One of the men who went to jail was Walsh’s old partner. His name was Al Furillo, and he’d accepted about $10,000 in illicit money to not come forward about drug dealing by other cops in his precinct. It turned out that Furillo had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was dying of leukemia, and he desperately needed the money to pay medical bills.
Some people thought Walsh might go easy on him because of the extenuating circumstances and because of their past relationship.
But Walsh personally testified against Furillo at the trial, and it was that testimony which helped convince the jury to convict him. He was sentenced five to twelve years in prison. Six months after he went to jail, his daughter died. Nine months after that, Al Furillo was beaten to death by another prisoner.
If Walsh was shaken up or remorseful over what had happened to his old partner, he never talked about it publicly. I found a statement from him when he was asked about his actions during the corruption probe where he said:
“There are times in your life when you have to make decisions between what is right and what is wrong. You can never let outside influences confuse you. Not friends. Not career aspirations. Not fear of being unpopular or of being ostracized or even of physical violence. Nothing and no one is more important than your integrity. As long as you have your integrity, you can hold your head up high. Without integrity, you are lost.”
No personal emotion of any kind in that statement… but then he hadn’t shown any public emotion when his own daughter died. So why would he act any differently for his old friend and partner?
I picked up my phone and called my police source who was trying to set up an interview for me with the deputy commissioner. He said he was still working on it, but he would get back to me as soon as he could. He added that Walsh wasn’t exactly the easiest person to work with. Thinking of the emotionless-sounding man I’d watched earlier, I could understand that.
“I just saw him at the press conference the day after the murder,” I said. “I’m sure he really loved his daughter and all, but it was hard to tell from that.”
“I think they had a very complicated relationship.”
“Complicated how?”
“I’m not sure. But there was definitely some kind of weird dynamic going on there though. Maura never wanted to talk about her father. If you asked her about him, she immediately changed the subject.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“Who knows? Just some kind of messed up father-daughter relationship. But that happens – hey, you know how father-daughter relationships sometimes have a lot of problems.”
“Nope,” I said. “I wouldn’t know anything about that at all.”
Three
My father died before I ever got a chance to meet him.
He was a fireman, and he was killed trying to rescue a family of five people from a burning building. The family got out, but it was too late for my father. He was hailed as a hero afterward for saving their lives and sacrificing his own in this brave and selfless effort. It was a memorable, moving story that brought tears to my eyes as a little girl every time my mother told it to me.
Except sometimes my father wasn’t a fireman at all – he was a soldier who bravely charged an enemy bunker and single-handedly wiped out a machine gun that had been decimating the men in his platoon. He gave his life for his country. His body was buried with full military honors and his coffin wrapped in an American flag.
Or maybe he was a police officer who held off a gang of armed bank robbers so that a group of terrified hostages in the bank could escape, before he himself was gunned down. There was a full-dress police funeral afterward where the mayor and the governor and a lot of other important people extolled my father’s actions as those of a courageous and dedicated servant to the people.
You see, all of these were things told to me by my mother when I was a little girl growing up and asked her why I didn’t have a father like all the other children did.
I believed her then, never questioning the details or the facts or the variations in the story, because that was the kind of father I wanted to have too.
It wasn’t until I was a bit older – and presumably wiser – that I discovered the truth about my father.
He wasn’t gone because he had died heroically in a fire, or on a battlefield, or thwarting a bank robbery.
He was just gone.
It turned out that he had walked out on my mother – and abandoned me too – right after I was born.
And my mother made up all these stories about him because she never wanted to admit the truth to anyone, not even to her own daughter.
I was thinking about all that now – probably because of my discussion about the relationship between Maura Walsh and her father – while I did my morning workout in the bedroom of my apartment on Irving Place in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan. It was a big bedroom, and I’d filled it with a lot of exercise equipment. Some days I went to a gym a few blocks away on Park Avenue South too for my morning workout regime. But I always did the workout either here or in the gym – and sometimes in both places when I really wanted to stretch myself out – without fail.
My workout routine varied, but I tried to do at least an hour before I left for work. I started with sit-ups and push-ups. Then twenty minutes of pedaling on a stationary bike. After that, I ran on a treadmill – generally while watching the morning news on TV. At the gym, I did leg curls and lifted weights and other stuff I couldn’t do at home. I swam there too, doing laps in an Olympic-sized pool at the club.
Sure, all of this sometimes left me exhausted before I even got to my desk, but it was worth it for me. I’d started doing all these exercises during my long recovery period from the brutal attack I’d endured in Central Park. I hadn’t even been able to walk then, but now I was almost healed, except for a stumble once in a while when one of my legs gave out, or the rare times when I needed to use a cane. But, all in all, Jessie Tucker was in pretty good shape for a woman who had almost died.
When I was finished exercising, I poured myself some coffee in the kitchen, toasted and buttered a bagel, then went back into the living room. I ate my breakfast in front of the TV – taking in the headlines about traffic tie-ups, fires, crimes, political controversies and, of course, the weather. The breaking news was it was going to be another hot one in New York City today. TV news loved to play up weather stories even more than we did at the Tribune.
I still had a bit of time before I needed to leave for work. So, after I finished the bagel, I took my coffee over to my laptop. Then I called up some of the old stories written about myself and Central Park. I did that sometimes. I wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe to show myself again how far I’d come since that terrible night.
There were two batches of stories.
The first was the story of my initial near-death attack. All about the heroic young woman – that was me – who bravely fought her way back to life and captured the city’s heart. The arrest of the man who did it. His confession, his trial and his subsequent death in prison.
The second group of stories was from what had just happened to me a few months earlier. The truth about who had attacked me – and why. And how I’d broken that story myself in the Tribune, even though I almost died again in the process of doing so.