad, constantly flashing images of the murder.”

Although LeGeros grew up in a “good” family and Crispo with no family at all, their childhoods shared the same injuries of abandonment. They had so much in common Crispo sometimes called LeGeros his half-brother. Looking back now, LeGeros believes “it was all fake. It’s all a by-product of his narcissistic manipulation.” When he was an infant, LeGeros’s mother once forgot him in a park. Soon after, she left him in a newborn-care center in Yonkers, visiting him only on weekends. Andrew, meanwhile, was born to 16-year-old Theresa Crispo, who had been raped by an older man, according to her family. When Theresa gave birth, her mother — concerned about appearances in their small Italian community in Philadelphia — insisted she give the baby up to the St. John’s Orphan Asylum.

After Andrew left the orphanage at 16, he turned tricks for a wealthy clientele, including Liberace and Henry Plumer McIlhenny, the curator of decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who was Andrew’s introduction to art — and to its criminal opportunities. Once, during a party at McIlhenny’s home, Andrew snatched a painting off the wall and ran. Not long after, he was caught shaking down Philadelphia restaurant owners, demanding cash in exchange for calling off a fictitious police raid. After that, he decided it was time to leave town.

In 1963, Crispo called up a handsome Southerner he’d met who worked in antiques and interior design in Manhattan. Arthur Smith was 22, quiet and ambitious, and had invited Crispo to stay with him. They wound up living together, first as lovers, then as friends, until Smith’s death from lymphoma 34 years later. Shortly after Crispo arrived in New York, he visited his first gallery and acquired a painting from its owner; he flipped it the next day for a profit. For a while, he worked at ACA Galleries and learned the business. When he felt he had extracted enough knowledge to strike out on his own, he persuaded an investor to give him the capital to open his own gallery. Blithely confident, the 28-year-old moved not to Soho with the other young gallerists but to the Fuller Building on 57th Street, the hub of the high-end art world and home of distinguished dealers Pierre Matisse and André Emmerich. Smith decorated the office to project power with crimson walls, heavy drapes, and a Louis XVI desk. And Crispo played the part, sometimes telling clients he was a descendant of the Medici.

Crispo hired Hamilton, who had worked at the Whitney, in 1974 to curate while he focused on sales. “He would talk to the clients about paintings, and he had absolutely no idea,” she says, but his charisma sold them. “Butter would have melted from his mouth.” The gallery staged museum-quality shows of American art by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and John Singer Sargent and turned the openings into red-carpet events. To celebrate a Lowell Nesbitt show in 1976, Crispo rented out the Rockefeller Center skating rink and a nearby restaurant. Attendees included Mick Jagger and Prince Egon von Fürstenberg.

A rare grouping of Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings, made possible by loans from museums and private collectors, cemented the gallery’s reputation, and Crispo soon bought the space upstairs to double his footprint. “This was all of a sudden the major gallery in New York,” says Ligare. “If he hadn’t flamed out, he would have been the Larry Gagosian of today.”

To finance his expensive ambitions, Crispo took on debt, including a particularly high-interest loan from Martin Ackerman, an attorney and former publisher of The Saturday Evening Post. For a while, Crispo was lucky. He had met the billionaire Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1973 and managed to convince him of the value of American art. Tim Hoffman, then an assistant to Nesbitt, remembers Crispo once tossing him a diamond the size of an egg and joking about how he’d been walking around the city all day with the 169-carat Star of Peace entrusted to him by the baron to sell.

Thyssen-Bornemisza already had a personal art dealer, Franco Rappetti, when he met Crispo, but Crispo inherited the business exclusively in 1978 after Rappetti fell from the window of a Manhattan apartment building wearing nothing but his underwear. The death was officially ruled a suicide, but there were rumors of Crispo’s involvement.

Crispo kept an iron grip on the baron’s business. He rebuked colleagues who tried to deal with Thyssen-Bornemisza directly and was said to alter the provenance of works so the baron couldn’t identify other dealers to buy from. It paid off handsomely. By the early ’80s, Crispo owned a penthouse on West 12th Street and a summer home in Southampton next door to Gloria Vanderbilt.

This was the Crispo whom LeGeros saw when he met the dealer for the first time as a 14-year-old messenger. LeGeros was on the small side and had a petite nose and big dark eyes like his Filipina mother. He paid occasional visits to the gallery throughout the early 1980s as he earned an associate degree from NYU and then took classes in film. He asked Crispo if he knew of any job prospects in the field, and Crispo connected him to Sam Collins, a friend who worked in video production. The meeting was life-changing but not because it led to a job. Instead, as LeGeros tells it, he fell asleep shortly after having a drink with Collins, only to wake up days later in the stairwell outside next to the garbage cans. “I was drugged and assaulted,” LeGeros says. “Physically assaulted, sexually assaulted.”

Collins denies this. “At no time did I ever have any thoughts of having sex with Bernard!” he writes in an email. “That accusation was another one of Andrew’s tactics to get Bernard angry and use him to murder me. Yes, from what I understand, I was on their list.”

LeGeros had no one to turn to. “I couldn’t tell my father — he’d laugh at me,” he says. His family was well off and highly educated — his dad a U.N. executive and his mom a scientist once dubbed “the mother of calcium phosphate biomaterials research” — but they were conservative. LeGeros was too ashamed even to tell his therapist. In 1982, a few weeks after the incident, LeGeros attempted suicide by taking cyanide. After he was released from Bellevue Hospital, he decided to open up to “Mr. C.,” as he sometimes called Crispo. “You could talk to him. He knew everything to say. You could trust him,” he says. “While I’m telling him this, he’s like, ‘Hey, want to do a line?’ ” It was LeGeros’s first taste of cocaine. “Then he says, ‘What you need is revenge.’ ”

Looking back, LeGeros believes that’s when he developed the capacity to kill. “I created this image of myself as a tough guy. Then I became that person,” he says.

Crispo persuaded LeGeros to drop out of college so he could work for him at the gallery as an assistant. “You’re going to make more money than your professors,” he recalls Crispo saying. In practice, he was more like a bodyguard; sometimes Crispo called him his “executioner.” This was the other side of the “two Crispos,” as LeGeros puts it — the one who came out at night. In certain company, Crispo joked about the best way to kill someone. He bragged that he could have someone’s legs broken if he wanted, that he’d once slit a woman’s wrists, and that he’d buried corpses in his yard in Southampton.

LeGeros’s presence at the gallery disturbed other employees. Crispo’s longtime associate Ronnie Caran has described the first time he saw LeGeros — who was doing drugs in one of the viewing rooms — and thinking he was a “street person.” LeGeros talked about guns constantly and owned several. He had his Mercedes armor-plated and its windows replaced with bulletproof glass. “I did that because I saw Scarface,” he says. But around Crispo, he was like a puppy, obedient and ready to attack on command. When one employee complained he was “a psychopath,” Crispo countered, “But he’s so loyal.”

“He was like a wall between everybody and Andrew,” remembers Vitale. But he sees what Crispo liked about him: “The first thing a hustler will do when he gets some money is hire another hustler.”

Crispo cruised for victims at clubs like the Hellfire. He stood out among the leather jackets in the crowd. “He was all very ’70s tony gay,” says a former employee. He wore blue blazers, button-ups, Cardin loafers. His social life “was very much about Hamptons decorators nailing very pretty boys.”

Or he might call a pay phone and pick up a cute passerby. He’d invite him up with the promise of coke, hot guys, and perhaps some rough play. Things would begin consensually. Crispo would pull out his props: handcuffs, dildos, whips, a police uniform, a leather mask. Sometimes Crispo paid other men in drugs or cash to join him and LeGeros. There were always massive amounts of coke. “A couple times, I was at St. Vincent’s because my heart felt like it was going to explode from my chest,” LeGeros says.

Crispo’s kink was watching men inflict pain on other men while he played the instigator. He would convince his victim to rile up his hired guns by calling them homophobic slurs. The victims didn’t necessarily know whether their attackers were gay or not, professional or unpaid, nor did the attackers know if the encounters were consensual. One of Crispo’s guests fled when he was told to submit to sex at gunpoint; another left when Crispo brought out huge spiked belts. An associate of Crispo’s told Vanity Fair he was paid $100 to wear the leather mask and rape a man at knifepoint. He believed it was role-playing until the man went stiff and begged him to stop. When he did, he says Crispo became furious and ordered him to continue.

“He would create these scenarios and then, like a movie director, pit one person against another. That was where he got his jollies off,” LeGeros says. It worked for a time because Crispo needed actors and LeGeros was searching for someone to be. “People were a medium for him. He would find kids from broken homes, and they would become part of his little fucking set.”

As Crispo’s drug use escalated, so did his legal troubles. Ackerman started selling the paintings he’d been holding for loans Crispo never repaid, setting off a bitter $3 million lawsuit between the two men (Crispo ultimately lost). Meanwhile, a creditor seized some of the gallery’s priciest works, including those by de Kooning and Pollock, and eventually sold them at Sotheby’s for $17 million. At the same time, the IRS was investigating Crispo for tax fraud dating back to 1979, which caused some of his clients to receive subpoenas too. In 1984, the baron cut ties.

“He flew high and crashed robbing Peter to pay Paul,” says attorney John Koegel. “Or just robbing Peter — forget about paying Paul.” In 1985, Koegel sued Crispo for nearly $800,000 in unpaid sales and unreturned art for his client Robert Courtright, which the artist finally won 13 years later. At the same time, Robert Rauschenberg sued for a $65,000 payment he’d never received for a painting Crispo sold. “He was regarded as an untrustworthy dealer,” said Gilbert Edelson in 1985, then the secretary-treasurer of the Art Dealers Association of America, which never invited Crispo as a member.

In 1986, Crispo pleaded guilty to evading $4 million in federal taxes and was sentenced to five years in prison. Before he could begin his term, he was arrested again. A man named Mark Leslie had come forward with accusations that Crispo and LeGeros had sexually tortured him for six hours just months before the Vesti murder.

Soon after I visited the storage unit in Albany, Contompasis took me to a dilapidated motel in the Catskills. Holes were torn in the ceilings and raccoons had made nests from shredded Crispo Gallery papers. The dealer had filled this old building top to bottom with his belongings and then stopped making payments. A decade ago, an antiques picker acquired the contents of its half-dozen rooms, then sold Contompasis his lot for $1,000. The most valuable items, the Victorian furniture and Wedgwood, were long gone, but the floors were still buried in Crispo’s loose photos, letters, and legal transcripts (plus moldy weed nuggets and sex toys).

I found a folder of typewritten letters to Crispo from Wiesner, then an inmate at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora (despite his convictions, he was admitted to the bar after ten attempts and is now an attorney), with extraordinarily detailed information about LeGeros: the names of his friends, his therapists, his supervisors; his nicknames (“Bernie” and “the Masked Killer”); where he was each hour of the day — 6 a.m. wake-up, 7:30 a.m. work in the tailor shop, 7:30 p.m. yard — and which guard was watching him when. “One thing that seems clear from all the information I’ve been able to gather from all my sources is that LeGeros has a button, which, when pushed, makes him irrational, ranting, and vitriolic. And that button’s name is Andrew Crispo,” Wiesner wrote.

Crispo had met Wiesner, a short, eccentric jailhouse lawyer, when they were serving time together at Otisville a year or two earlier — Crispo for tax fraud, Wiesner for drugs and attempted murder. As Crispo was preparing for the Leslie trial, he worried that LeGeros, a co-defendant, might say something to jeopardize his case. Wiesner advised Crispo on who on the inside might have information that could be useful to his lawyers.

Leslie, a 25-year-old waiter and NYU grad student, had answered a ringing pay phone outside the Mineshaft on September 20, 1984. He told the man on the other end of the line what he looked like — thin and handsome with dark hair, blue eyes, and a short beard. Crispo invited Leslie to his penthouse just around the corner for some fun, and it mostly was. They snorted coke, talked, fooled around. The next day, Crispo invited him to a birthday party at the gallery.

According to Leslie’s allegations, he arrived around 6 p.m. and was told to wait in an empty room, where he noticed a portrait of Roy Cohn. Then LeGeros came in with a gun, held it to Leslie’s head, and cuffed him. Ken Morales, a Bronx graffiti artist whom Crispo had paid $150 for the evening, showed up with three other friends who were compensated in cocaine. LeGeros denies having the gun but admits to slamming Leslie’s head against a gilded icon so hard the piece cracked. Then all the men took their turn whipping and kicking him.

“He was scared, did not want to get whipped, and was scared of Bernard’s gun,” Morales told police. As Leslie pleaded for his life, Crispo told him they had already decided to put him in a box and drop it in the East River. But LeGeros reminded Crispo, “You got three or four other witnesses here.” So Crispo agreed to let Leslie go on the condition that he stick his head in a toilet and sing “Happy Birthday” to Morales, who was turning 20, and visit the club with the guys to cruise for women. The men urinated on Leslie, flushed, and laughed when he got up.

After Leslie washed himself, Crispo demanded oral sex and then threatened to kill the young man if he went to the police. He pointed to the picture of his “very good friend” Cohn and mentioned that “the family” could “exterminate” him. Then he issued a final order: Meet him and LeGeros that night at a restaurant. Leslie said he did it out of fear for his life.

Leslie didn’t report the incident to police until he recognized LeGeros’s face months later in a newspaper article about Vesti. He went to Stony Point for an interview with detective Tom “T.J.” McGowan, who was investigating the murder. Soon after, McGowan was convicted of sexually abusing his 10-year-old stepdaughter and was placed in a cell directly across the hall from Wiesner.

Over the next few months, Wiesner worked to befriend McGowan. “I’ve kept you up to date on the strategy I intend to pursue,” Wiesner told Crispo in the letters. “I got the Entenmann’s yesterday and have started passing it out to him already.” Eventually, Wiesner convinced McGowan to open up about what he’d learned in his investigation. “I’ll pursue the stuff you’ve asked me about with him, and now that I see what stuff you want — inside stuff, stuff that’s normally kept under the covers — I think I can move on my own for a while,” Wiesner told Crispo.

Wiesner says Crispo “credited me with getting him out of the Leslie case.” He still had Crispo’s side of their correspondence at his weekend house in the Catskills, “somewhere among piles of boxes stored in the mouse-infested attic,” he said, which happened to be just 20 minutes from the old motel where I was.

Wiesner was eager to see what I might find as he pulled the attic ladder down from his kitchen ceiling. He has always believed Crispo was unfairly judged for his kinky tastes and told me how they cracked up when Crispo told the story of Leslie singing “Happy Birthday” in the toilet. “If somebody’s looking to be humiliated, that’s pretty good,” Wiesner says.

After about an hour, I found a bag of art postcards, the kind sold in museum gift shops. “There is still time to gather any helpful information,” Crispo wrote to Wiesner on one featuring a Thomas Hart Benton painting that, he noted on the back, he once sold. “So whatever you hear — no matter how trivial you may feel it is simply write it (with date, etc., and names) to my detective, lawyer, whichever.”

Wiesner responded that McGowan had recalled Leslie’s “glee” when describing his taste for hardcore sex. Crispo’s lawyers could use that to cast doubt on Leslie’s credibility. They would show the jury that Leslie was not “Little Miss Muffet,” as Wiesner put it. Later, Wiesner connected McGowan to Crispo’s private detective, who was able to locate the interview notes at the police station and have them turned over to the defense.

Incredibly, the man Leslie had confided in was now helping his predator from within prison. Crispo, writing on a Picasso postcard, told Wiesner, “Thanks for your recent material to [my lawyer Robert] Kasanof — I can not tell you how useful (and how grateful I am) for all that material. Our hopeful success certainly was made a lot easier because of you — we are breaking their case piece by piece.”

The odds were always going to be against Leslie. He needed to show that while he enjoyed “light pain” during sex, he did not consent to being tortured and sexually humiliated by five men for six hours. “He admitted what things he did willingly and then, when the line crossed, what things he was not willing to do,” Fairstein says, but there was no question in her mind about his mental state: “Mark definitely thought he was going to die.”

Leslie’s case was further derailed when a judge ruled that his team could make no mention of Vesti or Crispo’s involvement in that crime. In court, Crispo’s lawyer argued that the encounter with Leslie had been “consensual, social behavior” and that he was only using the trial as a way to receive yet “another exquisite humiliation.”

After six days of heated deliberations, the jury acquitted Crispo. LeGeros, who corroborated Leslie’s account, pleaded guilty to holding him against his will and in exchange received no additional prison time. “I wanted the truth to be known,” LeGeros says, “my part in it, which was beating up on the guy or whatever. Whether I knew it was consensual, not consensual, I had no concept at the time. I had no concept of these things.”

The motel upstate where Crispo stored his belongings.
Photo: Jay Henderson

Crispo died at the age of 78 from a brain tumor and complications from aids, according to his cousin Frank Crispo. His body went unclaimed in the morgue for five weeks before Frank retrieved it and held a small funeral in Philadelphia. “I can’t imagine how it was for him to be sort of discarded” as a child, he says.

Frank learned of his estranged cousin only when he saw him on the cover of a 1985 issue of New York. Frank, a former Manhattan restaurateur, met Andrew for dinner a few years later and remembers how badly he wanted to meet his mother — but she did not reciprocate. When Frank’s own mother died, Andrew went to Philadelphia for the funeral. “He just didn’t know how to handle family,” Frank says. “I pointed out the surviving members of the family, and he walked up to them, and he basically said, ‘Hi, I’m Andrew Crispo. I’m Theresa’s son.’ And they all looked at him like deer in headlights.” Frank buried Andrew in a cemetery “head to head” with his mother, he says. “If they could reach arms underneath, he could touch his mother’s grave and she could touch his.”

In the end, the closest thing to family Crispo had was Arthur Smith, who had become an interior designer for Jackie Kennedy and other celebrities, and left Crispo $200,000, though the majority of his sizable estate went to his family in Georgia — infuriating Crispo.

He accused Smith’s family of coercing him into changing his will at the last minute. But it might have been the other way around. Peter Vitale, who was Smith’s partner from 1973 to 1979 and remained close with him and Crispo, says Smith wanted to leave the money to his family but Crispo insisted he change his will. “Up until that point, I thought Andrew was probably not capable of anything,” Vitale says.

“But when Arthur was dying, he said to me, ‘Don’t leave me in the room alone with Andrew,’ ” Vitale says. For the first time, he thought “maybe Arthur does know something” about Crispo’s capacity for violence.

A source close to Crispo who asked to remain anonymous tells me Crispo was involved in another murder. On September 16, 1984, the body of Daniel Berry, a New York Public Library clerk and dancer from Queens, was found decomposing in the woods of Greenburgh. The source was with Crispo that Labor Day weekend and saw him with Berry and a few other friends. “Berry went in the van with them, but he didn’t look like he was happy, like he was going on a joyride,” the source says. Crispo had announced that he wanted to get revenge for a friend whom Berry had supposedly wronged. Berry’s body was found two weeks later with a single gunshot wound to the head.

In 2001, the Greenburgh Police Department said it was reopening the cold case, and Crispo was identified as a known associate of Berry’s. The Westchester DA’s office has confirmed that the case remains unsolved. (Greenburgh police did not answer questions about the investigation.)

Crispo spent the last decades of his life consumed by drugs, debt, and sex. He had taken up meth and crack and once showed up to Wiesner’s law office with a teenager who addressed him as “sir” and appeared ready to “perform” on command, as Wiesner puts it.

In 1999, Crispo was so distraught over a late $2,366 payment from his bankruptcy lawyer that he threatened to kidnap her 4-year-old daughter. He went to prison for another five years. After that, he took out numerous loans from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, putting up valuable art, including a Rauschenberg collage, a de Kooning painting, and a Picasso drawing as collateral. He also enlisted the ultrahigh-interest lender Borro, which “is pretty much desperation,” one art-finance expert tells me. He was eating at soup kitchens, and a neighbor had seen him naked and defecating in the hallway of the Brooklyn building that was evicting him. His bank accounts were overdrawn by a total of $84.85 at the time of his death.

But those who knew Crispo never believed he was truly broke. He had spent his entire life illiquid and in debt and always had incredible inventory. After the 1987 Sotheby’s sale to pay back his creditors, one business associate estimated Crispo still held some $45 million in art. Two years later, a gas leak blew up his Southampton home and Crispo was awarded more than $7 million from the Long Island Lighting Company. And when his friend Tom Pfeffer called Crispo a few years before his death to apologize for having turned over files used in his tax conviction, he says Crispo responded, “It really is fine. I got millions back.”

And Crispo was transacting in the art market even at his lowest moments. The dealer Anthony Grant recounted visiting Crispo several times in prison to organize a half-million-dollar David Hockney sale via Sotheby’s. And Crispo tried unsuccessfully to sell a Marcel Duchamp drawing of Nude Descending a Staircase for $17 million through Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. (The gallerist disputes this account.) Francis Naumann, a dealer and Duchamp scholar, estimates its actual value at the time to be between $1 million and $5 million, depending on its true date, which is under contention. Crispo ultimately sold a 59 percent stake in the work to Rosenfeld and kept the remaining 41 percent at his death.

Crispo might have been unwilling or unable to retrieve the art he had in storage in order to sell it. Much of the time he couldn’t access it himself because he owed the facilities back pay. Today, a huge amount of art, and many of Crispo’s secrets, is lost or locked up. The owner of one lot of boxes loaned a number of them to a filmmaker in Los Angeles, who said they burned in the wildfires. A filmmaker in New York recently paid Contompasis to hold another dozen or so boxes privately.

Frank Crispo and Sam Mauro, Andrew’s estranged nephew, won control of the estate from Andrew’s attorney, J. Benjamin Greene, who had claimed, “It was Andrew’s firm belief during his lifetime that he owed his birth family nothing.” Now, whatever the dealer owned will be disbursed among many relatives, who, for the most part, he never met. They are just beginning to access the other facilities, which likely contain Andrew’s most valuable possessions, and track down art allegedly taken by Andrew’s “degenerate” friends, as Frank calls them. Andrew once told Pfeffer that a neighbor had stolen a Salvador Dalí painting from under his bed. The heirs are also locked in several lawsuits with Andrew’s creditors. Crozier Fine Arts alone contends that, as of late last year, the estate owes $190,000 in unpaid fees — which could be pennies compared with the value of the 370 unnamed artworks inside.

In April, LeGeros greets me with a warm smile at the front door of his house in the suburbs of New York. He has a full head of gray hair and is recognizable only by his huge dark eyes, which are heavier now. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, looking like any dad you might see at a hardware store, which is how he wants it. Occasionally someone will recognize his face or name at the grocery or a restaurant and he’ll remember never to go there again.

The house is decorated with family photos and art, some of which he collected while working with Crispo — a Hudson River School painting, a violin sculpture by Arman — as well as his own paintings. In the smallest room in the house, which LeGeros chose for his bedroom because it’s the size of his Attica cell, is a painting of an attic window seen from the outside. Thresholds — doors and windows — are a common motif in his work, as are static scenes where life appears paused: docked boats, empty streets. “There are no people there because I did not feel alive” while painting them, he says.

After a brief tour, he takes me on a drive to the edge of Bear Mountain State Park to see where he discarded his gun after the murder. He did not use the .22-caliber rifle discovered at the gallery, he now says, but a Beretta .380, which was never found. We park and walk down a narrow pathway with cattails springing up from the marshland on either side. He points to places in the water where he threw the gun’s parts. He recalls how Crispo advised him against disposing of the gun that night because, as he told LeGeros, “20 years from now, you want to be able to look at it.”

When he was released on parole, LeGeros received a call from a familiar voice: “Does Mr. B have any ill feelings toward Mr. C?”

“You got to be kidding me,” LeGeros replied.

Crispo started to talk about Vesti, but LeGeros intervened. “I said, ‘Andrew, is that the smartest thing in the world, to be talking on an open line about your involvement in the homicide that I did 33 years for?’ ” he says. “I knew he had somebody else in the room and he was trying to show off.”

Crispo wanted to keep him close. He suggested he could give LeGeros a job selling art and collectibles out of his warehouse. Or perhaps LeGeros wanted to buy a $16,000 Rolex? “I felt a lot of that was to lure me into a false sense of safety,” LeGeros says. He knew communicating with Crispo was a bad idea, not least because it was a violation of his parole, but something still drew him to his former boss. He agreed to take a look at the watch, and they arranged to meet at a Manhattan jeweler to verify its authenticity.

Crispo never showed up. In nearly reopening that door, LeGeros says he was seeking closure. “I wanted to see him face to face, just to look in his face and say” — he trails off. “I don’t know what I wanted to say.”