HIGHWAY A1A, which runs along the Atlantic Ocean in Broward County, is typical coastal Florida—gated condos with palm trees and purple bougainvillea on one block, chain restaurants and Sam’s Club and sleazy nightclubs on the next. It may be the only place you’ll ever see a pony-tailed skateboarder, on a strip club’s empty parking lot, inspecting a white Rolls-Royce with a sign in the windshield that reads: FIRST PERSON WITH $25,000 CASH.
In the late 1980s, when I met Joe Viscido, Florida was awash in Colombian cocaine. I was looking for a new nonfiction book project, and I’d read a newspaper story about Joe’s determination to find the killers of his son, Joe Jr., who’d been murdered in a drug ripoff. After locating Joe in Pompano Beach, and talking with him on the phone, I flew to Fort Lauderdale to meet him.
Joe turned out to be a Korean War vet, a used-car dealer, a heavy smoker and decent pool player with an intensely defeated air. I wanted to like him, and I did; and I wanted him to like me, and he seemed to. Over many drinks and games of snooker, he told me his sad story. His only child, Joe Jr., “a really great kid,” had got into cocaine. To finance his partying, he started dealing coke to friends. Joe, alarmed, eventually got him into rehab. His son lasted a few months before relapsing.
Joe adored his son, a construction hand and champion surfer, and was determined to help him get back on track. He tried everything he could think of, finally buying a vacant lot on which they would build a triplex together and then sell it. Joe Jr. was to use the profit to start his own sports-memorabilia business.
Joe Jr. told his father he had something that weekend, then he’d be out. No more drugs, a fresh start, a revitalized relationship between father and son. Joe, himself a nicotine fiend, agreed to quit smoking at the same time. They’d work construction side by side and support one another. They were to meet at the jobsite on Monday morning. That Sunday—the night before—Joe Jr., just short of his 27th birthday, was robbed at his apartment. Battling his assailants, he was beaten and shot in the head.
DRUG MURDERS were not uncommon in Broward County, and the police investigation, energetic at first, soon bogged down under the weight of new cases. No matter how Joe hectored and pleaded, he couldn’t keep the case from going cold. Fine, he thought, if the cops won’t track down the killer or killers, I will. “Either I was gonna find them,” he told me, “or they’re gonna kill me, or I’m gonna kill myself.”
He began by talking to his son’s friends, who gave him valuable leads. Word was that multiple people had been involved. Joe opened a file on every name he heard. It’s a fine line between commitment and obsession, and you cross it unnoticed. His life became entirely devoted to tracking down his son's killers, to the detriment of his business and his marriage. He leased out his used-car lot, outfitted a mobile home for lengthy road trips, and set off.
Pursuing leads up and down the East Coast, using up his savings, he taught himself how to be a detective and eventually put together a convincing case. He turned over to police all the evidence he’d gathered, which pointed to three men—Peter Dallas, Stephen Rosati, and Peter Roussonicolos—as the killers. The cops were impressed. When the case was presented to a grand jury, however, they decided, by a single vote, not to proceed with an indictment. Joe was devastated.
WHEN JOE AND I talked about doing a book together, we had different notions of how to proceed. I explained that I’d need to interview scores of people to get my head around the story, depict other characters, understand history, establish context. He didn’t want me to interview his wife, his son’s friends, the detectives on the case. He wanted the book to be told through his eyes, from his perspective.
Joe suggested we retrace his odyssey up and down the East Coast, together in the mobile home, revisiting his stops as he explained his process. Joe practically vibrated with despair; I couldn’t imagine spending twenty-four hours a day in claustrophobic quarters full of cigarette smoke and such raw intensity.
Slowly, Joe crawled out of the ditch the grand jury had left him in. They needed more evidence? OK, he’d gather more evidence. He started investigating all over again. At one point he found himself in Queens, the New York borough. There, he’d learned, one of the suspects—Rosati, a bodybuilder and male stripper—had a court appearance. Joe waited outside on the courthouse steps.
When Rosati emerged, alone, Joe moved up close behind him. He had his hand on the gun in his coat pocket. “I almost shot him in the back of the head, but I couldn’t do it,” he told me. “Not because I’d feel bad, or go to prison. I couldn’t do it because the other two wouldn’t have gone down with him.”
Joe and I never came to terms on a book. I didn’t see how to write the one he wanted, and he didn’t see why I was wedded to my third-person approach. I tried to explain—“I would need to know things that you yourself couldn’t have known at the time”—but he wasn’t much of a reader and I’m not sure he fully understood. My time in Florida was becoming a costly investment, and when he said he’d decided to write the book himself, one side of me was disappointed, the other relieved. We parted on good terms and stayed in occasional touch.
TO SHORTEN a long and tortuous story, Joe’s obsession culminated a couple of years later in the arrest of Peter Dallas, one of the men he’d originally identified. Dallas confessed to the murder and named the other two, Rosati and Roussonicolos, as accomplices.
All three men were indicted. Joe felt jubilant and vindicated. His work had not been in vain; his son’s killers were going to face justice. Dallas pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and agreed to testify against Rosati and Roussonicolos. They were both charged with capital murder.
But the twists weren’t over yet. While awaiting trial, Dallas recanted, claiming he’d been coerced by Broward County detectives. They’d persuaded him that he’d “fry in the electric chair” if he didn’t confess and implicate the others. The whole case was turning into a messy legal swamp.
A special prosecutor was appointed. He found previously undisclosed information: after the murder, DEA agents had put a Florida police sergeant in touch with an informant who knew about Joe Jr.’s murder. The informant, wearing a wire, recorded a conversation with someone who had knowledge of the shooting.
During their conversation, the man told the informant that Joe Jr.’s murder had actually been committed not by the three suspects but by two other men, Kerry Carbonell and “Papa Jim.” Alas, the Florida sergeant had dismissed the information as unreliable, put the tape in his socks drawer, and forgotten all about it.
Florida investigators, meanwhile, had also found compelling evidence suggesting that the killers were indeed Kerry Carbonel and James (“Papa Jim”) Traina, not the three men behind bars. This time the grand jury saw fit to proceed, and Carbonel and Traina were both charged with Joe Jr.’s murder.
Meanwhile, the charges against Dallas, Rosati, and Roussonicolos were dropped. Their nightmare was over. All three filed wrongful-prosecution lawsuits and ultimately settled for amounts ranging from $89,000 to $1 million. Rosati later worked with a writer on a book that was published under the title Framed!.
The capital murder case went forward. Before Kerry Carbonell could be tried, however, he hanged himself in his jail cell. That left James Traina, who went to trial, was convicted of Joe Jr.’s murder, and is today serving life in prison.
JOE CELEBRATED Traina’s conviction, but his anguish never left him. He’d lost his son, and in Queens he’d come within an inch of murdering an innocent man. Yes, his obsession had paid off—the killers would never have been caught without his doggedness—but the seven-year experience left him a depleted, broken man. “Nailing those guys,” he said, “was the only thing that kept me alive.”
I wish had given me free rein to write his story. I believe it would have made a wonderful nonfiction book and movie. (I’d already cast the film in my mind. I’d seen Gene Hackman in “The French Connection” and “The Conversation” and felt he’d have been perfect as Joe.) But it was his life, of course, and I had no right to invade the sanctuary of his pain.
I didn’t have a child at that time, and I saw Joe’s story—his misfortune, his tattered soul—mainly as great material. Much as I liked the man, I registered his tragedy as a chance to burnish my reputation and perhaps my bank account, and his as well. Such was the practical basis of our relationship: writer and subject.
The more I got to know Joe, the more sympathetic and supportive I became, but without righteousness, without moral purity. Maybe he sensed that I was calculating as well as empathic, I don’t know. I do know that, today, I would have brought to our dealings a much more layered, sensitive spirit. My daughter is 27, his son’s age when he was murdered.
Joe passed away a couple of years ago in Port Ste. Lucie, Florida. He never did get around to writing his book.
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