Donley on Montserrat. Channel 10's Donley admits he told Dominelli he would give a copy of the taped interview to the other stations, but when asked why he didn’t tell Cubbison or the other station, he said. “No one asked, and it’s not my job to offer it.”

Ralph Frammolino was the first American journalist to arrive on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in search of fugitive financier J. David Dominelli. A reporter for the San Diego County edition of the Los Angeles Times since October of the last year. Frammolino had covered the Dominelli story sporadically for the previous month, mainly to fill in for the regularly assigned reporters, Anthony Ramirez and Bill Ritter. But when he awoke on the morning of Thursday, April 19 and read in the Times that the former investment king had fled to Montserrat, he scrambled to the downtown newsroom more quickly than usual, his instinct telling him something was about to happen.

Next to the story was a photograph of Diane Lindquist, smiling broadly, with a caption that read, “Diane Lindquist of the San Diego Union, tough, determined, relentless. She is prepared to take physical risks and endure insults in order to discover the truth about Dominelli’s collapsed banking empire.”

Something did happen. Immediately Frammolino was called into a meeting with Ramizrez, Ritter and city editor Bill Furlow, and was told that he would fly to Montserrat later that day. Over the last several weeks both Ramirez and Ritter had developed good relationships with a number of Dominelli sources here in San Diego. Furlow expressed concern that should Ramirez and Ritter leave town for Montserrat, those relationships might be jeopardized. And besides, Frammolino was the only one who passport was in order. (Actually, a driver’s license would have sufficed, but at the time they all believed a passport was needed.)

Ralph Frammolino found himself aboard a twin-engine plane the Times had chartered at a cost of $6000.

Late that night, after flights from San Diego to Houston and on to Miami, Frammolino found himself aboard a twin-engine plane the Times had chartered at a cost of $6000. The reporter remembers looking back at the lights of Miami and then looking forward past the two pilots, at the black sky that melted into the sea. “It dawned on me that I was flying through the Bermuda Triangle, and I sort of slunk back in my seat and said, ‘My God, I’ll never make it.’ And even though we didn’t get there [to Montserrat] until nine the next day, I got maybe one hour of sleep, just because I was so nervous.”

Jerry Dominelli accused Mayor Roger Hedgecock of “using [Nancy] Hoover and then ‘dumping’ her to ‘cover his ass.’”

For David Hasemyer, assigned to cover the Dominelli story for the Tribune, the Montserrat adventure had begun at 10:00 p.m. the night before on Wednesday, when he gave Nancy Hoover the last of his two or three daily check-in calls. She told him then that Dominelli had fled the country, presumably to Montserrat, and had left with her a letter to investors and friends that explained the reason for his flight. Hasemyer and his wife, fellow Tribune staff writer Anne Krueger, drove at once to the Tribune’s Mission Valley offices and began an all-night session of phone calls; they determined that Dominelli was indeed on Montserrat.

Three kitchen workers told him the location of a villa, once occupied by rock star Elton John, where Dominelli was staying less than a mile from the hotel.

After finishing a deadline story that recounted the results of the nighttime research. Hasemyer was dispatched to Montserrat by his city editor. Shortly before six that evening, he boarded an American Airlines flight to Antigua, a larger island twenty-five miles northeast of Montserrat, via Los Angeles and New York. At the New York stopover he discovered that among those who had been on his flight was Diane Lindquist, a reporter for the San Diego Union, Lindquist had just finished a story for her paper about Dominelli and Montserrat and she, too, was bound for the island.

Gene Cubbison. The Times'Frammolino agreed to share his information with the affable Channel39 reporter Cubbision, “since television and newspapers are two different animals.”

At Coolidge International Airport on Antigua, Hasemyer found that all available flights to Montserrat were already booked, so he pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from the supply of cash his newspaper had given him. The twenty found its way to an airline official and Hasemyer soon found himself on a twelve-seater bound for Montserrat. Lindquist had reservations and no problems.

Dominelli and Cubbison. "We went back there [to the condominiums] with the woman. Had her go up to his door and ask for an aspirin, and when he came out we were sitting there and I said, ‘Hi Jerry, how are you doing?'"

Friday, April 20

As soon as Ralph Frammolino had gotten off the Times' chartered plane after landing on Montserrat, he hailed a taxi and asked the drive to take him to the home of David S. Brandt, the Montserrat attorney who was supposedly working with Dominelli, and the person Frammolino thought would most likely know Dominelli’s whereabouts. (Frammolino had grabbed an evening Tribune at Lindbergh Field and had read that Dominelli had already checked out of the Vue Poine Hotel.)

Brandt refused to answer Frammolino’s call at the front gate, so Frammolino left his business card along with his room number at the Coconut Hill Hotel in Plymouth. His next stop was the Vue Pointe, where, on a whim, he asked three kitchen workers if they happened to know where Dominelli had gone. They did and told him the location of a villa, once occupied by rock star Elton John, where Dominelli was staying less than a mile from the Hotel. “We [Frammolino and his driver] drove up there and as I walked up to the front door, a hard-looking man with a mustache [Parin Calumna, a Dominelli associate] came out and when I told him I wanted to speak with Dominelli, he said he wasn’t there,” Frammolino recalls. “I told him the people in the hotel had said Dominelli was staying there and he looked me squarely in the eye and said, ‘You’re wrong.’ And I looked back at him, just as squarely, and said, ‘I think he’s here.’” Frammolino’s ploy didn’t work, however, and before he could say anything else, Calumna had marched him off the property, telling him. “You could be arrested for working on Montserrat without a permit.”

Frammolino hurried back to his hotel room and immediately called the island’s gregarious chief minister, John Osborne, “I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ and he told me he had just gotten a phone call from the villa and Dominelli was, in fact, holed up there.” Frammolino says, “He said he’d try to take care of it for me and a few minutes later he called me back and said he had persuaded Dominelli to give me an interview. So I went back to the house and the same man [Calumna] came to the car window and right away he told me I could take no notes, no pictures, and no tape recorder. I said, ‘How am I supposed to remember what he said?” and he just told me, I’m sorry,’ so I stepped out of the car. He said, “Please put your hands on the hood.’ And when I asked him why, he told me he had frisk me for weapons.”

As soon as Frammolino’s pat-down was completed, Dominelli walked out the front door of the villa and the two men spoke for less than five minutes. Dominelli repeated his promise to return the missing investor funds and said the charges brought against him by American officials didn’t matter now that he was under the jurisdiction of another country. Then he abruptly turned and headed back inside the house. Frammolino had no other recourse but to return to his hotel and start piecing together a story.

In the meantime, Hasemyer and Lindquist had arrived at 3:30 p.m. Montserrat time (four hours ahead of San Diego time) and, like Frammolino, decided first to contact attorney Brandt. “I was at the gate, hollering to him, but didn’t get any response,” Hasemyer recalls, “Then I left to knock at a neighbor’s door to see if I could learn anything.” Lindquist, arriving in a separate taxi shortly after Hasemyer, also began knocking at Brandt’s gate. “After talking with the neighbor, I started to walk back to Brandt’s house,” Hasemyer says, “when all of a sudden I saw the gate open and his good damn dog, a Doberman, came charging out and pinned Lindquist against her taxi. Then he backed off and started circling the whole property, and I thought to myself, if I stand here, this thing’s gonna attack me, so I went back to the neighbor’s house. Lindquist was petrified and ran inside her taxi.”

From there the two journalist took the taxi back to Plymouth to check into the Coconut Hill Hotel, the only hotel in town that still had vacancies (a golf tournament and a Rotary Club convention had filled the island with tourists). While still in Sand Diego, Hasemyer had been told by his paper’s travel writer that a good source in Montserrat was Howell Bramble, editor of the weekly Montserrat Times, so after check-in was completed. Hasemyer and Lindquist rode down to Bramble’s office for a meeting. “He told me, Yeah, Dominelli’s on the island; I’ll find out where he is for you.” Hasemyer says. The two then returned to their hotel and wrote their respective stories, based on Friday afternoon’s adventures and what Bramble and other island officials had told them.

That evening Frammolino was typing up his own story in his room, getting ready to telephone it in to the Times office in San Diego, when he heard voices in the hotel hallway that sounded American. “It turned out to be the team of Hasemyer and Lindquist from Copley.” He recalls his voice betraying an edge of sarcasm. “Diane was in the room next to me and Hasemyer was across the hall. And all the rooms had {ventilation} slats in the walls, which meant everything anybody said went into the hall.” Frammolino went out and introduced himself, and the three exchanged slightly strained pleasantries. “They were mutually shocked to see me, “ Frammolino says. “Here I was, I had hit the island, found the villa, and talked to Dominelli, and they had just gotten here and were checking into the hotel. The fact that everybody could hear what everybody else was saying seemed to bother them more than it did me; I remember sitting in my room and hearing Diane calling the Union and saying, very clearly that I was in the next room and she thinks I can hear everything she’s saying.”

After the three reporters finished their work that night, they had dinner together. “talking shop” and avoiding mention of what each had planned in regard to the J. David story. As the week progressed, however, the relationship between Frammolino and the other two writers grew markedly tense, chiefly, Frammolino claims, because Hasemyer and Lindquist appeared to be working in tandem, which to Frammolino was a clear violation of journalistic ethics. “This myth of independence between the Union and the Tribune disappeared quickly, as it became apparent to me they were working together on the story.” Frammolino says. “Every time I saw them, they were together, and I thought it strange that two reporters from supposedly competing papers were in lock step with one another. To me that is shameful unethical, and stupid.”

In respond, Hasemyer says, “I think if you go back and look at the papers, the Union and the Tribune, you can see the coverage was noticeably different. There were only so many people on the island — Dominelli, the commissioner of police, Chief Minister John Osborne — and since we all had to ask the same questions of the same people, we just all happened to be there at the same time. And obviously if Frammolino always saw us together, he had to be there, too.”

Saturday, April 21

After another near-sleepless night, this time due to mosquitos. Frammolino got a ride to the Vue Pointe Hotel and from there called Dominelli to plead for a longer interview. Dominelli initially refused, but then Frammolino had an idea. “I told him, ‘Look, either way, I’ve got this picture of Nancy [Hoover], and I’d like to give it to you.’ Right away he said he’d be down here in a few minutes. And sure enough, the next thing I know he drives up with Parin Calumna and we went out for lunch. I bought him a cheeseburger and ended up getting a forty-five-minute-long interview, with a lot of great stuff.” The next day (Sunday) Frammolino’s story appeared on the front page of the Times and brought to light for the first time Dominelli’s displeasure with Mayor Roger Hedgecock, whom he accused of “using [Nancy] Hoover and then ‘dumping’ her to ‘cover his ass.’”

Hasemyer, meanwhile, had gotten up at six o’ clock Saturday morning and started his day by making phone calls to the island police, Chief Minister Osborne’s office, and other sources, hoping to find information that would lead him to Dominelli. A few hours later, Hasemyer recalls, he received a phone call from Howell Bramble. “He said, ‘Come on over, I know where he’s at,’ and hung up.” Hasemyer immediately left for Bramble’s nearby office. Lindquist took a separate cab and did the same; Bramble had also called her that morning. Bramble told them the exact location of Dominelli’s rented Vista de Redonda villa and gave them the phone number. From the office, Hasemyer quickly dialed the number and was startled to hear Dominelli himself answer the call.

“We had known each other through previous stories.” Hasemyer says, “so I said gregariously, “Hi Jerry, this is David Hasemyer. I’m on Montserrat” And he said, ‘I didn’t ask you to come.’ I asked him for an interview and he said no, but at that point I had him on the telephone and just started asking him questions and in ten minutes I got a good deal of information out of him, including the answer to the question of why he was on the island in the first place.” During the conversation, Lindquist nervously paced around the office, unable to hear Dominelli’s answers to Hasemyer’s questions.

Hasemyer finally got Dominelli to agree to an in-person interview at 11:30 a.m., but when he and Lindquist (who had joined Hasemyer) arrived at the villa, they were immediately ordered off the property by Parin Calumna, despite Hasemyer’s insistence that the interview had been agreed to by Dominelli himself. The two hurried back to their hotel rooms and Hasemyer wrote up what he had and telephoned his story back to the Tribune, while Lindquist got a call through to Dominelli, interviewed him briefly, and then wrote her own story to call back to the Union.

That same afternoon another pair of American journalists arrived on Montserrat. Channel 10 reporter Bob Donley and cameraman Bob Lampert checked into the Vue Pointe Hotel (a few rooms were now available) and then quickly nabbed a taxi and asked the driver if he knew where Dominelli was staying. “ He said no, so we asked him, if we had twenty bucks, would he know,” Donley recalls. “He said, ‘I might be able to find the neighborhood.’ So I said, ‘If we had fifty dollars, would you know where the house is? And he said, ‘Right up there on the hill.’”

Donley and Lampert paid a visit to Dominelli’s villa that night; like the others, they were met at the villa’s front door by Parin Calumna, who took Donley’s business card, saying that if Dominelli wished to talk with him, he’d call him at the Vue Pointe.

Sunday, April 22

After attending Easter services at a nearby church, Ralph Frammolino went back to his room at the Coconut Hill to type up some notes; he then called Dominelli at his villa, requesting another interview. Dominelli, however greeted the Times reporter rather brusquely, Frammolino recalls. “He said to me, ‘What’s this I hear about you bribing me with a photo [of Hoover]? I don’t like that very much.’ Apparently he was calling home and having somebody read back to him everything that was being written about him.” Dominelli told Frammolino to call back in an hour, which he did, only to get the same answer. He called once more and again Dominelli told him to call back in an hour.

Around this time Frammolino heard more American voices from the hallway outside his room, followed by a loud rapping on his door. He went to open it and was greeted by a smiling Gene Cubbison from Channel 39, along with cameraman Dan Diaz. Miffed by both the run-around from Dominelli and the growing suspicion that Hasemyer and Lindquist were in cahoots, Frammolino agreed to share his information with the affable Cubbision, “since television and newspapers are two different animals,” he says, and such a working relationship would thus not violate his professional ethics. Frammolino related what had just happened on his calls to the villa and the three agreed to get a ride up the mountain and try their luck in person.

In the meantime Channel 10’s Donley and Lampert were still in their hotel room, impatiently waiting for a return call from Dominelli. Shortly before noon they, too headed back up to the villa but were told a second time by Calumna that if Dominelli wanted to talk with them, he’d call. They returned to their hotel room to wait. Finally, about 2:00 p.m., Dominelli called and agreed to meet Donley for a five minute interview at the villa, provided he submit to a pat-down search and that he promise not to bring any cameras or audio-recording equipment. Donley took a cab to the villa and ended up talking with Dominelli for more than an hour. “I kept saying, ‘One more question,’ and then we started talking about the Padres and the Dodgers,” Donley says, “Parin and Dominelli were joking about who was going to win the World Series, and I finally brought up the camera again and asked Dominelli if he would just answer one question on the film if I told him what it was in advance. He finally agreed, so I went back to the hotel and got Lampert and the camera gear and then went back to the villa.”

Donley got a ten-minute, on-camera interview. Dominelli’s first since arriving on the island, and he and Lampert scrambled back to the hotel to check out and dash to the airport so they could begin the long trip west and be at Channel 10’s studios in time for the 5:00 p.m. newscast. At Los Angeles International Airport they were met by the station’s helicopter and whisked back to San Diego, where they arrived at the studio with just seven minutes to spare. That same Sunday morning David Hasemyer placed a call to Dominelli, again asking for an in-person interview; Dominelli hedged and told Hasemyer to call him back. Hasemyer and Lindquist then decided to move over to the Vue Pointe Hotel to be closer to Dominelli’s villa; from the new hotel Hasemyer again called Dominelli, only to be told that both his and Lindquist’s requests for interviews would be turned down because, as Hasemyer remembers it, “he blamed the Copley press for his downfall and he doesn’t like the politics of the Union-Tribune’s publishing. I told him Don Bauder of the Union was the one who caused it and that we had all been friendly with him. But he didn’t change his mind.”

It was shortly after that call that Hasemyer learned Donley was about to interview Dominelli for television broadcast and Hasemyer became almost desperate. “I was dying,” he says, “I was at the Vue Pointe when Donley came back and got his cameraman, and this was right after Dominelli told me he wouldn’t talk to me. So I called him back and told him I was outraged. You won’t talk to me, ‘I told him, ‘yet you talked to the Times and look what they did to you.’ [Earlier, Hasemyer had called his office and had both the Times and the Union stories read to him.] I told him, ‘Listen, I’ve always been friendly with you. Every time I interviewed you in San Diego and you wanted something kept off the record. I didn’t use it,” and finally he started vacillating a bit and he told me to call him back. I wanted a while and then called him again; this time he said he’d talk, but only with the Union there, too.”

By this time Hasemyer had given up hailing taxis in favor of hiring a regular driver — a flamboyant felloe nicknamed “B-Beep” who seemed to know everybody on the island. The two reporters had B-Beep drive them to the Dominelli villa for an interview that lasted more than an hour. Just as Hasemyer and Lindquist were leaving Dominelli’s villa, Frammolino and Cubbison drove up and saw them walking out the front door, shaking hands with Jerry Dominelli. Frammolino recalls, “They walked by us with very big smiles on their faces and I said to Dave, ‘Did he let you count the money?’ Dave said, ‘Yeah, there’s lots of it,’ and then they left. All Dominelli would say to me was to come back tomorrow, which to me meant automatically that the Union Tribune would have a story on Monday that I wouldn’t have. That’s when I got really worried, thinking that maybe they had some fantastic story, especially when Hasemyer came out the door with his feet off the ground.”

Cubbison, too, approached Dominelli for an interview, but was told that Donley had been there earlier and that Donley said he would make the interview tape available to the other San Diego television stations so Dominelli could avoid the inconvenience of having to submit to another on-camera session. “But I had talked to Donley earlier and he never offered it to me, or even mentioned it.” Cubbison says, “That was one little deal that set us off.” (Donley admits he told Dominelli he would give a copy of the taped interview to the other stations, but when asked why he didn’t tell Cubbison or the other station, he said. “No one asked, and it’s not my job to offer it.”) So that night Cubbison again called Dominelli and told him he knew nothing of Donley’s offer. Dominelli agreed to meet with both him and Frammolino at his villa at eleven the next morning.

Monday, April 23

As soon as he awoke Frammolino called San Diego and had someone in the Times office read him the Union article based on Diane Lindquist’s interview with Dominelli the previous day. His fears from the night before, he says, proved to be unfounded. “There wasn’t much new information at all.”

Hasemyer and Lindquist spent the day apart. Hasemyer taking a day off because Tribune deadlines allowed him to do so. While Lindquist made her usual round of phone calls and visits to her own sources of information. Hasemyer took walks on the beach and watched the sunset, checking in periodically with Dominelli by phone “to make sure he was still on the island.” However, it was a work day like any other for Frammolino and Cubbison. At 11:00 a.m. the two showed up for their scheduled interview with Dominelli was using each member of the media as best he could to get his version of the story out, and sort of as a carrot he would offer each of us an interview with something a little different. So I made up my mind that the story was no longer what Dominelli said but what happened to him. In other words, I was going to cover action, not words.”

Hasemyer disagrees: “I was writing for the people of San Diego, and the people of San Diego wanted to hear what Dominelli had to say. I think it was more important to interview Dominelli every chance I got and represent what he had to say to the readers and let them decide if he was telling the truth.”

For the rest of the week Frammolino’s stories were conspicuously devoid of Dominelli quotes, save for a few dished out at a Wednesday press conference, while both the Union and the Tribune continued to quote the fugitive financier as saying he still planned to cooperate with island officials and return investor funds, although a self-imposed deadline of April 30 would not be met.

Tuesday, April 24

The fact that Tuesday was the first business day after a four-day Easter holiday made things a lot easier for the reporters on the island. “All the time we had been here, everything was closed, and it was a lot harder to track everybody down.” Hasemyer recalls. Both he and Lindquist working independently had contacted the banks on the island and found that none of them expressed a willingness to work with Dominelli; they also continued their periodic check-ins with Dominelli and with government officials to keep up on any further developments. Frammolino and Cubbison too spent the day interviewing the various other figures in the Dominelli story, many of whom were the same people. Hasemyer and Lindquist were talking to. That evening Frammolino and Cubbison, who had moved from the Coconut Hill to the Vue Pointe Hotel had dinner in the Vue Pointe’s dining room. As they were leaving through the lounge to return to their rooms. Frammolino recalls, “I went up to Debbie and said, “How are you doing?” and she said, in a real weird voice. ‘I’m not going to socialize with you.’ I said that’s fine, and after I talked a little to Parin and Valerie [Irwin], I walked away to go back to my room. Then I remembered something I wanted to say and turned around rather suddenly, and when I did that I caught Debbie giving me the finger. All that was on my mind at that moment was that these people had disrupted my personal life by me coming here, thousands of miles from home and that I couldn’t even spend Easter with my family and that this woman had the gall to give me the finger. So I walked up to her and said, “Debbie, good Mormon girls don’t do that.’ Because I had found out, while still in San Diego, that she was a Mormon. She said under her breath, I’m not a Mormon and I said, ‘I know, because I check with your bishop and he said you haven’t been to church.” At that point, Parin said, ‘Ralph you better get out of here,’ and I left. After that the air of antagonism between the Dominelli people and me grew even thicker.”

That night Channel 10’s Bob Donley and cameraman Bob Lampert, not wanting to be outdone by rival Channel 39’s Cubbison and Diaz flew back from San Diego to Montserrat and again checked in at the Vue Pointe Hotel. For the rest of the week Donley’s relationship with Dominelli seemed to grow more cordial as Frammolino’s continued to deteriorate. “I subsequently met with Jerry five times and he telephone me in my room four or five more times.” Says Donley, who spent a good portion of every afternoon windsurfing since his station’s deadlines required each day’s tape to be shipped off by noon and he felt that “there was no sense in doing anything because I couldn’t get it on the tape anyway — Jerry would call me, sometimes at midnight or at two in the morning just to talk to and we ended up getting to know each other quite well.” (A third Channel 10 staffer, field producer Maria Villalobos joined Donley and cameraman Lampert on Montserrat that Tuesday evening. Once the next day’s footage had been shot, she flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico and delivered the video tape to San Juan’s Channel 5. From there it was beamed back to San Diego via satellite at a cost of $2000. Villalobos then returned to San Diego. The next two nights Donley hired a charter plane to fly the video clips to the same San Juan television station for satellite feedback to San Diego, again at a cost of $2000 per transmission; Channel 39’s Cubbison used the same procedure and in addition sometimes had tape shuttled between Antigua and Miami, where a station would beam it back to Kearny Mesa. San Diego’s Channel 8 did not send a reporter to Montserrat.)

Wednesday, April 25

Dominelli called a press conference at the Vue Pointe Hotel which was attended by all the American journalists. He told the group he planned to cooperate with Montserrat officials, who were growing increasingly impatient. The journalists, too, were becoming impatient; they had heard these words from Dominelli countless times. Then he spoke about his plans to build a new banking empire on Montserrat, plans which Frammolino called “pure fantasy.”. The key was when he said his company had already obtained a banking license which would enable it to open up windows and be a complete local bank. The implication was that he was running it, whereas I knew he had been taken out as director of that bank more than a month ago. That press conference really reaffirmed my decision to cover his actions, not his words; I even told Cubbison that day, ‘Look, I don’t care what Dominelli says anymore — he could put on King Lear on the balcony of his villa and do all the parts himself and I wouldn’t care.’ I could no longer rely on what he said. Who knows if he wasn’t lying though his teeth? There comes a point in the media where you say, ‘I’m not going to report what he says, I feel he might be lying. I feel he is lying, and I’m not going to spread his lies.’”

Hasemyer was likewise not regarding as “gospel truth” everything Dominelli said at the press conference, but he still felt he should report on what Dominelli had to say, “Whatever the guy says, it’s my job to report it and put it in the proper context. That’s what I did; I mentioned what he said about his banking plans, but I also mentioned that the trustees had, in fact, removed him from power. Dominelli really didn’t tell us anything new, anything he hadn’t told us before, and while I had a lot of questions I did want to ask him. I didn’t want to ask him in front of all the other reporters, since I was reasonably certain I’d get the chance to talk with him alone again.”

Thursday, April 26

Hasemyer and Lindquist were by now sharing B-Beep as a driver and found him to be a valuable and loyal ally. “The competition between papers had become so fierce.” Hasemyer says, “that even the drivers got in on it and would spy on each other during the day. Now and then Frammolino’s driver would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Dave, have you been busy? What are you doing?’ And I knew full well that this garbanzo would hotfoot it back to Frammolino. So one time I said, ‘Yeah, I saw Dominelli taking off from the island in a helicopter,’ and he just said. ‘Oh,’ and left. I’m sure he told Frammolino.”

Frammolino and Cubbison meanwhile were making good on their vow to investigate Dominelli rather than listening to him. They observed him drive up on a road on the south side of Plymouth far from his villa. When he didn’t return, they decided to linger around the area. They stopped for lunch at a nearby hotel and soon struck up a conversation with a woman who was sunbathing there. Frammolino recalls. “We told her who we were and who we were looking for and she told us. ‘Oh, that guy just moved in across from me in the condos [a condominium development on the same road they had earlier seen Dominelli driving].’ So we went back there [to the condominiums] with the woman. Had her go up to his door and ask for an aspirin, and when he came out we were sitting there and I said, ‘Hi Jerry, how are you doing? He didn’t say anything but Parin, who was with him, got pretty angry. He said to Cubbison, ‘Well, you guys must think you’re pretty smart. Where do you think you are, in a James Bond movie?” Actually, that’s exactly how we felt at that point.”

Frammolino also felt something else; a growing resentment of what he considered to be the Hasemyer Lindquist “clique.” Which after that Thursday night had grown to include reporter Fred Muir of the Wall Street Journal. (Muir until recently had been a financial writer for the San Diego Union.) “It became very apparent it was them against us.”

Frammolino says now, “You can only be together for so long in a strange environment, so close together, before your ill feelings toward each other start to show. We saw the two — and then the three — of them together every day, all in the same hotel, all in the same taxis, and we just grew to resent it, because here we were, the first ones on the island, the first ones to find the villa, the first ones to talk to Dominelli, and it was obvious they had found out a lot of their information simply through reading the [Los Angeles] Times, such as the location of the villa.”

The fact that Hasemyer and Lindquist had dined with Montserrat Times editor Howell Bramble that night also irked Frammolino. ‘I didn’t trust that guy from the beginning.”

Frammolino says, “Way back when I first talked to Dominelli and got frisked. H[Bramble] called me out of the blue at my hotel room and asked if I would tell him where the villa is. He also told me he knew that I had been frisked. I just said, ‘Forget it, buddy, I’m not going to tell you.’ and hung up. But Dave and Diane had dinner with him and seemed to lock up a relationship with him. And I have to admit that relationship proved very beneficial to them.

Indeed, the next edition of the weekly Montserrat Times carried on page three a reproduction of the Tribune’s front page from the previous Thursday, with a prominent caption that read. “This is how a San Diego newspaper dealt with the fugitive financier who came to Montserrat.” Directly below the caption was brief but flattering story that commended the efforts of Hasemyer and Lindquist to track down Dominelli. Frammolino and the Times were not even mentioned. Next to the story was a photograph of Diane Lindquist, smiling broadly, with a caption that read, “Diane Lindquist of the San Diego Union, tough, determined, relentless. She is prepared to take physical risks and endure insults in order to discover the truth about Dominelli’s collapsed banking empire.” Says Frammolino. “Her only claim to fame was the previous Friday when the lawyer let out his dog and the dog pinned her to the car. I guess that’s what makes you famous and makes you brave and makes you proud. But it’s strange – very, very strange.”

“Frammolino lost a very valuable source because of that first snub.” Hasemyer claims. “And Frammolino. Bramble told me, apparently realized he was wrong, because he repeatedly called Bramble after that to invite him to lunch or dinner, but Bramble just didn’t want to have anything to do with him.” And as for the other papers deriving much of their information from the Los Angeles Times. Hasemyer is even more indignant. “It was Bramble, in fact, who told me where the villa is, not the Times.” He fumes, “ I could care less what the Times had; I didn’t learn anything from the Times. And as Frammolino became shut out, as his style of reporting began to alienate not just Dominelli but Montserrat officials, he became less effective and therefore he generated no substantial breaking news. But I don’t want to get into a petty name-calling contest. I was a professional over there, and I believe I did a professional job.”

After his dinner with Bramble that Thursday evening. Hasemyer returned to his hotel room and got a call from Dominelli, who invited both him and Lindquist up to the villa that night for another interview. Hasemyer, however knew that if he could postpone the interview until the next morning. Lindquist would miss her deadline for Friday publication while he could still meet his at the Tribune. He suggested to Dominelli that the meeting be moved to 9:00 a.m. Friday, and Dominellin agreed.

Friday, April 27

Instead of driving to the villa right away. Hasemyer waited until he got hold of the governor’s office, just in case a tip he’d gotten the night before proved to be accurate; Bramble had told him at dinner that Dominelli was about to be expelled from Montserrat. Over the phone, Hasemyer learned that Bramble was right – the governor had just decided that Dominelli had to be out of the country by 9:00 a.m. the following day, Saturday, or face arrest and deportation to the United States. Immediately after hearing this. Hasemyer says, Dominelli called, asking to postpone the meeting, and Hasemyer agreed, unsure of how much Dominelli already knew about the expulsion order. He changed his mind not long after. However, and with Lindquist and B.Beep, headed for the villa.

Frammolino and Cubbison also began their day with a bit of inside information. “I literally got a tip on the street from a guy I had just met who asked me to turn around and follow him.” Frammolino recalls. We walked awhile out of sight and he told me that the police were at Dominelli’s villa right now, so Cubbison and I jumped in our car and booked out of town. We got to the villa and the police were there, but Jerry wasn’t. so we took off for the condo and waited for Jerry, who we found out was inside. Parin came out and tried to get us thrown off the property by the manager, but the manager just old us not to stand in front and we moved oft to the porch. And we waited there until Jerry got in his car and we chased him across town back to his villa. Cubbison getting a great chase shot for that night’s Channel 39 broadcast. Jerry got back to the villa and right away police came out and said, ‘Mr. Dominelli, it’s nice to see you.” Then guess who drives up – Hasemyer and Lindquist. I said something like, ‘I knew we couldn’t start the party without you, ‘and they just smiled.”

The reporters waited around the villa for Dominelli to come out; Channel 10’s Donley briefly joined the others but left after a short time. Before long, however, Dominelli did come out, but before anyone had the chance to ask him anything, he was taken away in a small police car, accompanied by a police inspector. The other dozen police officers who had surrounded the house, along with three taxis carrying the Wall Street Journal’s Fred Muir. Frammolino and Cubbison, and Hasemyer and Lindquist, followed down the winding mountain road in hot pursuit. Midway down the mountain they saw Donley’s car coming back up, headed toward the villa, but as soon as his driver saw the caravan of police and press he made a hasty U-turn and joined the procession.

At police headquarters the press pool and a growing number of onlookers gathered at the station’s main gate waiting for Dominelli to emerge. Almost three hours later – and after Hasemyer had called in his notes to the Tribune — Dominelli appeared, only to step into a waiting taxi, which sped away. B-Beep was out to get a drink. Hasemyers says, and Frammolino and Cubbison had left the vigil moments earlier. When b-Beep returned, Hasemyer and Lindquist got him to drive them firs to the villa and then to the condo, but there was no sign of Dominelli at either place. Disheartened, they returned to the Vue Pointe.

Frammolino and Cubbison meanwhile had taken off to check the airport and the nearby boat docks to see if there was any sign of a premature departure on Dominelli’s part; they, too, returned to the hotel. “When we got there, we found Jerry walking out of Bob Donley’s room.” Frammolino says, “He had taken out his revenge on us, it looked like; he had called a press conference and we weren’t invited. I walked up to Jerry and said, “What’s going on, Jerry?” and he said, “Why should I talk to you? You’ve been dogging me all week.’ I just said, ‘How are you getting back?’ and he began to walk away, saying, ‘Maybe I’ll just beam myself up.”

An incensed Frammolino and Cubbison went to look for Donley, whom they found sitting in the hotel’s lounge. “We had found out from the manager that the room Dominelli had been in had been rented by Channel 10 and that Donley had allowed him to use his phone to make collect calls, since his phone service had been cut off two days before,” Frammolino says. “So what Cubbison and I did, when we found Donley in the bar, was tell him. ‘Mr. Donley, we think you are now part of the story. Would you care to answer why you were aiding and abetting a fugitive from the United States? Don’t you think that’s unethical?” He wouldn’t answer our questions; he had a smile on his face, his eyes got a little red, and he looked away. I then went back to the manager and asked him the same thing, asking him why he had let this happen and didn’t he know that Dominelli had been declared a persona non grata. He was as mad as we were, and right away went up to Donley and asked him to leave the hotel. But since he was scheduled to check out the next day anyway, he let him stay an extra night.”

Donley, though, has a different explanation for what happened: “I was just sitting in my hotel room when I got back from the police station and I got a call from Dominelli. He told me he wanted to get away from the media and since his phone had been turned off, could he come over to my hotel room and use the telephone to make a few collect calls. I said, “Sure come on down, and while I was waiting for him to get here I called my news director and my executive producer and asked them if letting him come here was all right. They asked me if Dominelli had been charged with any crime, and I said no; they asked whether Dominelli wanted me to pay for the calls and again I said no, he would call collect. So they said under those conditions. I should go ahead, provided he’s free to move around the island.

“When Frammolino and Cubbison saw Dominelli leave my hotel room. They got extremely disturbed. I guess they felt they had been scooped, and you have to remember they had been running around the island like a pack of animals trying to find him and stumbling all over themselves in the process. And they must have been afraid he was leaving the island and they had been made fools of because he was with me. SO they took out their anger on me by yelling and screaming at me once they found me in the bar. .. They cracked, both of them.”

Frammolino and Cubbison returned to their hotel rooms in time to see Hasemyer, Lindquist, and Muir, who had arrived moments earlier, bolt out of their own rooms and into a waiting taxicab. “B-Beep, who has fantastic eyesight, was watching the headlights of Dominelli’s car after he left the hotel. While we went back to our rooms.” Hasemyer says. “He followed them [the headlights] up to the villa and then he came and got all of us, Yelling, ‘Let’s go, he’s back at the villa!’ So the three of us ran out and Frammolino and Cubbison saw us, and right when we’re in the car, driving off. Frammolino ran up and threw a tape recorder at us asking how we felt, aiding and abetting a fugitive. He must have thought we had been in the room with Donley and Dominelli. But out driver just drove away, and Frammolino was running alongside the car with his tape recorder until Cubbison showed up and the two of them got into their car and began following us.

“They were about two or three minutes behind us on the winding mountain road leading up to the villa – we could see their headlights, off in the distance behind us. About three-quarters of the way up the mountain, we passed Dominelli’s driver, coming back down the mountain; our driver, who knew everybody on the island, stopped him, and the two began to jabber in high-pitched tones that we couldn’t even understand. I turned around and could see Frammolino and Cubbison believe him, we made a slow U-turn and headed back down the hill. We watched their cab stop and their driver start to chat with Dominelli’s driver, who had met them a bit further down the hill; we drove by them, back down the hill, and sure enough they followed us. So we very casually drove down the mountain, taking a very innocuous route and driving just slow enough to be sure they’re following us. “

And then B-Beep said, ”We gotta make this good,” and he sped up and caught up with Dominelli’s driver and I paid him a bribe, twenty East Caribbean dollars [seven U.S. dollars], not to say anything more in case Frammolino and Cubbison stopped him again. Then we turned around and started making our way back up to the villa. But lo and behold! Frammolino and Cubbison showed up on our tail again, so we turned around in the opposite direction again and this time B-Beep floored it. It was a real cat-and-mouse race. We got up to sixty miles per hour on a very narrow mountain road, and at one point, rounding a curve and then speeding down a straightaway out of their direct sight, our driver turned off his headlights and drove off the side of the road, hiding behind some trees. We waited about a minute and watched Frammolino and Cubbison speed right past us, and then we continued on our way back up to the villa with our headlights off.”

Actually, the fact that Frammolino and Cubbison lost track of B-beep’s taxi was as much due to bad luck as deliberate deception. When their car was met by Dominelli’s on the way up the hill to the villa, Dominelli’s driver didn’t do as he had been asked by B-Beep. “He told us they were, indeed, going back up to the villa.” Frammolino says, “but we thought, no way, they probably told him to say that, and when he saw them head back down the mountain we turned around, too, and followed them. Then we lost sight of their car, and also got a flat tire and spun out. We decided to head back to the village and another driver there told us they had made a U-turn and were headed back toward the villa; they had apparently wanted to switch cars so we wouldn’t recognize them. But we just said, forget it, they’re going to get what they’re going to get and Dominelli’s not going to talk to us anyway.”

When they got to the villa, Hasemyer, Lindquist and Muir were told by Parin Calumna that Dominelli was eating dinner but would be ready to talk with them in about half an hour; they hid the cab and waited. Finally they got the chance to talk with Dominelli, who informed them he was leaving the island by plane the next morning for some other location, also in the Caribbean, which he refused to disclose. Then the three returned to their hotel rooms.

Frammolino and Cubbison had returned earlier to the hotel after having lost sight of the others, when Hasemyer, Lindquist, and Muir walked into the hotel lobby. “We didn’t know what was going on.” Frammolino says. “They walked inside with big smiles on their faces – Cubbison told me this, because I was back in my room – and Hasemyer is not walking, but actually skipping. This is professional journalism, right? His new nickname is Skippy. But the whole thing was just ludicrous, journalists taking other journalists on a car chase. Come on, that’s exactly what Dominelli wanted. We didn’t know if Dominelli had given Hasemyer a key to the money, although I assumed he gave them one last interview in which he told them such very important information as ‘I will pay back all the money’ and I have another place to go but I won’t tell you where.”

At midnight in his room and planning to retire, Frammolino looked at the villa and noticed it was all lit up. “Then I saw a flashlight going on and off, and I thought that kind of strange, so I went down to the beach. I saw a windjammer, the Polynesian, and it was just about ready to take off, and there were lights on the windjammer that were flashing, too. I called Cubbison and we just didn’t know what was going on; was Jerry crawling out on his belly, leaving aboard the boat? So we walked out to the end of the pier and there was a taxi sitting nearby. We went back to the beach and looked up at the villa again: another light started flashing, and at that moment the taxi put on its lights and started to back up and then it took off. I said to Cubbison, ‘Did Dominelli just take off in that windjammer?”

Hasemyer was also out by the water that night. “I was in my room, writing a story, when I got a call from the manager of the Vue Pointe, telling me it appeared Dominelli was heading for a small bay. So I took a cab over there –B. Beep had already gone home for the day – and went out there, but saw nothing and went back to the hotel. I had a room facing the villa, and not once did I see any ‘bright spotlights gleaming out to sea.’ As the Times reported the next day.”

As it turns out, the windjammer belonged to someone not at all connected with Dominelli, although Frammolino insists, “it was all part of the intrigue he was trying to weave for us, to throw us off.”

Saturday, April 28

All the reporters showed up early at the Montserrat airport and there was Dominelli and crew, ready to take off for whereabouts unknown aboard a chartered plane. Frammolino arrived to find what he remembers, struck him as “a mob scene . . . like wolves around a wounded animal.” Making his way through the throng of press people and curious islanders. Frammolino saw Channel 10’s Donley leaning into the cockpit of the twin-engine Cessna already on the runaway, preparing for takeoff. “At that point,” Frammolino recalls, “I was so peeved at all his gloating that I went up to him and said, “What are you doing, getting your last kisses in?” “Donley suddenly grabbed him by the shoulder and growled. “You say one more thing to me, buddy, and I’m gonna punch your face in.” But before further words could lead to fisticuffs, Cubbison, a few steps behind Frammolino, stopped between the two men and pushed them apart. “Hey, come on guys,” he said, in as amiable a voice as he could muster. “We’re all Americans.”

As Dominelli’s plane took off, the pilot shouted to immigration officials. “We’re going to Guadaloupe!” But before the plane was out of eyesight, it abruptly changed course and headed toward Antigua. Hasemyer, still at the airport, met a photographer from the Associated Press who had charter reservations for Antigua and would be leaving soon, so he offered to pay half the charges if he could come along. The photographer agreed. Before long the charter plane appeared and the photographer and Hasemyer (now joined by Lindquist and Muir) climbed aboard. To everyone’s surprise and delight, the pilot was the very same man who had just flown Dominelli on the sort, twenty-five mile hop to Antigua; he had turned his plane around and come directly back to Montserrat. As the four journalists flew off to catch up with Dominelli, they learned from the pilot that Dominelli had planned all along to fly to Antigua and that announced Guadaloupe destination had been intended to throw off the press. The pilot also related what had happened at the Antigua airport and repeated the now-famous words of the immigration officer who greeted Dominelli; “Sir, you are detained.”

From Antigua, Lindquist and Muir flew immediately to Miami to await Dominelli’s arrival and apprehension by U.S. authorities. Hasemyer flew back to Montserrat and telephoned his notes back to the Tribune, then prepared to check out of the Vue Pointe. The hotel clerk, however, demanded that he pay for both his and Lindquist’s rooms. Hasemyer did his best to explain that they worked for different newspapers, (Lindquist eventually returned to the Vue Pointe from Miami.)

That night Frammolino and Cubbison, still in Montserrat but scheduled to leave the next morning, had dinner in the hotel dining room with their driver. Hasemyer, a few tables away, sat by himself.

On the next day’s flight from Antigua to Miami, Donley managed to befriend an Eastern Airlines employee and persuaded the man to let him sit next to Dominelli, who was on the same flight. Also aboard the plane was Frammolino, who had just taken his aisle seat in the twentieth row when Hasemyer stopped in front of him. Pointing to the window seat next to his, Frammolino asked, “Is this your seat?” and when Hasemyer glanced at his ticked and nodded, Frammolino let him slip in. The flight to Miami took three and a half hours. During that time, the two men did not speak one word to each other.