48 Hours - Live to Tell: The Birthday Party

Episode Date: December 25, 2016

Kidnap victim Stanley Alpert was later able to lead the FBI to his captors.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It was January 22, 1998. It was Stan's 38th birthday. He didn't come to work, and that's notth birthday. He didn't come to work, and that's not like Stanley. Here's a very diligent person with a very high profile job, and he had an appointment that he didn't show up for and didn't call anybody about. A federal prosecutor was missing, and nobody knew where he was.

A federal prosecutor was missing and nobody knew where he was. A group of his friends were throwing him a party at a club in downtown Manhattan. It was his birthday and he didn't come to his own birthday party. Did he go out? Did he go partying? Did he drink? Was he using drugs? Was he involved in some sexcapades? Did he drink? Was he using drugs? Was he involved in some sexcapades? You know, they were saying no. You know, he's kind of a quiet, mild-mannered guy. Like, he wouldn't just disappear. He wouldn't just not come to work. One possibility was that he was at home, either ill or sleeping or passed out. When we arrived at Stanley's apartment, the superintendent didn't have the key.

So one of the guys followed the building superintendent up the fire escape, and the superintendent used his elbow to smash in Stanley's kitchen windows. There was nothing that indicated that Stanley had been there recently. There was nothing that indicated that Stanley had been there recently. Then somebody pressed the answering machine on his telephone. Hi, it's Stan. Please leave a message. You know, beep, happy birthday from some friend or relative. And then the third message was, this is your credit card company calling to say there's unusual activity on your card a couple of beeps after that was even worse a person called and she said I found your wallet in Bedford Stuyvesant in the garbage and that was really scary.

Bedford-Stuyvesant is a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn. What would his wallet be doing Bedford-Stuyvesant? Somebody said, maybe he's lying in an alleyway somewhere bleeding. And somebody else said, or maybe he was dead. And somebody else said, or maybe, he was dead. This is unbelievable. There's got to be something more to the story. As we started to look into it, people were thinking,

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Everybody had their theory of where Stan was and what happened to Stan. Certainly it was possible to me that he'd been murdered. We're sort of trying to come up with a plan of action when the phone rings. We sort of looked at each other and were like, well, somebody get it. So I answer the phone, and the voice on the other end of the phone says, this is Stan, who is this? So I tell him who I am.

I say, are you all right? And he says, yes, I'm all right, but I was kidnapped. We were sort of kind of stunned by that. You know, he was kidnapped. I mean, who would kidnap a United States attorney? I just ran for it. I ran across Prospect Park West and went down one of the side streets on my way to 7th Avenue. There was a pizza place that was open,

and I start saying to the guy behind the counter, can I use your phone, can I use your phone? I was just kidnapped, can I use your phone? I'm a federal prosecutor, but I made it out, you know, can I please use your phone, I gotta call people. He looked at me like I had three heads. And I said, Stam, where are you? So all we got on the phone was,

I'm at a pizzeria in Brooklyn. Stay where you are, we're coming to get you. Stay where you are. We piled in cars. I went with one agent. I remember feeling incredibly frustrated because he wasn't zooming through the red lights. When the agents and detectives picked up Stan in Brooklyn, he was in front of a pizzeria right where he said he would be.

When we drove up and I saw him him he looked almost like a skeleton he looked exhausted he was really really nervous um you know looked like he'd been up all night so they drove me from brooklyn to the ninth precinct in the east village and they brought me inside and they put me in a room in the 9th precinct in the East Village. And they brought me inside and they put me in a room. And they started questioning him and he started going through his story. And it wasn't until, you know, hours later that we would start hearing, you know, the details of that evening, you know, between the drugs and the sex. People were like, you know, this doesn't make sense at all. you know, this doesn't make sense at all.

It was a pretty bizarre story that most people were having trouble embracing. You're kind of rolling your eyes thinking, oh my gosh, this is crazy, this is crazy. The night of January 21st, 1998, I went on a blind date. Didn't work out. An hour later, I went on a blind date. Didn't work out. An hour later, I got on the train to come home. It was a freezing cold night,

one of those bitterly cold winter New York nights. There was nobody around. It was roughly 11 o'clock. I was walking down 10th Street toward Fifth Avenue in the village. And as I get toward the corner of 10th Street and Fifth Avenue, from out of nowhere, I didn't see it, I didn't hear it before,

I feel a tug on my elbow. I spin around, there's a big, fat, black-barreled automatic machine gun sticking in my gut. There are two guys behind me, shove me from behind, they push me out into the street. Move, move, don't say a word. Just get in the car,. They put me in the backseat of the car.

I could see the outline of the word Lexus on the dash, so I knew we were in a Lexus. The guy in front of me starts talking. What's your name? Stanley. Stanley, let me tell you what we're going to do. We're going to take you to the cash machine and we're going to get your money. And if you with us, we will kill you. That guy was named Lucky. The toughest thug was called Sen. He was across from me to the right. Almost by accident, I didn't want to, I looked at him. Our eyes met and Sen stuck his pistol in my face

and he screamed at me, he's got big eyes. I should kill you for those big eyes. The guy on my right, his name was Ren. Ren seemed to be more of a henchman. He seemed to be the one who would just do what they told him. They took me to the cash machine at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue.

Lucky goes in to get money. So they asked me how much I had in my savings account. And I knew I had to tell the truth because all I had to do was go put in my PIN number and they can know everything. So then I said somewhere around $110,000. They heard that number and they were amazed. Well, that's the point where the plan shifted. They drove towards the West Side Highway and Lucky started explaining to me what their plan was.

He said, we're gonna hold you overnight and tomorrow morning we're gonna take you to a bank and you're gonna withdraw $50,000. And if you don't cooperate, we'll kill you. And then he ordered Wren to blindfold me. So Wren pulls my scarf off and wraps it around my eyes, you know, my own scarf, ties it tight. Then he shoved me down on the seat next to him

in a fetal position and they drove. I didn't know where we were going. It was too early to think at that point. I was just petrified. It was the most horrifying moment you can imagine. They decided that they had caught something that they wanted to keep for a while. That was me. Hotshot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty.

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The agents interviewed me with all deliberate seriousness, and they kept me there for hours. Stan told a story. You know, he's kidnapped off the streets at gunpoint, but... I had absolutely no clue that they didn't find my story credible. Not a clue. I had absolutely no clue that they didn't find my story credible. Not a clue. You gotta keep in mind I'm blindfolded.

What you learn if you're blindfolded is you can pick up a lot through your sense of hearing. When we go through the tunnel that's at the bottom of Manhattan, I know we're through that tunnel because it sounds different. And a few minutes later, I could hear us going over a bridge. So I knew we were going somewhere in Brooklyn or Queens. They pushed me out of the car. I went up a couple of steps through a doorway, a couple of steps more through another doorway, down a long, thin hallway,

and then they shoved me up the stairs. And now I'm trapped in somebody's apartment. And I can still see a little bit out the bottom of my blindfold. I can see two mattresses on the floor. It looks like a place where people just crash. The most obviously terrifying, violent member of the gang was sent. Actually, I could practically feel him close to me at one point, you know, pointing the gun at me and saying,

Stanley, you ever see one of these guns? All I gotta do is pull the trigger and bam, bam, bam, your brains will be all over that wall. Repeatedly they kept cocking and uncocking the guns so that I could hear it. hear it. They demanded my father's address. It was in my wallet. Lucky told me that if I didn't cooperate with them at the bank in the morning, he would kill my father, that they would break body. It always drove me crazy that they picked him of all people because apparently they thought he was some rich Wall Street lawyer type. Stan was a federal prosecutor. That was a very important job.

He's a person who wants to make an impact on the world and in many ways wants to make the world a better place. Stanley was certainly not born with a silver spoon. He was the kind of guy who had to work for everything he had. I grew up lower middle class in Brooklyn. We didn't have a lot of money. I spent all my time out on the streets. I was a little guy, a little skinny guy, so talking your way out of things was one good skill that you needed to learn. A few minutes later, I could hear the front door of the apartment open, and I could hear a bunch of footsteps. I could hear them talking, hey Dee, hey Mystic, what's up, how you doing, how'd you do out on the street?

Mercedes and Mystic come into the apartment. These two teenage girls who are prostitutes and they're friends of Ren and Sen. So a few minutes after that, Lucky left the apartment. And, you know, you got the feeling that people were kind of settling in. Somebody struck a match and you could smell the marijuana. So then they're smoking pot and you can hear that there are sexual acts going on. And you know, this was an awful good thing that I was blindfolded because I couldn't see what was happening around me. So here is Stan, this sort of reserved U.S. attorney, sitting on a mattress while two

people are having sex next to him. And then another couple is having sex across the room. Oh, my gosh, this didn't happen. This guy got lost for 24 hours, and he needs a good story. And then, you know, when it was over, there was a calm in the room. So Sen asked me, Stanley, what would you be doing if we hadn't grabbed you on the street? I'd be meeting my friends for a concert

because that day was my birthday. And they heard that and they just burst out laughing. Oh my God. We kidnapped the on his birthday. Oh my God. We kidnapped a on his birthday. Then Sen says, you know, it's your birthday. You deserve something nice for your birthday. How about a from one of these girls?

These are nice girls. And I said, no thanks. And then they kept pushing it. Stanley, you should take it, because you know what, I think the girls like you. So I said, you know what? The only reason they like me is because most of my face is covered. Here's a guy who's been kidnapped.

You know, he's sitting there, and they're offering him oral sex. A lot, I think, the more seasoned individuals didn't believe it at all. I can't explain it. I just tried to make them not dislike me so that they wouldn't want to kill me. In the middle of the night, Sen and Ren were openly discussing what their plans were with me. And Sen wasn't happy with the plan. He didn't think it was going to work. It's not going to look right.

It's going to look odd for two black men to be taking this sort of nerdy white man into the bank, and he's withdrawing all this money. So Lucky comes back at 4 in the morning, and Ren and Sen say, look, we've got to talk to you, and they go outside the room. They talk for a couple of minutes, and then Lucky pops his head back in the room. And he says, Stanley, tell me again what you do for a living. And I say, I'm an assistant U.S. attorney.

And he says, U.S.? Oh, no. The FBI is going to be after us. And that's when Lucky told me that they changed the plan. And he says, Stanley, look, I got good news for you. We're going to be taking you back. I'm going to come back here at 7 in the morning. We're going to take you back and let you go.

They stayed outside the room at that point talking. So did I think they might be planning to kill me? Sure. Until this thing was over, I knew that my life was hanging by a thread the whole time. In the early morning hours, things got very quiet. There wasn't much activity. And, you know, I could feel that dawn had come. I could hear buses going by.

And I also could hear seagulls. And then this guy Lewis shows up and he's renting the space to them. Sen and Wren have decided that they wanna get out of there. They've got things to attend to. So they tell Louis, here's our guns, you stay here, you hold these guns, you watch this guy until we get back. Louis so offered me food. Actually all of them offered me food at one point or another.

I thought about trying to convince Louis to let me go. Because there were hours where the other guys went out. He's there holding the guns. He's with the girls. But he was a volatile, paranoid, scared kind of guy. And what I was really afraid of is that if I tried to go down that path, if I tried to convince him to let me go, he'd freak out.

I mean, just pull the trigger on that Tech-9, multiple bullets are gonna come out per second. I'm done. You know, in 25 hours of being blindfolded and sitting on a mattress, you have a lot of time to think. And what I was thinking was, if I don't get killed, I'm gonna gather enough evidence so that these guys get put away

and they don't do it to anybody else again. put away and they don't do it to anybody else again. I had a lot of clues that could help them find these guys. I could actually see the pattern on the tiles as we went into the building and I tried to memorize the pattern. I could tell it was a railroad flat in an old tenement building. So I counted the steps of the first landing and I counted it to the second landing. They tortured me. They threatened to murder me. They threatened to kill my father. I couldn't possibly allow them to do that to another person ever.

I was absolutely devastated by the thought that anybody would hurt my father. During the interview when Stan was sharing about his dad and his concerns about his father, you could see a physical change. Now it was becoming emotional. This is something he was feeling, and for me as an investigator, it's telling me that he's telling me the truth. We ended up after several hours of talking to him, believing what he said. Hour after hour goes by and nobody knows where's Lucky. Nobody is telling me why he didn't come back. Nobody is telling me why they haven't set me free. About six or seven o'clock, Ren and Sen came back. So there was a period of a few hours when things got lighter.

And, you know, they started getting friendly. They wanted legal advice. I think one of them had gotten into some sort of a car accident, and he had some injuries from it. He wanted to know Stan's opinion that would he be able to have a lawsuit. And he wanted to know how much his case was worth. He had a lumbar problem. He had to go to a chiropractor once a week. He wanted to know how much he could get for his case. He had a lawyer, but he had, look, he had me there. He had a chance for a second opinion.

But he had, look, he had me there, he had a chance for a second opinion. And then there was this whole period where everybody sat around like we were at a dinner party and starts telling jokes. And they kept calling me Steven and I kept correcting them and said, my name's not Steven, it's Stanley. And at one point Ren says, oh sorry Stanley, our mistake, Steven's the guy we did this to the other night. And then somewhere around 10 o'clock at night, Lucky comes back, comes bursting through the door. Right away, the mood changed. Lucky was the boss. He's back. They're not going to be joking around anymore. Everybody is dead serious. Everybody is quiet. And he says, come on, let's go. And boom, like with military precision, they marched me out the door.

I started to get very nervous. I started to feel palpitations in my heart. I got a sweat on the back of my neck and my forehead. I felt a little sick. Lucky stopped at the doorway, turned back to me, and said, Stanley, let me ask you something. If you had the chance to put me away for life, would you do it? Look, you already told me you know where I live you know where my father lives I don't know who you are I don't know where we are and you say you're gonna release me unarmed I don't think

this has to go any further. Nobody says a word. Lucky gets out of the car. Until a minute later, I hear the trunk opening. And then I heard the sound of duct tape being pulled off of a roll. And it's that point that I was positive that my life was over. I was sure they were going to kill me right then and there. Suddenly your whole life flashes in front of you. You'll never call somebody, you'll never watch a movie, you'll never sit down to a meal, you'll never meet somebody with the hope of getting married. All those things that make up life,

for me in that moment when I heard the duct tape pulling off the roll, that was over. And that was really the most horrific feeling anybody can imagine. So, a second later I heard Lucky applying the tape to the plastic that was covering the broken window on his car. And then it slowly dawned on me that I had just made a big mistake. Overnight somebody had broken into his car, smashed the passenger side window, so he was just fixing the plastic.

They kept driving and drove for, I don't know, maybe another 10 or 15 minutes. And then they stopped the car again. And the guy to my right says, "'Should we give him $20 for a cab? Of course, it was $20 of my own money. But that sounded courteous. But they might have been tricking me.

I really didn't know. That same guy opened the door, and he took me outside, and I'm still blindfolded, and he said, put your hands up. And he says, you just walk. So I took a step and then another step. And eventually, I think I can very gently hear the Lexus pulling away.

So I said, are you there? And nobody answered. And I ripped the blindfold off and I spun around and they were gone. and that was the happiest moment of my life it was it was it was it was ecstasy it was pure ecstasy i just ran for it yeah i recognized that it was prospect park i grew up there i was there all the time i was rushing to find a business or restaurant something like that where i could go in and make recognized that it was Prospect Park. I grew up there. I was there all the time. I was rushing to find a business or restaurant, something like that, where I could go in and make a call. And then when the phone call came in, that's when the energy in the room sort of went from zero to 60. Just stay where you are. Stay where you are. The precinct was crazy. It was a

buzz with energy. You know, they debriefed him and they started typing up the report. And it was, as she was typing it, we were pulling it off. She would get a half a page typed and we would yell, print it. She'd print it and then we would run with it. We had one group of people, you know, running down, you know, ran and said, and we had another group that was looking for know, running down, you know, Ren and Sen.

We had another group that was looking for Lucky, looking for that Lexus. We had people looking for the prostitutes. We ran Mercedes, that nickname through the NYPD database, found a young female who'd been arrested a number of times for prostitution. Our job was to try to see if we could locate Mercedes and interview her. I'd seen a number of pictures of her from, you know, her rap sheets. There's these two girls standing in front of this building. As soon as we walk up, I recognize Mercedes right from the pictures.

So I actually say to her, hey, Mercedes, how you doing? You know, I said, hey, listen, we've got to talk to you for a minute. When you do an interview with somebody, what you want to do is you want to basically elevate the level of threat towards them, which makes them feel like they're in a world of trouble. You have no idea, I said, you and your friends have basically done one of the worst things you could possibly ever do. You kidnapped a US attorney, and I said,

I'm an FBI agent, and I said, and if you've ever been in trouble before, you have no idea what kind of trouble you're gonna be in now. So she gave up everything that she knew. You know, she started rambling off Lucky and Wren and Sen, and all of a sudden it was like, oh my gosh. You know, everything that Stan had told us,

she confirmed for us. She said she had felt sorry for Stan and had offered him oral sex because it was his birthday and she felt bad for him. Based on the information that she provided, we had Lucky's cell phone number. Every time he turned his phone on, we were able to see what cell tower it was pinging off of.

So we were able to sort of narrow down where he was. So we had agents and detectives out in Brooklyn. A lot of police work is boring. But when you get to the hunts, there's nothing like it. Nothing like it. I always loved the hunts, there's nothing like it. Nothing like it. I always loved the hunts. The Lexus had a broken window, we were told. But we also had a plate number.

And it was about 9 o'clock at night when the Lexus drove by us. So that's when our hearts started beating and we gave pursuit. You know or you believe that they're all armed and you know you have to really be careful at this point because we just don't know what's going to be the next move on their part. Well, we pull them over. We're on both sides of the car, right? We all have our guns drawn and we're telling them we want to see their hands. We want to see all their hands.

The perps we pulled out of the car were Lucky and Sent. We cuffed each one of them. And we got into our cars and we all drove back to Manhattan. Wren was picked up by a couple of other detectives probably not much later. Criminals have the idea when they come into an interrogation room they're going to outsmart me. My feeling is if they had brains, we would be in trouble. My end goal is to solicit the truth. I want toit the truth.

I want to know the truth. If I have to cry or laugh in an interrogation room to get the truth, I'll do that. If I have to be their friend. I'll do that. The first interview I conduct is with the defendant, Lucky. He kept saying, I didn't do anything wrong. I know my rights. And he says, I'm having a lot of trouble remembering even what's going on the last few days he said i had a very very bad time it really screwed up my mind i said well why don't you tell me about your bad time so he went on to tell me how two male blacks came over to him, approached him, pulled out

guns and forced him into his car. And while they were driving him around, they brought him to different banks and gave him an ATM card and they made him withdraw money. I said, you gotta be kidding me. I said, you've got to be kidding me. I said, that's horrible. Randall Senn told him to go back to Brooklyn, to an apartment they had over in Brooklyn, and he went back to the apartment.

And he said, my sole objective here was to calm Stanley down. He said, I could see he looked a little bit nervous. He said, I really liked Stanley. I thought he was a nice fella, and I felt really bad about him. He said that Ren and Sam were bad guys and that they were more than willing to kill this guy. And he insisted that they had to let him go. I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes that he was such a concerning human being.

He was so concerned about Stanley. Once I had that, I had really more than I needed. Lewis walked into the precinct and surrendered. Said to the desk sergeant, I understand you're looking for me, and told him who he was. Right away, Lewis didn't strike me as being very intelligent. And I said to him, Lewis, I got Lucky, and I got Wren, and I got Sin, and I got Mercedes. I says, and they're all saying, you're the ringleader.

You're the guy that set this up for Stanley. I says, don't say a word. I said, before anything, I want to know, are you going to be on my team or their team? And he looked at me and said, I want to be on your team. I said, you got it. And he said, I didn't do anything. He said, it was my apartment.

He said, all I did was sit with Stanley. He said, I had nothing to do with the kidnapping, and I really shouldn't even be here. If criminals had brains, we'd be out of business. It's 12 or 15 hours later. Now we've got everybody wrapped up. Now we have everybody in a big holding cell. I'm on the other side of the squad room and I got my foot up on the desk

and I'm smoking a cigarette and I the squad room, and I got my foot up on the desk, and I'm smoking a cigarette, and I hear, psst, psst. I'm looking around, and I hear, psst. I look across the room, and it's Lewis, and he's got his face in between the bars. So I go walking across the room. I said, what's the matter? He says, I want to know. Am I still on your team? I said, yes, you are.

And with that, I fell right to the floor. That's what happened. When they picked him on the street, they had no idea that this mild-mannered man was going to turn out to be an amazing, amazing witness. He truly had to have a survival instinct in order to get through an ordeal like that. Oh, he was great. He was the best. He was able to joke with them. He was respectful. He was

polite. The things that Stan remembered, the evidence that he gave us, was critical in solving this case. Absolutely critical. They eventually all decided to plead guilty. and the men got substantial time. I personally believe that they got what they deserved. There was no doubt about it. We have the right to be able to go from point A to point B without being accosted by people with guns and dragged off and held somewhere against your will. Looking back, the post-kidnapping part of my life is really better than the pre-kidnapping part of my life.

I think I learned some important lessons. These days, I live life more fully. A year after it happened, I got myself a dog, which I'd wanted for a long time. It's a little silly, but I went out and bought myself a little Cabrio convertible. Just recently, God finally blessed me and had me meet somebody who I fell in love with.

I managed to get married, which was, you know, one of the happiest moments of my life. And so in many ways, this kidnapping was a wake-up call to me. was a wake-up call to me. It made me realize how precious life is. Lucky, Wren, Sen, and Lewis received sentences ranging from 15 years to life. Mercedes received six months.

Mystic was never charged. Stanley Alpert has written a book about his ordeal. It's called The Birthday Party. the birthday party. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey.