Читать книгу Killed in Brazil? - Jimmy Tobin - Страница 9

“Terrible things happen all the time. This is the terrible thing.”

—Martin Amis, The Killings in Atlanta

When Amanda Gatti went to bed the night of July 10, 2009, she thought her marriage was over. “Don't go to bed angry,” that piece of marital wisdom, like so much of its kind easier to prescribe than follow, seemed futile in a moment of such fracture. The night's volcanic and far-too-public fight had exhausted her. She crawled into bed and waited for sleep to deliver her from the trials of the night, to prepare her for the morning and the trials it must bring.

A few hours before sunrise, Amanda descended the stairs of her suite in Hotel Dorisol, Porto de Galinha, a seaside resort in Pernambuco, Brazil, where she was on a second honeymoon of sorts with her husband, iconic boxer Arturo Gatti, and their ten-month-old son, Arturo Junior. The baby needed his bottle. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her husband. He looked as he might reasonably be expected to considering his behavior only hours earlier: naked but for his underwear, a crumpled heap. Knocked out.

She'd seen it before, suffered it before, too. Gatti was, in Amanda's words, “a completely different man when he was drinking.” And he'd been drinking. The crowd outside the pizzeria that served as the setting for their latest fight could attest to that. So could her body, bruised and bloodied as it was. Drunk, angry with her for refusing to join him at a local bar, Gatti had shoved her to the ground.

“He wouldn't let me take my son,” she would later admit. So, hurt and exhausted, she left Gatti with their son, who was asleep in his stroller.

When she came back to their room sometime later, Amanda found Gatti sitting, his arms around a crying Junior, his blood spattered on the baby's bib. Amanda didn't yet know it, but a crowd had witnessed Gatti assault her. It responded with street justice. After she left the bar to return to the suite a mob twenty-deep attacked the boxer. Gatti fought back in a rage but bore the marks of a man hit by fists, rocks, even a bicycle.

“I guess it's over, huh?” he asked. Resorting to a question can be easier than stating the answer—especially an answer you don't want to hear, don't want to speak. A question retains some hope. A question can be a dare.

“It's over,” she told him before going up to bed.

So Amanda said nothing to her husband as she came down the stairs in the early morning, perhaps because with him in that contorted repose, in his peace, she found a little of her own. Perhaps because there was nothing to say, nothing left to fight for—and no fight left. Not enough anyway. Junior needed his bottle, too, and whatever closure she might reach with her husband, at that groggy hour it came second to the needs of their son.

Back to bed then, bottle in hand. Imagine her stealing another glance as she crept up the stairs. Did she narrow her eyes at the cause of so much of her pain or shake her head in disgust? Did she breathe a heavy sigh for him, for their family, and maybe with it feel her resolve soften just a bit? It is a terrible thing to break up a family, after all.

What the morning brought was worse.

Around nine in the morning, Amanda made her way back downstairs, still upset, still ready to say goodbye. This time she went to him, shook him. He was cold. Face-down. A halo of blood fanned out around his head. A knife lay nearby. The anger that had fortified her nerve, that had fixed her jaw as she came down to confront the aftermath of the night, disappeared.

“Arturo, I forgive you! Please wake up! Please wake up, Arturo!”

Then came the screams.

“My husband's dead! My husband's dead! Please, someone, help me!”

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Alone in that hotel room with her baby—the body of her dead husband, so powerfully inanimate, anchoring her to a nightmare she wished only to escape—Amanda needed help, alright. But dead bodies demand an explanation, and once she was safely removed from the scene, Amanda was expected to explain as best—as convincingly—as she could what happened. More specifically, she was expected to explain her role in it. The first explanation left the twenty-three-year-old suddenly single mother in desperate need of help again.

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Amanda Rodrigues was arrested in Recife, Brazil, on July 12, 2009, the primary suspect in her husband's murder. If she had felt alone the morning before, it was nothing like the sense of isolation she felt now, separated from her baby, in the custody of Brazilian police. Yes, dead bodies demand an explanation, and at that stage of the investigation the most likely explanation for Gatti's death was that he'd been murdered by his wife. There were strangulation marks on Gatti's neck, marks that seemed to have been caused by the blood-stained purse strap found at the scene. The assumption among Brazilian law enforcement was that Amanda had strangled a drunken Gatti while he slept, a state that would've allowed her to overpower a man who not only outweighed her by some seventy pounds but who knocked people cold for a living.

Moreover, she acted alone. This much was confirmed by Mosies Teixeira, the lead investigator in the case. Teixeira told the Associated Press that it was “technically impossible for a third person to have been in the flat.” There were no signs of forced entry and the electronic locks on the door confirmed that no one other than Amanda and Gatti had entered the unit. “The investigation isn't finished,” said Teixeira, “but we continue to think she did this alone.” Teixeira's suggestion that the investigation had not yet ruled anything out misrepresented the matter somewhat. What had been ruled out thus far was the possibility that Amanda acted with an accomplice. And implicit in that belief was the assumption she had acted.

Amanda was less certain about what happened. In her version of the story, she had been sleeping, ignorant of the ending being engineered downstairs. She suggested Gatti might have killed himself, or that someone might have somehow entered the apartment and murdered him. She was innocent, however, on this she could accept no doubt.

Teixeira dismissed both explanations. Brazilian law dictates that although police accuse a person of a crime, the prosecutor is responsible for formally filing a charge. Police had until July 22 to share their findings with the prosecutor, and it boded poorly for Amanda that Teixeira, already analyzing the case as a murder, hoped to have the investigation completed before the deadline. Ten years later, Main Events CEO Kathy Duva would come back to this point in explaining her sense of what happened that night. “That they arrested her immediately tells me they had good reason to think that she did it.”

Seemingly unfazed by Teixeira's expectations, Amanda welcomed a speedy resolution. In a letter from prison, she wrote: “I am innocent, and I know that this will be proven in a few days.”

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A few days? Not given the evidence. The early defenses offered on Amanda's behalf were unlikely to dissuade Teixeira. Amanda offered one herself, sharing a letter she wrote from jail with the Associated Press on July 15. In it, she stressed the strength of her bond with her husband. “The people most important to my life,” she wrote, “who know us, know the size of our love.” Speaking to her suffering, she continued: “What hurts me is knowing the suffering of my family and friends. What hurts me is to know that my husband will not be in my house waiting for my return.”

Confronted with the possibility of Amanda somehow being a murderer, with the despair of having to reevaluate their image of her as a result, Amanda's family urged the world to understand her as they did. In an interview with TV Jornal, a Recife news station, Amanda's sister, Flavia, expressed her family's support: “Amanda told us that she didn't kill Arturo, and we believe her,” she said, adding, “My sister, like us, is very religious and would be incapable of killing anyone.”

Leaving aside that very religious people often commit murder, the use of “like us” here is telling. It is an attempt to confine Amanda to a context where murder is an aberration, unthinkable. In the context of the family, Amanda couldn't be a murderer. It was membership in a group, in their group, that made Amanda's guilt impossible for her family. The Gatti family would use a similar logic in their steadfast refusal to believe one of their own could take his own life.

Even Flavia, who gave no ground in defending her sister's innocence, struggled to understand Gatti's suicide. Nor could she understand what might precipitate the kind of fight between the two that would result in tragedy. “Sure they had fights,” said Flavia, “but he was crazy about her.” Amanda and Arturo didn't just have fights, though. To suggest as much was either naive or dishonest. The dysfunction in their marriage would come to light. And when it did, it would take more than character witnesses to see Amanda exonerated.

For now, though, the puzzling physics of the crime scene were in Amanda's favor. Speaking to Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, Flavia argued that Amanda could not have strangled her husband, who physically dwarfed her. It was a line of argument echoed by Celio Avelino, Amanda's attorney: “She is fragile, young and skinny—how could she kill a boxing champion?” he asked. A fair question, though one that excluded some pertinent details. What about Gatti's inebriation, the injuries he suffered at the hands of that angry mob? Avelino wasn't finished though. Even had Amanda succeeded in subduing and strangling Gatti in his drunken state, she still had to suspend him from the stairs, and from a height of seven feet. That too seemed a physical impossibility. Avelino believed these feats eliminated Amanda as a murder suspect. “When she awoke,” he said, “she presumed he had committed suicide. But she had nothing to do with it.” This statement, too, is a little curious, if only because it introduced another possibility. The possibility that Gatti committed suicide, and that Amanda had played a role in his doing so.

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That Amanda had nothing to do with her husband's death is something the Brazilian police eventually accepted. On July 30, they ruled Gatti's death a suicide. Police official Paulo Alberes told the Brazilian news­paper Diário de Pernambuco that Gatti used Amanda's purse strap to hang himself from the hotel-room staircase. “The case has been resolved,” said police spokeswoman Milena Saraiva. “While the evidence at the scene first led us to think Gatti was murdered, the autopsy results and a detailed crime-scene analysis simply pointed to a different outcome.”

After nearly three weeks in jail, Amanda was released when judge Ildete Verissimo de Lima ruled that there were no grounds for retaining a suspect in an investigation that excluded the possibility of murder.

The final moments of Gatti's life then, in the eyes of Brazilian police, were entirely his own.

Grimly fashioning a noose, adjusting it for size, positioning a stool, calculating the stability of his makeshift gallows—alone in this despairing ritual, one imagines, despite the world around him, despite the reason for living asleep upstairs. He had to climb the stool too. His body betraying him from the “seven cans of beer, along with two bottles of wine” he'd consumed at dinner, betraying him from the head injury he'd suffered when that mob attacked him for throwing Amanda to the ground. Did he stand resolutely atop that stool, his faulty balance countered by the firmness of his resolve? Did he think of the wife he would leave permanently, the son who may never grasp why he was separated from the man whose name he shared, that unforgettable man he could never fully remember? Did Gatti think he was giving up? Did he think he had a choice?

These are questions an autopsy can't answer. And Gatti, leaving no suicide note, left them unanswerable, lost forever at the thud of a toppled stool.

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So many questions left to be answered by the people who cared most for him. And these people couldn't agree on an answer. Amanda had her own explanation for Gatti's suicide. “I believe that when we got home and he saw he hurt me, he thought I would leave him, that I would tell him to just let me go, that I would separate from him,” she told the Associated Press after walking out of jail. “He did that in a moment of weakness. He was drunk, maybe he didn't know what he was doing, maybe he thought I would leave him the next day.”

A charitable treatment of this explanation might read as follows: a new widow, one who discovered her husband's dead body, who spent nearly three weeks in jail while being investigated for murder, who answered countless questions about her knowledge of the events that widowed and jailed her, provided the only explanation she could imagine.

As far as explanations go, it is a poor one, maybe understandably so, but a poor one nonetheless. Because while Amanda might well have been about to leave Gatti in the morning, it is hard to imagine that Gatti, even in his despair, would consider a failed marriage reason enough to make his two children—Junior as well as a daughter from a previous relationship—fatherless. Yes, it appeared like he and Amanda were trying to salvage a tumultuous marriage with their second honeymoon. And yes, Gatti's friends and family pleaded with him to escape a toxic relationship. But he told them he'd submit to a spin on the marital Catherine Wheel to preserve his relationship with Junior.

Accepting—as many did not—that Gatti and Amanda were trying to find happiness together does little to make Amanda's explanation more satisfying. If their union was so strong, so important that ending it would show the world what Gatti was ultimately capable of, why couldn't Amanda provide greater insight into what drove him to suicide? Granted, she may not have known him any better than anyone else. Their relationship was only a few years old. It can take much longer than that to learn who a person is, especially if they're afraid to lose you. Still, Amanda's explanation for Gatti's death hinged on the importance of her in his life and his drunkenness. And that may have been all she could honestly offer. She didn't have to offer more given the conclusions of the police investigation (her explanation was mostly immaterial where that was concerned). But it did little to dampen suspicions.

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Just how strong was the bond between the two, anyway? In a phone interview she gave shortly after Gatti died, his mother Ida said that the couple was always fighting, that Amanda was “yelling all the time,” telling Gatti “I'm going to kill you!” And there was hostility in more than their speech. In April of that year, Gatti violated a restraining order filed against him. Who filed the restraining order wasn't clear in the record but Ida confirmed it was Amanda. She had called 911 claiming that Gatti hit her. He was charged with assault and released on bail. Gatti was ordered to stay two hundred yards away from Amanda and to abstain from alcohol. Not that he did; not that Amanda wanted him to.

Then there is Duva's story about the night she learned Gatti died. It was July 11. Duva was standing in her kitchen when her phone rang. Rick Reeno of boxingscene.com was on the other end. “Did you hear the news?”

“I thought it was a hoax,” remembers Duva. It wasn't, and so with Gatti's manager, Pat Lynch, in Italy, she traveled to the Prudential Center in Newark, where Tomasz Adamek was fighting Bobby Gunn. Gatti's friends were at the fight, and Duva made it her duty to break the awful news. She remembers walking through the arena, telling Gatti's friends as she saw them. One of his friends responded in a way Duva has never forgotten:

“She finally killed him.”

“The people that were closest to him,” says Duva, remembering all those difficult exchanges, “this was their reaction.”

This was the same reaction Gatti's younger brother Fabricio had to the news. “The first thing that popped into my mind? She killed him.” At a time when the details were unclear, when there was little more to process than loss and shock, mariticide was the only explanation for those who knew Gatti best.

Further domestic dysfunction was revealed in 2011 when the Gatti family tried to annul the final version of Gatti's will (a will that left everything to Amanda). In Quebec's Superior Court, Gatti's friend, Antonio Rizzo, testified to the marriage's stormy nature. Rizzo said it was a union marked by continuous fights, that Gatti had become increasingly worried that Amanda might take Junior from him, and feared what she was capable of while in Brazil. Recounting a conversation he had with Gatti about this fear, Rizzo remembers his friend saying, “She wants me to sign a Brazilian passport for him. But if she takes my son I'll never see him again.” These fears weren't the product of paranoia either. Duva remembers Lynch sharing a story of a neighbor who lost custody of his child when his wife left for Brazil with their baby. It was Duva's understanding that, second honeymoon or not, Gatti was going to Brazil to come home with Junior, and that on his return he planned to change his will once more.

Throughout his testimony, Rizzo apologized to the court for replicating the language Amanda used in her fights with Gatti. He told the court about a night at the couple's penthouse on Jarry Street in Saint-Leonard, Quebec. Amanda, screaming, hit Gatti over the head with a broom, smashed crystal all around him, and demanding he clean up the mess. “You're a loser,” Amanda told him, “the only thing you're good at is bleeding, your mother's a whore, your sisters are prostitutes.” Rodrigues's lawyer objected to the story on the grounds of it being hearsay and therefore inadmissible. But it is hard to unhear such things.

Rizzo wasn't the only person in Gatti's life who had seen that side of Amanda. Gatti's childhood friend, Chris Santos, offered testimony that supported Rizzo's depiction of the Gatti marriage. He, too, said Amanda was “foul-mouthed and bad-tempered” and had once given Gatti a black eye. Amanda herself testified to keying her husband's truck after an argument. The incident produced $4,000 in damages. In the police report Gatti filed that night, Amanda was listed as his ex-wife. Details like these Amanda tried to explain away as idiosyncrasies of her marriage, incidents that, for the uninitiated, appeared worse than they were.

At times, money was at the root of these eruptions. Despite a notary giving the court a copy of Gatti's last will and testament, Rizzo said Gatti complained in the months before his death of the pressure from Amanda to leave his estate to her. “I told him: ‘It's fine. You have two kids, your relationship is upside-down,’” testified Rizzo, “‘You leave half to your daughter and half to your son.’” Gatti's response? “‘You don't understand. Amanda wants me to leave everything to her. I will never do that.’”

Then there was the voicemail Gatti left Rizzo, a voicemail Rizzo saved for years after. At the time he left it, Gatti was in Amsterdam, on the European leg of his trip with Amanda and Junior. That trip had started in Paris, where Gatti surprised Amanda with a romantic trip up the Eiffel Tower. While taking in the view, Gatti had champagne brought over. There was a diamond ring in Amanda's flute, a gift from her husband. Amanda said it was here that Gatti apologized for his behavior, that he swore he would mend his ways for his family.

There is none of that optimism in the voicemail.

“Yo Tony, you were fuckin’ right,” said Gatti in the voicemail. “It's a fuckin’ nightmare. I'll talk to you later, alright? I'm gonna be back sooner than I expected. Ciao.” This sounded nothing like a man recommitting to his marriage. It sounded very much, however, like the words of a man who spent some of his marriage living in his mom's basement instead of going home to his wife. “A world champion. Living in a basement,” remembers Rizzo. “Incredible.”

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It hadn't always been that way. Duva recalls Gatti excitedly introducing Amanda and her family to his inner circle at a fight. He said she was a student, that they met walking their dogs. “She didn't look like a student,” remembers Duva, but Gatti wouldn't discuss the matter any further. The real story, many people hold, is that Amanda met Gatti at Squeeze Lounge, a New Jersey gentlemen's club where she worked as an exotic dancer. Former employees of the establishment have corroborated that story. Amanda vehemently denies it. There is no record of her being an employee of Squeeze Lounge, and she has taken legal action against news organizations that claimed she was. But a photo of her in the club wearing a bikini has fueled suspicions regardless.

For Duva, there was something a bit peculiar about the Rodrigues family too. She remembers being struck by how happy they were, exhibiting a strange amount of joy at the new relationship. Gatti was smitten, enamored with a girl he was convinced liked him for who he was—not for his fame, not for his money, but for his charming and fun self. Was Gatti right? Had he found in Amanda—who was slack-jawed when she found out he earned his living in the cruelest sport—someone drawn to the man he was away from the spotlight, the crowds, the fast life? Or was Gatti succumbing to a willful naivete? It isn't hard to understand why he might want someone who desired a quieter, less destructive version of himself. Mario Costa, who owns the Ringside Lounge, a bar next door to the gym a nineteen-year-old Gatti joined when he moved to Jersey City, said the fighter “lived in go-go bars.” Costa saw Gatti's life as one desperately lacking structure.

If it was structure, peace, even a sort of amorous innocence Gatti was looking for, however, there is little evidence that he found it with Amanda. “He had terrible taste in women,” recalls Duva. “And the one woman who really cared about him [Erika Rivera, his ex-fiancée and mother of his first child, Sofia], she really couldn't take it.” There is a nod here to Gatti's wild side, of its prohibitive force, and perhaps in that an explanation for his poor taste in women. It may be difficult to find a girl to settle down with when you never settle down yourself. Still, women troubles aside, Gatti “was really good at picking his friends,” said Duva, a tinge of regret softening her voice, “I just wish he would have taken his friends’ advice.”

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In a sad irony, the girl who Gatti believed loved him for him, ended up embroiled in a bitter dispute over his money. His family sued to have the will that left Amanda the beneficiary of his estate declared invalid.

The fight over Gatti's will hangs over and lays beneath the entire ordeal of his death. Like so many before, it was a fight Gatti was supposed to have ended with his own hand. That this struggle persisted after his death does him a disservice. He had left his affairs in order or at least assumed he had. This can be a courtesy the dying leave the living, a gesture of love and consideration for those left behind. But in another sense, Gatti's will wasn't a courtesy to the living, it was an act of extortion—extortion he intended to overcome once he returned to the United States. In its devotion to Amanda, Gatti's will was evidence of her innocence. But that devotion is also suspicious. Rewritten so close to his mysterious death, Gatti's will can also be interpreted as a placating gesture performed to appease the mother of his son, a woman whose ability to tear him from his son left Gatti fearful. More, it is a motive for murder. Submitting, even temporarily, to the pressures of his wife, Gatti left everything to her before departing for a foreign country where he died violently while she slept only feet away. The timing was too convenient: if Amanda was going to kill her husband, it made sense to secure her fortune first. The will can't be all of these things at once, either Gatti killed himself or he was murdered. But if nothing else, Gatti's will reveals the touch of madness in his marriage.

Montreal notary Bruce Moidel was responsible for drafting the final version of Gatti's will. He testified in the civil trial. Moidel remembers his meeting with the couple as “a normal, typical meeting for a young couple about to fly off and leave a baby behind with family” (Arturo Jr. did not accompany the Gattis on the first leg of their vacation). But that impression flipped quickly. As the trio worked their way through the will's details, Amanda began to air mistrust of her husband. She seemed convinced that Gatti would one day be unfaithful. Where such jealousy might figure in drafting a will is unclear, but it proved to have financial consequences. Straining to convince his wife of his devotion, Gatti told Amanda he'd give her a million dollars in the event he was unfaithful. And he wasn't just talking. Moidel eventually drafted an agreement accompanying the will stating that if Gatti ever cheated on Amanda he would have to give her the money. Moidel, who became a notary in 1958, admitted he'd never encountered a measure like that, and that it was entirely the work of the couple.

Was Gatti unfaithful? Did Amanda have reasons for doubting him? The answers to those questions have yet to breach the silent respect for the dead. Gatti's gesture, however, in its overcompensation, is difficult to interpret as anything but an indictment of his marriage.

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It looked to many like the Gattis had exhausted their life together. Yet even if that were true, might Gatti not have retained some perspective on what a future without Amanda could promise? After all, he “loved his children, traveling, enjoying his retirement,” said Lynch, “[h]e was happy, upbeat, and enjoyed life. He had too much to lose.” Interestingly, for Lynch, Amanda did not figure in the list of things that Gatti found joy in. That may have been a coincidence, but maybe not. This omission suggests that Amanda's absence from Gatti's life would make it no less worth living.

There is evidence Gatti himself was unconvinced of the emptiness of a world without Amanda. Days after their 2007 wedding, Gatti visited a New Jersey lawyer with Amanda to tear up a copy of the couple's prenuptial agreement. That agreement left Amanda with nothing in the case of divorce, not even alimony. According to The Canadian Press, Amanda testified that Gatti destroyed a copy of the agreement as an unsolicited gesture of his love for her. Does this testimony really contrast with the one Rizzo provided, which depicted Gatti as a man fearful of not appearing devoted?

This ceremonial shredding may have been a gesture of love, but Gatti made sure the prenuptial agreement remained valid. By 2009, when the couple's marriage was experiencing periods of increasing turmoil, Gatti asked his lawyer in New Jersey to send a copy of the agreement to his divorce attorney in Montreal. Amanda too had been in contact with a divorce attorney by this time. Even the momentary nihilism that might have precipitated Gatti's suicide, then, seems out of place. Gatti had loved, lost, and recovered; he was capable of planning responsibly. There is futurity in these legal proceedings that makes Gatti's suicide puzzling. A man planning for his future does so because he intends to have one.

We accept that love can kill. The world has its share of suffering Werth­ers who, unable to obtain their sole desire, embrace a liberating nothingness. But the love between Amanda and Gatti wasn't unrequited—they were on a second honeymoon, with their baby no less. Loss too can precipitate suicide. It's called “the widowhood effect,” a term used to capture what is, according to the British Medical Journal, a strong association between spousal bereavement and death.

To see Amanda walk through the iron doors of a Brazilian jail, smiling and waving in the bursts of flashbulbs like a coy paparazzi obsession, was to see a woman who looked anything but bereaved. Perhaps this isn't fair, reading into the body language of a woman moments into her freedom a perhaps criminal absence of sadness. And yet it is an image that stuck in the craw of Gatti's friends and family. So maybe it isn't right to say that analyzing Amanda's behavior as she crossed the threshold into freedom is unfair. It might be unfair if she were innocent. But there were a lot of people who doubted she was.

By the letter of the law, of course, Amanda was indeed innocent. Still, Gatti's family and friends remained unconvinced by the police investigation's results. What they saw in Amanda's smile was the satisfaction of a woman who'd gotten away with murder. And they were going to wipe that smile from her face.

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The first step for the Gatti family was requesting a second autopsy. The initial autopsy indicated that Gatti “may have committed suicide.” It failed to rule out the possibility that he didn't. Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Cannon, supported the family's request for a second autopsy, formally asking Brazilian authorities for further information about the case. According to forensic pathologist Satish Chundru, a second autopsy is most commonly requested by the family of the deceased to get information or answers to questions the first autopsy couldn't satisfy. Not only were the Gattis unsatisfied by the findings of the first autopsy—they were suspicious of it. Gatti's older brother Joe suspected the Brazilian authorities of trying to exonerate Amanda. “Everything points to her,” said Joe, as the suicide speculation first picked up, “No doubt they're trying to get her off.” Lynch echoed Joe's sentiment, saying, “Everyone who knew him would know that's [suicide] far from the truth.”