Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 19, 1993 TAG: 9308190159
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Sometimes he just wanted to die.
"I begged my captors to take me out and shoot me and leave me on the road where my family could find my body," Harvey Weinstein recalled.
The 68-year-old millionaire who was kidnapped and kept in a pit for 12 days recounted his ordeal Wednesday to a packed news conference.
"It's said that events don't make the man, they reveal him," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in introducing Weinstein, a native New Yorker who made his fortune manufacturing tuxedos. He was abducted at knifepoint in the parking lot of his favorite diner on Aug. 4.
When he overheard his captors' plans to demand a multimillion-dollar ransom, "I told them they had the wrong guy," he said. "I added up my checking account and thought I was going to be a little short."
Blinded by goggles, he was spirited to a secluded ravine off a Manhattan highway and dropped into an abandoned, 8-foot-deep utility shaft. His abductors shackled him, then covered the top of the hole with a metal plate.
From the start, the former Marine and avid tennis player "knew the key was my mind and not my body."
As hours, then days passed, he drew on his World War II combat experience, when he spent long stretches of time in pitch-black foxholes.
He rationed the bananas, plums and water his captors dropped through a small shaft, eating as little as possible to avoid filling the hole with excrement. He calculated the passage of time by listening to the highway traffic patterns.
He also started "the greatest autobiography never written," he said.
"I would start each session with `This is the verbal autobiography of Harvey Weinstein: Age 6,' and it was astounding the memories that would come back."
After about a week, despair - and thoughts of death - began.
At one low point, he said, he began "yelling at Janet Reno to get more people on this case."
"I was not very kind, because I felt she was not giving enough support."
Above ground, a small army of police detectives and FBI agents worked around the clock, monitoring phone negotiations between Weinstein's family and the kidnappers, who demanded $3 million.
Finally, Monday morning, Weinstein's son delivered the cash. The man who collected it, Fermin Rodriguez, was trailed and arrested. In all, three people have been charged with first-degree kidnapping.
Rodriguez, an employee at Weinstein's tuxedo factory, helped lead detectives to his boss's prison.
By then, Weinstein said, he was in "the deepest depths of despair."
Suddenly, he heard the calls of detectives. He returned the calls, and soon was bathed in daylight as the steel plate was removed.
At the news conference, Weinstein re-created the moment of freedom, reaching out to the clutch the hand of the man who pulled him to safety, Detective William Mondore.
"Grabbing his hand through this little aperture" and being "pulled from my prison was an experience that very few humans are ever given," he said.
"I knew I was home. I knew I was safe. And I knew God had smiled down on me."
by CNB