One evening in late fall 1998 I -- a journalist and author, on the trail of a powerful story about a very likable young New York woman who disappeared without a trace --was sitting with assembled volunteers in a Brooklyn brownstone, waiting for the guest of honor to show. The guest of honor was The Expert -- a professional in finding vanished and victimized people, and he was going to teach them all how to do their volunteer canvasing, poster-distributing and amateur search. He was Gil Alba, a detective who specialized in missing young people; he had recently led the (ultimately tragic) search for a young male student who hailed from Gil's own upper-Westchester or Putnam County region. Gil had heard about Kristine Kupka's disappearance and had driven all the way down the twisty Saw Mill Parkway to Brooklyn , to help Kupka's family organize volunteers to help find her.
Who are you? A reporter, huh? I don't know if I want you in this room while I talk to them," Gil loudly launched in at me, as I hunched, scribbling notes, the proverbial fly on the wall. His in-your-face gruffness (something I would soon learn to appreciate as a method of getting people to cough up the beans right away) and singling-out of me (damn!, I was trying to suck up to this family!) intimidated, annoyed, intrigued, and impressed me, all at once. I squeeked. in a schoolgirl octave: "I'm a contributing editor for New York magazine; oh, please, let me stay! I won't tell anybody what happens in this room!": now sucking up to this large, gruff ex-cop as well as to the assembled friends of Kristine.
Gil let me stay.
Phew.
Later, of course, I would see that Gil's tell-it-as-he-sees-it verbal style and his macho was, aside from a good diagnostic tool, both the essence of his pull-no-punches honesty and the cover for a very kindly heart.
Gil has been doggedly on the case of Kristine Kupka's disappearance -- and, I think it can be safe to assume: murder -- all these years. He has never given up. He is heroic for this. I don't know if I ever told Gil, in my 5+ years of knowing him, that one of the reasons I became a writer specializing in crime (I'm attaching my career bio) is that my own cousin, Ellen Jane Hover, 23, disappeared from New York in 1976, and the detective on that case was an impassioned sleuth who never gave up*, working it for years with no money. In my years of knowing Gil, with his passionate dedication to the Kupka case and others, he is in this same hero-detective mold, in the process educating countless citizens and friends and relatives of crime victims on how to find their loved ones and get information, closure, and justice.
Anyway, after his gruff "who are you?" in Kathy Kupka's apartment that night, Gil and I bonded. He came with me on some of my investigative rounds for the story, amplifying my writerly timidity in approaching people with his macho-cop shtick. Without him, I never could have gotten the story. We were a great team, and my story broke news when it appeared on New York magazine's cover 8 weeks later.
I then left the story, but Gil has never left it. Over the years every time I called him he would be that much closer to finding out what happened to Kristine. The loyalty, that doggedness, that refusal to give up on a dead woman, or her grieving and mystified family: in a city and a world that demands instant results and instant payoffs, this is the definition of character to me.
A few months passed from Kupka's disappearance. In February 1999 the story that came to rivet New York was the appalling shooting death of African immigrant Amadou Diallo -- the hard-working young man with the sweet smile -- in a hail of 41 bullets in front of his house in the Soundview section of the Bronx by 4 New York City Street Crime Unit Cops. The entire, immense liberal world of New York -- every latte-sipper and quite a few instant-Maxwell-House drinkers as well -- went (you should pardon the expression) ballistic at Mayor Giuliani for what we heard and felt was his no-holds-barred encouragement of the Street Crime Unit to engage in tactics that not only denied African Americans their civil liberties and assumed that black men in this city were criminals until proven otherwise...but that had fostered the hair-trigger-ness that cost Diallo his life. (Of course two and a half years later those same people who hated Giuiliani would see him as their, and New York 's, and the country's, hero. But that, as we all know, is another story -- THE story of our time.)
And everyone in the Manhattan chattering classes hated those four Street Crime cops.
Well, everyone but me.
I had befriended many a policeman through the course of writing four true crime accounts of high-profile crimes in ten years. So, since cops were my heroes, I had gazed at the lineup of the Diallo cops...and when my eyes came to Richard Murphy, who had had an impeccable record (zero civilian complaints or killings) and also wore a Jewish star (for his wife;s religion) along with a cross around his neck, I decided to stick my own neck out and do a New York magazine profile on Murphy as...a good guy who was caught up in a system run amok.
"Hey wait a minute, Sheila! You like the guy just because he wears a Jewish star? -- that doesn't make sense!" There was Gil on the phone, trying to put a little stuffing in my impetuous naivete.
Gil was a total guide, partner, listening post, compass, chaperone, and educator during my months on the Murphy story for New York. Oh, did we shlep!: out to Long Island to try to get Murphy's high school yearbook (getting high school year books, as all you investigators know, is like trying to get Pentagon files). Up to the Bronx , to the Diallo crime scene, for what seemed like hours: looking at every bullet hole, Gil helping me try to run the tragic shooting down. He was a better reporter than I was, teaching me the reporter's lesson: Throw away your preconceived notions. Dare to find out what might kill your story. Keep an open mind. And to an upper Manhattan coffee shop where a friend of Gil's who he'd talked into meeting with me sat down, and told me the real-deal story of the Street Crime Unit. Because he had been a part of it for years. We looked over all the documents, the police reports, the profiles, and I listened to those two pro's talk. Though I had talked to many cops over my career, this was like being at Cop Harvard. By the time I got up from that leatherette booth I knew what had happened that fateful night, and which one of the four cops (not my guy Murphy) had been "the problem." It never came out at the trial but I think the theory (which of course I never committed to paper) was a sound one.
My story, "The Shooter," came out in New York magazine in December '99, just as the Diallo-cop trial was starting. The story was praised for its open-mindedness and humanity. I couldn't have done it without Gil, who underneath his toughness and his bluntness, taught me a lot about open-mindedness and humanity, and who, in a way that isn't obvious when you meet him, identifies with ethnic minorities and eschews and was deeply offended by the kind of profiling that was at the heart of the Diallo tragedy.
Over the subsequent three years I would call Gil whenever I had a story that I needed a strong P.I. p.o.v. on -- or when I needed to talk out a hypothetical. Okay: Whenever I needed a favor. And favors I asked him and favors he did. To my thank-you-thank-you!s and my flailing offers to write a brochure for him, then, and now he always said the same thing:
"Sheila, don't keep saying you'll do something for me. You owe me nothing."
That's my definition of a mensch.
Gil is always there to shoot down a wild but genuinely-bandied-about theory -- as when, just a month ago, some p.i. professionals in a shall-go-nameless state honestly believed that a beloved, mild-mannered female cultural icon had something to do with her husband's drug-overdose-death. He's always there for advice. For help. But mostly he helps others -- a whole country-full of desperate family members who have no other allies in the thankless search for their missing loved ones, searches their local police departments cannot or will not or will no longer do, because it's been years since the loss. Gil has gone around the country giving workshops, meeting and helping these people, and helping other p.i.'s learn how to do what he has been doing on the Kupka case for all these years: Never give up. A human being is missing -- someone's child. Never give up, for them. For the sake of them. Never give up, like the NY detective (now deceased) did for my cousin Ellen.*
Gil, you richly deserve this honor, and I am proud of you for it, proud to be your friend, and proud to have my testimonial included in the ceremony.
Just one more thing, because Gil will no doubt be too modest to tell you this: Last year in the wittier-than-thou -- and read-by-everyone-who's-everyone-in-New-York NY Times column "Boldfaced Names" -- a chronicle of the rich, the cultured, the famous, the accomplished, and the bullshit artists of Gotham: Gil (not Brad Pitt, not Michael Bloomberg, not Henry Kravis, not Graydon Carter, not Sean P. Diddy Combs) -- our Gil-- was cited for his sartorial wardrobe.
Take that, all you snooty out there who still use the term "gumshoe."
Fondly,
Sheila Weller
* Ellen's bones were found a year later in a wooded area of Rockland County. Her killer, a photographer with a record for rape named Rodney Alcala, was never prosecuted for her murder, and in that inability to prosecute him he drove across the country and went on to kill a 12 year old girl, Robin Samsoe, for whose capital murder he was, after a mistrial, finally convicted. Two and a half decades later, Alcala remains one of the most notorious and despicably-bogus-appeals-filing inmates on California's Death Row.