Joran van der Sloot`s ex-girlfriend for the morning news? Want an

Interested in booking Joran van der Sloot’s ex-girlfriend for the morning news?
Want an exclusive? Got a little cash to spend? Larry Garrison’s the person to call, though
most news networks won’t admit they call him. The inside story of how tabloid TV news
is made, bought, and paid for—and its implications for the news industry and our society.
THE NEWS MERCHANT
By
Sheelah Kolhatkar
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G LU E KIT
“I
don’t think you should go with CNN,” shows, all to satisfy viewers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for
Larry Garrison says into his cell phone as real-life tears and melodrama. Sometimes network bookers
he paces across a hotel lobby near his home go out hunting for subjects themselves, armed with bouquets
in Westlake Village, California. “I’d like to of flowers and boxes of tissues and the names of their star
team up with you.” He’s talking to John anchors (Diane Sawyer, Matt Lauer) as chits. In many cases,
Muldowney, a 78-year-old retired propane though, Garrison gets there first, locks up the rights to the
inspector from Manheim, Pennsylvania, person’s story, and becomes an unavoidable middleman in
who thinks that he and his wife might have found Natalee whatever transactions follow.
Holloway’s remains while snorkeling off the coast of Aruba.
In addition to feeding what Garrison likes to call “Oh my
The story involves blood and tragedy, but also the opportu- God” stories to news networks, people like him serve anothnity to go on television, and Garrison, who has one of the er purpose: they make it easy for mainstream media outlets
most unusual—and controversial—jobs in the TV business, to pay for interviews while obscuring the fact that they do.
exists to make that happen. “I want to make sure you don’t The agent delivers the interview, and in return the network
have your day of glory and then everyone forgets about you,” makes him a paid producer or consultant for that particular
Garrison continues, his eyes gleaming. “I’ll be there for you.” program; what he then does with the money—keep it or share
There is no single term that fully captures what Garrison it—is his own business. (For his part, Garrison tends to keep
does for a living, although it involves a lot of time spent ca- the whole fee, while sometimes promising to try to secure a
joling people over the phone. He’s sometimes called a fixer, book or movie deal for the grieving mother or accused mura story broker, or—his preference—an independent televi- derer’s ex-girlfriend he is representing.) If the person has a
sion producer and consultant, but all the titles mean the diary or photo album to sell for on-air use, Garrison can help
same thing: Garrison gets paid to bring tabloid stories to TV with that, too.
news programs. Missing toddlers, murdered coeds, septupGarrison has been in the business in one form or another
lets, serial killers—an endless parade of freaks and victims for decades, handling media, book, and movie deals for a
is marched through the studio sets of Dateline NBC, 20/20, host of people on the margins of dark celebrity: jurors in the
Good Morning America, Inside Edition, and countless other Michael Jackson child-molestation case; a friend of Robert
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Blake’s dead wife; John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed valuable—“classier”—than a three-minute sound bite on a cato killing JonBenet Ramsey. But he made his name working ble program. He leaves the producer a message. The alleged
on the story of Holloway—the 18-year-old Birmingham, Ala- skeleton is probably a piece of coral, or even a hoax, but the
bama, blonde who went missing during a high-school class small possibility that the Muldowneys have actually found
trip to Aruba in 2005, and became the apotheosis of a golden Holloway’s remains could translate into big dollars, and Garage of dead-white-girl television. Garrison teamed up with rison wants to be a part of the deal.
Natalee’s father, Dave Holloway, negotiating his TV appear“In my gut intuition, I feel this may be it,” he tells me as we
ances, speaking on his behalf, and co-authoring a best-selling hop into the Mercedes and start speeding toward his house.
book called Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Hol- “God works in funny ways.”
loway and Corruption in Paradise.
Five years later, the Holloway story continues to be a Tabloid television has been big business, of course,
source of fascination, and Garrison is eager to persuade John for well over a decade. Its rise was fueled by a number of facMuldowney to work with him. Like sharks on the scent of tors, not least of which was the launch in 1980 of CNN, the
anchovies, Nancy Grace and Fox News have also come call- first 24-hour news channel. The commodifying effect that caing, looking for airtime with the elderly couple who might ble had on TV, putting dozens or even hundreds of programs
have inadvertently discovered Holloway’s final resting place on equal footing, combined with sophisticated new methods
during their Royal Caribbean cruise vacation. “I did the news of tracking viewers—allowing news producers to see, in real
on this for five years, I wrote the book,” Garrison tells Mul- time, when people were tuning in, staying tuned, or clicking
downey. “I have people in Aruba who can look for the body. the remote to something else—led to a gradual reframing of
You didn’t give out the location, did you?” Pause. “I can put in the purpose that television news divisions could serve for
a call to Dave Holloway.” A man passing by turns to stare. Gar- their corporate owners. Earnest cost centers where scrappy
rison has electric-white teeth, a deep tan, and carefully styled reporters purported to do the Lord’s work gave way to slick
brown hair. With his Prada sunglasses and silver neck chain, operations, seen as sources of profit, whose anchors comhe looks like some former Hollywood player you should pos- manded massive salaries. Fox News Channel was launched
sibly recognize but don’t. The
in 1996, underscoring the fact
matching car, a white Merthat cable news—and even
cedes convertible with leather
network news—was there to
ABC News paid $200,000
seats and vanity plates (MOVIE
make money. It hardly matTV), sits out front.
tered that everything broadto the family of Casey Anthony,
Garrison has not yet secast on TV jumbled into one
who is on trial for murdering
cured Muldowney as a client;
big spectacle, whether it was
her 2-year-old daughter, to
the conversation is aimed first
a celebrity murder trial or a
at assessing his credibility—
presidential address.
license videos and pictures.
all sorts of attention-seeking
Minute-by-minute comcranks, faux psychics, and
petition among network
The money was used to help
nut jobs have claimed to have
newscasts and among newssolved Natalee’s murder—and
magazine shows such as 60
pay for Anthony’s defense.
then at convincing Muldowney
Minutes and A Current Affair
that he should trust him. Garled to a sort of programming
rison’s trying to get answers to
arms race, and an inexorable
a few questions that might illuminate the couple’s motives: slide into the softer, more salacious—and more popular—
why did they wait six months before coming forward with “infotainment” that now fills prime-time hours. The murder
their discovery? Have they notified the FBI about the under- trial of O. J. Simpson in 1995, the death of 6-year-old Jonwater picture they took, so that it can investigate? Is their sto- Benet Ramsey in 1996, and the story of a mother and two
ry marred by inconsistencies? While Garrison tries to figure teenage girls murdered in Yosemite National Park in 1999
out the truth, he continues with a gentle, but insistent, sell.
were all beamed into millions of American homes, and each
He tells Muldowney that he will look out for his inter- set cable ratings on fire. By the end of the 1990s, sensational
ests and protect him from the rapacious tendencies of the tabloid fodder had grown from obscure filler into a dominant,
press. His advice is geared toward maximizing the potential driving force in television news—and the networks found
value of the story, including news, future book deals, mov- that there simply weren’t enough young, pretty, white crime
ies, and television specials. Muldowney has already agreed victims to go around. Bidding for stories, once anathema, beto an interview with CNN the following day, which Garrison came commonplace.
thinks is a mistake, and to an appearance on Nancy Grace,
All of the networks now dabble with payment in one form
a show whose host Garrison says he finds too “sensational- or another, according to Garrison and others who work in
ist” to deal with. (“Until the day I die, I will never do Nancy the industry, although some shows and networks have a repGrace,” he repeatedly tells me.) After he hangs up the phone, utation for being more aggressive than others. One former
Garrison puts in a call to a producer at ABC’s Good Morning network-news booker told me how disheartening it became
America to see if he can goose any interest; he thinks that a to work in such an environment. “There was an utter dessit-down interview on a network talk show would be more peration to get first crack at a top-flight story, and this was
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the only way to do it,” he said. “Every time a big story broke,
Sometimes Garrison is involved in these kinds of negotiait would become a circus … Someone always came out of the tions, and sometimes he isn’t. But no matter what the netwoodwork with a deal.”
works might argue, he says, “they all pay.”
Not infrequently, Garrison has been that someone, though
t night I only watch Diane Sawyer.
many TV news producers won’t acknowledge that they do
She’s the best,” Garrison says. He has
business with him. I couldn’t find any who would comment
strong opinions about TV people—the oron the record.
igins of which are sometimes highly per“It’s a very defined underworld of behavior that people
sonal. His antipathy toward Nancy Grace,
really don’t talk about,” said the former booker. “All the
for instance, seems to stem mostly from
networks have policies not to pay.” Indeed, most network
an incident in 2006 when he says Grace
news divisions are officially prohibited from paying sources
for interviews, but they can get around that problem in any accused him, on air, of working toward a book and movie deal
number of ways. In addition to paying a fee to a middleman, for John Mark Karr, the man who had confessed—falsely, it
rather than to a subject, the network might conduct the inter- turned out—to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. (Garrison
view in a lavish location, with all expenses paid and tickets to was trying to arrange interviews for Karr at the time, but deBroadway shows or Disney World thrown in. Or the network nies he was trying to sell a book.) Garrison was so angry that
might pay for the use of a photo or video, with the interview he pledged never to deal with Grace again.
He is hunkered down in the master bedroom of his onecoming along “for free.” Sometimes, a trashier evening tabloid show will license photos and get a coveted interview, story house, in a gated community full of mansions belongand then both are recycled onto a more respectable morning ing to CEOs and Hollywood actors, about an hour west of
or evening news program on the same network, which can Los Angeles. The place is overflowing with animals—a pair
broadcast them freely while leaving its own checkbook un- of Chihuahuas, parrots and mynah birds in elaborate cages,
sullied. In each instance, everyone knows what’s happening a battalion of desert tortoises in pens on the back terrace. In
the corner where Garrison works are framed photographs of
except the viewers.
“We don’t pay for interviews,” says ABC News spokesman him with different celebrities—Sawyer, Larry King—as well
Jeffrey Schneider. “If someone has photographs or video that as a picture of Ben Affleck holding the book Breaking Into
we want to license, we will license it, and we will disclose on Acting for Dummies, which Garrison wrote, drawing on his
the air that we have licensed pictures or videotape.” ABC’s previous career as a Hollywood bit player.
Garrison has been working on the edges of the entertaindisclosure policy is a recent development, put in place after
one of the most stomach-turning examples of network pay- ment business since the late 1970s, when he left his job as a
ments came to light: ABC News paid $200,000 to the family stockbroker. He studied acting with Lee Strasburg in New
of Casey Anthony, who is on trial in Florida for murdering York and then moved to California, where he landed a series
her 2-year-old daughter, to license videos and pictures in of small roles, including a part on the soap opera Santa Bar2008. (Garrison was working with the Anthonys early in the bara and another in the movie Mulholland Falls.
One day, he says, he went to meet a producer who was
case, but he did not broker that payment.) This March, it was
revealed that the family used the money to help pay for An- “eating a pastrami sandwich with Thousand Island dressing dripping down his face,” and who talked on the phone
thony’s defense.
Other recent examples of the creeping influence of money throughout Garrison’s audition. This humiliation prompted
in television news are plentiful. Last year on Christmas Day, him to move into producing. He acquired the rights to the
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explo- inspirational life story of Tracy Taylor, a poster girl for the
sives hidden in his underwear on a Northwest Airlines flight March of Dimes, which led to an article in People magazine
en route to Detroit from Amsterdam, and was tackled by a and the development of his first movie project. (The movie
group of passengers who managed to thwart the attack. Upon was never made.) He tells me he did some work with Scott
arriving in Miami, a Dutch passenger named Jasper Schur- Brazil, a television producer known for shows such as Hill
inga clumsily tried to auction off to media outlets a fuzzy cell- Street Blues, and with the Dick Clark Film Group. Over the
phone photo he had taken of the hijacker. It worked: in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Garrison came to specialize
end, he reportedly received some $18,000 for the image from more and more in true stories, a relatively open field at the
CNN, ABC, and the New York Post. Coincidentally, Schuringa time, standing apart from the more glamorous scripted entertainment that had attracted him to the industry in the first
sat for an interview with both television networks.
Around the same time, a New Jersey resident named Da- place. After a divorce and a tumultuous period dating model
vid Goldman was fighting to bring his 9-year-old son, Sean, types, he remarried in 2007. He is close with his three grown
back from Brazil, where the boy had been living with rela- kids from his first marriage—one daughter is a makeup artist,
tives of his recently deceased mother, who were fighting another is a housewife, and his son is a photographer.
He fires up his computer and AOL bleats out, “You’ve got
Goldman for custody. Every network was salivating for an
interview with Goldman; NBC won out by chartering a plane mail!” Garrison says that dozens of tipsters, some of whom
to carry him, young Sean, and an NBC correspondent named he has on retainer, constantly bring him story ideas. But he
Jeff Rossen back to the United States, where the father and also does a lot of scouring himself. In his 2006 autobiograson promptly appeared on NBC’s Today show and a two-hour phy, The Newsbreaker, he lists some keywords that signify a
captivating subject: arson, fraud, murder, millionaires, slavery.
Dateline special.
“A
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CE M E T E RY R I DE
My new copper-colored bicycle
is looking pretty fine under a blue sky
as I pedal along a sandy path
in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,
wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons,
the Campbells, the Vesers, and the Davenports,
Arthur and Ethel, who outlived him by eleven years
I slow down even more to notice,
but not so much as to fall sideways on the ground.
And here’s a guy named Happy Grant
next to his wife Jean in their endless bed.
Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds
a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley.
And good afternoon, Emily Polasek,
and to you too, George and Jane Cooper,
facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.
I wish I could take you all for a ride
in my wire basket on this glorious April day,
not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith,
even trickier than Clarence Augustus Coddington.
Then how about just you, Bernice Owens?
Would you gather up your voluminous skirts
then ride sidesaddle on the crossbar
and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?
I’ll even let you ring the silver bell.
But if you’re not ready, I can always ask
Amanda Collier to rise from her long sleep
beneath the swaying gray beards of Spanish moss
and ride with me along these sandy paths
so I can listen to her strange laughter
as some crows flap in the blue overhead
and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.
—Billy Collins
Billy Collins’s new collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, will be published
early next year. He served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003.
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The competition for anything truly dramatic is immediate
and fierce; mainly, it comes from the news shows themselves,
although a few other independent operators might be in the
mix as well. Garrison moves in quickly on people who may
still be reeling from a traumatic event. “I love the chase,” he
writes: “finding the people, contacting them, and convincing
them that I am the one they should entrust their information
and rights to.”
His daily routine consists of scanning the wires, monitoring his Google alerts—on Natalee Holloway, other stories he’s
working on, his own name—and watching a giant TV. At the
moment, a group of talking heads on Fox News is analyzing
the story of a 19-year-old boy named Colton Harris-Moore
who went on a crime spree in Washington state and then disappeared into the woods. Garrison says that he isn’t going to
pursue the story—“it would influence kids”—but if he did, he
might call the kid’s mother: “I’d like to do a movie and a book
entitled In the Middle of Nowhere,” he would tell her. “Or
something glamorous. I’d lock up his rights, and when he’s
caught, I’d own his rights and have his exclusive interview.”
Right now, Garrison is fretting about the Muldowneys,
who haven’t called him back in the past couple of hours.
When I ask him what he has to offer them, he says: “I could
make sure that they’re not humiliated.” He goes on, “I feel
this [might] keep awareness on this case, and also help promote the boycott of Aruba, because in my opinion, Aruba is
corrupt. We gotta get to the truth, so that way justice will be
served.” He pauses. “Now, if they don’t call me back and they
decide to do their own thing, God bless them.”
He doesn’t stop trying, though. He dials up the Good
Morning America producer again: “I wanted to know if you
were interested in the couple that has the picture of Natalee
Holloway,” he coos into her voice mail. “They’re supposed
to do CNN tomorrow, but I can turn them for you if you’re
interested.”
If Good Morning America calls him back, Garrison is confident he can persuade the Muldowneys to postpone their
CNN and Nancy Grace commitments. If things worked out,
he says, he could demand a fee—perhaps $2,500 or $5,000. Or,
in this case, he might waive the fee. “I could say, ‘I want you to
put them on and treat them right, and that’s it,’ because this
might be the final chapter of my book and it may be worth it
[for book-writing and -marketing purposes] just to lock them
up and have the ability to say that I’m working with them.”
Garrison is coy about just how much money he makes
each year, though he says he isn’t wealthy. He moved out of
a more extravagant house a few years ago, when he says he
decided to simplify his life. He also sold off his antique-car
collection (car catalogues are still piled up on his desk). “In
the old days,” he told me, networks “paid a lot more money
for stories—they’d pay $100,000,” he says. “Now they don’t
[pay the really big bucks] unless it’s an ‘Oh my God’ story—
like if I had Tiger Woods’s first interview.”
The Internet has commoditized some of what Garrison
does, and competition has become more intense. Gossip
sites such as TMZ and Radar Online provide a nonstop fix of
tabloid titillation, while anyone with a valuable photograph
or video can sell it easily and directly to a photo agency like
Splash News. Then there’s the generally beleaguered state
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of the television-news business, where budgets have been
slashed over the past couple of years. For those reasons, Garrison has turned increasingly toward longer-term book projects that he can develop out of his stories.
In any case, he tells me, the money isn’t so important. “I’m
not a flashy person,” he says. “I’m proud of what I do. I’d like
to believe that I make a difference.”
I
s i t r e a l ly so bad that people get paid to be
on news shows, or that people like Garrison broker the deals? The networks, after all, are making
money off the stories through advertising revenue.
Shouldn’t some of the people they’re profiting
from—bewildered actors in real-life soap operas—
expect to share in the spoils?
As to Garrison’s role, he does, arguably, provide a valuable service. Many of the people he deals with are unsophisticated; a middleman might help them negotiate a better deal
for their story, and possibly manage their image and their
prospects for a book or movie contract, in addition to reducing the media swarm. “I always say to people, next Christmas, you’re going to be sending me a Christmas card, where
tomorrow that network show is gonna be gone. They’ll get
their ratings. But I’ll always be there.”
One of Garrison’s clients, Sue Doman, expressed relief
that she had Garrison standing between her and the reporters who were banging down her door. Doman’s sister was
married to an Illinois police sergeant named Drew Peterson,
who was charged with murdering her after he was named
as a suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife. Garrison has locked up Doman’s film, television, literary, and “life
story” rights. If he successfully sells a book based on her story,
he will take the entire advance, according to Doman. After
the advance is paid back through book sales, she will receive
one-third of the royalties, which she plans to donate to a domestic-violence shelter. “I trusted him to be able to control
the media for me, so that’s why I did it,” she says. “I couldn’t
ask for a better person.”
Still, the same lack of sophistication among news targets
that makes brokers valuable to them also leaves them open to
bad faith. And the whole practice of payment raises troubling
questions. A long-standing tenet in journalistic circles holds
that paying sources will corrupt them, that people should
not be driven by money to talk, because cash undermines
their credibility and might push them to say things that aren’t
true. “It is entirely possible that if someone is being paid for
a story, they will cater what they provide to make [the person paying them] happy,” says Andy Schotz, the Ethics Committee chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists.
“It’s no longer about the pursuit of truth, it’s the pursuit of a
financial arrangement.” Paying subjects also means that an
individual might stage a stunt—the infamous “Balloon Boy”
incident comes to mind—just to get attention or earn some
money. And there’s always the potential that a murderer will
be rewarded for his crime.
Garrison is still digging himself out of a reputational hole
caused by one of the worst professional situations he has ever
been involved in, which has made him especially sensitive
about working with the wrong people. The Casey Anthony
murder trial has turned into one of the most sensational media circuses of all time in a state—Florida—that is famous for
them. The story has attracted all manner of bizarre parasites and hangers-on: agents, lawyers, representatives, and
middlemen, who have attached themselves to the Anthony
family in some form or another, hoping to gain notoriety or
make a buck.
Garrison signed on as a “spokesperson” for Casey, 24, and
her parents, George and Cindy Anthony, in late summer 2008,
supposedly at no charge, during their search for 2-year-old
Caylee Anthony. The entire family was under a cloud of suspicion—the press seemed convinced that Casey had murdered
her daughter, and that her parents were helping to cover up
the crime by launching a fake missing-person campaign. Protesters stationed themselves outside the Anthony house, and
George and Cindy appeared on their front lawn, erratically
gushing and ranting to reporters about the case, the police,
the media. Garrison sensed the potential for a blockbuster
book deal, and says that he believed the grandparents when
they told him that they thought their granddaughter had
been kidnapped. He did several television interviews on their
behalf in which he urged people to search for the missing
girl; he went on On the Record With Greta Van Susteren wearing a Help find Caylee Anthony T-shirt.
By October, Casey Anthony had been charged with murder,
and Garrison’s relationship with her parents had degenerated. Garrison says he began to suspect that they weren’t being straightforward with him about the alleged crime, and he
issued a press release in November 2008 saying he had quit
working with them. On March 20, 2010, he issued another
press release, titled “Setting the Record Straight on Caylee
Anthony.” In it, he described a conversation he’d had with
Cindy over the phone shortly before he stopped working with
the couple. According to Garrison, Cindy confessed to having
switched out Caylee’s hairbrush to confound police as they
gathered evidence. Garrison says that he immediately reported this confession to the prosecuting attorney’s office.
“Cindy Anthony came to me with George and said, ‘My
granddaughter was kidnapped, and I want people to keep
looking for her, so if you help me to get the word out, I will
do a book with you later on.’ And I said okay,” Garrison says.
He adds: “That was the first time in my 25 years that anyone
duped me.”
Some press accounts tell a different story. In October 2008,
George and Cindy were flown to New York for an interview
with NBC’s Today show. They taped an interview for Dateline
that day as well. According to a report in the Orlando Sentinel, Garrison charged the network $6,500 for the Anthonys’
Dateline appearance, without telling the Anthonys about the
payment. Their lawyer at the time, Mark NeJame, released a
faxed bill from Garrison to a producer at NBC for the use of
pictures, as evidence of the payment, and said that Garrison
didn’t have any of the family’s pictures to sell.
The Anthonys were outraged when they found out that
Garrison had been paid for their television appearance without their knowledge, and immediately fired him, according
to people close to them. Garrison denies being fired, and says
that he was not paid by any networks for interviews with the
Anthonys, and that the Sentinel reporters who wrote about
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his fee from NBC were making the whole thing up; he also off of the Caylee Anthony case, it would have never gone to
says the faxed bill was “fabricated.”
the grandparents or to Casey. It would have gone to me.”
“I have seen some of the most wonderful acts of human
kindness on this case, and some of the most despicable and “I believe, spiritually, what you put out comes back
sleaziest signs of human behavior as well,” says NeJame, who to you,” Garrison tells me one morning. Something similar
represented George and Cindy until he quit the case him- might be said about what appears on television: what viewself, in November 2008, because they were not following his ers watch, they will see more of. Everything that follows is
advice. “I have rarely experienced anything like this, in my entirely predictable. Judging from the ratings, as long as what
30-year career, as far as the various people who attempted to is shown onscreen is entertaining, the people watching aren’t
bothered by what may have gone into getting it there.
exploit and prey upon this missing child.”
Garrison and I are sitting down to breakfast when his
While the relationship between Garrison and the Anthonys was hurtling toward its bitter denouement, Casey cell phone rings. He starts gesturing after he answers it. “It’s
Anthony’s defense lawyer, José Baez, was reportedly mak- Dave Holloway,” he mouths to me. Holloway is apparently
ing his own deal with ABC, which is owned by the Walt Dis- calling to ask about the skeleton photograph. “Something
ney Company. 20/20 wanted to devote an episode to Casey, doesn’t seem right with these people. They’re doing Nancy
who was under investigation at the time but hadn’t yet been Grace tonight,” Garrison says into the phone. “In my heart,
Dave, I’m pulling away from these
formally charged with murdering her
people. It doesn’t seem right to me.” He
little girl. Casey gathered some home
pauses. “I just don’t want to see you get
videos of Caylee, and Baez flew to New
Garrison lists some
hurt … You know me, I don’t like Nancy
York in August 2008 to meet with netkeywords that signify
Grace.”
work representatives and offer the vidThe undersea-skeleton story never
eos for licensing, according to someone
a captivating subject:
goes anywhere. John and Patti Muldinvolved in a similar negotiation at a
owney make an appearance on Grace’s
competing network. The videos were
ARSON,
show, where they slump embarrassaired during a 20/20 special that was
ingly in a pair of chairs, sharing screen
broadcast on September 5, 2008, and
FRAUD,
time with a series of plump-lipped foon Good Morning America that mornMURDER,
rensic analysts and other made-for-TV
ing, though Casey was not interviewed
MILLIONAIRES,
experts who yap loudly about the case.
(she had been arrested for writing
SLAVERY.
It seems that Garrison was right in adfraudulent checks on August 29, after
vising them not to do the show, on the
Baez’s New York trip, and was still in
basis of pure tackiness if nothing else.
custody). In March 2010, during a court
He moves in quickly
One day in June, though, there is a
hearing to determine whether Casey
on people who may
major break in the case: Natalee Holwas indigent and incapable of paying
loway’s suspected killer—a 22-year-old
for her own defense, Baez told the
still be reeling.
Dutch kid named Joran van der Sloot—
court that ABC News had paid Casey’s
“I love the chase.”
is arrested in Chile for killing a young
family $200,000, which had been used
woman in Peru. It’s an explosive story,
to pay his legal fees up to that point. It
and van der Sloot’s scowling, frat-boy
was revealed in separate court documents that ABC had also paid for George and Cindy to stay face appears on magazine covers and in the full-time televiat the Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes Orlando Hotel for three sion rotation. The tabloids report that van der Sloot has told
Peruvian authorities that he knows where Holloway’s body is,
nights that December.
Other people have also cashed in on the death of Caylee but will only reveal the location to the Aruban police.
Shortly after, Garrison signs up one of van der Sloot’s exAnthony. A CBS affiliate in Orlando, WKMG, reported that
a meter reader named Roy Kronk, who discovered Caylee’s girlfriends, an Aruban named Melody Granadillo, who startdecomposed body in the woods, was paid $20,000 by Good ed dating him in 2003, when she was 16. Their arrangement
Morning America, supposedly for a picture of a snake he had leads to an interview on 20/20, and Garrison pitches a book
snapped in the area; he also sat for an interview on the show. on van der Sloot to several publishers, imagining that it might
Another local TV channel, WFTV, reported that CBS News be the crowning achievement of his career. “This one is big,”
had paid the Anthony family $20,000 for photographs of he tells me, “and it’s being done with integrity.”
ABC broadcast the 20/20 interview with Granadillo on
Caylee and Casey.
Garrison insists that he’s never seen money, or its pros- June 18, and as of this writing, it is still available for viewing
pect, taint anyone he’s worked with. When I ask him why the on ABC’s Web site. There, the following disclosure appears:
television networks are so squeamish about admitting that
The teen saved everything from her dashing Dutch suitor, inmoney changes hands, he says, “If that [$200,000] is what’s
cluding a diary they shared, filled with pages upon pages of
paying for Casey Anthony’s defense right now, then shame
pictures, cards, emails and love poems. Granadillo licensed a
on the person who paid it.” He says he draws his own line to
selection of these materials to ABC News.
determine whom he will represent and help enrich. Then he
pauses and says, “You know, if I was to have made any money Sheelah Kolhatkar is the features editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
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SEPTEMBER 2010
THE ATLANTIC
7/13/10 4:58:02 PM