The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (39 page)

"Yeah," M says.

Anything special you remember about it?

Everyone's silent, staring at him with vague smiles.They desperately want to go there with him, wherever it is he might be taking them, but they don't know what he's talking about. Earlier that night he said: Hopefully, this chapter in my life is almost over, or this novel in my life, because that's what it is. But it's not going to be over if it continues to be a more attractive identity for Matt than the one he's currently living.

You remember any stories?

"Like?" says M. "Stories?"

"Jennifer Lynch or whatever?" the bartender says.

You remember anything about money? Something about GIs finding two hundred million dollars and trying to steal twelve million of it? They all smile now and nod, though whether or not they know the story is anyone's guess. Yep, Matt says, that was me, no shit.]

Devin Friedman is thirty-four years old, works as a senior writer for GQ magazine, where this story was published, and has never been in the army. He believes he would have been tempted by finding two hundred million dollars in American currency in the middle of a war zone, but believes even more strongly that no one really knows what he or she would do unless they've been in those circumstances. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award for essay writing, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Best American Travel Writing. He edited a book of photographs taken by soldiers who've served in Iraq called This is Our War, and believes that if he didn't mention Fred Woodward, GQ's very talented art director, and the photograph editor Greg Pond, he'd be screwing those two over for their work on the book.

If you've ever watched a trial you know the first rule of trying to re-create a crime: events start to break down upon scrutiny. Unless you have a videotape, and sometimes even when you do (Rodney King et al.), you're never really going to know what happened. And in my limited experience reporting crime stories, the more interviews you do the more it starts to feel like reality is coming unstitched. Even in this case, the case of (as they're referred to in this story) The Novak 8, when events were widely witnessed and the conspiracy lasted only a matter of hours, facts begin to lose their purchase. Did the lieutenant make off with a bunch of money as charged? Did the first sergeant? Was Matt Novak really the ringleader, as the army contends, or the fall guy? In any case, pretty much everyone involved in this incident feels they were singularly screwed. Matt Novak especially so.

The last time I saw Matt was via satellite when we were both being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo was being kind of a dick, insinuating that Matt was a quasi-criminal scumbag. It didn't really help Matt's worldview, which, as far as I could tell when I spent those wintry days up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin doing the reporting for this piece, wasn't too rosy to begin with. After we went off the air on Geraldo, I tried to talk to Matt, but the connection was dead. My little flesh-colored earpiece was silent. Later, when 60 Minutes II called me to do a story about Matt (they barely credited my story in theirs, by the way; more on this later) I found out that Matt felt a little screwed over by me, too. And having tried to call him minutes before composing this coda, and being greeted with silence, I cannot report back about what exactly Matt objected to in this piece. Maybe it's that the story didn't completely alleviate his sense of being persecuted, which is what I think he'd hoped it would do.

Finally, a mea culpa: I got the idea to do this piece from seeing an interview with Matt in a documentary called Soldiers Pay that the director David O. Russell was working on when I was doing a profile of him for GQ. I promised Tricia Regan, the co-director of the film, that I would mention it in the article, since they'd been generous enough to give me contact information for Matt. And, in the final version of the story that got printed, the name of that film did not appear.And for that crime: I am guilty.Add both the director of Soldiers Pay and me (hey, 60 Minutes II!) to the long list of people who believe the world kind of screws people over.

from Cleveland Scene

Renee clutches a creased black-and-white mug shot in the dim light of a suburban diner. The forty-three-year-old strokes her strawberry-blond ponytail as she surveys the scrawny Vietnamese man in the photo.

She nods recognition at his deer-in-the-headlights eyes, flared nostrils, and pursed lips. "He looks just the same," she says. "But I look pretty much the same too. I guess not much has changed in twenty-five years."

Now a wife and mother, Renee still remembers the smallest details of the night they first met, though she hasn't spoken of it in two decades.

It was August 29, 1980. Renee-who talked to Scene on the condition that her last name not be used-was a petite but tomboyish eighteen-year-old working at a McDonald's in Akron. At 2:00 a.m., she was closing up the restaurant alone.

As she turned off the parking-lot floodlights and walked toward her '69 Pontiac, a man sneaked up behind her. He held a kitchen knife to her throat."Get in and drive," he said in a thick Asian accent.

The man guided Renee into a sparsely furnished studio apartment in a house on a hidden alley. "I'm not going to hurt you; I just want to talk," he said.

Keeping the knife at her back, he politely introduced himself as Hy Doan. He told her he was fromVietnam and that he was a math student at the University of Akron. "He just kept talking off-the-wall, like we were friends or something," Renee says.

They spoke for several hours, before Doan asked Renee about her sexual history. She didn't have one."I'm a virgin," she said.

Doan didn't believe her. His small talk became aggressive.At five foot five and 120 pounds, he was almost as tiny as his victim. Renee figured she could take him.

Suddenly, she jumped on his back and wrestled him to the floor. She got her hands around his slender neck and choked him until he appeared to pass out.

Renee jumped up and ran for the door. As she fiddled with the lock, Doan got up. Just before Renee could open the door, he grabbed her long ponytail and yanked her to his bedroom, ordering her to undress.

Afraid for her life, she sacrificed her virginity.

As Doan raped her, Renee stared through the doorway at the kitchen cupboards, which were filled with shiny packs of ramen noodles. "To this day, I can't eat the stuff," she says. "I can't even look at it."

When he was finished, Doan made her lie in bed and cuddle. He asked if she enjoyed herself. "He was talking to me like I was his girlfriend," she says. "I think he really believed it was consensual."

The sun was already peeking through the blinds when he allowed her to get dressed. He said he'd let her go home if she promised to keep seeing him. She gave him a fake phone number and left.

Renee went to a friend's house. The girl talked Renee into going to Akron City Hospital. Police were notified. Doan was charged with rape and kidnapping.

Two months later, the case went before a grand jury. But Doan, who maintained the sex was consensual, wasn't indicted. The jury didn't buy Renee's story. She knew too much about Doan's home to have been there only once, jurors believed. They assumed the two were friends. "I was there for seven hours, memorizing everything in that house, to make sure I could prove to police that I was there and that this happened to me," Renee says. "The legal system did nothing more for me, other than rub salt in my wound."

It wouldn't be the last time Doan wriggled his way out of a rape case because of a discredited victim. In the past twenty-five years, he has beaten at least six.

Detectives, prosecutors, and judges say Doan has developed the perfect M.O. for stealing sex. "It's not rape," says his lawyer, Jonathan Sinn. "It's theft."

Sinn describes his client as a "walking stereotype."

"In court, he bows, talks about honor and family, and comes off as a naive immigrant," Sinn says. "In reality, he's very intelligent and understands everything."

Doan's victims all describe him as a petite, polite man, with rotting teeth and foul breath. Though his accent is heavy, making him hard to understand, he has no problem with English.

He was born in Saigon in 1959. It's unclear when he immigrated to the United States. Doan did not respond to Scene's numerous interview requests, though an anonymous man claiming to be a relative called on his behalf. "Hy does not want to talk to you, because he feels he paid for his mistake and has forgotten the past," the man said.

A 1998 incident report states that he has a sister, Nicole, living in Fairlawn, Ohio. But when Scene contacted Nicole, she had trouble deciding whether she knew Doan or not. She also denied being related to him.

"Doan is like the last name Smith," she says. "Just because we have the same last name don't mean we are related. Maybe I helped him once. I help a lot of Vietnamese people. I've lived in Akron for a long time, and we are a small community."

Still, amid her denials, Nicole was able to confirm that Doan graduated from the University of Akron in the early 1980s. He then moved to DeKalb, Illinois, where he earned a Ph.D. in math at Northern Illinois University. "He's not a stupid guy," Nicole says. "He has tutored manyVietnamese in math.There's just a lot of stupid people who say stupid things about him."

Despite his academic achievements, Doan returned to Akron only to work a string of low-wage restaurant jobs while tutoring math on the side. Though he refers to himself as a full-time University of Akron tutor, the school has no record of his employment. But former employees of various Akron restaurants remember him.

In the late nineties, Greg Madonia worked at Papa Joe's, an Italian place popular with the elderly. Doan worked the salad-and-dessert line. He told Madonia he had a Ph.D. in math, but couldn't find work in the United States, which was why he was dressing lettuce for six bucks an hour. His much younger coworkers referred to him as "Mr. Hy." Madonia never noticed anything unusual about him.

Tom Feltner, who washed dishes with Doan at the Mustard Seed, an upscale health-food market and restaurant in Montrose, recalls a slightly more offbeat Mr. Hy.

"He was a weird guy," Feltner says. "He didn't say much, but he'd fly off the handle a lot."

Feltner, sixteen at the time, was under the impression that Doan didn't speak much English. He also remembers Doan boasting of his math credentials and marveled at Doan's dishwashing skills."He could do the work of two people," Feltner says.

"He was like the kung fu master of dishwashing," says the restaurant's owner, Philip Neighbors.

Coworkers pegged Doan for a harmless oddball. Little did they know they were in the presence of Akron 's best sex thief.

After the jury let D oan off the hook in 1980, Renee would see him around town.

He'd show up at McDonald's, stand in a corner, and watch her for hours. She told a security guard, who warned Doan to get lost.

But Akron isn't a big town. Once, while waiting at a red light, Doan crossed in front of her car. "If I knew what I know now, I would have run him over," Renee says.

After all, less than a year after her case, Doan was standing trial for attempted rape.

Nineteen-year-old Lauren Crouser said that she went to a college house party with several friends, according to the police report. She claimed Doan dragged her into a bedroom, choked her, and told her he'd kill her if she didn't do what he wanted. He tried to take her pants off, but she broke away and ran to a nearby Holiday Inn.

Once again, however, the jury apparently didn't buy the victim's story, though records from that time are too sparse to explain why. Common Pleas Judge Patricia Cosgrove, then a notoriously tough prosecutor, handled both cases. She doesn't remember either.

Yet Cosgrove understands how a man could escape two seemingly straightforward rape cases in less than a year, especially in such he-said, she-said situations, in which victims can be easily discredited. "Sometimes people are good at picking their victims," she says.

Shortly after the trial, Doan disappeared. Renee thought he'd finally been deported, but he'd actually gone to DeKalb, Illinois. It would be fifteen years before police encountered him again.

In 1996, Doan was back in Akron and up to his old tricks.This time, he'd added a new twist to his hunt for women.

Though records are scarce, Fairlawn Sergeant Richard Moneypenny has little trouble remembering July 31 of that year. He was called to the front desk to deal with a trio of oddballs- Doan and two exotic dancers. "We'd already gotten a call earlier that morning from a hotel clerk who said an unusual Oriental man checked into a room with two girls," Moneypenny says.

But this time, Doan was the one demanding to file a report.

He said he met the two women at the downtown Akron Hilton. They asked him for a ride to a less expensive hotel. He took them to the Days Inn in Fairlawn, according to the police report.

Somehow, Doan ended up in their room, where the women tried to blackmail him: Hand over four thousand dollars, or they'd claim they were raped. He said he'd take them to an ATM. Instead, he delivered them to police.

Yet Moneypenny soon uncovered the fiction in Doan's tale. Earlier that day, Doan phoned an escort service, requesting two dates. He met Taryn Chojnowski and Teresa Richard at the Days Inn bar.

He told the women he was a doctor and offered them four thousand dollars for a private dance.The women agreed. Doan got a room.

Afterward, Doan said he had to go to the ATM at Akron General Hospital -where he claimed to work-to get their money. He drove toward Market Street, passing numerous cash machines on the way. Chojnowski and Richard never seemed suspicious.