...And Never Let HerGo

was moved out of Gander Hill, Rosa said, he’d called Tom’s relatives to check on him around the time of the bail hearing, and everything seemed fine.
    And then he heard that Tom had been denied bail and was still sitting in prison. In March 1998, Rosa was moved back to Gander Hill on another matter and into the 1-F pod. And although he was housed several cells away from Tom, they had managed to communicate fifteen or twenty minutes a day by standing near each other’s windows during yard time.
    By March, Tom’s rage at his little brother was no longer uppermost in his mind. Connolly already knew about the burglary plot he’d set up with Nick Perillo—but now Rosa told Connolly that Tom was willing to go further than that to punish Debby. “He wasafraid that she was gonna break,” Rosa said, “because the federal government was poking around, asking her questions.”
    When Rosa was moved into the cell next to Tom’s, they resumed their hours-long discussions of what could be done to be sure that Debby didn’t cooperate any further with the prosecutors. It galled Tom to think that the woman he had once controlled completely should now be in a position to pose such a threat to him.
    There was no solution, really, but to have her killed. When Rosa seemed receptive, Tom slipped him some pictures of Debby and gave him her address on Delaware Avenue. He explained—as he had to Perillo—that her house was almost invisible behind tall hedges and that a fence separated it from the neighbors on either side.
    “There was a good possibility,” Rosa told Connolly, “that someone could just walk up to her door like a flower delivery guy and just whack her.”
    It seemed not to have occurred to Tom that he was dealing with men who were exceptionally con-wise. He was vastly underrating Colm Connolly and Ferris Wharton; he was barely aware of Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert. And he was certainly unaware that his jailhouse confidants were talking to his prosecutors.
    Tom listened with interest when Rosa told him that he believed his brother-in-law Jorge would be willing to murder Debby if the price was right. They decided it would be safer to talk in code. Debby would be referred to as “tuna,” and instead of saying “kill” or “murder,” they would say “black.”
    Writing in Spanish, Rosa actually sent a letter to Jorge using the code words. He told his brother-in-law to ask no questions, but simply to rewrite the contents in his own handwriting so Tom wouldn’t recognize the real author, mail it to Lilia to send on to Tom. Then in order to assure Tom that the conspiracy to murder was moving ahead, Jorge was to go take photographs of Debby’s house, which were to be sent to Rosa at Gander Hill.
    All in good time, Rosa showed Tom the photos of the house that had been so familiar to him for many years. He was apparently convinced that it was only a matter of time before the hit on Debby was accomplished.
    Rosa’s letter to Jorge had mentioned a “blackened tuna,” in Spanish. “Does that mean a dead Deborah MacIntyre?” Connolly asked him.
    “Right.” He nodded. “[The lady] being dead.”
    The investigators found Jorge, who turned over a copy of the letter that discussed a murder and the photographs of Debby’shouse. They told Rosa to limit his conversations with Tom to the discussion of the plot to kill his ex-lover. But Tom wasn’t satisfied with that; he evidently felt the plan was going so smoothly that he told Rosa he wanted to add a hit on Gerry to the contract.
    On June 9, 1998, Debby and Tom Bergstrom had a meeting with the prosecution team. Every time she thought she had absorbed the worst pain their revelations brought, she was wrong. But these men whom she had resented deeply because she thought they were persecuting the man she loved had now become friends. The scales had fallen from her eyes, and like it or not, she had long since realized that Tom didn’t love her and had, perhaps, never loved her. But this day brought such ugly revelations that her conscious mind quite literally refused to listen to them.
    Just as she and Tom Bergstrom were about to leave the June meeting, Connolly said something to her about a murder plot. “I heard it,” Debby remembered, “but I didn’t hear it. It went over my head. In the middle of the night, his words came back and I started to think about it and thought that couldn’t be what he’d said.”
    She called Bergstrom the next day, and when he