I had everything when I left for the desert. I did. I left a beautiful wife and two beautiful children, had a beautiful husky puppy and two cats. I had two vehicles, a Camaro and a Mercury Tracer, 1995 vehicles. Not like a couple of beaters. I had a 1997 brick home, corner lot, quarter of an acre. Privacy fence. Now what do I have? The money was the downfall of my entire life.
[The last of our interviews takes place late at night in a bar called the Thirsty Whale, located on Lake Minocqua, now abandoned for the season. Outside, the wind is howling through the bleachers, where summer people watch waterskiing shows. On one portion of the tapes, Matt is trying to enlist some help in destroying his ex-wife's Durango. Come on! Let's push it in the lake! Or set it on fire in the woods out by my folks' house!
He keeps talking about how he got more resolutely fucked than anyone else who was involved. He confesses that part of the reason he wants to talk about this episode in his life is that he hopes that a letter-writing campaign will ensue. He wants his day in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I asked Sergeant Kenneth Buff, Matt's platoon sergeant and the first guy to find money that day, if victimhood was simply Matt's default identity. Buff said that Matt Novak was the kind of guy you wanted to hang out with. He was universally liked. Funny. Clever. It was only after all this that Matt had changed. "Matt sunk into a real depression," Buff said. "And I don't think he ever recovered."
Matt doesn't deny that he tried to steal money, but he is more interested in knowing: In the movie, is he the good guy or the bad guy? Maybe his guilt depends on the precise moment he made that crucial decision that his desires came before the greater good. As Rideout says:"A good supply sergeant, very few of them are probably legally correct. This guy was right on the edge of right and wrong." Was it the hypnotic power of seeing $200 million in cash, the golden ring in front of you? Or before that, when he kicked down that first door to take a sweet Sony television so his unit could watch porno movies in more dramatic fashion? Or earlier, when he got to Kuwait and was told he had to steal shit to do right? Or even earlier, when he was an infant, a fetus, a zygote that mutated imperceptibly? Or was it pre-Matt, in the primordial ooze, and it just so happens that anyone in Matthew Novak's position would take that money?
At the Thirsty Whale, Matt picks out a girl from across the room and takes a seat next to her at the bar. Her name is M. She works in customer service, and she recently had a nervous breakdown. She's medicated now. She and Matt hit it off almost immediately. She looks a little stiff, with her primly crossed legs and glossy new handbag. But Matt could smell the emotional injury on her, the fragility, the liability of having had a nervous breakdown.
M says,"Don't I recognize you? Are you from here?"What kind of line is that?
Well, you know the war in Iraq, right? The flush of false modesty rises.
"Yeah," M says.
Anything special you remember about it?
Everyone's silent, staring at him with vague smiles.They desperately want to go there with him, wherever it is he might be taking them, but they don't know what he's talking about. Earlier that night he said: Hopefully, this chapter in my life is almost over, or this novel in my life, because that's what it is. But it's not going to be over if it continues to be a more attractive identity for Matt than the one he's currently living.
You remember any stories?
"Like?" says M. "Stories?"
"Jennifer Lynch or whatever?" the bartender says.
You remember anything about money? Something about GIs finding two hundred million dollars and trying to steal twelve million of it? They all smile now and nod, though whether or not they know the story is anyone's guess. Yep, Matt says, that was me, no shit.]
Devin Friedman is thirty-four years old, works as a senior writer for GQ magazine, where this story was published, and has never been in the army. He believes he would have been tempted by finding two hundred million dollars in American currency in the middle of a war zone, but believes even more strongly that no one really knows what he or she would do unless they've been in those circumstances. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award for essay writing, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Best American Travel Writing. He edited a book of photographs taken by soldiers who've served in Iraq called This is Our War, and believes that if he didn't mention Fred Woodward, GQ's very talented art director, and the photograph editor Greg Pond, he'd be screwing those two over for their work on the book.
If you've ever watched a trial you know the first rule of trying to re-create a crime: events start to break down upon scrutiny. Unless you have a videotape, and sometimes even when you do (Rodney King et al.), you're never really going to know what happened. And in my limited experience reporting crime stories, the more interviews you do the more it starts to feel like reality is coming unstitched. Even in this case, the case of (as they're referred to in this story) The Novak 8, when events were widely witnessed and the conspiracy lasted only a matter of hours, facts begin to lose their purchase. Did the lieutenant make off with a bunch of money as charged? Did the first sergeant? Was Matt Novak really the ringleader, as the army contends, or the fall guy? In any case, pretty much everyone involved in this incident feels they were singularly screwed. Matt Novak especially so.
The last time I saw Matt was via satellite when we were both being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo was being kind of a dick, insinuating that Matt was a quasi-criminal scumbag. It didn't really help Matt's worldview, which, as far as I could tell when I spent those wintry days up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin doing the reporting for this piece, wasn't too rosy to begin with. After we went off the air on Geraldo, I tried to talk to Matt, but the connection was dead. My little flesh-colored earpiece was silent. Later, when 60 Minutes II called me to do a story about Matt (they barely credited my story in theirs, by the way; more on this later) I found out that Matt felt a little screwed over by me, too. And having tried to call him minutes before composing this coda, and being greeted with silence, I cannot report back about what exactly Matt objected to in this piece. Maybe it's that the story didn't completely alleviate his sense of being persecuted, which is what I think he'd hoped it would do.
Finally, a mea culpa: I got the idea to do this piece from seeing an interview with Matt in a documentary called Soldiers Pay that the director David O. Russell was working on when I was doing a profile of him for GQ. I promised Tricia Regan, the co-director of the film, that I would mention it in the article, since they'd been generous enough to give me contact information for Matt. And, in the final version of the story that got printed, the name of that film did not appear.And for that crime: I am guilty.Add both the director of Soldiers Pay and me (hey, 60 Minutes II!) to the long list of people who believe the world kind of screws people over.
Denise Grollmus : Sex Thief
from Cleveland Scene
Renee clutches a creased black-and-white mug shot in the dim light of a suburban diner. The forty-three-year-old strokes her strawberry-blond ponytail as she surveys the scrawny Vietnamese man in the photo.
She nods recognition at his deer-in-the-headlights eyes, flared nostrils, and pursed lips. "He looks just the same," she says. "But I look pretty much the same too. I guess not much has changed in twenty-five years."
Now a wife and mother, Renee still remembers the smallest details of the night they first met, though she hasn't spoken of it in two decades.