Chapter 8

The Marshal Service found what they thought of as the perfect place to send the big black man, his pretty blond wife, and their little boy. There was a retired Secret Service agent who had inherited a cattle ranch outside Lewistown, Montana. Tony could be taught how to herd and care for cattle, as well as the plethora of other little jobs that need doing on a ranch. Heather couldn’t teach in school, but the rancher had seven kids. She became the nanny and home school teacher for them all.

They lived in one half of a duplex, where the retired agent and his wife had lived before his father passed and he took over the ranch. His mother had died seven years earlier. It didn’t even require a Marshal to ride herd on them because anybody who wished them ill could be seen coming fifteen miles away and would then have to navigate a driveway that was five miles long. The rancher had five other full time men working for him and all of them went armed as a matter of course. Because Tony wasn’t convicted of a felony, he could still go armed as well.

It took over a year for the case to come to trial, because seven other subjects were tried first. Four of those were local law enforcement officers who were on the take. Two were bouncers at the club who had forced dancers to “be interviewed” by Bob in his office, on his bed, or had taken women to be tattooed. And one was Maurice Townsend, who was charged with aiding and abetting income tax evasion and money laundering. He pled guilty in exchange for a sentence of only one year. His guilty plea identified Bob Alveezo as the person who had given him the numbers to use in both sets of books that had been found in Bob’s safe. The state arrested and tried two dozen people involved in human trafficking and distribution of controlled substances. Two more men took a plea bargain for the offense of failure to properly dispose of a human body. These were men who had assisted in burying homicide victims. It turned out you could get ten years just for moving a dead body to a site where burial would be improper or unauthorized. The plea bargains required that the men testify against the person or persons who had hired them to move the bodies. That person was not named in the indictment.

On the Federal side of things, five people were brought to trial, four of whom were discovered during the investigation into Bob and Miss Kitty’s. Bob was given an opportunity to testify against them in exchange for a recommendation of leniency in any sentence he might get in the future. His attorney recommended he keep his mouth shut, since the government was going to charge Bob with crimes for which he could, in theory, be executed. “Leniency” in that situation would mean being housed in something less than a super max prison.

When Bob finally came to trial it took almost five months for the government to present its witnesses and evidence. The defense tried to discredit all the witnesses, as was expected. That’s why twenty-five women who had been trafficked were put on the stand. Each one showed her tattoo. Charlene was put on the stand to testify that she had been under death sentence because she talked to a policeman about Bob’s crimes. She had already testified against the dirty cops, all of whom had been found guilty. Two of those cops were brought from prison to testify that they had been paid large sums of money to avoid being in certain areas of the county when told to, and for helping Bob cover up complaints and crimes. None of them actually took part in any trafficking or any of the homicides.

Heather and three other women testified that Bob had forced them to let him impregnate them. None of the children were brought into court but photos of them were shown to the jury. The defense claimed that none of these children had been sired by Bob until the government presented a witness who had done paternity testing on the child. All four women produced birth certificates that matched entries Bob had made in his little red book, but only Heather’s had Alveezo as the baby’s legal last name. The defense did not request paternity testing for the other three babies. Instead they tried to get answers to questions designed to make these liaisons consensual, and make the mothers out to be sluts.

Jerry testified as to borrowing money from Bob for a business venture and then being required to let his wife be taken as a partial slave when he could not pay back the loan. The defense demanded to know what kind of business venture the loan was for and then wanted proof of its failure until the prosecution objected and said it was irrelevant.

Then Tony testified. During his testimony he confessed to breaking the law and told about all the things Bob had told him to do. He spoke of the farm and the backhoe and there were photographs of the crime scene, put up on a big screen the judge and jury could see. He pointed out each of the re-excavated holes and identified who had been buried in it, if he remembered the name. There were a number of bodies he could not identify, but he testified that he had buried them. He identified the ones Bob had shot personally and which ones Chuck had killed. His testimony was devastating and Bob’s lawyer tried every trick in the book to discredit him. But a man who confesses to committing a crime, in open court, is a man who has credibility. The jury didn’t know about the deal he’d made to avoid punishment for his crimes, the deal that would change his name to Daniel Covington, a man who would never resemble Tony Partridge again, except in stature.

Tony’s testimony took three days, primarily because the prosecution tendered lots of pieces of evidence as he described it, and the defense objected to everything except what color of socks he was wearing. The defense attorney shot himself in the foot by dragging it out so long. Tony was on the stand enough that the jury got a sense that he was not the man who had planned all this. That’s what the defense attorney would claim in his summation before the jury went to deliberate. He would talk about how Tony had confessed to burying those bodies and that’s because he had killed them. He claimed Chuck and Tony were the central minds behind the whole criminal enterprise that Miss Kitty’s had been shown to be. They were the bosses, partners in crime, and they camouflaged themselves as simple bouncers. Bob Alveezo had been merely a figurehead, put in place to take the fall, if such was needed. And here that time was. Here poor Bob sat, dazed and confused as to what he was being accused of.

The defense attorney did not attack the evidence, other than to say Tony had lied and all the girls had lied because they wanted to be prostitutes and wanted to protect their pimp. Instead of trying to discredit the physical evidence, he attacked Tony Partridge and the deceased Chuck Tanner. Bob was innocent, and the jury should set him free.

It was a hail Mary and the prosecutor said as much during his summation. He did not ignore the evidence and reminded the jury of the evil that had roamed the land in Bob Alveezo’s shoes.

“I know he did it all,” said the assistant United States Attorney. “You know he did it. The bailiff even knows he did it. He deserves to be put in a dark hole and buried in the penal system forever, just like he consigned all those souls to the grave. If you do not convict him, more people will suffer and perhaps even die. Put him where he belongs. Put him in a super-max prison so we’ll all be safe at night.”

The jury was only in deliberation for two hours. To be honest, an hour of that was chitchat about how their kids and spouses were doing. It had been a long trial and everybody on the jury had suffered. Their loved ones had suffered, too. Then the foreman took a vote. There was one slip of paper that was marked not guilty. It had been marked that way by Phillip Townsend, who said, “I thought we should at least make it look like we argued a little bit.”

The second vote was unanimous: guilty on all charges.

They talked about the death penalty for twenty minutes before deciding not to recommend it. Several jurors said that rotting in jail for the rest of his life was better punishment.

It took longer to write out what the foreman read when they came out than it did for them to convict him on it.

Sentencing was scheduled for three months after the jury found him guilty. The pre-sentencing investigation identified twenty-three women who had been put in a position where they had to submit to having sex with Bob. Three family members of homicide victims were found and interviewed. Heather brought Robert Preston Alveezo with her. He was now almost two years old.

“I love him,” she told the court’s investigator. “He’s the light of my life, but not because his father was involved. I had no choice in the matter. The very first night he knew me he made me have sex with him. He called it an audition to be a dancer, but I had no choice. This happened literally within an hour of when I first saw him. After he raped me he made me strip at the club. I continued to have no choice as he had sex with me day after day and month after month, until I was pregnant. And yes, he said he’d forgive a hundred thousand dollars of our debt, but that still left almost two hundred grand because of the interest. So he owned my womb for nine months and I basically got nothing out of it.” She blinked. “Except Bobby. I love Bobby. So I’m conflicted.”

“I’ve talked to several of the dancers who got tattooed. I understand you did, too,” said the judge.

“Yes. It branded me as his property.”

“Can I see the tattoo to verify it?”

“You’ll have to see a very intimate part of me,” she warned.

“I don’t have to see the whole thing. Just a bit of it will do.”

She undid her jeans and pulled her panties down until the tail of the dragon showed. It was new enough that its colors were still vibrant.

“Has that affected your life in any way?” asked the man.

“My husband divorced me during this whole debacle,” she said. “He saw me exposing myself to men and knew I was being told to have sex with some men. So now he’s my ex. I can’t explain to a stranger why I had that tattoo, so I can’t really date. I’m lucky that there was chemistry between Tony and me. He understands and doesn’t think of me as a whore.”

“So, to sum it all up, you were repeatedly raped until you were pregnant, and then your rapist had you branded to tell the world he owned you. Is that basically correct?”

“Yes, but please remember that I also had to suck stranger’s dicks as a perk for some of his associates. I’m sorry for the vulgar language, your honor. I get a little emotional when I remember this. He pimped me, except nobody gave me money.”

“And the child, other than just existing, hasn’t impacted you seriously, right?”

“Wrong. At school, a teacher who is a white woman married to a white man can’t have a mixed race child and avoid assumptions that I had cheated on my husband. We had to make up this ridiculous story about Jerry being sterile and us having to accept whatever donor sperm was compatible with me. I lost the respect of a lot of my peers at school and I can never overcome that. Anyone who knows me and sees me in public with my son assumes I had round heels and got knocked up accidentally. If I wasn’t in witness protection I wouldn’t have any friends at all.”

At sentencing the judge was as efficient as the jury had been. He said Bob was an evil of major proportions and had ruined the lives of at least a hundred people. He said he believed there were more victims out there, but that they could not be included in the impact that resulted in his sentence. He said he had detected no remorse or repentance on Bob’s part and that there were no mitigating factors that could reduce his sentence.