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Silence of the Lam Twenty years ago, Benjamin Holmes disappeared. Twelve years ago, his wife had him declared dead. Two months ago, he returned with a bang.
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
Holmes can finally go home again: At his mother's house in Youngstown. Photograph by Jessica Wynne.
here's a particular quality to the moment a long-held secret is unearthed -- the one around which, subterraneously, a life is organized, like the temple of a ruined city. You take a step back and look again, with wonder. There it all is: roofless rooms, passages twisting into forgetfulness, an altar . . . painted? Blood-stained? What?
I had been surprised that Benjamin Holmes, an F.B.I. fugitive, wanted on charges of aggravated arson until he surfaced recently after two decades on the lam, was eager to talk. But 20 years of self-imposed silence turns out to be a difficult discipline to break. Holmes is uncomfortable talking in public when we first meet in the lobby of the Youngstown Holiday Inn in Ohio. The desk clerk's eyes go wide as we leave for my room. Holmes, 48, is an imposing man, 6 foot 4, thin but muscular, wearing cracked plastic shoes.
He needs to lie down, he says. He's a few days out of the hospital, recovering from the gunshot wounds that marked his re-entry into the world. He came out of hiding to reconnect with his wife, and she shot him. But he doesn't want to talk about that now.
Stretched across one of the room's two beds, he is startled by the maid's knock. "What are you going to do for security here?" he asks. "I could pick that lock." He refuses to let me tape the conversation (although I suspect he's taping it himself, a recorder concealed in one of the pockets of his guerrilla-style vest). He's wary about being photographed: "I've spent all these years making sure I was never -- ever -- photographed," he says. "Now I'm gonna sit for a portrait?" After many hours of conversation he becomes suspicious. "How do I know who you work for?" ID is no good. "This could be fake ID," he says. To an argument about the necessity of trust, he counters, "The only thing that's necessary is to know when people are lying to you."
Melanie Thernstrom is the author of "The Dead Girl" and "Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder."
But this man, Ben Holmes -- or Sandobal Reyes or Ibn Saad Kaharleed or Slim or at times just Robert Holmes -- has made deception his life's work.
"I had no choice," he says.
The police -- or perhaps the mob -- tried to kill him by planting a firebomb in his house, he says, burning 60 percent of his body. Charges of arson followed. He ducked bail, disappearing from Youngstown at the apt hour of half-past midnight, Sept. 28, 1980. Television and radio announcements said that he was dangerous, and he heard that the police had shoot-on-sight orders. Besides the arson charges, there was speculation that he was the head of three gangs and might even have had something to do with the disappearance of the brother of an alleged witness to the arson.
And why did someone blow up his house?
He had a "valuable skill," and "they" wanted him to make something "very illegal," and he refused. "I was framed," he says. It's a standard claim for a fugitive, of course -- not something you expect to believe. But unlike most criminals, Holmes has an arsenal of evidence refuting the charges against him that he has saved for 20 years. He also has old tapes of a police officer trying to blackmail him, which he promises to play for me and which he plans to use in the lawsuit he is preparing against the Hubbard Police Department in Ohio. He pats his ratty brown vinyl briefcase, stuffed with his legal documents, tapes and a fugitive self-help book, "The Poor Man's James Bond."
One more question -- about what his valuable, illegal skill actually was -- and Holmes snaps. His warm affect shifts; his glance is filled with fear. "Why should I tell you my secrets?"
Holmes was the unusual fugitive who -- if he is to be believed -- stayed pretty close to home the whole time. He often thought of his forebears: "I was hiding out along the old underground railroad that crosses from Mississippi through Ohio into Canada, where some of my ancestors -- Mississippi slaves -- made it." He still has family in Canada he could have gone to live with, he says, but he didn't want to leave the state because he heard that the penalties for a fugitive captured crossing state lines are more severe. He made a point of spreading rumors that he had flown to California, Mexico, Brazil, however.
'I liked beating the system,' Holmes says. 'I liked how easy it was. I could have hid out forever. I was hooked.'
Being a fugitive wouldn't appear to be as exciting as its myriad fictional treatments; the main qualities it requires are patience and paranoia. Holmes seems to have had an abundance of both. It was many months, for example, before he even had a friend send word to his wife that he was alive. He lived briefly an hour away in a friend's apartment in Lorain, Ohio, then moved back to Youngstown and lived in a racing-car clubhouse owned by friends. It was back in his hometown that he perfected his guises. His face had been altered by the burns, his skin lightened. Formerly he had been clean-shaven and bespectacled; he grew a beard and long hair, got contacts and developed a limp. He learned never to look people in the eye when talking to them -- That's when they really see you."
Eight months later, he says, he moved to Cleveland, where a friend he identifies only as Peaches owned a building and an auto shop where Holmes could live and work. Peaches, so-called because he's a black man with light skin, was understood to have "disappeared" himself 30 years earlier, after being accused of the capital crime of killing a white man in Mississippi. Not that Holmes was happy to find himself keeping company with fellow desperadoes. "They're thinking they're doing me a favor," he says, "and I'm thinking I could get picked up if they come for them."
The last time Holmes had real ID was 1979.
The old white stereotype of blacks looking alike was finally working in his favor. Twice during his years in Cleveland, Holmes claims he was in a car that was stopped by the police and taken to a station. ("That's racial profiling," he says. "Black men driving a nice car.") A fake ID saw him through both encounters. The ID, he told me, had been bought for $400 from a Dominican moving back home. Holmes notes, with a touch of pride, "I don't speak Spanish." When questioned about a neighborhood robbery and asked to take a polygraph test, he was terrified the police would fingerprint him, but they didn't; he says that biofeedback techniques helped him to pass the polygraph.
He calls the type of fake ID he used "double entry" ID because it was shared with someone else, someone who did not pay taxes or have a job or a bank account. Homeless black men were a good source of such ID's -- although these were usually good for only 30 days or so, because often, annoyingly, the owners resold their cards behind Holmes's back.
He found life in Cleveland liberating in some ways -- he could go to a basketball court and be the fifth man with four whites in a game, something considered beyond the pale in Youngstown. But when Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson came to town to give a concert, he felt it was too risky to go.
"Don't forget to say how lonely I was," he adds. "It was a lonely, paranoid existence." He had abandoned his wife, Addie, with their 3-month-old child, Benita. (Holmes is cagey about how much contact he had with his family during his early years as a fugitive.) Moreover, he says, he wasn't in a position to make new friends. He recalls a Haitian medical resident in Akron, whom he liked and who told him she was going to spend most of her salary on a fast car. "I would have liked to say, 'I like racing cars too,"' he says. "I would have liked to have told people who I was and laughed and talked. When you're socializing you get to wanting to talk."
Pressed about whether there was anything he liked about being a fugitive that kept him in hiding so many years, Holmes hesitates and then admits he had fun. "It's one thing to say you want to be a family man and another thing to live in the same place for years and years," he says. He had a talent, and he knew it. "I liked beating the system. I liked how easy it was. I could have hid out forever. I was hooked."
t sounds like the beginnings of a shaggy-dog story: how many enemies does a paranoid fugitive really have?
Holmes's answer is a long one, filled with the names of people who are dead or in jail or who refuse to talk. He's like the protector figure in "The Terminator" being questioned by the police captors: he can't prove he's from the future any more than Holmes can bring back his past. His story is airtight in its internal consistency, as paranoid fantasies often are, and numerous details check out, but it may take his lawsuit, if he makes it happen, to open the book on his gravest allegations.
It's in keeping with Holmes's biblical worldview that the real danger turned out not to be the law but what was closest to him.
Holmes dates his one-man witness-protection program to late spring 1977. He was working in a small shop he owned that converted ordinary cars into racing cars when two Black Muslim acquaintances paid him a visit, he says. "Salaam aleikum," they said. Then they told him what they wanted: help making gun silencers.
Holmes, who had studied mechanical engineering at Youngstown State University and in Sussex, England, often customized mufflers for racing cars and was excited by his alternative idea of trying to make a gun silencer from a lawn mower. He says he redrew the men's blueprints but stopped short of actually making the silencer (which is illegal).
Holmes's story now takes a darker turn. A few weeks later at Dee's Lounge, a strip joint down the block from his shop, he was sitting at the bar in front of the long mirror that was rumored to be a two-way, hiding men with machine guns on the lookout for raids and robberies and hits. Eddie Truelove, who managed the bar for Joey Naples, one of the two controlling mobsters of the region, sidled up to him.
"Brother Holmes, Benny, Benny the Blood," Holmes recalls him saying. "Why you helping the other side? The Black Muslims are running off at the mouth and telling people that they're going to own this town because you're doing things for them exclusively that you won't do for us."
The F.B.I. has described Youngstown as the last mob-controlled city in America. Also known as Bomb City, Crimestown U.S.A. and the Wild Wild West, Youngstown is a place that for decades has had among the highest per-capita homicide rates in the country -- exceeding those of nearby Cleveland and Akron by many times. When Holmes's parents left their sharecropping lives behind in Itta Bena, Miss., in the early 50's and reached Youngstown looking for work, the city was still hopping. "These mills, they built the tanks and bombs that won this country's wars," Bruce Springsteen sings, elegizing the economic collapse of Youngstown into poverty and crime. "We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam, now we're wondering what they were dyin' for." The 1978 closing of the local mill was a civic disaster. "My sweet Jenny, I'm sinkin' down. Here, darlin', in Youngstown."
"Isn't that illegal?" Holmes asked.
Yes and no, the officer replied.
It was the first, Holmes says, of many such requests. He claims that one officer in particular became obsessed with him. (Through the Hubbard Police Department, this former officer has repeatedly declined to answer Holmes's allegations or comment on the tapes, other than to pass along a reminder that Holmes is still under investigation for criminal charges.) Holmes recalls that whenever he was around or working on his car, his nemesis would come by and buddy up for hours, talking about favors for favors. Holmes says he refused.
In February 1978 there was a surprise raid on the Holmes house. Holmes says that the cops told him they had been tipped off to a silencer lab and a drug lab in the basement. Although the police found nothing illegal and the Holmeses were released the next day, their confiscated belongings were not. His wife's wedding dress disappeared, along with his valuable collection of 17 guns, with which, Holmes says, he had been futilely trying to outarm his packed neighbors. His arsenal included a pre-Civil War 12-gauge shotgun, which Holmes says was given to his great-grandfather by his slave master on his release, and an 1876 30-30 Winchester buffalo soldier rifle.
"In those days, when the police raided someone's house it was just like, 'Garage sale!"' says Anthony Longmire, a detective in the Youngstown Police Department, commenting on the general tenor of the time. "When they took a burglary report at Radio Shack, it was, 'Time for new radios!"'
Enraged, Holmes filed a lawsuit against the Hubbard Police Department for violating his civil rights, illegal search and seizure and theft. He says his nemesis warned him that the police felt such a suit was spitting in their faces.
n Halloween 1979, Holmes returned home with a friend from a private club for racing-car fanatics, and a trick-or-treater told him that he had seen a pink Cadillac in front of his yard and a man inside his house. Holmes says that when he hit the light switch, a "hot shower" -- a bomb made from gasoline inside the bulb -- detonated. Holmes was thrown into the garage. Then a ball of fire, he rolled into a puddle in his yard. "I prayed to Jehovah to see my unborn child," he says.
Why Holmes returned: With Addie in 1977. Photograph from Benjamin Holmes.
He spent several months in the Akron burn clinic, not expected to survive. It wasn't long, though, until his nemesis and another officer showed up at the hospital, smirking, Holmes says, and informed him that he was being charged with having burned down his house himself to get insurance money. They claimed that they had a witness (an acquaintance of Holmes's). He was placed under arrest. A police guard was posted in the room.
When the alleged witness's brother disappeared, Holmes says, a prosecutor threatened him: if he didn't cooperate, Holmes might be charged with obstruction of justice if the body was found. Then his nemesis offered him a deal. By this point Holmes had become so paranoid that he was secretly taping all his calls -- including his nemesis's.
Listening, finally, to the actual tape was a startling, eerie and persuasive experience. I was struck by the odd rapport between the two men, the threats mixed with chuminess. First, there's a series of messages they leave with families for each other, then a conversation. The officer's voice is low and self-effacing as he tells Holmes he has had to move in with his mother following his divorce. He expresses suspicion that Holmes is taping the conversation, which Holmes denies. Holmes asks the same of his antagonist. Without apparent irony, Holmes's conversant describes "the problems" between them as caused by "a lack of communication." He says he has been authorized by the prosecutor to make a deal. He asks Holmes to meet in a place where each will "feel comfortable." "Maybe things could work out for both of us," he says suggestively.
They met in the parking lot of the Perkins pancake house at 8 p.m. on Sept. 28, 1980. The offer, as Holmes maintains: he lies low for a while and fails to show up at the hearing scheduled for his lawsuit against the Hubbard cops, the court drops it and then, after a suitable interval, the police drop their arson charges. Holmes collects the insurance money and can rebuild his home. The officer, he says, told him to return to the pancake house at midnight; the prosecutor would be there to cement the deal.
In the parking lot, Holmes maintains, the officer rapped on Holmes's car window and told him that the prosecutor was in the other car and that the deal was solid. Holmes says he tried to shine his headlights into their car as he left, to see if the prosecutor was really there, but the person ducked.
Everything in Holmes's story leads to, and away from, this moment -- the moment he decided to disappear. And as often as he brings it up, the moment disappears: the end of the tape, the blinding headlights, no deal on paper -- nothing.
He went home to pack. He didn't wake Addie to say goodbye. He told himself he'd be back in a couple of months.
Holmes kept his end of the bargain, although the courts took two years to drop his suit. But the police didn't drop their charges until May 2000, when someone reviewing the books noticed that Holmes was declared dead 12 years earlier.
merica is filled with two-bit fugitives. Van Harp, an F.B.I. agent, says that in his Cleveland office alone there are 14,000 outstanding arrest warrants. Of those, the F.B.I. selects some fugitives to search for aggressively. The majority are caught quickly, Harp says. After that, the warrant and information on the fugitives stay on the books, popping up if they are arrested for something else -- which happens often, according to Harp. Holmes's record stayed on the books right up to the day in October that he surfaced. But no one was looking too hard for him.
There's a dose of egotism to being a fugitive, a sense of playing Harrison Ford in a big movie, with important people on the chase. "There may have been a big cat-and-mouse game going on in his mind," Harp says. "But there was no cat."
Perhaps Holmes succeeded too well at the fugitive game, passing from invisible to forgotten. In some ways, the death certificate for him that Addie obtained in 1988, enabling her to collect life insurance on him for the next decade, represented the truth. From the world's point of view, Benjamin Holmes had been long dead.
ood afternoon, Miss Sunshine!" says the detective at the Youngstown Police headquarters, the friendliest police station in America. All the detectives in the open room look up at me from their desks, expectantly. But everyone is disappointed at the mention of the former fugitive's name.
"Geez, why you interested in him?" Longmire complains, but he agrees to pull Holmes's file. "Look at this mug shot. Does this look like an innocent man to you?" Longmire, who happens to possess a lovely, guileless face, is part of the new law-enforcement generation. He's a member of the Black Knights, a minority police association that successfully sued the city some years back, effecting its diversification.
In some ways, the death certificate that Addie obtained represented the truth. From the world's point of view, Holmes had been long dead.
Longmire says that the file does not contain any of the old papers -- neither the detective's notes nor the fire inspector's reports. So Holmes's story that the firebomb in his house was planted by the police or the mob . . . ?
Everyone chuckles at the idea of the mob's botching a hit. "You think the mob would let him lie around in the hospital for months afterward?" Longmire asks. "You think the mob can't find someone when they disappear?"
And the police?
"The police might have done that kind of thing in the old days. But then again, why wouldn't they just take him out and shoot him?"
They refer me to Detective Jack Palma downstairs, one of the few detectives still around who was on the force at the time. Palma doesn't remember details of the case and says that the filing clerk couldn't locate the Holmes files, which means they're either misplaced or have been moved out of the office, into deep storage.
Surely they could be found?
Palma folds his hands over his waist. "Once something's gone, it'd take an act of Congress to dig it up."
I go over Holmes's story a last time with Longmire. "So the whole thing could be explained by bad police work," he says hypothetically after listening to the story. "Yeah," he says, mulling it over. "I told you things were far-out in the old days. But there's something I just don't trust about the guy. He's shifty."
rom wherever he was hiding, Holmes always managed to obtain a copy of the Youngstown paper, The Vindicator, even if he had to go back to the city to get it. He carefully clipped news of his enemies and added them to his bulging briefcase.
In the last four years, the F.B.I. investigation into civic corruption in Mahoning County has resulted in the conviction of more than 70 cops, lawyers, mob figures, public officials and others -- many of whom Holmes says he was personally acquainted with, from the wrong side of the table. Holmes says that sometimes, frustrated with the slow pace of justice, he would send the F.B.I. an anonymous tip -- the names, say, of people who could corroborate the details of the night he saw a former Youngstown police officer standing behind the counter at one of the mobster Joey Naples's bars "selling coke and stolen leather jackets like they were Sno-Kones."
"I was really satisfied when a lot of people around fell," he says. He relished the news about the ambush-death of the mob grandfather Joey Naples after a lengthy reign and the death of Eddie Truelove after his heart exploded in a cocaine-snorting contest. He savored the story about Hubbard's police chief John Karlovic being convicted of, among other things, assault.
But most satisfying of all, he tells me, was the story of Allan Frost II, who fled to New Mexico in 1988 after Karlovic assaulted him when a drug deal with Karlovic's niece went sour. He filed suit in 1990 against Karlovic and other city officials.
"I almost came out when I read Frost sued and won," Holmes says. The actual settlement amount was confidential, but Holmes assumes that it was substantial, as he hopes his will be.
He watched the trials of Rodney King and O.J. Simpson on television and says he felt that "the public was ready to see police corruption -- that people can be framed just like I was." He was aware as the years passed that even if he could not beat the aggravated-arson charge, it would probably carry a sentence of only a year or two, and that he had never in fact been charged with the arson witness's brother's death. But he wasn't in a hurry. He had figured out how to support himself in exile, working in car shops and turning a profit on the very thing that led to the exile: gun silencers. He sold silencer blueprints through advertisements in the backs of handgun magazines he still carries in his briefcase. (Although this is legal, the editorial mood toward such ads sometimes shifted, and Holmes would have to juggle them among magazines.) He sold the blueprints and the parts as a package for $44.99. Once a month he picked up the money orders at a P.O. box.
He realized, though, that he was missing the markers of his family's lives. He missed his brother's and grandmother's funerals. He felt terrible for his mother, Lillie, who lived with curtains drawn for fear of the police.
He would go to Youngstown, sometimes, to check on his daughter, Benita. On one occasion, standing across the street, feeling like a ghost, he watched her wait for the school bus, then he saw a woman's car skid over the curb and almost hit her. He spoke to her once, and she told her mother that night that a strange man had approached her. "I wanted to see my daughter before her hair turned gray - or blond," he says.
Addie and her new husband, James Crawley Jr., told me their story in her lawyer's office. Addie, a beautiful, fragile-looking woman who conveys a sense of profound sadness, says she had been involved with Crawley for a few years. Three weeks after their wedding this past September, her old husband popped up from the dead and, she says, held her hostage for four days before she shot him. "It wasn't a classic hostage situation," her lawyer, James Gentile, says quickly, trying to account for the fact that she went to work those days and didn't try to call the police. "It was more of a psychological situation."
Addie may have felt trapped by her fugitive husband, but the entrapment seems to have begun long before. Holmes says that he moved into Addie's small tract house two years ago. Addie and Crawley have disputed this claim in her criminal trial for shooting Holmes.
Holmes shows me his Nautilus equipment in the basement and the enormous manuscript he has spent the last two years working on, which connects racism to Satanism (and which he had been planning to publish under Benita's name). He opens a panel in Benita's closet to reveal a tiny hideaway he built to conceal himself when visitors came over -- the kind of thing his ancestor known simply as "the African" might have curled his long body into.
In the bedroom a cabinet is filled with kidney medications prescribed in the name of Robert Holmes, from when Holmes suffered kidney failure in May. He says Addie nursed him well, driving him back and forth to the hospital in Akron. He was haunted by the fear that during an operation he would give himself away.
The domestic situation mirrored Holmes's byzantine mind-set. He had finally come home, but he couldn't stop being a fugitive. He knew Addie was having an affair with someone at work -- and he used his intelligence techniques to spy on her. He bugged their phone and taped conversations between Addie and Crawley (and also between Addie and himself) and tormented himself by listening to their conversations. Yet even though he uncovered every detail of her secret, and confronted her again and again, he still listened to her denials.
"He ain't in no danger and neither are you," Holmes tells Addie toward the end of the tapes. "I ain't trying to interfere in nothing. I'm just a desperate man trying to hold on to what was everything to me, and it did not work. Like I said last night, you just never cared -- not for a long time. There ain't nothing I can do -- no violence, no love, no begging, no nothing."
Although Addie was making around $65,000 a year working as an engineering technician, Holmes claims she had developed a gambling habit and bad credit. He says he has been collecting her financial statements, lottery tickets and cash-advance receipts in his briefcase. She believed that Crawley, who drove fancy cars and went on cruises, was flush.
In late September, Holmes says, Addie told him she was going to visit relatives in Virginia. There -- in a ceremony whose legality is of course now suspect because of Holmes's reappearance -- she secretly married Crawley. After the wedding, she returned home alone. Holmes picked up a message on their answering machine from a local jeweler: a wedding ring was ready for pickup! He confronted Addie, but she claimed it was a practical joke. On the last of Holmes's phone tapes, on Oct. 11, he recorded Crawley telling Addie he would move in the next day.
That night, Holmes says, he stayed up all night making love to Addie. In the morning, he woke to gunfire, and a burning in his stomach, as Addie stood shooting the gun his father had given her. With one hand, he put two fingers in the two bullet holes (inspired, he says, by an episode of "Magnum P.I."). With the other, he wrestled the gun from Addie's unsteady grip.
She dropped to her knees and, according to Holmes, said: "I did it for Benita, I did it for Benita. James can be a better father than you."
He threw the gun on the bed and told her to take him to the emergency room.
"If I take you to Akron, you'll bleed to death."
"Take me to St. Elizabeth's," he said, referring to the local hospital. "I don't care anymore."
When Holmes came to in the hospital after an operation that left two bullets in his liver, his ID wrist bracelet said "Unidentified Male." But then a nurse came in and joked: "What do you want me to call you, Ben or Robert? Who are you today?"
And he knew they knew. He felt a long-forgotten happiness as he said his name aloud to a stranger again for the first time.
He plans to file suit as soon as Addie's trial ends. He has begun work on a memoir he calls "Invisible Man."
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December 3, 2000
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